FeLiNa (Breaking Bad Spoilers)

This post has been written in commercial breaks as a stream of consciousness.  Nice beginning there, with the whole shout out to the song Felina, that many of we fans had seized upon.

Our friends from Gray Matter were played perfectly there and so was Walt’s decision on how to handle them.  Nearly ten million in an irrevocable trust for his son, for college and taking care of the family from “wealthy benefactors who once knew his father quite well” who were sorry the family suffered.  The laser pointers from the meth addicts being the “hitmen” was brilliant as well, just the sort of ploy we’ve all come to expect from Heisenberg.

Walt’s birthday, 52 apparently.  Only two years has passed in show?  The final showdown comes on the anniversary of when it all began.  Flashback to the pilot as Walt reflects on how it all began in the ruins of his former home, fallen into disuse and vandalism.

Lydia meats Todd at her favorite place to eat.  He makes awkward small talk as Walter White sits down next to the two of them.  He tries to convince them he needs money and has a new method of making meth.  Lydia dismisses him and tells Todd, essentially, to mercy kill him.  Then the camera zooms in as she puts her sweetener in her tea; Walt remarked he knew to find her there because they always met there, at that table…is the ricin in the sweetener packet?

Walt shows up to talk to Skylar one last time, right after Marie calls about him being back in town according to an old neighbor.  He tells her how Hank and Gomez died and hands her a lotto ticket, the one with the coordinates, and tells her they’re buried there and to call the DEA when he leaves and trade it for a deal with the prosecutor.  He starts to say he has one last thing to tell her about why he did it and she interrupts, telling him she’s tired of his saying it was for the family.  He cuts her off, the month’s introspection helping him apparently, “I did it for me…I was, I was good at it.  I felt alive.”  He plaintively asks to see his daughter one last time and wipes a wisp of her hair from her sleeping face and leaves.  Flynn gets off the bus, and Walt watches, unable to speak to his son who now hates him, closure seemingly denied.

Walt’s machine gun key fob rig was a bit contrived in all honesty, but the way it killed almost all the Nazis wasn’t.  I was happy to see Walt tackle Jesse to save his life and even happier to see Jesse get to garrote Todd.  Walter’s true moment where we saw his growth as a person had to come as he held the gun on the wounded Jack, and Jack tells him that he can tell Walt where the rest of the money is.  Walter kills him.  It’s not about the money for Walt now, it’s about tying up loose ends.  It’s about leaving a better world for his family.  He asks Jesse to kill him, because he’s been mortally wounded by the machine gun.  Jesse refuses and drives away, yelling happily.

Jesse Pinkman ends this series as the redeemed man.  He began as an addict, he abetted White’s fall into evil, he became a partner in great evil.  However, after his imprisonment by the Nazis, he no longer seems addicted (months of forced hard rehab).  He has the chance to kill White, something he wanted months ago, and he spares him, a bit to see him suffer, but also to free himself from servitude to White’s whims, just as Walt saved him from servitude to the Nazis.  He apparently goes to the police too, because we see them pulling in, in the middle of nowhere, as Walt holds a gas mask and leaves a bloody handprint as he falls dead next to a tank in a meth lab.  We begin to pull away and show the police storming the place…any doubt that Walt is dead is dispelled when they treat him as a dead body.

As for Lydia, the corporate face of the blue meth empire.  She won’t be distributing any stored up product the Nazis might have given her.  She calls Todd’s phone shortly before Walt dies and is answered by Heisenberg, who informs her that she’s suffering flu like symptoms because the ricin was indeed in her sweetener.  He hangs up and tosses the phone away, having pronounced her death sentence.

Walter White destroyed everything he had built.  His empire built upon the death, suffering, and addiction of others is toppled.  In the end, even he finds a measure of redemption, his fatal wound being the result of having saved Jesse’s life.

At the end of the night, redemption is the word of the hour.  In the words of J.K. Rowling, “All was well.”