Near the end of “Fly,” a drugged and introspective Walt tries to nail down what would have been the perfect moment for his death: late enough for him to leave a suitable nest egg for Skyler and the kids, but early enough to minimize the amount of harm he did to people outside the drug world.
It’s hard not to think of Walt’s question when contemplating the end of Breaking Bad itself, particularly since the final four episodes all but beg you to play Choose Your Own Adventure on the best possible way for the series to die. Would the story, and the audience, have been best served if we concluded with:
1. Hank slapping the bracelets onto Walt in the desert near the conclusion of “To’hajiilee”?
2. Walt climbing into Ed’s minivan at the close of “Ozymandias,” leaving behind a trail of bodies and ruined lives?
3. A defeated, useless Walt sitting at the bar in “Granite State,” waiting for the cops to take him away?
or
4. The actual ending of the series in “Felina,” where Walt takes out the Nazis and Lydia almost single-handedly; sets Jesse free to drive off into the night; says goodbye to Skyler by giving her leverage to potentially avoid prosecution; arranges for Gretchen and Elliott to give his remaining fortune to his kids in a manner Flynn might accept; and dies at peace, if not happily, surrounded by the equipment he designed to cook his signature meth, while Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” sums up the legend of Heisenberg one last time?
It’s no coincidence that “Felina” was preceded by three episodes that each, with a tweak or two, would have been fine series finales, albeit very different from the one Vince Gilligan ultimately chose to use. With a few more episodes to play with than a normal season, Gilligan and company got to make every potential finale: the triumph of law over criminality in “To’hajiilee,” the nihilist wreckage of “Ozymandias,” the demythologizing of the entire series in “Granite State,” and the actual conclusion, in which Heisenberg somehow rises once more to dispatch all his remaining enemies and do right (or as much right as he is capable of) by his remaining loved ones before letting a stray bullet finish the job the cancer started but couldn’t finish.
Gilligan recalled years later that, in the writers’ room that season, “We were very greedy. The expression ‘have our cake and eat it, too,’ was said so often, it could have been a drinking game.”
All four are incredible episodes of television, and each would have made for a conclusion that would have felt satisfying. Your preference for one over the others ultimately says as much about you and what you enjoyed most about Breaking Bad as it does about that particular hour’s merits or plotlines.
Hank arresting Walt might have rung slightly less true than the others, if only because the series always seemed headed for a darker ending,1 but it still would have led to the ruin of Hank’s career, of Skyler’s life and reputation, and of Jesse’s freedom, as he surely would have had to do some time alongside Mr. White. “Ozymandias” is my personal preference—both because it’s the best episode of the series (and of all of dramatic television, really), and because the utter despair of it is exactly where Walt deserves to be left after all he’s done—but it might not have provided enough closure for Jesse,2 Skyler, or anyone else. An alternative ending for “Granite State” in which Walt doesn’t leave the bar combines a mixture of the previous two—Walt on the verge of arrest, everyone else’s lives destroyed—while offering more clarity on what would happen to the other characters going forward, but it might have been too muted a close for so explosive a series.
“Felina,” though, is an ending in every sense, in which the villains—Walt included—are all vanquished, while the survivors get a small measure of comfort. Skyler may avoid prosecution but will forever be The Wife of Heisenberg. Jesse is freed from slavery, but will spend the rest of his life as either a fugitive or a federal prisoner. No major questions are left unanswered. It is Gilligan settling all family business as much as it is Walt doing the same.
It is the perfect conclusion to the story of Breaking Bad. But is it the perfect conclusion to the experience of Breaking Bad? Particularly following the three prior episodes?
Again, look at “Granite State.” That is an hour that takes a machine gun to every myth of Heisenberg there ever was, leaving only a sick old man who has ruined everyone else’s life and is powerless to do anything about it. Walt not only gets back his mojo in the next episode, but gets it back to such an amplified degree that all of his ridiculous plans—threatening Gretchen and Elliott about the money,3 slipping Chekhov’s Ricin into Lydia’s tea,4 and MacGyvering his trunk weaponry to wipe the neo-Nazis off the face of the earth—come to fruition without requiring his usual string of backup plans (though he has to improvise slightly when he discovers that Jesse is the Nazis’ prisoner, rather than their partner). Walt has lost everything, and is in failing health, yet this is in many ways his most impressive triumph; whereas he had help from Jesse and Tio in taking out Gus, he has to do all of this on his own.
It’s cathartic to watch the machine gun’s bullets rip the Nazis to pieces, to see Jesse choke the life out of Todd with the chains that have held him prisoner for the better part of a year, and to hear Walt tell Lydia that she’s about to have an awful death that she can’t do anything to prevent. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen Walt overcome the odds to vanquish a tactically superior foe. From Krazy-8 through Gus Fring, Walt has managed to outwit and outlive many of the men who wished him harm over the years. Breaking Bad has always toggled back and forth between Walt’s triumphs, his failures, and those moments (like the death of the Cousins) when the universe stepped in to fight his battles for him. It’s not narratively out of character for the series to end on one last victory, particularly such a pyrrhic one. But in the wake of the exponentially increasing darkness of the previous three episodes, any kind of Walt victory—even one he doesn’t survive—feels like a Hollywood ending to a show that often liked to remind Walt and Jesse (and us) that such endings don’t exist. Walt and Jesse’s business was much more complicated and difficult than other pop culture had suggested, and an ending that thinks otherwise casts a bit too much light on the darkness of the series as a whole.
And yet … there is that moment in Skyler’s shabby new kitchen where Walt surprises her, us, and maybe even himself, when he utters the most important sentiment in Breaking Bad history: “I did it for me. I was good at it. I liked it. And … I was… really—I was alive.”
These are the words that we never thought we would hear Walter White say, that once and for all repudiate the idea that he was doing this for Skyler and the kids. These are the words that definitively acknowledge Walter White’s true path and motivation—that Heisenberg was a conscious choice rather than an accidental mutation. They are Walt’s final confession, a mark of his self-awareness, and serve as a retroactive thesis for the entire show. They are also the words that Vince Gilligan states are the primary reason the series had to continue for two episodes past “Ozymandias,” which otherwise might be the more appropriate conclusion:
“That was very important,” he said of Walt’s admission, in a moment when Skyler is understandably convinced that he’s about to utter his usual line about doing all these terrible things for her, Flynn, and Holly. “It’s the one argument for having those final two episodes, to my mind. It could be argued that he sees in ‘Ozymandias’ the damage he’s done to his family. But I wanted it a little more explicit. In the writers’ room over the years, I had said a few times, ‘This guy is astoundingly untrue to himself. This guy lies to himself like no character I’ve ever heard of. This guy can rationalize any kind of bad behavior. Isn’t it time for him to just cop to the fact that he’s a villain? That he is doing it for himself?’
“Sam Catlin, one of my writers—and this was two or three years before our final episodes—he said a wise thing: ‘I think that the show is over the moment Walt realizes that he’s been rationalizing. Once he admits to himself who he truly is, in that ve
ry moment, the show is over.’ I wasn’t sure he was right at the time, but I realized later that Sam was absolutely on the money. In that final episode, he realizes it not at the final moment of the series—there is a whole other act to go, but that final act is really housekeeping. It’s hopefully very cinematic housekeeping, but the final act of Breaking Bad is just housekeeping. Walt has already emotionally ended the series by telling his wife, ‘I did it for me. I was good at it. I liked it.’ The final act is fun—just seeing a bunch of white supremacists mowed down with a machine gun, there’s a visceral thrill from that. But emotionally, the series is over at the end of the previous act.”
Viewed in this light, “Felina” serves a critical purpose in the story of Walter White, and there’s a sense throughout the episode that his plans keep coming together because they’re being done from a place of penitence and self-awareness, rather than Walt’s usual denial. When the car he steals in the New Hampshire snow5 eludes his attempt at hot-wiring it, Walt—a man of science, not faith—whispers a prayer of sorts, asking whatever power is listening, “Just get me home. I’ll do the rest.” And so the keys literally fall into his lap. And when he visits Skyler—to give her the GPS coordinates to where the Nazis buried Hank and Gomez, which he hopes will give her leverage to avoid prosecution, but also to say goodbye to Holly and watch Walter Jr. from a discreet distance—he finally says out loud what Skyler, and much of the audience,6 has understood for a long time. If there really was a higher power in the Breaking Bad universe7—albeit one who allowed for the senseless deaths of many innocents—perhaps it was waiting for Walt to let go of his pride, ask for help, and admit the truth, once and for all.
Whether or not you want to believe that theory, or any other one about the finale,8 Walt and Skyler’s final conversation is a wonder—so painful precisely because of how quiet it is compared to their usual verbal pyrotechnics, with Gilligan making beautiful use of the wooden column in the kitchen first to disguise Walt’s presence while Skyler is on the phone with Marie, then to literalize the tremendous divide between the former couple. The long pause Walt takes after his confession to Skyler—closing his eyes and truly reckoning with all the hurt he caused because he kept chasing his power high—is among the most impactful things Cranston has done in the entire run of the series.
It’s a spectacular moment, and a necessary one that couldn’t have come within the context of a “To’hajiilee” or “Ozymandias.” Both the series and Walt needed some distance from the events in the desert for him to be able to say those words; for that reason alone, “Granite State” and “Felina” both have to happen in order to physically and emotionally get him to the place where he can finally confess. But even with that scene, and even with the plot wrapping up with the massacre of the Nazis, it seems best to look on the last two episodes as epilogue to the story of Walter White, which reaches its proper conclusion in “Ozymandias.” That’s the end even Gilligan (who has called it the best episode the show ever did) seems to prefer over the one he wrote and directed himself.
“Felina” really is exciting housekeeping, but it’s also reminiscent of an argument Walt and Jesse had way back in the pilot, where Walt kept insisting on an organized workspace—with top-notch safety equipment and an emergency eyewash station—while an incredulous Jesse just gawked at him and thought about the profoundly messy business Mr. White was about to get into. “Felina” is the way Walt intended to conduct his business; “Ozymandias” is how he had to actually do it.
1 It also would obviously have been wholly incompatible with the Mr. Lambert flash-forward from “Live Free Or Die” (S5E1), which is the last corner the writers painted themselves into, and one that proved to be particularly agonizing to get out of. As Peter Gould recalls, “There were so many times when we broke season five, Vince said, ‘God, what would we do, the world would be open to us if we hadn’t put the machine gun in the trunk? Why oh why did we have to do that?’”
2 If there’s an obvious weak spot to the final season, it’s that Jesse—who had become a deserved co-main character for the series’ middle period—got left behind a bit, with his role reverting back to that of one of Mr. White’s victims. The finale at least offers us that lovely fantasy sequence where Jesse makes another gorgeous wooden box, like the one he told the twelve-step group he made and traded for an ounce of weed back in “Kafkaesque” (S3E9). This is Jesse temporarily escaping his nightmarish existence with a dream of one of the many turning points that could have prevented him from ending up as Todd’s slave.
3 Badger and Skinny Pete playing the role of Walt’s assassins by holding laser pointers in the woods provides one of the finale’s few light moments, and also lets those two knuckleheads exit the series unscathed, which is much more than can be said for Jesse or Combo.
4 “Lydia, as awful as she was, would be out there still, and go on to thrive and survive,” says Gilligan of finally deploying the ricin on her. “I couldn’t stomach the thought of that, and I didn’t want to see her shot or killed in some violent manner. That’s the closet chauvinist in me. Dying in a Shakespearean manner from poison seemed fitting.”
5 The opening scene of “Felina” works as a bookend to the opening of the entire series—Walt in the cold and snow of New Hampshire rather than the heat and sand of Albuquerque, in a vehicle that won’t start rather than one he’s driving way too fast—yet in both cases, cars with lights and sirens get uncomfortably close without proving to be a threat to him.
6 Not all of the audience, however. Even years after the finale aired, I still encounter people who insist Breaking Bad is different from The Sopranos and the other antihero dramas of the era because “Walt was always doing it for his family.” Even when the text comes right out and disproves this, some viewers—Nussbaum’s Bad Fans?—don’t want to let go of Walt’s lie, because it would mean accepting that they were watching and rooting for the bad guy for years.
7 Gilligan seemed open to the idea of a moral force in the Breaking Bad universe. When he and I discussed season two’s plane crash, he described it as “a rain of fire coming down around our protagonist’s ears, sort of like the judgment of God.” In a 2011 New York Times interview, he said, “I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something…. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen…. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’”
8 A popular one at the time—advanced by people as disparate as comedian Norm Macdonald, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, and television critic Emily Nussbaum—proposed that Walt’s easy success in Albuquerque made the bulk of the episode feel like it was a fantasy he was having while freezing to death inside that snowbound New Hampshire car.
Breaking Bad was the exclamation point at the end of the TV sentence that began with Tony Soprano: an antihero saga told so vividly that it rendered pointless the idea of additional ones. Which hasn’t stopped the TV business from trying, always to diminishing effect, because imitation is the sincerest form of television.
But the series was ultimately the apex of more than just one sub-genre that became popular in the early to mid-’00s. In many ways, it’s the summation of all that TV storytelling can be.
Television’s great narrative advantage over film had always been time. A movie, no matter how perfect, is a compact, finite experience that begins and ends over the course of the same evening. Watch it again and again, and you may notice something new each time, but the story itself will not change, nor will the character arcs. Even the greatest of films is a one-night stand, where a TV series is a relationship—between the creators and the characters, and then between the characters and the audience—that can last years, with changes both subtle and inescapable along the way.
As David Chase once put it to me, “In a television show, you can spend a lot of money on very little
small things about people.”
It took the keepers of the medium a long time to understand this advantage, and longer still to fully exploit it. Scripted television was invented as a way to sell soap, and for decades those stories were viewed by network executives as every bit as disposable as the products advertised during each break in the action. Characters and situations were kept static, the better to make each new episode comfortingly indistinguishable from the one before it, and the idea of giving the audience closure at the end of a series seemed ridiculous. When producers of The Fugitive wanted to produce a final episode where Richard Kimble got to stop running, they had to go straight to the sponsors to get money to pay for it, because their bosses at ABC didn’t believe anyone would care. (Those bosses were wrong, to the tune of a record-setting audience of 78 million people.)
This would start to change in the ’70s (with the more complicated characters on the Norman Lear and MTM sitcoms) and ’80s (with Hill Street Blues and its many descendants), but it wasn’t until the ’00s that TV writers and TV executives alike began to fully embrace the idea of serialized storytelling, as well as long-form character arcs that might display all the things Walter White loved most about chemistry: growth, then decay, then transformation!
But even many of Breaking Bad’s remarkable cable predecessors didn’t entirely embrace all the tools they had at their disposal. The Sopranos was filled with stories that seemed to be building to something huge, only to end with defiant anti-climaxes, and character arcs often felt beside the point for a series about the fundamental difficulty of personal change. The Wire presented itself as “a novel for television,” and while that meant David Simon and company were embracing the power of ongoing narratives like nobody ever had before, their work was, indeed, structured more like a book than a TV show, where all the pieces made each other better, but few of them could function in isolation.
Breaking Bad 101 Page 25