“Wicked Felina, the girl I loved”
Waiting for the elevator 15 minutes before the Breaking Bad finale last night, I overheard two guys talking in the lobby. I didn’t have to ask what they were discussing, and they didn’t have to say.
“Who’s going to die?” one asked.
“Everybody.”
It was easy to think that going into this week’s ever-so-slightly extended episode. After Hank, after Andrea, after all the evil Heisenberg had wrought, it was hard not to imagine “Felina” would be a bloodbath, full of shootouts and Nazi death pits and ricin poisonings en masse. And there was plenty of that. But Vince Gilligan and company, always eager to slip past expectations and reach their destination in a way you never could have thought of, don’t send Heisenberg back to Albuquerque just to make his bitter final stand. In fact, I would argue Heisenberg doesn’t make an appearance in this episode at all.
There’s been a lot of talk over the course of the final season about the idea individuals can “contain multitudes” — a phrase straight out of Gale Boetticher’s favorite book of poetry, Leaves of Grass. That is to say, everyone has multiple, even contradictory, identities that ebb and flow like the tides. A man can be both Walter White, a loving if misguided family man, and Heisenberg, a self-involved, mass-murdering super villain. He can wear Walt’s Dockers and paternal smile one day and Heisenberg’s black hat and scowl the next.
If that’s true, Heisenberg froze to death back in New Hampshire, surrounded by ice and blood money and two copies of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. The appearance of the show’s theme song at the end of the penultimate episode, “Granite State,” didn’t, as it turns out, mean that Heisenberg was going to roar back in to town with a machine gun to blow away Jesse, or Saul, or Gretchen and Elliot or any of the other fan theories that assumed Walt’s final act would be to burn himself and everything around him down. Rather, the show’s theme ended up being Heisenberg’s swan song. “It’s over,” Walt is finally able to admit. All that’s left is to try to tidy things up before dying with whatever dignity can be salvaged.
So Walt doesn’t come back in hopes of stealing back his fortune from Uncle Jack’s band of Nazis or even, I would argue, for revenge. He seems too resigned to his fate to be concerned with vengeance; when he poisons Lydia and guns down Jack, he seems like a man settling his affairs, not satisfying his taste for blood. There’s no “I won” phone call to Skyler, as there was after he defeated Gus Fring. There’s just a silent moment of mutual acknowledgement between Walt and Jesse and then the cold embrace of death.
But there’s lots to cover before the final standoff — part of what makes “Felina” so great is its efficiency; there’s not a single wasted scene, not a shot without a purpose. After escaping the Granite State — a tense and lovely scene that includes Walt praying for the first time in years and the wonderful shot of the windshield wipers struggling to clear away the snow and then succeeding, leaving Walt with a clear view of the world for the first time in ages — Walt heads over to the Schwartzes’. There, a combination of humility and intimidation (thanks to Badger and Skinny Pete, who get the send-off they deserve) persuades them to quietly pass along Walt’s remaining drug money to Flynn on his 18th birthday. And so two more people get drawn into Walt’s criminal web — but for the last time and, for once, actually for the sake of the White family.
He even manages some kind of reconciliation with Skyler, finally admitting to her and to himself that the entire ordeal was selfish, not for his family. After so many lies, that bit of truth — combined with the GPS coordinates of Hank’s body, which Skyler can hopefully trade for a plea bargain — is enough that Skyler seems, if not to forgive him, then at least to understand him enough to let him see his daughter one last time.
And then there’s Jesse, still chained up in a Nazi meth lab, looking more animal than human, mourning the death of the one of the few good people who ever cared for him and remembering the one time he ever made something he was truly proud of — a small wooden box in high school. The slumping, defeated way he pulls at his chains, the primal fury with which he strangles Todd, the elation of a broken man breaking free as he drives away into the night — all respect to the amazing Bryan Cranston, but Aaron Paul just might have given Breaking Bad’s best performance. (I say that, but then I think about the way Walt’s voice breaks when he asks Skyler if he can see Holly, and I’m not so sure anymore. Point is, this show is a master class in acting.)
“Felina” (the name of the doomed gunman’s lover in Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” which plays on the radio of Walt’s stolen car) isn’t as in-your-face with its stylization as past episodes have been. That’s not to say Gilligan, who wrote and directed the episode, falls short of the show’s normal visual panache. The final shot, the film-noir lighting of Skyler’s new apartment and the inky blackness — almost like a Renaissance painting of the martyrdom of a saint — of the Nazi compound are all among the show’s greatest images, but it’s a far cry from the nightmare grotesquerie of seasons three and four’s dizzying perspective shifts, when even a shovel and a fly could get point-of-view shots.
I’ve heard complaints from some that the finale wasn’t crazy or exciting enough, that it didn’t feature enough of the show’s whiplash-inducing twists and turns and, worst of all, that Walt didn’t go out like a badass. (I don’t want to say there’s a wrong way to watch a show, but if you read Breaking Bad as the story of Walt’s action-hero triumph, you’re simply refusing to meet the show on its own terms.) It seems clear in retrospect that the season’s climax came in “Ozymandias” — maybe even in that cut to black at the end of the “To’hajiilee” shootout — and that “Granite State” and “Felina” are all denouement, more about watching the dust settle than setting the fire.
And so Walt dies alone, after building himself his own personal hell to be Satan of, surrounded by the instruments he loved and cost him so dearly. But it is worth noting that, for all the people he kills, Walt never lies in “Felina.” He admits wrongdoing. He prays. He doesn’t even care where Jack hid all his money. There is still too much Heisenberg in Walter White for him to ever be redeemed, but at least he dies with his eyes open.
