Today AMC released a new trailer for the final season of Breaking Bad, featuring the voice of Walter White (the masterfully articulate Bryan Cranston) reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias”. The only reason I’m telling you this instead of showing you is because The uploader has not made this video available in your country which is pretty fucking insensitive of them. UPDATE: Thanks to Tom Hansford in the comment section for directing us to video that can be viewed in Australia. Check it out after the jump.
Just from reading Shellley’s foreboding, visually arresting poetry – a bleak satirical portrait of the folly of human ambition – you get a pretty tangible sense of what’s around the corner for the show’s every man turned hero turned supervillain, Walt/Heisenberg:
I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.”
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Bleak.
What Australian YouTube viewers can watch is this newly released behind-the-scenes short featuring the BB cast and crew weighing in on the final episodes. Bryan Cranston says: “These episodes take on a trajectory that we haven’t experienced before,” which, for a show with a Shakespearean tendency toward escalation, is saying something.
The final series of Breaking Bad premieres Sunday 11th August (in the US). Just get on with it already.
Via Huffington Post
