So, that’s it then. “Breaking Bad” has ended. Maybe not with a bang, but not really with a whimper either. We got everything we were promised by “Felina”—FeLiNa: blood, meth and tears, as well as a cheeky nudge via Marty Robbins’ song “El Paso”—maybe not in the capacity or bombast expected, but absolutely with the mastery and nuance promised by what seems fair to call one of television’s most astonishingly crafted works.
What’s so deeply satisfying about the finale is that it really does feel like Walt has finally completed his katabasis; he has ventured deep into the bowels of hell and emerged as a new man—maybe not a better one, but at the very least one who’s learned something. The most obvious nod to this was his final interaction with Skyler and his long awaited, “I did it for me.” I’ve never cared much for Skyler and Walt’s relationship, but this one exchange had a semi-truck’s worth of catharsis behind it, unraveling seasons’ worth of disillusionment and self-denial. Skyler is a static character; she’s always wanted what’s best for her family, even if the methods shift. Walt has changed, however, and here we see it in absolute.
Perhaps a bit tangentially, there have been a number of complaints recently about the character of Skyler White and how her “mishandling” has been a major downfall of "Breaking Bad." While Skyler certainly is a poorly written character (I’d contend that almost all the women in "Breaking Bad" are, aside from maybe Lydia), comments particularly about her lack of agency with regards to Walt’s machinations seem ridiculous. This was never her story. It was never anybody’s story but Walt’s: the story of how he rose from the ashes of a broken but brilliant husk of wasted potential, scrapped together an empire and then flew too close to the sun. The people around him aren’t really characters (barring perhaps Jesse), they function as the gears that keep Walt’s story ticking. That’s why the show ends immediately after Walt dies—there’s no point in going on. We've seen everything, we’ve had our adventure. Now it’s time to go home.
I could talk about the Nazis getting what was coming to them or Walt’s repeated displays of badassery, but we know all about that. The question was never whether or not Walt is smarter and more capable than everyone around him, because the answer always has been ‘yes.’ Instead, we wonder how much he can struggle against the tides and against his own stupid arrogance to arrive somewhere greater than where he started. And I think he has.
With his and Jesse’s final interaction—a starkly tragic exchange between two brilliantly realized characters—we saw for the first time Walt willingly giving (in my eyes) the most important person in his life some semblance of control. No anger. No fury. No intellectualized bullshit rationalization. Just the calm pass of a gun. Just the change promised by Walt in the very first season of the show. Their nods as Jesse drove away to freedom and Walt slunk off to die were absolutely perfect—it was an act of father/son acknowledgement that the old Walt found impossible. And that scene, like few others in television, made my heart swell. In my eyes, that’s the sign of true art, a canon which “Breaking Bad” can now comfortably assume its place within.
