The season finale of Breaking Bad was a little surprising. For several weeks now, they’ve been teasing us with images of a teddy bear in the swimming pool, crime scene experts photographing the broken windshield of Walt’s car, and a couple of bodies in the driveway. The implication was that something bad happened to Walt or his family.
At the beginning of this week’s episode, they showed us a little bit more of that scene, and the camera pulled back far enough to reveal that the crime scene experts were NTSB, which implied some sort of major transportation accident. I wish they hadn’t done that, as it ruined the “surprise” for me a little. As soon as we found out that Jane’s father was an air traffic controller, the ending was telegraphed.
However, that’s not to say that the finale wasn’t powerful. The bit where Saul’s guy shows up at Jessie’s apartment reminded me of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. The scene where Walt scours the crack house for Jessie was as gritty as anything I’ve seen on the show so far, and the final confrontation between Walt and Skyler as gripping and unsettling. The show hasn’t been afraid to take risks, and they’ve pushed Walt from the well-intentioned but woefully misguided man into something verging on despicable. And while most people (in the show’s reality) will never make the connection, the plane crash at the end was as much Walt’s doing as anyone’s. You can draw a trajectory line from the first episode of the series to the Season 2 finale and Walt appears at every step along the way. The Butterfly Effect, in a way. How appropriate that it should all come crashing down around him like that.
Today I am past my prime (for the next five years). My new age has ten unique factors, which pleases me for some reason.
