Last Turn in Albuquerque - Chris 'Preach' Smith

This past Sunday night, we said goodnight to the bad
guy that captivated our television screens for five heady
seasons on AMC as ‘Breaking Bad’ reached its end. The 
fact that the finale has left many buzzing may just be
the key testament to the show’s success as well as a
look into our own psyche in terms of pop culture these
days and what we expect of it.

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room right away. This
finale deserves its accolades as one of the best to end
off a TV series in quite some time. It’s not perfect by
any means, but damn near. When you take into account
that fans of ‘Dexter’, Showtime’s long-running series
that ended the week before were outraged at that
final episode’s slackness and even those who loved HBO’s
‘The Sopranos’ felt this outshone that series’ own
cryptic small-town diner conclusion, you know it was
good. But if anything what has to be seen with ‘Felina’
is this: Vince Gilligan and crew did what any good team
of innovators would do. Learn from successes, but do
capitalize on misses. And keep an ear to the ground. There
are those who felt that Walter White got off scott-free,
that his tying up of loose ends was too neat. That in
that way, he bacame a hero. As some critics would say,
‘the white man’s Scarface’. My rebuttal to that is a
two-pronged response. One, that title is best conferred
on Ronald Reagan and second, what this represented was
a break away from such ‘villain-as-hero’ archetypes. It
particularly struck a cord with those who love the HBO
series ‘The Wire’ (myself inculded). ‘Breaking Bad’ has
navigated those racial complexities to some degree, with
Walt even shaving his head to be more like the Latino
dealers he encounters early on. Even the ‘Negro Y Azul’
episode with the narcocorrido done by Los Cuates De
Sinaloa speaks to this. (More on that later though.)The
way Bryan Cranston depicted Walt in ‘Felina’ and the
previous episode, ‘Granite State’ was eloquent in the
fact that what you got was a man left with only echoes.
And those echoes reminded him of his mortallity and
the ultimate futility he refused to face up until he was
at that bar in New Hampshire. Some say he died then.
But I think it’s more the fact that he ACCEPTED death,
but also chose to amend things knowing that nothing 
would be right or could be ever since he approached 
Jesse Pinkman so long ago.


Walter White wasn’t going out a total hero; he 
had gotten money set up to give to Skyler, Walter Jr. 
and Holly sure, but in the process he got reminded of 
his own hubris and had to accept it. He had to accept 
what all O.G.s had to. Few ever get out without paying
a heavy cost. Sometimes a final one. The baddies got
their just desserts(with Lydia ensuring that Stevia will
see their stock prices drop with her demise)and Walt
dies, surrounded by police. What Walter White did leading
up to his demise at the very end ties in well with Gilligan’s
assertion that the series was a Western in many ways. Walt’s
own death was reminiscent of Alan Ladd at the end of Shane,
where the gunslinger rides off into the sunset past a cemetery
full of grave markers. While Shane’s end has been a big
point of speculation because you don’t know his ultimate
fate in the movie or the book that inspired it, it can be 
and has been construed as a symbolic death. In ‘Felina’,
you don’t get that ambiguity only because of Walt’s 
cancer and that image of him alone, drawing back his
jacket to see he’s been wounded after the machine gun
barrage that took out most of Uncle Jack’s Neo-Nazi gang.
Gilligan might also have drawn influence from another
film that has Western elements mixed with noir, that 
film being Bad Day At Black Rock. There’s one similarity 
between Spencer Tracy’s Macreedy in that film and 
Cranston’s Walter White in that both men are met with
life altering infirmities(Macreedy in the film is a one-armed
man, suffering the injury in World War II). But there is
a stark divergence in their responses as Macreedy seeks
to right a wrong and is given courage to do so. Walt 
starts out with a pure intention but it is marred because
it is an intention that gives him license to ‘break bad’.
Another bit of influence that I’m sure isn’t lost on a few
fans of ‘Breaking Bad’ is that of hip-hop. It reared up
again as Walt had his final conversation with Gretchen
and Elliott, infra-red dots trained on their chests courtesy
of Badger and Skinny Pete. That whole scene reminded
me of the end skit from The Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Warning’
off of Ready To Die. You can even argue that ‘Felina’ gave
a nod of the hat to Blaxploitation classic The Mack as
Jesse got his revenge on Todd for killing Andrea and in
effect, enslaving him to cook meth after the shoot-out
with Hank Schrader & Gomez. Look at the finale of that
movie where Goldie’s brother, played by Roger E.Mosely,
chokes the life out of the dirty cop and look at Aaron Paul’s
Jesse. You’ll see the shared anguish, the angst.

 
Ah yes, Jesse Pinkman. The one part of the finale that 
everyone can agree on is being glad that he’s alive. It 
would’ve been the height of cruelty to have him snuffed
out. And in a story where life bonds have been violated 
every which way, it was a fitting end to the dynamic 
between Walt and Jesse. Some would say love story, and
it’s hard to dispute when looking at it through the prism
of student and teacher. And ultimately, father and son.
The moment where Jesse picks up the gun and aims it 
at Walt who begs him to ‘end it’, and Jesse walks away?
Tremendous. It’s that moment that gripped me to the 
core watching it because Jesse in that moment, made 
his freedom final. It was a fitting way to cut the strings
of the puppetmaster once and for all. That final head nod
they gave each other said volumes, just as that final
scream Jesse lets out as he sped off into the night. 

Were there other flaws in ‘Felina’? Yes there were. As
Emily Nussbaum pointed out in her piece in the New
Yorker, the fact that Walt slipped into town with a
shadowy, mythical air nearly hinged on the melodramatic.
We also were left without knowing what really was 
the impetus for Walt leaving Gray Matter outside and
in turn, his relationship with Gretchen(left untouched
after their Santa Fe dinner table tete-a-tete). One
thing for me was also Skyler’s smoking resurgence. It
leads one to ask if she was a serious smoker and the
resulting second hand smoke was a trigger for Walt’s
lung cancer? But given those instances, most of the 
loose ends were tied up to satisfaction. I won’t go into
doing full comparisons of shows’ runs based off their 
finales because it’s not fair. I’ve seen discussions where
‘Breaking Bad’ is compared to ‘The Wire’ as to who’s
better, with the racial aspects a prime focus. I would
argue that ‘Breaking Bad’ can be mentioned in the 
same ether as ‘The Wire’ because it has been a prime
example of great drama. Could it be argued that it may
be a fantasy vehicle for some white viewers as opposed
to not wanting to deal with the scope and reality of ‘The
Wire’, the latter show being based on testimony from the
streets of Baltimore through both the criminals’ eyes and
the police? Sure. ‘Breaking Bad’ did exhibit a commentary
on racial politics early through Walt’s immersion in the
drug game and more importantly in Hank’s character.
Hank, who went from being an overly mouthy DEA agent
to having his eyes opened by a cartel attack early in the
series while re-assigned to an office where HE was the
odd gringo in the group.


But again, this kind of discussion only proves one thing:
the finale did ‘Breaking Bad’ justice whether you liked it
or not. The last turn for this series is artful, and the thing
about good art is, it can leave you both satisfied and
a bit unsettled. In a time where the understated is 
tossed aside for the flashy, it’s refreshing to have yet
another series bring that lesson back to the forefront.