the first example coming to mind is the whole James Bond series. Every movie plot depends on 1 in a thousand chance, bad guys not killing Bond when they have the chance, etc. etc. And we love them.
You can tell they thought it up early: it’s not a Breaking Bad idea at all. That’s a Silence of the Lambs/Dexter kind of idea. Looks like the other potential series were pretty similar to stuff that was proposed on the SDMB, although I’m sure discussion in other places fell along similar lines.
I’ve said once or twice this season that the series was Walt living out a fantasy.
From the Facebook recap: “Stevia Artificial Sweetener: Hey, you know what? This show sucks!” and “Stevia Artificial Sweetener: SERIOUSLY, FUCK THIS SHOW! We’re just trying to offer a healthy alternative sweetener, here! Christ!”
So we’re not the only ones to’ve had this thought. 
“Equal and Sweet 'n Low like this.”
First off - M-60. We don’t really get a feel for how the bullet gets him (ricochet, maybe?), but he clearly winces when he’s on top of Jesse and the bullets are flying. I knew instantly that he’d been hit.
As for how he got into the AB compound - they let him in. He knew where it was because it was the same place that he’d gone to to hire them to kill Jesse. He talked to Todd/Lydia and “convinced” them that he had a better meth cook strategy. In reality, they were just waiting to get him there so they could kill him, so they let him in. Basically, both sides had a pretense on why they were doing what they were doing, but in reality both had a plan to kill the other.
Totally disagree. Freeing Jesse was not on his mind at all. If Jesse had in fact been partners with Uncle Jack, he would have been killed too. The only reason he even brought Jesse up was to buy time to get his keys. Then when he saw his pathetic condition, he decided to save him.
I just watched the scene again. Walt is apparently hit and jerks right after one of those plastic counters hanging above the pool table is struck by a bullet. In fact, I thought that Walt had been struck by the counter itself. But it probably couldn’t do enough damage.
Someone explained upthread that if you fire that gun that way its aim is going to become more and more erratic. The scene plays out that way and you can even see that the gun shoots a bunch of holes in the wall of the trunk (and then the mechanism catches fire).
It couldn’t. The counter thing was funny, though. It was like something you might’ve seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and that was the last place I expected that kind of visual joke.
Nothing to do with the season finale, but this bit with Vince Gilligan at the end of Monday’s Colbert Report was amusing.
It was funny- but somehow at the end I found I was glad that Vince Gilligan is being released from Breaking Bad. 
Aaron Paul seemed to be having fun with the Jesse Pinkman character on SNL on Saturday night. I particularly liked when he appeared in the opening skit as Jesse and was describing how his “friend” (i.e., Walter White) had to resort to making meth because of health insurance issues. At the end he said, “Wait, don’t you want to know what happens to my friend?” and everyone there said, “No” because of course they didn’t want the ending spoiled.
Walt gets shot because he is lying on top of Jesse, he literally takes a bullet for him.
This reminds me of two previous scenes:
Hank telling Jesse “Walt’s ruthless. He’ll do just about anything to protect his interests. I agree. Except when it comes to you. He cares about you. Can’t you see?”
When Todd tells the train heist story, he describes how the train went over Jesse and didn’t harm him because he’s a “skinny little guy.”
After not being able to say goodbye to his son, Walt’s fatherly feelings towards Jesse kicked in and he shielded him.
In the end, Walt’s own creation shoots and kills him.
Still, he dies a content man.
Jesse has left, he is surrounded the bodies of his enemies, his family is almost certainly provided for, and his legacy as the legendary Heisenberg is assured.
He is the Ultimo Hombre, the last man standing.
He dies on his own terms, surrounded by the scientific tools he loved so much.
I think repeated viewings will enhance this ending’s power.
I agree, totally.
You might even take it further. As I said before, it’s like the show has been trying different endings on for size. Even episode 508 before Hank finds the book, with Walt retired and connected with his family, feels like one possible ending. It could be argued that we have a bunch of endings: Walt retiring (“Gliding over all” before the “oh shit” moment, plus maybe even ending on that “oh shit” moment for a properly ambiguous ending), Hank winning (“To’hajiilee” before the shootout), Walt busted but getting away (“Ozymandias”), in addition to “Granite State” (Walt dying alone, and Walt turning himself in to the police) and “Felina”.
That ties in with one of Breaking Bad’s greatest qualities, which was its ability to give you something you expected in a way you didn’t expect it. Of course when that happened it almost always made everything worse and somehow ramped up the tension.
Agreed. The problem with Skyler killing herself, though, is that she wouldn’t be able to un-kill herself again, and after that there would be really just no way of pulling a “happy fantasy” ending out of the hat for Walt. The writers, at least, obviously felt that they needed one, and I agree (at least right now). Although they did sort of hint at the possibility at one point, when she wades into the pool in “Fifty-One”.
Personally, I wanted to see baby Holly kick the bucket, but that would have the same problem. The Nazis breaking into the house and Skyler finding them around the crib was, I suppose, a hint at that possibility.
Huh. I guess there are a few of those moments, when it’s like the show says “we *could *have gone all the way with this… but we won’t”. Jesse almost burning down the house is another.
I guess Jesse got the dead spouse angle (twice!) as a kind of proxy for Walt. The poor kid really is paying for Walt’s sins.
Not that I’ve seen, but I haven’t looked at a lot of reviews. Let me know if you see it mentioned. (And thanks. :))
BTW, if you want to go anywhere further with the Aristotelian tragedy angle, you can totally map the hamartia to either Walt’s pride (if you want to think of it as a “tragic flaw”) or to him leaving the book in bathroom (if you want to see it as simply a mistake or error in judgement), and the *peripeteia *to Hank’s “oh shit” moment. Or, perhaps more accurately, the “oh shit” moment is Hank’s own moment of *anagnorisis *that leads to peripeteia.
Anyway, something along those lines.
I think they went for the ending with the most resolution. Calling it a happy fantasy is going too far (I understand you’re using it as shorthand). I’m going to say this might’ve been the best ending possible for Walt under the circumstances, but if you look at the expression on his face throughout the episode - when he says goodbye to Skyler, gets to touch Holly for the last time, watches Flynn from a distance without talking to him, and gives Jesse that farewell nod - he’s not happy. He fulfills his plans but even when he vanquishes his enemies he doesn’t get the Heisenberg thrill anymore. The thrill is gone. (Is WordMan still reading this?)
You know what the general idea is with ghosts: they’re still here because they have unfinished business. That’s Walt in this episode. He’s sustained for a little because he has a task to complete. With that done, he goes to the lab and fades away.
It’s possible to pick a bleaker ending for sure. I thought for a while they were headed to one because this season was, for the most part, really bleak. I thought for a while that Skyler was going to bite the big one. I said Marie might try to kill Walt and get her by accident. But I couldn’t imagine suicide with the way this season played out (earlier I could’ve pictured it). Skyler was really tough, and she’s the single parent of a toddler! Even if Holly might be better off with Marie in some ways, it’s hard to Skyler doing that to her children. Doubly so when those children will someday know what kind of a person Walt was. Suicide arguably would have been worse than everything else she did with Walt.
And I’m very glad the show never did violence to Flynn and Holly. I never thought they would, but I’m still glad they didn’t. The implication they were in danger (which already happened via Gus) is one thing. It would have been too horrible not just because of how tragic it is on its own, but because it turns them from characters into props illustrating Walt’s crimes. It was very hard to watch that happen to Jesse over and over, and unlike him they were blameless in all this. I really liked Flynn and after the way he proved his courage this season it would have been unbearable.
All of Walt’s sins were visited on Jesse throughout the series. In part that’s because from a story point of view they couldn’t have had Walt beaten to a bloody pulp and continue to fool his family and couldn’t have killed the Whites in season two or three and then kept the show going with a meaningful amount of drama. Sometimes I disliked the way they kept doing that because it became a little repetitive, but it did make for a real catharsis when Jesse got away. I wish they’d let that scream in the car keep going for a few more seconds so we could’ve felt a little more of that.
It’s interesting reading those five alternative endings to find out that they didn’t actually have the ending plotted out when they put the M60 in Walt’s trunk to start the season. It seems they would write themselves into corners and have to work out solutions, which is interesting because it is exactly how Walt had to do things. Walt can only plan on the things that have happened, he can’t see the future and it seems the writers had something like that going on as well.
Well, yeah. I agree, call it the “best possible under the circumstances” ending. There’s obviously still a lot of bitterness and loss there. Which is a better ending than a completely “happy” one anyway.
I thought Colbert had an insightful question for Gilligan: In the beginning, Walt found out he had cancer; didn’t he eventually become the cancer?
By the way, to get on my soapbox again for a second: Talking about Shakespeare and the classical tragedians in the context of Breaking Bad is kind of interesting in another sense. It’s easy for modern audiences to think of those things as “highbrow” or even “boring” now (not saying anyone here does), but that’s just because the context and the times can seem a bit foreign to us now, and academia and people wearing tweed got to them. Really, in their own times, they must have hit their audiences in the balls just as much as Breaking Bad does with us (well, they still do with us, too, if the angle and velocity is right). Really, Shakespeare, and before that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, were the Vince Gilligans of their times.
I very much like that. There really is something ghost-like about Walt in this episode, with the way he’s able to just walk right in to Casa Gray Matter, and then Skyler’s house.