Redemption and Breaking Bad

Walter White is a bad person - one could imagine him as an anti-hero as one begins the show, but very soon - the second episode, for me - one could begin to see his true nature - not as a hero at all, but a villain protagonist.

Walter's decisions get many, many people killed. A few of them he kills himself, but in most cases, he creates a situation in which people wind up dead. Walter has an amazing capacity for rationalization. Indeed, even by the end of the series, he never once really considers that the production of crystal methamphetamine itself is an evil act - that he is creating a drug that does longterm harm to its users. Gale Boedecker at one point refers to himself as an "extreme libertarian" as his justification for cooking, but Walter never even considers this.

The focus of the series is less about the drug-use itself, but about the criminal world that one must involve oneself with to partake in such a business.

The events of Ozymandias are the culmination of the collapse of the world that Walter has tried to create. Uncle Jack's arrival technically frees him from arrest, but the disintegration has already begun. We see Walter at his most despicable - even though he tries to save Hank's life, he still envisions some sort of endgame that leaves him with his family and his money, but the truth is that all of his sins have isolated him, and he ends the episode by severing his ties, trying to give Skyler enough distance by playing the role of a more monstrous and cruel version of himself, a brute rather than a liar.

Granite State, the penultimate episode, shows us how even these last efforts were not enough to ensure a legacy. Horrors persist in this world, and Jesse is left enslaved, with the innocent Adriana - someone who I had foolishly thought was safely no longer a factor on the show - is executed by the neo-Nazis - a demonstration of their ruthlessness and a gun to the head of her son.

Jesse is essentially in hell - he's in a place where he must escape into a dream-like version of his task, an amber-colored vision of solid craftsmanship in which he imagines he's building some sort of innocuous woodwork. He has life, but what kind of life is it?

Such it is for Walter White, who has been relocated to New Hampshire to live in a freezing cabin and... wait to die. Any move he makes will invalidate the safety he has, but what was the point of "freedom" if freedom requires him to hide out in two acres of snowy forest?

Walter makes one last attempt to do something for his family, but Flynn isn't going to put up with his shit anymore. Walter knows he's never going to be that paragon provider now. He'll never be able to get what he wants how he wants.

But he might be able to get what he wants.

Thus we come to the finale, Felina. While I think it's generally well-regarded, I have heard some dissenting voices saying that it lets Walt off too easy. I understand that position, but on the other hand, I don't think we automatically have to complain if we get the slightest modicum of a happy ending (hint hint, George R. R. Martin...) Walter does not make up for all he has done - not by a long shot. But he is able to get something resembling justice. He spends his last days putting things, if not right, then righter than they are.

His journey begins in a snow-covered car, and it's here that Walter makes one plea to whatever higher power that might be. Walter isn't a religious man, and religion actually plays a very small part if any in this series, but whether it's fate or a god that is willing to give him one last chance, the keys fall into his lap and he is allowed to move forward.

First, he pays a visit to the Schwartzes. It's actually a fairly horrifying scene, and that fear doesn't really let up until we see who the "assassins" were. Granted, by the time the sniper-lasers showed up, I was pretty sure this was a ruse, but one sort of wonders just how much the Schwartzes deserved this treatment. Indeed, we never really get a sense of what exactly went down between them. Still, they really threw Walt under the bus on Charlie Rose (by the way, when did that become an expression because I feel like I only started hearing it a couple years ago.) Still, this allows Walter to get the money to his family without their knowing it's from him. It's still a fairly prideful act, but it's one that doesn't require his family to acknowledge him as the source of the wealth.

But he does come to say good bye, and Walter's true atonement to Skyler is that he finally confirms that yes, he did all of this for him. Finally, he drops the bullshit and tells her that he became what he was because it made him feel strong and in control. After five seasons of lies, this means a lot, and it allows him to have one last moment with Holly.

The last act of Walter Heisenberg White, though, is one of brutal justice and mayhem. What I find fascinatingly ambiguous is what his intentions are toward Jesse. Is he still furious with Jesse for going to the cops? Somehow that doesn't really sit right with me - as an audience member, we know that Jesse is hardly getting anything good out of this deal, but would Walter really want Jesse dead for cooking their blue meth?

The real target, though, is Uncle Jack and his aryan asshole brigade. There have been plenty of terrifying bad guys on this show, but there was usually some kind of redeeming quality to them. Gus, in particular, might have been a callous killer, but he had his own history and motivations. Uncle Jack is just disgusting. He's a nasty killer in a nasty little criminal world, without any of the grand vision or projected civility that we saw out of Gus.

So Heisenberg does as Heisenberg tends to do. He goes in with an engineered plan. He cooks up a bullshit story to approach Lydia with what seems like a desperate new business opportunity. Now Lydia, a season-five addition, is a monster of a different sort. Like Walt and like Gus, she has tried to maintain this distance from her business to keep herself safe. But she is also paranoid, and thus she has allowed many people to die to clean up her perceived messes. Her willingness to kill for her own safety doesn't differentiate herself much from the rest of the villains in this show, but it seems that murder (always by someone else's hands - she's not even willing to look at the bodies of the dealers that she has Uncle Jack wipe out) is her first and only option.

And it's Lydia who finally winds up taking the dose of Ricin that Walt originally cooked up for Gus, I believe (I think the one for Tuco got splattered on the floor by his uncle.) There's probably a whole article about the way that Lydia - as the only real female villain in the show - fits into a story that is so much about masculinity, but this is already very long.

Walt goes to Jack's compound seemingly in an act of foolishness, as they're planning on just killing him. But Walter has already arranged things, parking his car so that the automated machine gun he's hooked up will blast the clubhouse with a deadly barrage.

The only real hitch in the plan (other than the rather easily-dealt with issue that his keys are a bit of a reach from him on the pool table) is when they present Jesse. Again, I wonder how much Walter knows - if he's really ready to take revenge on Jesse for filling his shoes, or if he is simply trying to draw him out - but when he sees that yes, clearly, he's been mistreated, Walter does one last good act, pouncing on Jesse in the pretense of attacking him just as the machine gun opens up and wipes out the aryan asshole brigade.

Almost. Jack's taken a lethal hit, but Todd is unharmed. He gazes in childlike astonishment at the death-trap Walter created, only for Jesse to both take revenge and free himself by choking that scary motherfucker to death. Todd (excellent naming, by the way - no offense to real-life Todds) is weirdly inhuman. It's almost like he doesn't really understand what is wrong and what is right - this is the guy who offers Jesse ice cream for getting a 96% out of a batch, but also murders a child with absolutely no remorse. There's a childlike quality to him, but the horrifying things he does prevent us from viewing him as anything resembling innocent. It's the uncanny valley.

Uncle Jack isn't quite dead, and he tries to play his last moments cool - he knows where the money is. But this was never about money, and Walter lets him know with a bullet.

Finally, the reckoning comes between Jesse and Walt. Walt kicks the gun over to Jesse. He has no hatred, and no reason to harm Jesse anymore. He offers himself up, but Jesse knows that killing him is exactly what Walt wants. And besides, Walter is already bleeding from a nasty wound from a stray bullet he took protecting Jesse.

The point is, Jesse is done being anyone's tool, and he won't be Walter's killer. Jesse, that poor Jesse, drives to freedom. What the future holds for him, I have no idea, but damn it's good that he's free of that cell, free of that lab, and, frankly, finally free of Walter White.

As the police arrive, Walter goes to the lab that Jesse had been working. He's done all he could to set things right. Was it enough? Has Walter redeemed himself? I don't know if I'd go that far, but he has finally been honest with himself and with the people who are important to him, and he has done what he can to fix the problems he has created. And so, Walter gets to die where he belongs - in a lab, surrounded by chemistry equipment. A lab that produced his most famous creation.