Summary: Breaking Bad is over. Who wins in the end: Heisenberg, or Walter White?
If you have not seen this episode yet and don’t wish to be spoiled, tread lightly.
Review
1.5 million people watched the first season finale back in 2008. 10.3 million watched the series finale, six years later. It’s rare to see a show grow so exponentially and drastically, especially one that never aimed to be terribly crowd-pleasing. After all, it’s an overly artsy, slow, quiet show with a middle-aged average joe deciding to cook meth. It doesn’t even make sense that it became the weird phenomenon that it became.
The thing is, while Breaking Bad doesn’t appear to be a show that would appeal to everyone, its strength lies more in its ability to tell a really good story impeccably well. Vince Gilligan knows his television, his myths, his songs and his movies. There was a clear vision right from the start, and while things certainly changed from time-to-time, there was always a sense of cohesion and trajectory. The final season is the hardest to pull off for something like this, with so much weighing on how it all ends and a finale is even harder to do. But like I pointed out back in “To’hajillee“, one of Breaking Bad‘s greatest strengths was and is its ability to do exactly what’s predicted of it, but do it well. It has never been afraid to tell the story to its fullest, most natural point, doing what it needed to do to be satisfying even when it wasn’t all that surprising.
“Felina” has that in spades, following Walt on his “farewell tour” of sorts. We get brief glimpses of the remaining central characters, sometimes to play a role, sometimes just to get one last glimpse. But for the most part, the goal of the episode is simple: get the money to the White family, and take out Jack and his men. There’s nothing else to it, nor does anything else need to be done. And as such, when Walt accomplishes those two goals, it’s satisfying. It’s not really mindblowing, devastating, infuriating or even tearjerking (though Heisenberg-fans might certainly shed a tear.) It’s simply satisfying, and that’s what it’s going for.
Probably the most efficient way to watch “Felina” isn’t as a singular final episode, but the final act of this stretch of episodes beginning with ”To’hajillee”. Throughout these four episodes, we got moments and resolutions for each and every major character–Jesse getting back at Walt, Hank catching Walt and going down a cowboy, Skyler standing up for herself, Walt Jr. reacting to the secret, etc. It culminated in “Ozymandias”, the series finale for all the supporting characters and the majority of the plot in a lot of ways. Walt’s final internal struggle began in “Granite State”, and “Felina” completed that internal struggle, as he learned to accept himself and accomplish his major goal. Structuring it this way keeps “Felina” from being an instant classic, as most of the season’s big moments were in episodes past, but Breaking Bad‘s efficiency has always come more from the sum of its parts rather than individual episodes. Vince Gilligan knew these strengths, obviously, and saved it from being a potentially overstuffed, trying-too-hard-to-be-big finale.
The White family had their big moments in past weeks, but we get some good glimpses of them here. Skyler’s last scene is, of course, with Walt, and she finally gets a way to dig herself out of the hole Walt threw her in. Anna Gunn portrayed this cold, hardened Skyler wonderfully, but excelled in capturing the tiniest spark between she and Walt. These were people married for a long time, hard as it may be to remember, so it’s fitting for Walt to finally give something back to the wife he’s torn apart. Skyler’s best moment remains to be in “Ozymandias”, but her “epilogue” of sorts at least showed that, while she’s not great, she’ll probably be okay in the long run. Coupled with Walt secretly watching Walter Jr. from afar, the farewell to the family he worked so hard for was a subtle, quiet but fitting end to the family so essential to the series. Betsy Brandt, sadly, didn’t get much to do as Marie, but at least our last moments with her showed her caring side still in tact in spite of everything. Kudos to wardrobe and make-up for making Brandt look significantly less glamorous in her single scene, though, as would be expected for a woman who lost her husband so horrifically.
The tense scene at Gretchen and Elliott’s home was a wonderful way to up the tension in an otherwise slow episode, and Walt’s slow creep to them during their nonchalant conversation was one of the best sequences of the episode. While the pair has been missing from much of the show since its early days, it’s essential that they were brought back for the final bow, becoming a sort of deus ex machina for Walt, who could simultaneously get revenge on them, in a way. Between Walt giving them the money and then Skinny Pete and Badger (!!!) being the “hitmen,” that entire first half of the episode was exceptional, showcasing both the tension and the humor the show could excel at.
While the White family got to make their big bows before we got here, Jesse was in desperate need of something else. He already expressed his hatred of Walt, but now, not unlike Walt, he had to make peace with himself. While much of this is inferred, it’s likely that Jesse needed the torture, as a final way to atone for the wrong he’s done in ways Walt never could. Jesse is a clean slate now, likely with a new appreciation for his life and soul. He dreamed of making that wooden box again, the one he sold for drug money; maybe now, he’ll know to appreciate the box and why it’s important to not throw away the good things for some quick highs. Not that the drugs themselves were literally the problem, but in that Jesse has always been impulsive and completely without foresight in situations where he needed it. Now he’s free to make whatever decisions he wants, but with the opportunity to use knowledge of the horrible things he’s experienced to not fail this time. After all, we know he’s got some good in him. While he got a much-deserved (and amazing) Todd kill to let out that last bout of pent-up anger, his sparing of Walt sealed Jesse’s mercy and their underlying friendship. Walt may be the devil to Jesse, and Jesse may be a rabid dog to Walt, but they still trust one another in a twisted way. In the end, they trust that they can each be left to their own devices. And while Walt’s acceptance was also the acceptance of his death, Jesse’s acceptance of himself was also an acceptance of his freedom. This is no more apparent than in Aaron Paul’s final, wonderful screams as he raced the car through the gate–out of the prison he was kept in by Jack, as well as the prison he’s kept himself in for years.
There are very few negatives about this finale, and all of them are exceptionally subjective. The major issue, overall, is the antagonists. Uncle Jack was never set-up as the finest Big Bad, and his demise was no where nowhere near as cathartic or engaging as Gus’s, or even Tuco’s. Now, the upside to this is that Walt’s journey was at the center, so keeping the villains to a minimal meant more time would be focused on him. This is a valid move; Gus Fring often took away from Walt a bit too much in season 4, and it’d be a crime for it to happen again here. But it is a little disappointing that Walt’s ultimate win is sort of masked in the defeat of a villain no one really cared about, or will even remember much when all is said and done. And at that, as fun of characters as Todd and Lydia were, it’s a little sad that they got more screentime in the finale than the White family combined. In Lydia’s case, it was superfluous to get that phone call proving she got the ricin (as awesome as it was to hear another one of Todd’s fantastic ringtones) as the close-up of the Stevia pretty much said it all. The results of using these villains as plot devices justified much of this, but it’s still disappointing that there hadn’t been a way to make the villains feel more effectual or imperative.
So, in the end, does the man choose to end his life as Heisenberg, or Walter White? The answer, ultimately, is that he’s both. The men Walt tried to be in the two halves of season 5–full-on egomaniac Heisenberg last year, and family-oriented redemption-seeking Walter White this year–were two sides of the same coin, but going too far in either direction led to Walt’s downfall in both cases. The true “triumph” of Walt in this final hour isn’t that he finally gets the money to his family and goes out like the cowboy he wanted to be. It’s that he finally accepts and is content with the man he is: a horrible, selfish, goal-oriented man, but one who honestly managed to accomplish every one of those goals, hopes and dreams. As he says to Skyler in a wonderful scene, “I did it for me.” It’s actually cathartic to hear (and visibly cathartic to Skyler herself.)
There’s a twisted inspirational feeling to it, if not for the sickening reminder of all the death and destruction that led up to this. He became the primary provider to his family with no strings attached, but completely tore them apart psychologically and emotionally to do it. But he did it, and he got to lead the exciting life he always regretted not living. He found his true love, “sweet baby blue”–not necessarily the meth itself, but the 2-year-long adrenaline high it gave him. Thanks to Bryan Cranston’s always winning performance–and honestly, what else can be said about it?–Walt has been a character we can’t help but invest in. And despite how much hatred he instilled, Cranston was able to pull out every bit of humanity, small as it was, so that Walt could ever-so-slightly redeem himself at the end, just a bit. Everyone will remember Walter White, and he made as big a footprint on his world than anyone could have. It’s just that his footprint isn’t one that will be remembered fondly.
Well…not in his world, anyway. But in ours, Breaking Bad certainly will, and “Felina”, while certainly not the single best episode of the series by a long shot, did complete the last piece of this series which, as a whole, is one of the most satisfying television experiences in modern times.
Odds & Ends
- In the days between the episode’s premiere and the publishing of this review, wave after wave of review, reaction and analysis has been pumped out from every scale of the internet. It’s worth taking a step back and thinking about how cool it is that TV shows can bring together so many people of diverse lives, tastes and experiences to discuss, speculate and argue.
- “Felina” does a fine job at bringing a “full circle” feeling to the show without being overindulgent. Walt’s return to his broken home is enough to bring back feelings of the beginning, and the brief (and only) flashback to season one is used as more of a gut punch than anything else. Simply put, it pulled the right emotional strings without taking too much away from the present.
- Breaking Bad has always, always had an amazing ability to grab the absolute best music and utilize it wonderfully. This final episode is no different, with “El Paso” and “Baby Blue” pulling the same “totally on-the-nose but still super enjoyable” music trick. If they released a soundtrack for the show, it’d be a work of art. It’s kind of astounding that they haven’t.
- The teaser, with the lights from the cop cars swashing over Walt’s face through the snow, was beautifully shot.
- Like I mentioned last week, one of the more interesting decisions of these last episode is how little it bothers to focus on how the outside world reacted to all this Heisenberg madness. How would kids treat Walter Jr. after finding out his dad, the chemistry teacher, ran a drug empire? Skyler was barely shown to have friends outside of her family…does she? In a way, that might be what made the show so satisfying: fewer threads were spewed out, and thus fewer loose ends needed to be tied.
- So, Saul did not appear, sadly (but kind of appropriately.) Which means if his spin-off wanted to flashforward to a post-Breaking Bad timeline, it feasibly could. Whether or not that’d be a good idea, well…
- I have yet to see anyone compare Walt to Jesus in that death scene. Thank god.
- “The whole thing felt kinda shady, like morality wise.”
- If you’d like to go back and see all our past recaps/reviews (which started with “Live Free or Die”), KSiteTV’s Breaking Bad coverage has now been archived in its own category. Thanks for reading!