No matter how great a story may be, a botched landing retroactively ruins everything preceding it. Battlestar Gallactica might have been the greatest science fiction show of its era, but the last 15 minutes turns everything that came before into a confused, and frankly, amoral mess. Lost probably lost* steam in the beginning of season 4, but the series finale, in which Everyone Gets To Be Together In Heaven, turned entire seasons worth of character building into a silly greeting card. At least neither one of them ended as the delusion of an autistic boy, but the result is the same: a serious work of art turned into a joke in the final minutes. Maybe for this reason, discussing the end of Breaking Bad, which finally kicked off its final season last night, feels like trolling.
You'll always find people willing to insist either that a terrible ending was actually brilliant, or that even if it wasn't, what came before was still watchable even if you can't shake the knowledge of where it all goes. Whenever such a show comes up, it feels like thanksgiving dinner with your family; you desperately pray that your father won't angrily let some racist crack slip during dinner, you practice your technique for veering the conversation away from the President's birth certificate, you're constantly on guard for the moment when Uncle John has too much wine and wants to rant about why affordable health care is a threat to national sovereignty even as he accuses anyone opposed to free trade agreements of "protectionism."
Breaking Bad has for four seasons been an almost perfectly constructed story, and going into the final season, I'm filled with dread. How on earth can a show this good not stumble in the conclusion?
I can't help wait for the moment when the series finally runs out of steam and it's revealed that the writers never actually had any idea where they were going with the insane and pitch perfect look at the underbelly of the Great Recession. Thank fucking Christ that, at least in the first episode of the final season, it's as good as ever.
Bringing back a convention not seen since season 2's epic plane crash, last night's premier began with a cold open set during a flash forward in which Walter White has assumed a false identity other than 'Heisenberg'. Bearded, scraggly haired and carrying around what looks like a lot of turmoil, we see him accepting what appears to be a contract killing or, perhaps, simply the acquisition of a weapon capable of dealing immense damage to his enemies. "This isn't going to get out of the state?" asks Walt Sr.'s guns dealer. "It won't even get out of this town". We're forced to wonder if we're seeing Walter in the establishing stages of yet another reinvention, or the preface to his going out in a blaze of glory.
But just as we were beginning to wonder how the hell the show skipped ahead however many months, it returned to the final moments of season 4, when an exhausted, fugue-state Walter informed his terrified wife Skyler that he'd engineered the destruction of Gus Fring. "I won," he says in footage reused from the last season finale, only now we see the immediate aftermath of Walt's Victory, and it isn't pretty.
Since the moment in Season 1 when Walt impulsively decided to cook meth after learning he'd contracted cancer, Breaking Bad has been about the slow manifestation of Walt's true personality. He was never a mild mannered man pushed to the edge by personal tragedy, he was a bitter, resentful prick with a shriveled ego that needs constant tending who kept this from himself due to a lifetime of having ran from even a hint of possible failure. His illness freed him from pretense, not from restraint, and one can't help but think that had Walt not decided to embrace narco-economics, he'd be spending his time wearing powdered wigs at political rallies and demanding that the Government stay out of his medicare.
With every criminal success, Walt validated his sense of total superiority and embraced just a little bit more of the entitled, white male jerk he really is and now, with the eradication of his bitterest enemy, the mask is off for good. It's made even more clear in the first 10 minutes that Walt's declaration of victory wasn't intended to make his wife feel better, it was bragging. Much like his drunken refusal to let Hank believe that Gale was Heisenberg, or his pathetic (at the time) boast to Skyler that he is "the one who knocks," it's an expression of his need to feel like a balla.
That need colors every moment of the season premier, particularly his relationship with Jesse Pinkman. Early on, Walt realizes that despite having rubbed Gus out, he still has a lot of shit to clean up, particularly the matter of Gus' copious records. Indeed, the DEA discovers rather quickly that Fring kept a camera in the meth-making facility, and manage to impound the laptop on which he kept the footage. Walt and Jesse are forced to recruit Gus' right hand thug Mike (still recovering after his gut shot injuries in the previous season and absolutely hungry to put a bullet in Walt's head) to clean up the mess. Walt and Mike's dislike for one another keep them from coming up with anything useful but Jesse, unaware of what Walt did to manipulate him into helping him kill Gus, still has his wits and suggests a rather clever solution to the problem.
The solution (we won't spoil it for you) works like a charm, but Walt's need to be balla almost ruins everything. As the three of them leave the scene of the crime, Mike freaks out about a very serious mistake. "It worked," Walt smugly assured Mike. "Because I say so," suggesting not only that Walt is positioning himself to be the new leader of Albuquerque, but that he believes his own bullshit to the point that he's actually going to take credit for Jesse's idea, at least in his own mind.
Uh Oh.
Meanwhile, Skyler has returned home, and she's terrified, not only of her revealed-to-be-a-stone-killer husband, but of the fact that her scheme to force her former boss and ex-lover Ted to pay the IRS might blow up in her face. However, when she visits Ted in the hospital, he swears never to tell a soul about what happened, looking at her with the same dread Skyler gave to Walt only minutes earlier. It's almost as though the 'be a criminal' virus has gone airborne in Albuquerque, and if Walt is the disease vector, Skyler is patient zero. Like it or not, she's a gangster too.
Not that Walt thinks so. Saul Goodman also gets a few moments of typical hilarity, not only bringing the news to Skyler that Ted had woken from his coma, but also confessing the whole Fiasco to an enraged Walt. Clearly terrified by the emerging monster in front of him, Saul tries to quit, only to be told "You're done when I say you're done." Walt clearly doesn't give a fuck anymore, but for now, at least, he seems to grasp that he needs to at least look like he does. Perhaps it's a scintilla of humanity, but more likely it's the need to feel like a Benevolent dictator, but when Walt goes to confront Skyler about the cock up, his reaction to her confession is to give her the world's most terrifying hug and tell her "I forgive you," as though she did anything even half as bad as Walt does before breakfast, or that he has the moral high ground necessary to offer forgiveness at all. Skyler hugs him stiffly and the moment feels like "the call is coming from inside the house!". It's a brilliant final moment that leaves you feeling sick at the fact that you ever liked Walter at all.
Thinking back to the opening, while waiting for his business contact, Walt has ordered bacon and eggs and spends the time breaking the bacon strips and rearranging the pieces to spell '52'. "It's my birthday today," Walt tells the waitress, suggesting that by the time we reach the end of the line, we're looking at almost two years to the day (in universe time) since Walt first entered the drug trade. Two years isn't a long time to be the most powerful person in your little region of the universe, but it's more than long enough to completely destroy everything in your life.
* hah.
