‘Breaking Bad’ series finale review: Did Walter White, Jesse Pinkman survive?
It has been a long, dramatic and glorious journey over the past 5 seasons with Walt, Jesse, Skyler, Hank, Marie, Saul and Walt Jr. and tonight it all ends with the series finale of “Breaking Bad”. Even with some of the more disappointing series finales airing in the past couple of weeks (we are looking at you “Dexter”) we haven’t been worried about this one. We know it’s going to be emotionally charged and will likely leave us in tears. Let’s get to it.. our last review ever for “Breaking Bad”.
The finale started out with Walter White and his one focus: Getting home and tying up loose ends. First he met up with his original Grey Matter Technologies partners Gretchen and Elliot, showing up unannounced at their house. After convincing them to carry $9 million dollars into their house he tells them to keep the money until Walter Jr. 18th birthday and then to give him an irreversible cheque. They agree, but Walt shows them that he has hired two hitmen that will come after them if his son doesn’t get the money. Did he really hire hitmen? No, it was just Badger and Skinny Pete with laser pointers, but the point was taken.
When Walt finds out that his blue meth is back in circulation, he realizes that Todd (otherwise known to us as Meth Damon), hasn’t killed Jesse and that he’s cooking again… Actually he’s been cooking the whole time Walt’s been hiding up at the cabin, he’s been their cook slave.
We loved seeing the flash forward of Walt on his birthday at the diner and him back at his old house getting the ricin tied into the finale. After he gets the poison, he surprises Lydia and Todd at a coffee house and tries to tell them that he’s willing to come back and show them a new way to cook since they will be out of methylene soon. He tells them that he’s run out of money and needs the work and Lydia says okay, but as soon as he leaves she clues Todd into the fact that Walt’s sick and they won’t be working with him, they’ll let Jack take him out. As she stirs her sweetener into her tea, we know that she’s just gotten a cup full of ricin.
Skyler and Marie’s relationship isn’t back to what it was (far from it), but when she finds out that Walt is back she calls Skyler to warn her. Skyler gets off the phone and we see that Walt has been standing in her kitchen the whole time. Skyler tells him that she’s worried about the men in masks coming back and he assures her that they won’t be back. He hands her the lottery ticket with the GPS coordinates to where Hank and Gomez are buried, telling her to use the information to make a deal for herself. The one thing we loved was that Walt finally came clean about the fact that he did all of this for himself, not the money: That it made him feel alive. This brings a certain amount of relief and understanding to Skyler and helps to unburden Walt. He is able to have a proper goodbye with Skyler and Holly, but with the cops are watching Walt Jr. (and him has no interest in seeing his dad), Walt waits outside to catch one last glimpse of him as his own way of saying goodbye.
Now that the goodbyes have all been said, this is where things start to get tense. Walt shows up at Jack’s compound and he tells Walt that they aren’t interested in working with him, in fact they just want him dead. Walt calls him out on having Jesse as a partner and Jack becomes furious at the fact that he thinks he’d partner up with a rat. Jack has Jesse brought up to the club house to come face to face with Walt and he sees that Jesse has been cooking as a slave. Walt attacks Jesse, throwing him to the ground as he sets off a gun contraption he set up in his car to kill everyone on Jack’s team. Did it work? Walt got everyone, but Todd… he was left for Jesse to strangle with his own chains.
Walt slides his gun over to Jesse and tells him he wants to die, asking him to kill him, but when Jesse sees that Walt’s been shot, he drops the gun telling him to do it himself. Jesse is finally free and we admit we cried in joy when we saw him smiling as he crashed his car through the gate. Walt spends his last moments in the cook lab Jack had set up, reminiscing over how this whole experience made him feel and as the cops come to arrest him, he dies.
This ending couldn’t have been more perfect. We knew Walt had to die and after seeing everything Jesse has gone through we wanted nothing more then to see him driving off into the sunset with a smile on his face and a second chance at life.
Did you feel that this was a great way to end “Breaking Bad” or were you hoping that Walt would’ve gotten away with it all? Leave us a comment and tell us what you loved or hated about the ending.
Photo: AMC