Ah, hubris. Delicious, delicious hubris.
Sure it was stupid, but I thought it was contextually believable. People get stupid over the weirdest things.
Jesse is walking dead too. The connections never end. 
The central scene was with Skyler, and it was very good. The thing is, Skyler liked being part of it too, but the difference being that she wasn’t in as deep, and Walt was never honest with her about it, just like he wasn’t honest with himself till that very moment.
I really think that Todd was just short of twigging to the fact that it was Mr. White doing the shoot out. Another second or two. And he was stupid to turn his back on Jesse.
As for the AB, they are all in prison for life. They can kill anyone on the inside, but everyone on the outside is dead, and the guys on the inside don’t know anything about why, even if any of them are ever getting out.
I’m a bit surprised that Walt crossed the country in the Volvo, there would have been an assumption that a local missing car was stolen by him.
Jack too has his pride. I loved how Walt played him for being a partner with a rat. Rats are Jack’s weakness. He won’t have anyone calling him the partner of a rat in front of his crew.
10,000 Quatloos!
Indeed.
And subterraneous - yeah, I started looping in those pesky Greek tragedians upthread, too. They kinda started the whole tradition.
Marley23 - my point is that, as you say, Walt got to exert some control. He got to stop the damage and set his loved ones on better paths. I still feel like that’s a big difference.
“anagnorisis” – wow what a cool word to learn. Thanks!
As to the finale, it was fine but somewhat anti-climatic for me. Everything that was predicted to happen happened – Walt getting vengeance on Jack + crew, Jesse getting freed, Lydia getting the ricin, payback for Gray Matter. I don’t have a problem with any of that, just that all of it was done without any big surprises. The cleverest thing was the robot gun in the trunk, which I really liked. The farewell scene with his family was quite touching and superbly acted. I do appreciate the tying up of loose ends and that the ending was unambiguous. Thank you Mr. Gilligan.
I am glad Jesse was freed, but won’t he now just end up in jail? With Walt dead, Jesse is the only one left to pay for all this. The DVD with Jesse’s confession is still at the Nazi lair, which the police will find. I guess jail is better being than a meth gimp. But I don’t see the future as being so good for Jesse.
If we go by the timeline, how many months has he been missing now (captive by the AB)? THe police may have thought he went missing with Hank and Gomie, since his last whereabouts were with them. Maybe there is still time for him to slip away (to Mexico or just out of state) before the cops realize he was still around.
I don’t think Walt played anything there. He really thought Jesse was Jack’s partner in some kind of arrangement. He never would have guessed that Jesse was being kept as a meth-slave.
I had posted earlier that I think Jesse will keep on driving towards Alaska, but I now recall that his whole thing with throwing away the money and spilling his guts to Hank was to unburden himself and accept penance for all of his wrongs. Maybe he’s since had a change of heart and will consider his imprisonment by the AB as “time served” but I can also see him going to the police and paying his dues. He has a lot of information that can be used to negotiate some kind of plea deal at least.
You know - I spent most of this half-season saying that I thought Jesse was dead on his feet and might even welcome death, but I was wrong. That’s the only moment of the finale I feel like watching again because he really seemed like he was alive as he busted through the gate and escaped the compound. (If we’re doing the Shakespeare thing, think Prospero freeing Ariel.) He’s looking at years of horrible nightmares and the guilt is never going to go away - and it shouldn’t - but I think it turned out that he had enough of a spark of life in him that he can keep going. After all the torture he endured, I was glad to see that.
It’s one of the three terms you need to know from Aristotle’s Poetics when discussing tragedy, along with hamartia (the “tragic flaw”, or a mistake or error in judgement) and peripeteia (a turning point, or reversal of circumstances). Well, those, and catharsis.
Probably about 6 if you look at his hair and Holly had toys that would suggest she was walking.
(stolen shamelessly from Reddit)
I don’t understand why everybody thinks it stretched credulity that the Nazis didn’t check the trunk. Why should they? They had Walt unarmed and led him into the house - why would they be worried about what he had in the trunk? Should they have foreseen an M-60 rigged to a garage door opener?
That’s why I love Vince Gilligan. Jimmy Kimmel remarked to Vince how cool it was that Skylar’s reflection was on the microwave door, and instead of taking false credit for his “brilliance”, he said he was off having a sandwich when the editor noticed it. When it was pointed out to him he said “hey, that’s cool”.
Well they will now!
He could have stolen another car, but that’s a risk in itself. Especially with having to transfer $7 million dollars from one trunk to another.
And once he got out of NH, and probably even before, as long as he wasn’t speeding he’d probably be OK. I’m sure it might happen, but the ‘nationwide APB’ seems unlikely.
Well, I feel the obvious answer is no, we shouldn’t have more classic tragedy. Shakespeare did it well, and I’m not sure we should try to breathe life into old forms as a matter of compulsion. Breaking Bad did a pretty good job of taking the basic premise of ambition leading to ruin, and modernizing the story and its form. Why try to fit it into a particular structure?
The people who were involved with Walter White after his diagnosis have paid dearly for his ambition. Even in the case of Mr. White himself, though his ambition drove him to destruction, it was worry about his family that got him to take the first chances at cooking methamphetamine. His family was the original reason he broke bad. The excitement and getting a repeated feeling of success is what ruined him. In the end, he might be able to take care of his family, but only Gretchen and Elliott know it. In everyone else’s eyes, he abandoned them, and his family hated him before he left. He dearly regrets that, especially his son’s hatred, who thought the world of him until he finally had to run. We saw that by his risking getting caught by watching Flynn walk home through the laundry room. He could have closure with Skyler, but the exchange on the phone is the nicest reaction he’s going to get from his oldest child at this point.
I found the final episode pretty damn satisfying. The main characters continued revealing things about themselves up until the last minute. The massacre of the AB was a microcosm of the whole series; Walt “won”, but ended up hurting himself. This time his luck ran out, and it was finally fatal.
Thanks to whoever pointed out that his “Felina” was the chemicals and the lab. I smiled when the tape case fell out of the glove box. When he started the car, and I heard:
I saddled up and away I did go,
Riding alone in the dark.
Maybe tomorrow a bullet may find me.
Tonight nothing’s worse than this Pain in my heart.
I got completely misty. It was too perfect.
And thank you drastic_quench, my vocabulary got larger today! Anagnorisis is a “where have you been all my life?” word.
And the ending of the song:
Agreed, but I think Walt was playing Jack to the extent that (1) he wanted Jesse in the room, presumably to be wiped out by the machine gun, and (2) he was stalling for time by playing on Jack’s pride to honor the initial agreement that Jack kill Jesse.
Walt had to know that the “plan” he pitched to Todd and Lydia would be rejected, so he knew that Jack would try to kill him. I think his plan was to just get everybody in the room and hit the key fob (perhaps even killing himself in the process), but once his keys were taken he had to improvise. And then he improvised again when he saw Jesse in chains.
Absolutely right; Todd was a psycho, but also an idiot. This was the perfect way to have him die.
“I did it for me” was, IMO, the most crucial line of the final episode, and made what could have been a filler “goodbye” scene an essential part of the story. Walt’s recognition of what has been an obvious undercurrent of the show was a beautiful coda to the family side of the story.
Better late then ne–
oh wait, nevermind.