Note: there are srs SPOILERS galore in the following post. You are warned.
I started watching Breaking Bad a few years ago, where I was under the ill-conceived impression that it was going to be a kind of less interesting version of Weeds, with Malcolm’s Dad as the poorly cast, struggling meth king. I began watching it after I’d spent an emotional six months or so pouring over The Wire, enthralled by the Baltimore drug trade, of good versus evil, the paradigms and pre conceived boundaries constantly shifting, dissolving and meandering among the police and the street. It was the first long-form television show I’d ever stuck myself in to, and I still maintain it to be the most well executed, and my absolute favourite. Going in to Breaking Bad, I was following an extremely hard act: I’d only just figured out who Wee Bey was, I was still mourning Omar‘s genuinely shocking, anti climatic ending, I was ever so attached to Stringer Bell. I was reading John Waters‘ Role Models and thought that, despite its flaws, Baltimore was heavenly. Enter: tighty whitey wearing Walter White in Albuquerque.
Needless to say, I pretty much loathed, had no interest and held no passion for the first episode of season one; I turned it off halfway through, bitter by a show that dared attempt to conquer my HBO standards. I didn’t think about it for months.
A while later I picked the show up – through procrastination, probably, and got very obsessed, very quickly.
A few years on, I’ve found myself at the day before the beginning of the end: Breaking Bad Season Five Part Two, airing tomorrow, and I’m feeling like a pathetic fangirl, entrenched in a pre-emptive mourning of one of my favourite shows’ end. The only time I’ve felt like this before is when I lined up at a bookstore in 2007 to get my copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. No need to revisit the ugly crying that ensued, but trust me: it was a big deal.
Anyway, If I try to put my emotional attachment and flood of incurable #feels aside, there’s a few things that have got me obsessed in hopeless speculation about the upcoming season finale of Breaking Bad. Firstly,
WILL VINCE GILLIGAN MEET MY LOFTY EXPECTATIONS?
The frustrating ellipsis (above) that was the end of this season’s first instalment was excruciating. Hank makes the ultimate connection in his head that Walt had been hiding since the beginning, that is: Heisenberg’s extremely close-to-home alter ego. I think I actually verbalised a “Fuck you, Vince” when the show ended like that, and writhed painfully in my chair. The cliffhanger sets up season five part two as the most anticipated, with the hardest fight ahead: Walt’s inevitable demise and battle against Hank. This is so heavy! I mean, this makes Gus Fring‘s casual slitting of throats with box cutters seem like child’s play, and the aforementioned #heaviness that will ensue has so much to live up to. This week, just about everybody has been speculating about what will happen, but what I’m more concerned with is, will it be good enough? I’ve dissected this show with such an enthralled spirit, with so keen an eye and engaged in such deep conversations with those similarly inclined, while steadfastly begging people to, for the love of God, please watch this show. Breaking Bad can’t let me down now.
Above all, Breaking Bad has made me think. So clever is Gilligan and the performances of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, this show has been the most convincing portrait of suburban, familial malaise deteriorating in a way that is at once surreal (but decidedly not Lynchian), while also utterly convincing; it has tackled the most fundamental notion of good versus bad in one man’s collapse and slide between the two. Maybe Breaking Bad isn’t strictly didactic, but it surely presents a reality so close to one that could play out in anyone’s life that you can’t help but learn about the strength (and deeply flawed weaknesses) of the human spirit. To cut that tl;dr down: I’m expecting and hoping so much of Breaking Bad’s ending, anything less than perfect will be a grave disappointment.
WHAT ABOUT JESSE?
Some people hate Jesse Pinkman, but throughout the show I’ve always held a tenderly soft spot for the wayward guy who has an affinity for calling people bitch, is genuinely talented at (yeah Mr White!) science, has a kind of fucked up family life and lost his girlfriend at a time when he was getting way to deep, way too quickly. The end of season five’s first instalment had Jesse saying—once again—that he was done with the game, he was calling it quits. Yeah bitch! If only that story could maintain for the rest of season five, but it’s inevitable that Jesse will become embroiled in the Hank/Walt chase when it arrives in its veritable implosion. I’m most attached to Jesse because I know he wouldn’t be facing a royally messed up life if it weren’t for his partnering with Walt from the beginning, a move that he could never quite reverse. Everyone is wringing their hands at the fate of Walt—the ultimate anti hero, the love-to-hate beacon—but what about JESSE, you guys. I’m already getting torn about his storyline before I’ve even seen a second. Can’t handle these feelings.
DO I WANT WALT TO BREAK GOOD, OR TRULY
BREAK BAD?
In Season Five Part One, there was a harrowing, heart-stopping moment when it was clear that Walt’s business had took a sickly turn. Where season one had happy go-lucky comedic vibes, of Walt and Jesse’s Excellent Adventure: Now With Meth, season five turned irretrievably bleak when an innocent bystander to Walt’s train-robbing crime, a child, is shot by fresh colleague,Todd. Sure, Walt didn’t pull the trigger, but the end of season 4 showed us that Walt wasn’t afraid of hurting kids in the grand scheme of his elaborate plans (when Walt gives Brock a poisonous dose of berries from a Lily of The Valley plant). I’ll be honest, you can maintain a frightening level of detachment to the carnage in Breaking Bad, with each season escalating in its death toll exponentially. The theatrical montage during season 5’s eighth episode, where 9 people are simultaneously killed, demonstrates that best. Getting attached to deaths in Breaking Bad would be counterproductive and exhausting: but there’s something so drastically different about killing a child, a repercussion that shook Jesse (in particular) after Todd swiftly did away with a kid who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Walt’s done everything else in the show up until this point: he’s merciless, conniving, bordering on insane, but labelling someone “evil” is a hefty call.
For Walt to finish off his story, to consider the five seasons a path that documents an average guy literally breaking bad, would make sense; getting from Out-Of-Control-Walt to Inherently Evil King is a big leap, and Walt would have to do something drastic: kill a child or a member of his family for him to be officially granted that unattractive status. It’s hard enough to relate and have empathetic feels for a middle aged meth king as it is, but descending in to Bad bad would provide a dramatic flourish, removing Walt permanently from our perception of, “oh, he’s just a regular guy.” I think that closure could be quite comforting in its detachment, though also slightly disturbing if you were to study Walt’s trajectory from season one to five. Could this happen to anyone?
On the other hand, a theory has been suggested that Walt has broken good by the time we reach that flash forward at the beginning of season five (to the diner on his 52nd birthday), as it looks like he may be wearing a wire—presumably to give in to his crimes and help in investigating the opposing syndicate. There’s also the fact that Walt told Skyler that she would still like Walt by the end of it all—maybe there’s a degree of truth in there?
WHO IS GOING TO DIE, AND IS MY BODY READY
FOR THAT SORT OF THING?
Comrades, there will be blood in the next eight episodes to come, prepare yourself. Gilligan already stated that the show wasn’t going out with a whimper, and the recent allusion to Ozymandias, a poem about a fallen empire, is an ominous sign for all-out destruction. No empire falls lightly, especially not one as intricate as Heisenberg’s.
There’s a few options for where the blood may spill among the show’s major characters, let’s hope Gilligan has a steadier hand than George R.R Martin and we don’t have another Red Wedding on our hands:
WALT
Considering that Walt is so integral to the show, I’m pretty convinced he’s going to survive the bloody demise that the next few episodes may bring. If Walt does die, I know that Vince Gilligan will do it in a way that is so surprising it will take a long while to fully process. In the end, I trust Gilligan to deal with Walt’s survival/death in the most elegant way possible.
WALT JUNIOR
I really think this theory about Walter Junior’s demise has legs, as expressed by Benjamin Secher in The Telegraph, “Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece is a full-blown tragedy, and the loss of his son is the only comeuppance that would befit Walter’s crimes (which, let’s not forget, already include poisoning one child; and disposing of another’s body). Besides, there are only two reasons to give a character the exact same name as his father: one is to suggest that the boy will inevitably follow in his dad’s footsteps (and if the series had a softer centre, it would end with Junior taking the helm of Walter’s crystal meth empire); the other is to set-up a scene of mistaken identity. So when an assassin sent by Lydia, or a sniper working for Hank, arrives on the scene, I predict he will end up offing the wrong Walter White.”
I don’t think I have enough attachment to Junior as a character for his death to upset me fundamentally, but the gravity of that event on Walt’s life is so profound, it would surely be the most emotional TV death in history.
HOLLY
If Holly dies, (and there’s been some heavy foreshadowing that she will) it would warrant the same feelings as Junior’s death, but it would feel a million times worse.
SKYLER WHITE
Everybody really, really hates Skyler for some reason. Which is exactly why Vince Gilligan won’t kill her off, it would be too congratulatory to his fans. Dammit. She is pretty annoying.
LYDIA
Let’s be honest, Lydia is just a death waiting to happen. Only introduced in the last season, she’s almost guaranteed carnage. Sorry.
HANK
If Hank dies, which is a distinct possibility, I think it will be more tragic than you may predict: after all, when the audience sides with Walt during the first few seasons, Hank is the petulant enemy. It’s all, “God, Won’t You Just Leave These Criminals Do Their Thing In Peace?!” But as it progresses, Hank is revealed ever so slightly as, I guess, a good cop. Hank isn’t evil: he supports his family, works hard and fights drug lords. He comes off as the villain, but he’s really Walt’s antithesis, and his death would be a real shame.
JESSE
Nope, not happening. I will refuse to process this.
WITH BREAKING BAD OVER, DO WE HAVE ANYTHING
AS SIMILARLY SUPERB TO LOOK FORWARD TO?
When I finished The Wire, I was pretty convinced it was going to be (and at that time, it already was) considered the pinnacle of long-form television. Much like Hitchcock cleanly capped off the crime and horror genre with his last film, forever to be imitated but hardly ever to be contended, I thought that a sprawling narrative like the one that belonged in Baltimore was an exception to the rule, a shining singularity among a bunch of keen contenders, never to be repeated. Breaking Bad showed me that it wasn’t the case, enlightening a whole new sphere of intelligent, engaging, funny, affecting TV production. Breaking Bad will end in a matter of weeks: will this signal the defeat of our Golden Age of television, or simply inspire a show to be worthily set among its ranks, next to The Wire? While I obviously wouldn’t reject a show that rivals those two shows, I’m sure I’d feel a warm sense of closure if nothing else quite made it up there, as if McNulty and Walt really were integral to the best of the best, responsible for a generation of forever-striving carbon copies.
The second instalment of Breaking Bad’s Fifth Season airs in the US on August 11.
