Having tasted Stevia, I’d pick the ricin too.
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I like the mirroring of the car keys at the beginning and at the end. The NH car keys in the sun visor falling into his hand at the beginning of the episode and the car keys with the gun controls Walt is stealthily reaching for throughout the Nazi clubhouse scene.
Satisfying ending. Great writing, great acting, great series.
I see Bryan Cranston on stage on Wednesday at the Cambridge American Repertory Theater playing LBJ. Should be interesting.
I also felt that getting rid of Lydia put the final stop to this particular channel. She was the source of the methylamine, and had a vested interest in keeping business going. Even with all the existing crews annihilated, Lydia would have pressed on. Walt’s overwhelming need to keep the “credit” for his blue meth probably drove him to sterilize any possible future attempts to replicate it. Lydia’s operation had tried, but failed, until they got their hands on Jesse. In the end, by killing everyone including Lydia, Walt keeps the Precious all to himself. In telling her that he has done so, he asserts his own dominance in the field. One last time.
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Well, as I said, “It’s connected to the previous memory”. Already given. Go back and rewatch his face. That’s not just a box this time. That’s all I need to say.
Agreed.
Lydia may only have [a few hours left to live at this point][1]. She doesn’t look to be in much condition to orchestrate a hit considering the nausea, diarrhea, tachycardia, hypotension and seizures. Walt knows the condition of her hit men of choice and he knows the amount of her dose. Lydia is rapidly running out of time.
Personally I find this much easier to believe than the fact Walt was able know precisely where to park in order to gather all the Aryans, with the exception off Todd, in the line of fire of his contraption. Consider that Walt has never visited the compound. I know he was told where to go but what a stroke of luck to get them all.
My second point was not making the distinction between “not deserving to live and deserving to die” as you say. I made an entirely different distinction.
[1]: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/27/things-you-should-know-about-ricin-before-watching-the-breaking-bad-finale/
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Somehow I don’t see Skyler “buying” into the 10 million dollars trust fund set up by the Schwartzes as plain generosity or pity; I think she’d sense that Walt is/was behind it. Question is, would she tell Flynn.
Is any part of the internets making anything of how Walt is posed on the floor in the ending crane shot, and how a cross appears over him as the camera continues traveling upwards?
BB was initially described as a show that was really about a middle-class everyguy’s attempt to maintain his lifestyle in the blasted hellscape of post-industrial America. Which was pretty pretentious. I think that the deeper themes you’ve dug out here - that what made Walter White so seductive to us all was that so many of us share that deep-seated feeling that somehow, due to missed opportunities and the increasingly Darwinistic distribution of wealth, we have been cheated.
His admission - that in the end, he did it for himself - is the most honest moment White has allowed himself to have. Did he deserve the kind of redemption Vince GIlligan bestowed on him in this ep? Hell, it’s Vince’s show, so he gets to make that call. It was certainly satisfying to the audience, I’ll tellya.
Even the Economist weighed in on the significance of BB this week, finding in it lessons for the would-be Masters of the Universe. That so many of them wind up in empty lives with the equivalent of Walt’s “useless drums of linen” is an interesting judgment to come from a magazine devoted to commerce.
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I think she’ll let it go. She’s done with the pain that Walt caused and doesn’t want to burden her son for the rest of his life, he’ll have it tough enough. And it’s not like the Schwartz’s will ever say that it’s not from them, so she’s going to have to go on suspicion.
But if she only really knows them via Walt’s tales, she could easily see them feeling guilty about their bounty as a result of Walt’s hard work and wanting to make right for his children, just not him.
Yes, and so much better than any other explanation! I knew from the beginning of the season that Walt would die at the end, though not precisely how - I had predicted he would take himself out in order to square things up, which he basically did.
But that song! Anybody who knows that song knows that it meant the bad guys were going out the hard way and Schuyler would be left alone, as she was Felina. Whatever she deserved for her own bad behavior, he’d already handed her her comeuppance, and then some. The slight smile on his face at the end could not have been more perfect. His being at peace at last made it ok.
I saw the thing with Jesse differently. Finn was his real son, but Jesse was his emotional son - and they’d been through a lot more together. I didn’t have the sense that Jesse refused to shoot him out of hatred or wishing him a worse fate, or even because he was already shot. It was more…Jesse loved Walt. But he was grown up now, and metaphorically announcing that each man had his own fate. Like - when a young man steps to the old man. Doesn’t matter who ‘wins’ the round. It’s the rite of passage that matters.
Also, thought when Jesse fantasized making the box again, that it was for her ashes? Apparently not, tho…
IOW. Hated it, loved it. Bummed, gonna miss it. But kinda relieved, too. Damned thing was addicting as meth.
I haven’t been watching the second half of season five I’ve been vicariously reading about it here and other places.
After reading about it my analytical mind rebells against this ending. This isn’t tragedy or comeuppance or a tale of justice. This is wish fulfillment and fan service through violence. Cowboys and indians. The people the fans want to die - they die. The anti-hero kind of redeems himself. He goes out by his own hand and his will is triumphant. He dies in a meth lab in a lawless desert. Never had to answer for his crimes. Never brought to justice. If he did all this out of ego was his ego ever punctured?
A bullet in the gut -vs- cancer treatment in prison and the scripted theatrics of a trial? Being treated as a cop killer for his brother-in-law’s death? What does justice look like?
Seems kind of an easy out for an epic show in the golden age of television.
I think she’s going to know it’s from Walt the instant it comes in at some really high and specific amount instead of a cool round million bucks.
It also leaves open the question how a pair of white bread WASPs are going to launder that much money in 10 months. Sure their company is pretty big, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a cash business, and they probably want to keep drug money out of it regardless.
I’m imagining them just making the trust out of their own funds and using the mountain of cash to cover their day to day expenses for the rest of their lives. Maybe setup a drug rehab charity and donate it peacemeal and anonymously for the rest of their lives?
No true fan would do what you did. Not one.
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Lydia was not only a potential threat to Sky and the kids, but a means of Todd and his gang finding success, and a potential continuing threat to Jesse - as well as doing to her own kid what Walt had done to his own, but without his reasons. At best, she was worthless, at worst, a threat t everything he actually held dear. She had to go.
And, I actually liked it that she went.
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He dies alone and estranged from his family, his friends (well, friend), and with only a legend about his persona living on. It’s hard to imagine any sort of mortal justice that would exceed the punishment he inflicted on himself.
Having the cops pick him up would really be anticlimactic really. He’s picked up, found guilty as hell, and dies of cancer pretty quickly after going to prison. There is no additional justice there.
I’m still wondering who called the cops. It’s pretty clear that the Nazi compound was pretty far out in the boonies with few/no neighbors (they ran a poorly ventilated meth lab there for a long time) and random gunfire couldn’t have been that uncommon there. Just look who lived there. At the very least I would have expected only a single patrol car to show up originally, to respond to yet another noise disturbance at the damn Nazi compound.
I guess maybe Walt had them called in just in case they got the drop and killed him early? I guess it would be a pretty good backup plan, since these guys were running a poorly disguised massive meth lab that even the APD would find after like 10 seconds. It would explain the police numbers too if he said something like “Heisenberg is at a massive meth lab on XYZ Road”.
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Vince Gilligan said that he believed Walt intended to kill Jesse that night. The fact that Walt sees Jesse’s suffering, jumps on him to save him, and even takes a bullet for him, indicates that that final moment was the first time he truly did something selfless for Jesse - the first moment he cared. It is far from redemption - there is no redeeming what Walt did to Jesse - but hopefully this final act at the end of Walt’s failed life will be the beginning of Jesse’s successful one.
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Why does everyone see Jesse as some victim of Walt’s. Jesse is equally culpable and in some ways worse than Walt. Don’t forget Jesse was cooking his poison long before Walt. He was just in denial about it’s repercussions. Jesse’s meth has likely damaged more than a child or two. The difference was that Walt went into it with a better understanding of the stakes.
He probably did when he believed Jesse was a partner with the Aryans.
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Admittedly, I would like to know more of the Gray Matter / Walt leaving Gretchen backstory. I missed the part where they lied about his contributions on national TV unless that was part of season 5 (no, sadly, I haven’t watched any of S5 yet), but it’s also been a while since I’ve watched the first season… I might need to re-watch that.
In the second to last episode they appear on PBS and say that Walt’s only contribution to the company was half of the name.
However, his backstory with Gray Matter is never really explained other than he took a crappy buyout real early on and missed out on big bucks and fame that came along with it. As fans we can speculate that it was his complete inability to power share that caused a power struggle that he eventually lost (presumably with Gretchen and Elliot voting him out 2 to 1), but nothing is ever explicitly said about those days. It is pretty clear that Walt is still bitter over whatever happened so many years later and he thinks Gretchen and Elliot are too, hence the comment about finally setting things right.
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