Anna Gunn about to fall to her knees on the ground as Skyler crying after her baby is taken from her by Walt
if you cut them [man’s laws] down … d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then … Yes I’d give the Devil the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake — Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons
But see this pinned up photo of Andrea (Emily Rios), among the world’s targets: who cares what happens to her: anyone may and does shoot her in the head
Dear friends and readers,
I finished what I’m calling a first viewing of the extraordinary 42 hour Breaking Bad to the bitter end last night. Even to try to take it in would require several viewings. Each of the last shots of the principles epitomizes some final statement about what each has become and how they related to the story’s themes and action. In the last feature as well as a parody, “Alternate Ending,” Vince Gilligan offered his view of the two men’s last moments.
The series’ last shot of Bryan Cranston as Walter White
White, he suggests, is “spiritually broken, his hopes for revenge pipe dreams; he’s too sick,” the last episode “an elegy, a bit of a goodbye — he goes out on his own terms, the cancer does not kill him, he is killed saving Jesse, there’s almost a perverse feeling of victory to it for me, at least.” Walt’s life up to the time he began to cook meths was a long mortification, failure as most in his society saw it, mocked by the bully brother-in-law, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) in a video replayed briefly made during Holly’s baby shower. He tells Skyler he did it “for me. I liked it. And I was good at it. I was alive.” Look at that look of bliss on the man’s face as Walt enters the darkness from which we all come, for him the release of oblivion. His life as Walter White ended when he was told he had terminal inoperable cancer; now the love he depended upon is gone from his family, he has done for them what he could monetarily, and he now dies on his own terms, blithe to go.
I’m not as persuaded by Gilligan’s view of Jesse. He’d “like to think Jesse escapes,” that there is “some hope of a life ahead.” Look at that face whose every nerve is suffused with moral pain and despair:
Last shot of Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman
Jesse crashes in a junk car at full throttle through an iron fence from the last lair of murderous crooks with which he and Mr White have had to deal and Walt destroyed. Realistically, he’s nowhere to hide: Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) has vanished (“it’s over”) and with him his mechanisms for creating new identities for his clients. Jesse will end up seeking out his two feeble friends, Skinny Pete and Badger, and die on the streets if not jailed: he has been called “the moral compass” of the series;” it’s more true to say he has bneen its bleak victim, the one beat up continually, targeted again and again for killing, enslaved with chains, at the close yes knowing he made a killing choice to join Walter White and Jesse is no killer. Each time he shot or killed someone it was after an intense effort to force himself: only the strangulation of Todd (well deserved after Todd coolly shoots Andrea in the head) came naturally.
The alternate ending has Cranston as Hal, a comic emasculated character with Lois, his formidable wife (Jane Kaczmarek, from a once TV popular series, the two of them starred in, 2006 Malcolm in the Middle) waking in the night, trembling from the “scariest” dream you can imagine: told he had cancer (!), he took to cooking meths, making bombs, killing people (!), alongside a “lost waif, a man child who looked like he was always wearing his older brother’s clothes and he would always say things like “b…” [he stops embarrassed and worried his wife won’t approve], the b word he would use the b word a lot he would say (shouting) “yo B word” and “yah science b word …” In “Felina” we see Jesse when young lovingly carpentering a wooden box, his drawings of himself as a boy hero were recognized by Jane (Krysten Ritter), one of his two loves, as the work of a comically self-deprecating artist. Despised and rejected, with no Mr White to save him, Jesse zooms into the darkness too.
In this dream Hal tells Lois, as his actual wife (much TV self-reflexivity here) that he, Hal, was married to this “tall beautiful blonde woman” — Lois the wife semi-jeers, incredulous of course. When Skyler is last seen she is continually smoking, chain-smoking. She sits and smokes. She is terrorized twice in this season, both through her baby. After a terrific scene after Walt has produced another set of lies to account for his absence and where Hank could be, she sees a fancy knife in a knife set on the table we have seen many times. She grabs it and lunges at him, screaming, “leave us alone, just leave us alone.” Walt defends himself and they fall to the fall, rolling, tussling; he manages to wrench the knife back but not before she has slashed his hand. Horrified, Walt junior becomes hysterical as he watches this.
To this they have descended. Well he gets back; before she can rise and adjust herself, he has taken the baby in its carrier, run to his car and is driving off. She rushes out after them frantic, asking for her baby back, and falls on her knees to the ground as he drives away. A stunning moment. She begins at long last to cry. Walt does care for Holly and leaves her with the firemen, where we presume Skyler can pick her up safe and sound.
Again another moment in this last season, late at night, she hears a sound from the baby’s room and finds herself by the crib with three men who surround it. They are masked and the dangerous Todd is one of them. They say she has been talking to the police and if she tells about who Lydia is or anything she knows they will return — implication and kill this baby. She mouths obedience.
Last shot of Anna Gunn as the show’s princess Skyler White seeing how bad Walt looks
Anna Gunn interprets her character inadequately throughout. She says Skyler is a shell, nothing in her. But for her life is not pointless as yet: she has her children, but like Jesse, they make her intensely vulnerable to those who want to get at Walt or any of his associates. Unlike Jesse, once her court case is done, if she does not go to prison (and a plea bargain seems probable), she must (like Saul) move, and if not get a new identity, keep out of harm’s way. Her beauty is of no help for what she cares about — though perhaps it attracted Walter White in the first place, made him dump Gretchen Schwartz. The characters in the series invite these kinds of speculations: we learn enough about them suggestively over the slow-moving 6 year series. I imagine she will eventually stop the heavy smoking — though she will never be the complacent woman she once was. She will remember a world of terror that she joined in on (to the extent of telling Walt to have Jesse killed when Walt balks at this), that still exists but which she now wants no part of.
The very last shot of the series: the men with big guns in the scientific lab (as Fortinbras has the last word in Hamlet)
There is a bleak inference to be garnered at this end: at each and every turn of their career, the two men came up against people who had become inured to murder by dint of murdering other people lest they be murdered or found out, bullied into confessions, and then tortured by penal servitude for decades to come. Each set of murderers were worse than the ones before: from Krazy-8 (seemingly sane) to Tuco Salamanca (who commits acts of wild crazed violence), replaced by the frighteningly homocidal Gus Esposito and his ruthless hitman, Mike Ermantraut, replaced in this last season by the vicious Nazi crew run by Jack Welker (Michael Bowen), with perhaps the scariest pair of them all, Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons) and Lydia Rodart-Quayle (Laura Fraser). Hank tells Walt he is a dead man ten minutes ago when Walt is still so foolish as to try to bargain with Jack for Hank’s life based on reasoning:
Near last shot of Dean Norris as Hank: to Walt “you were the smartest guy I ever knew, but you are too stupid to know it was over ten minutes ago.”
The mini-series presents law as providing a modicum of safety for those who do not break it: those administering (inflicting?) and obeying it do not fear one another and however personally awful, mean, demeaning of others, have a vested interest in not breaking it. So some control is exerted over people, some order set up (however morally cruel or wrong) whose rules most of the time can be depended upon — at least by white middle class people.
Marie (Betsy Brandt) left alone, widowed in her impeccable kitchen — having learned nothing, her lips tight as she spews out unfocused anger
At least you know where you are with the DEA, the medical establishment, the schools, family rituals. There are levels of barbarity such people most of the time do not stoop to. Not everyone is inside this net — those on drugs, alcoholics, non-whites, the poor, women who are driven to prostitution, for whom there is no pity, no understanding. The show does not include GLBT people who presumably are not inside the Net if they reveal themselves.
Walt’s last view of Walter Junior (RJMitte) who he has tried to provide money for funneled through the Schwartzes
I would not want to be a disabled person, a child, someone who does not conform in the surface way the well-rewarded Schwartzes have.
A bad dream? Says Mr White to Hank (who soon after ends up buried in sand), if you do not know what this has been about (“who I am”), tread lightly:
The remark is not to limited to Heisenberg as Hyde but the whole complex of life we’ve experienced.
Have I mentioned how effective are the inconsequential shots of the series: as Walter White is taken away to hide in the granite state, a stray dog crosses the road
Final shot of Oxymandias (13:6)
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Robert J. Musscutt: “I did it for me … ” We shouldn’t forget that Walt’s initial problem is getting the money. Later his problem is ensuring that Skyler and Junior will accept it when the time comes”
My reply:
“I agree Bob. This intense desire to erase the reality that Walter White is our hero, and remains essentially the home-body man, he who acquired a second son, who wants to leave his family in comfort and was fighting a fleecing establishment is erased. And after all the cancer came back — we see the insinuated lies (he would stay in remission) he and Skyler were led to pay for with money they couldn’t begin to have legitimately (the Schwartzes were offering to put Walt in one of these insurance-company enriching schemes their company had access to but Walt didn’t want it — he hadn’t wanted the chemo either.). I remember her early in the series reading a pamphlet that doctor gave her which she said was ‘so hopeful, Walt.’ We are not shown the usual mutilating operation or the real suffering of chemotherapy in the series: that’s flaw.
I didn’t have access to the special features, so was interested in the parody alternative ending you describe, Ellen. From what you say, it underscores how andocentric the series is: We are to understand that Skylar as a tall, blond, thin trophy. Walter didn’t just “settle” for the overweight, brown-haired woman. He is a man’s man. It’s sad to me, even if I was once tall, thin and blond, that this mentality is still current.
I stand by Jesse as the moral center, as he manages to operate humanely–or at least remain humane– in the sociopathic macho world of drug dealing. While the series may encourage us to see him as pathetic, I find he transcends the ordinary.
When I said he was the series central victim, I didn’t mean that negatively — I realize the word pathetic can suggest scorn but I mean to use it both ways. No one needs to be a hero — or even strong against the world. I’m more and more seeing all the gothic elements of this mini-series and at the core of a gothic is suffering victim the universe hits hard. Jesse’s morality is not pro-active beyond refusing to do the worst evil — kill others. It’s true as he progresses and sees what meths does to young boys, he seems to want to get out. But that’s a central personal identification; he never quite repudiates selling the stuff (he does to his support group). He does never really seem personally to bond with Andrea — and when he did with Jane look out they ended up — dowsing themselves with heroin. Walter White was not responsible for Jane’s death. She injected herself — and Jesse.
Or another way of putting this is if he’s a moral center, what trouble we are in. Look at him from the get-go. Look at how the world has treated him and his face at the close.
There is no moral center to the series — as in the gothic there often is none. The “alterative ending” mocks the macho male by having this reverse caricature of the man who is afraid to “say the b … word” in front of his wife. I do find it absurd, even impossible, such a show as Malcolm in the Middle could win awards and be super-popular.
In the series finally Walter White is the hero and he is blithe to go. His final settling of accounts and death reminds me of Thomas More in the second act of Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, the coming in of the men with big guns how (bleak dark hilarity there) the replacement of Hamlet with Fortinbras.
There’s your lesson — look out at who runs the world, and how the Hanks support them. In the end Marie was a petty fool. I’d like to say Skyler learned something but her quickness to consign Jesse to death gives me pause. At the close she’s more like Jesse mid-way: “our natural business lies in escaping” says Thomas More in Bolt’s play, second half. In modern terms, lay low, don’t get in the way of the guns. Samuel Johnson has a line about the peace and tranquillity of virtuous obscurity in such such a context. Remember Voltaire’s Candide.
P.S. Bolt was an important writer of the 20h century. He’s ignored because seen as “costume drama” writer. What nonsense. He has a play which is a version of The Death of a Salesman — transposed into English terms.