Fans anticipate the season finally of ‘Breaking Bad’
If this truly is the golden age of television, then Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” is surely its king. Over its six-year run, it has retooled audience expectations for what a serialized TV drama can and should be.
And now, at 9 p.m. on Sept. 29, it will finally come to an undoubtedly bitter end. One way or another, it’s time for Walter White to finish what he started so long ago in an RV in the New Mexican desert.
Picking up immediately where the first half left off, this heart-racing and soul-crushing half-season
of “Breaking Bad” has taken off in a mad vortex of chaotic retribution and unbearable confrontations, headed straight towards the bleak end that everyone knew had to be coming.
One of the best aspects of “Breaking Bad,” which has continued through to season 5B, as it’s being called, is how the show tests the allegiances of its audience.
Throughout the series, Walter White has strattled the line between being sympathetic and morally bankrupt, testing the spillover point for each audience member. It’s been interesting, then, to see how Walt’s character in 5B is decidedly less of the near-total villain that he was in 5A.
This provides the show with a more interesting situation to explore dramatically.
Though Gilligan has compared Walter to Scarface, the arc isn’t quite so clear. Walt isn’t Tony Montana, Tyler Durden or Icarus, for that matter; he isn’t a character to be struck down at the height of his excessive power.
Rather his downfall, like his cancer, is set to return just as he’s attempting to settle back into a normal life. In this way, the justice which is fast approaching him seems all the more tragic.
Of course, it hasn’t been easy to feel sorry for Walt, as Jesse Pinkman has served as a constant reminder of his crimes. If Uncle Jack, Todd and their crew of Swastika-sporting psychopaths represent the karmic floodgates of hell which Walt opened and now cannot close, then Jesse has come to epitomize the lives Walt has ruined in his wake.
In this half-season, Jesse finally realizes that Walt has manipulated him every step of the way, and thus teams up with Hank to usurp the great Heisenberg from his throne of bloody drug money.
All of this conflict came to a head in “Ozymandias,” an astounding episode that left most fans in a state of total disbelief.
In this episode, Uncle Jack, accompanied by the Aryan Brotherhood, murders Hank, steals the majority of Walt’s buried fortune and captures Jesse, forcing him to cook meth for them. Walt then returns home to find his family has turned against him.
The penultimate episode of the series, “Granite State,” is a systematic repudiation of everything we thought we understood about Walt.
As a desperate means of self-preservation, he flees to the snowy backwoods of northern New Hampshire as a nationwide manhunt for him begins. During his five- to six-month stay in a small isolated cabin, he begins to come to bitter terms with just how insurmountable his situation has become.
At one point, in a particularly striking image, Heisenberg stands frozen, signature pork pie hat placed pitifully on his head, next to the gate to the outside world. The man who once declared that he was “the danger” is now paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.
By the episode’s end, Walter White has hit rock bottom. Despite spending his nights, shivering with cold and shriveling with cancer, next to a barrel stuffed with $11 million, Walt finds he can send only a mere $100,000 to his family. His son rejects the offer during a heartbreaking phone call, telling him that what he has done is unforgivable.
And then, when all seems lost, Walt finds a reason to return home.
Back in the first episode of season five, when that flash-forward showed Walt buying an M60 at a roadside Denny’s, it seemed reasonable to assume that he was coming back to town with heroic intent, or perhaps to do what was necessary to defend his life.
The final scene of “Granite State,” complete with its pulse-quickening use of the show’s main theme music, indicates that Walter isn’t going back to Albuquerque for his family, or Jesse, or any of the other good intentions he typically pins his monstrous actions on.
No, here we see Walter headed home with fury in his eyes. His former colleagues, Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz, publicly spurn his name on national television. In doing so, they have reopened the old festering wound that Heisenberg originally crawled his way out of.
The lying, the meth cooking, the money — none of it was ever really about doing what he could to provide for his family. It was really about fulfilling his desire to be idolized. It was about constructing a legacy for himself.
Now if he can get back to Albuquerque, kill Uncle Jack, Todd and their gang, get back the $70 million that was stolen from him and go out in a blaze of glory, then maybe, just maybe, someone will remember his name. If not his family, then someone …