Breaking Bad

[Swanny]

Did anyone else enjoy the dead body in the massage chair as much as I did?

[alB5]

Did anyone else enjoy the dead body in the massage chair as much as I did?

yes. yes i did.

[TurboJake]

Perfect ending.

Great show. Will watch again in the future.

[willworkfore30s]

^^That GIF is blowing my mind. Is that him, was he really on PIR? Must google

[illest318i]

Wait, do we know that all of Jesse's money is gone? Did the DEA take it or am I missing something?

Do you remember the episode where he was throwing it all away? I'm pretty sure it was one of the first episodes of season 5. Then after that the DEA took him in, I think they kept the money and just released him.

[R3Z3N]

When people call this the golden age of television,

Hopefully this never happens.

[AwakenNoMore]

I was happy with the ending, I actually had to take a break while watching because of the anxiousness I was feeling. At the end I didn't feel sad, I felt closure, relief. Perfect.

[gtdragon980]

Do you remember the episode where he was throwing it all away? I'm pretty sure it was one of the first episodes of season 5. Then after that the DEA took him in, I think they kept the money and just released him.

OH right, got it. Dammit, what a dumbass!!!

[hfabricius]

The DEA may have taken Jesse's money but he has to know what Todd's uncle did with the 80 million he stole from Walt.

I thought the finale was awesome. Can't think of a better way they could have ended it.

[Swanny]

Blasting away to freedom in an el camino. Perfect ending.

[DEV0 E30]

Did anyone else enjoy the dead body in the massage chair as much as I did?

Double yes.

Hopefully this never happens.

As in, television keeps getting better, and we're not simply set for shit reality tv from now on? I agree with you and hope we haven't eclipsed what is good tv already.

But I've hard that this is the TV Age and is the golden age of television everywhere, it's been coined and will continue to be used.

Hell it's even used in possibly my favorite review / look back / critic's piece on the finale:

https://medium.com/editors-picks/eb7f96cf945c

‘Breaking Bad’ finale: ‘Just get me home. I’ll do the rest’
Vince Gilligan serves up an unexpected final chapter to his unforgettable drama (spoilers)

The golden age of television has produced some amazing series finales. The Sopranos finale’s heartstopping but artfully mundane blackout confounded viewer expectations, yet allowed us to never stop believing in (and being haunted by) one of the most beloved antiheroes in TV history. The finale of Six Feet Under, in contrast, treated us to the future lives and deaths of every character on the show, a choice in line with both the show’s theme and the audience’s desire for an emotionally gratifying tearjerker of an ending. The Shield’s finale was not only suspenseful down to the final minute (in keeping with the entire series), but it managed to serve up Vic Mackey’s comeuppance while also capturing his stubborn determination to break the rules at all costs.

Sunday night’s Breaking Bad finale clearly belongs on this short list with the smartest, most satisfying TV finales. The last few episodes of death, destruction, and darkness proved to be a great set-up for an unexpected final episode in which Walt finagles a way for his son to get some of his money, for Skyler to win immunity from prosecution, for Todd, Lydia and the Nazis to pay for their interference with his plans, and — most shocking of all — for Jesse to go free. Although some viewers might feel that Walt had earned a far worse fate than bleeding out in a meth lab alone (yes, only on Breaking Bad could anyone see that as a storybook ending), the truth is that Vince Gilligan already took care to drag Walt across the coals but good. Let’s review: Walt lost most of his fortune to an insane Nazi. His brother-in-law was murdered. His whole family grew to hate him. His own son told him to shut up and die, already. And he was dying of cancer, slowly but surely. Watching Walt ride back into town to set a few things straight, and every single aspect of his plan didn’t backfire for once? That was a big shock. The episode constituted a shift away from the dominant tone of the final season, sure, but that was sort of the point. Walt was still going to pay, of course. So why not save a few innocent (and not-so-innocent) bystanders at the buzzer?

Is Breaking Bad a character-driven, plot-driven serial drama, after all, or is it a cautionary tale first and foremost? Gilligan set the record straight with this finale. Instead of sticking to the hopeless trajectory of a consistently moral universe, Gilligan served up a story we could believe and enjoy.

The greatest challenge, of course, was getting us to buy each character’s evolution from the start of the series to the very end. If Walt or Jesse or Skyler were going to behave in strange ways, or change their stripes significantly, we needed to understand that it was possible, and believable, for them to do so. One of Gilligan’s big accomplishments with this series was that he forced us to reckon with a complex, atypical lead character. We understood Walt’s capacity for both ego-driven spite and compassion. Each step of the way, we weren’t sure which side of Walt would reign, the reasonable, sympathetic side or the dark side. Even as the show spiraled into total darkness and Walt became increasingly fixated on controlling everything and everyone around him, we knew that he was still tricking himself into thinking it was about his family. That’s how he allowed himself to continue doing horrible things.

And that made his final admission to Skyler all the more unexpected. “Skyler, all the things that I did,” Walt says. “You need to understand.” “Do I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family?” Skyler replies. “I did it for me,” Walt admits, finally. “I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.” Walt’s admission doesn’t contradict Gilligan’s moral universe so much as demonstrate that this final stint as an outlaw has radically changed Walt’s perspective on his own life.We never saw Walt enjoy his work that much, or enjoy the money he made, or even savor his status as the boss. Every now and then, he got the last word, blew up a car, told Skyler, “I’m the one who knocks.” But mostly, he was running for his life.

In other words, even Walt didn’t realize that he liked what he was doing until the very end, when he lost it all. Teaching chemistry was pure misery for the man. His entire life was a failure. He was demeaned and disgusted with himself. He turned to cooking meth as a desperate way to save his family. He adopted that story and he stuck with it. But his motivations shifted, over time, until he couldn’t stop, couldn’t back up, couldn’t undo what he’d done — and he didn’t want to anyway.

This realization was consistent with the incredible restraint and economy of the show. Every season, you’d see some aspect of a character that you’d never seen before. Thanks to Gilligan’s withholding nature as a storyteller, you never completely understood Walt or Skyler or even Jesse. Hell, it took, what, three seasons to see that Jesse was a reasonably smart, good guy with really bad instincts? Walt spent the first three seasons sweating and shaking and manipulating other people. That was about it. He rarely connected with anyone, rarely said more than a few words. One of the transfixing things about the final season was that Walt was finally talking. Sure, we hated him more than ever. But when things got truly awful, he started to explain himself a tiny bit.

But never too much. Even in the final scenes of the show, there was so much that we wanted Skyler to say to Walt, or Walt to explain to Jesse. And yet, these relationships were resolved as much as they ever could be. That was the trick of the whole finale: We got just enough but not too much.

Could we really wrap the series without revisiting the Schwartzes? Having Walt murder them might’ve been a stretch, really. But it made perfect sense for him to use them as a way to get his money to Junior. And seeing Elliott and Gretchen in their immaculate, spacious new house, chatting aimlessly about Napa and whether or not their housekeeper had left them something tasty in the fridge? It was a glimpse of the kind of life Walt might’ve wanted if he hadn’t been cut out of the business: faintly reminiscent of Gale’s connoisseur enthusiasm, but without the hermetic weirdo desperation, and with exactly the kind of relaxed, teasing rapport that Walt and Skyler never had. But there was also something repugnant about Elliott and Gretchen, in their high capitalist smugness. Their little scene served as a sly commentary on what becomes of truly successful people: They are reduced to boutique-culture consumers, living in sterile bubble environments, talking idly about food, visiting Napa over and over, arguing over trivia.

The Schwartzes’ mere existence tortured Walt from the start of the show. To see him break into their house and not kill them, but force them to do his bidding and make them live in terror forever? That was at once surprising, highly amusing, and, let’s just admit it, satisfying. We wanted to see those two finally affected by something Walt said or did. “You’re talking about your stock prices, without a worry in a world, and then suddenly, you’ll hear the scrape of a footstep behind you,” Walt tells them, conjuring the imaginary hit men who’ll kill them if they don’t give Junior Walt’s money. “But before you can even turn around: Curtains!”

And then his hilarious parting words: “Cheer up, beautiful people. This is where you get to make it right.”

It was hard to imagine that the finale could get more satisfying than that, but it did, when Walt not only admitted to Skyler that he acted selfishly, but also told her the truth about Hank’s murder. Of course, it was all Walt’s fault that Hank got killed. But it made sense that Skyler and maybe Junior would at least know he didn’t do it himself.

Then there was the final scene at the Nazi compound. Pure gratification. The fact that merciless Nazi criminals were involved in the final stretch of the show was sort of a tip-off that they were going down, right? But their starkly evil nature was also part of the reason that everything slipped out of Walt’s control at the end. From the point where Todd kills the kid after the train heist, forward, there’s a new level of evil in play. Even though Uncle Jack and Todd are hired by Walt, they take control of his fate. Uncle Jack doesn’t listen when Walt calls off the hit on Jesse, so Hank and Steve Gomez get shot and killed. He also doesn’t listen when Walt tells him to kill Jesse, so Jesse ends up chained to the lab, cooking meth for them. Skyler could’ve been murdered, simply because Todd is insane and he likes Lydia. Andrea, on the other hand, is murdered by Todd. When Walt pulls up to the compound, it’s finally time for the guys who’ve been running roughshod over Walt to get their due. We know that Walt is going down no matter what. This last stretch is mostly a set-up for Walt to show Jesse a tiny shred of compassion, at long last.

Oh, and it’s a set-up for watching Jesse kill that “Opie, dead-eyed piece of shit,” Todd. Surely watching a man get choked to death by a chain hasn’t qualified as a happy ending until this moment.

Some have already argued that the Breaking Bad finale broke the rules of the entire show. But as viewers, we got to have our cake and eat it, too. We got to enjoy a really spare, gorgeous, dark narrative that held its structural integrity until the second to last episode: Walt follows his ego, and everyone he knows suffers for it. But we also got to enjoy the kind of ending that’s very rare on TV, and is much more typical of movies: The (anti)hero rides into town and rather unexpectedly sets a few things straight. In some ways, it helps to think of the first seven episodes of the last season as the show’s final chapter, and then the finale is a kind of swashbuckling denouement in which Walt does the things he’s never completely succeeded at doing before: He saves the day. Kind of. A little bit. Except for the chain-smoking Skyler and the dead Hank and the depressed Junior and the bleeding-out-on-the-floor part.

Still, as far as Breaking Bad goes, this was about the happiest ending possible. Would the purists be happier if Skyler ended up in prison or dead, Jesse killed himself and Walt died alone, coughing blood all over his money? Arguably, that would be more in keeping with the tone of the series. But personally, I’m thrilled that Gilligan found a way to pull back on that throttle and give us something unexpected: Walt, showing self-knowledge and compassion. After a long time alone in a snowy cabin, dying of cancer, why not? He rode back into town not for himself, but for everyone else. It was the first time we saw Walt do something so purely generous. He found a way to make things a tiny bit less terrible. And really, without that time in the cabin, knowing Skyler and Junior hated his guts, we wouldn’t have bought it.

Similarly, if Jesse hadn’t been in captivity, he wouldn’t have wanted to live again. His enslavement amounted to a brilliant twist: It allowed us to believe that he had finally figured out a way to bring himself happiness — the way most of us find happiness — through steady, difficult work. That was the key to Jesse’s redemption all along. His character weakness, from the start, was laziness and shortcuts and wanting to skip over the difficult stuff and get to the fun stuff. This avoidance led him to drugs, endless “parties,” friendships he’d outgrown, and being manipulated by Walt (not to mention some pretty disgusting-looking pizzas). You always knew Jesse was getting his act together when he bothered to clean up or fix up his house, or cut his hair, or shave. The daydream Jesse has of finishing a wooden box in the finale demonstrates that being chained up has taught Jesse that life is worth living after all — if you have something concrete and productive to focus on.

In the end, Walt did come back just to die in the arms of his one true love, just like the lyrics of “El Paso” foretold. He went down to the meth lab, clutched the equipment, and, as he slid to the floor, left a smear of blood across the stainless steel. Cooking crystal meth was the one successful thing Walt ever did in his godforsaken life. Sure, he was cooking drugs, and he screwed up everything and everyone along the way. This is a tragedy about a regular man who slowly becomes increasingly evil until he’s unrecognizable, after all. But it’s also a dark comedy, underscored by that final song about “the special love I had for you, my baby blue.” Maybe the moral of Breaking Bad is exactly what we expected all along: Once you start down the path to the dark side, you can’t go back. Or maybe the moral of Breaking Bad is just this: It’s nice to have a craft.

Either way, Vince Gilligan brought us one of the most beautifully shot, thoughtfully plotted, riveting stories ever told on TV. And to the detractors, I can only say this: Cheer up, beautiful people. This was where Walt got to make it right.

I felt like screaming with Jesse when he blasted to freedom like when he got picked to be on PIR:





ALSO:

[LateFan]

I once had Breaking Bad, but then had got new pads & rotors, plus alignment is bad also. Now is much more nice to drive.

Sorry for my english....






wait...wut..

[brutus87]

From first to last episode in 8 days.

Wow, what a series.

[e30trooper]

From first to last episode in 8 days.

Wow, what a series.

I started on it about 2 weeks before the last season. Wish I caught on months or years go. Good shit.

[Exodus_2pt0]

While I miss Breaking Bad, I just started watching Game Of Thrones.

This is going to be good.