...Discuss the End of Breaking Bad
My guess is that you’ve read all the Breaking Bad think pieces you want to read, and have little interest in another. I get that, so I won’t take up too much of your time. But it doesn’t seem fitting for a crime fiction writer (even an upcoming debut one) to allow one of television’s greatest crime shows to end unremarked.
Good television shows are inherently judged by their finales, ever since M*A*S*H set the standard and Seinfeld and The Sopranos failed to live up to their audience’s expectations. I loved the end of Breaking Bad, but my wife thought it was anticlimactic. She found Walt’s death too passive, compared to the ingenious and explosive deaths he’d engineered throughout the series. But I liked it, even if if it was heavy-handed. Walt descended to his darkest levels this season, and I don’t think anyone disagreed with Jessie’s statement: “Mr. White, he’s the devil.”
Until this season, you could make an argument that everyone Walt killed had to die. Every choice Walt made, even if it was evil, was a necessary evil. Check this list out, and you can make the argument that everyone who Walter killed was done (in some way) to protect his family. He rarely acted in a manner that was intentionally evil. He didn’t reign chaos because he wanted to; he did it because he had to. And, as Hank observed in the moments before a bullet smashed into his head, Walter was never able to understand evil for the sake of evil: “You’re the smartest guy I ever met, and you’re too stupid to see he made up his mind ten minutes ago.”
I don’t normally write about Christian theology or symbolism, but I think it’s necessary for this show and post. If Breaking Bad was about a man’s descent into evil, this episode was obviously about redemption. From the beginning scene when Walt offers a prayer and the car’s keys fall from above into his hand, to the crucifixion-imagery at the end, when he lies arms-spread on the floor, a wound in his side, Walt is on a mission to right whatever he can. Not that it matters. Walter White is headed to hell – an unremarked element of the show are the (likely) thousands of lives he’s destroyed with meth, and for that he makes no atonement. And judging by his admiration for the manufacturing machines at the end of the show, he doesn’t even have a wish for atonement.
Imagine a similar show about someone developing a nuclear bomb, and wistfully, ruefully regarding the manufacturing machines in the show's closing moments. There's no heroism there.
Breaking Bad was, ultimately and obviously, about the necessity and nature of evil. And that's why the show was so goddamned good. Walter White was the devil, but not the devil we are familiar with. Not the clumsy simple one that most entertainment (and our society’s consciousness) creates. Not the devil who brings chaos just to do so, or the evil spirit who kills out of unremittant glee. The devil is more than that, and that’s what makes him so terrifying – the devil is a person who makes choices, yet never truly understands the havoc they inflict. We cannot understand this evil because we believe our choices are necessary. Satan chose to battle God. Walter White’s life ends viewed silently from above, lying on the factory floor, eyes open as earth’s guardians cautiously approach…but the view from above remains above, and Walter White remains cast down. As he chose.
E.A.
