NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT

BREAKING BAD FINALE = B+

As I've not-famously argued, the SOPRANOS series ending was the most gratifying act of withholding in TV history.  A mouthpiece for creator David chase, it wasn’t so much a "thank you for watching" but a well-meaning "screw you, bitches--I'm out[drops mic]". By denying us closure on the moral argument that could only be solved by definitive life or death for Tony (i.e., is he a "good guy" or a "bad guy") Chase effectively chastises us for reducing his character--his art--to such base binaries, and for pontificating so fervently on how the series 'should' end.  It wasn't Tony who was whacked but us, the hungry audience, who suddenly is plunged into darkness and informed that that's all the story we get—there aint no more.  It hurt; it was brutal; it was genius.

BREAKING BAD goes for something different.  In a show that leaves little (and certainly decreasing) doubt that Walter is indeed a "bad guy" by the end, it's finale spends entirely too long lionizing him in what amounts to be a distractingly neat conclusion.

What's neat about a self-firing, oscillating machine gun taking out a room of neo-Nazis, freeing Jesse and catching Walt with shrapnel which will finally--finally--end the reign of Heisenberg?  It doesn't require CHOICES.

Choices are the engine of human mess, and BB turned out to have surprisingly few of them.

Skylar was painfully annoying, but her washing up on the "victim" side of aftermath beach is fascinating.  Arguably she's still perpetuating the deceptions Walt planted, yet we aren't given insight into her feelings (except, what, she's taken up smoking? I'd probably have taken up meth).  The show seems as uninterested with Skylar as it always has-- not as a real woman, but as the wife that will or will not catch her husband in "the act".  When she does catch him, Gilligan wisely makes her complicit, but only so our story can continue.  But he never bothers to explore what that complicity means, how it changes her, or how it was there all the time.   She's a cipher.

As is poor RJ Mitte who I hope goes on to meatier roles than Walt junior.  Poor little druglord's son.  His histrionics on the phone in the penultimate episode illustrate the problem I had with his character all along -- his moral puberty never comes; he never gets beyond "my dad’s the best" until he gets to "my dad’s the worst."  This  peculiar Oedipal dialectic may actually be quite interesting psychological fodder, but BREAKING BAD doesn't give a shit about Walt Jr's psychology.  This is why we don't get scenes with him alone, or with his friends, or really doing ANYTHING besides reacting to his parents deceptions/truths/postures.  It's actually a patently odd omission in hindsight -- we don't know jackshit about who Walt Jr really is, and it's a missed opportunity six seasons later.

One that BB’s finale eschews in favor of its perseverant focus on Walt Sr.  Sure he's the antihero and center of this story, and Bryan Cranston does great work here (though he's always Malcolm in The Middle-dad to me).  But we are so aligned with Walt's POV through BREAKING BAD's endgame that we don't experience the genuine abjection the other characters have come to know so deeply.  And spending so much time getting Walt's rationale through Walt's eyes (if not literally than certainly story-wise) we can't quite fully chastise him for his choices.  Sure he's a bit of a dick, but wasn't he doing it for the family?  Why else does his final “confession” somehow SEEM so false-- "I did it for me.  I liked it."   That fact, which we know, which we always so strongly known, suddenly seems like the lie.  After all, he’s trying so hard to get that money to his family.  For his ego?  For a judging deity?  For Skylar?  That's the power of BREAKING BAD's myopic narration.  We don’t believe the most obvious thing of all—Walt’s quite simply, in Jesse’s words, “evil.”

I'd usually be the last one to suggest moralizing as a positive creative force, but in a show called BREAKING BAD its a bit disingenuous to imply that the particular brand of Bad that Walt has broken is anything as ambiguous and morally gray and even borderline meritorious as the finale implied.   He doesn’t/shouldn’t get the hero’s ending, even the antihero’s ending, with his final plan a success, Jesse free, his family guaranteed money, the pieces all just right before he can look over his meth lab equipment in satisfaction, and die in peace.  And as much as I’ve been horrified by the nihilism and bloodshed of these last six episodes I feel gipped in a way that it was in service of delivering what is—if surely not a traditional “happy” ending—as happy as an ending as BREAKING BAD could muster.

SOPRANOS denied us emotional catharsis through sleight of hand nonsense (Meadow parallel parking) and a brain-dead, hackneyed soundtrack (DON’T STOP BELIEVIN) rounding out its precious final moments.    BREAKING BAD forces emotional justice, forces closure, onto a story that demanded chaos.  With the refrain of the final Badfinger song “Guess I got what I deserved” over Walt’s death scene, Gilligan is almost embarrassingly juvenile in his foot-dragging affection for Cranston or for Walter White, or likely some amalgam of the two.   If you think DEATH is what Walter White deserved after these six seasons, you haven’t been watching. 

Walter White got off easy, and so did we.