Despair.
NOTE: Are there spoilers here? OF COURSE THERE ARE.
I’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad. I may have posted about it here before, in fact. At this point I think the only people who don’t think Breaking Bad is easily one of the greatest TV shows ever are those effetes who refuse to own a TV because obviously and those who refuse to watch it out of some sort of weird pride. And, of course, small children.
For the rest of us, it’s been one hell of a ride. An almost perfect show, with very few weak spots. And the last episode, Ozymandias, was one of the few times in my life I’ve sat with my mouth open for an extended period of time. I could have easily been photographed and inserted as the example illustration under the head MIND: BLOWN.
I thought the previous episode, To’hajiilee was just slightly slow. Not bad, mind you, just … somewhat deliberately paced. I enjoyed moments of that episode immensely and overall would give it an 8 or 9 out of 10. But it felt like they held back a little, and it was irritating. And then in Ozymandias, Vine Gilligan and company did the impossible: They made Walter White the hero of the story.
When was the last time Walter was the hero? Episode One? Two? Not much beyond that. You can argue about when, exactly, he stopped being the hero of this story, but however you define it, it’s been a long time. He became an anti-hero, and then merely a protagonist, and then for a while, frankly, he’s been the villain.
And in Ozymandias, they made him into the hero again. That’s fucking balls.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mean “hero” in any sort of laudatory sense. Walt’s an evil bastard and he’s not redeemed in any way. This is just about story mechanics. When Hank cuffed Walt and told him he was going to jail, that was right and fitting. Walt had become the villain and now he was getting his comeuppance. But then Uncle Jack and Todd show up, kill everybody, and Walt does two amazing things: He gives up every dime he’s earned as Heisenberg in an attempt to save Hank’s life, and then he gives up any shred of decency he has left in order to secure the murder of Jesse Pinkman.
But why? Why does he go out of his goddamn way to get Jesse killed? Not simply because Jesse betrayed him. Because he blames Jesse for Hank’s death. Rightly or wrongly, Walt pins that on him. Because if Jesse had just gone away like he was told to, or at least met with Walt and listened to reason, none of this would have happened. In Walt’s mind, killing Jesse was a just punishment.
So now we have new villains: Uncle Jack and his happy White Power Crew. These guys just destroyed everything, burned it down, and are fixed to become the new Heisenberg Meth Power. Because of them, Hank is dead. Because of them, Jesse is still alive. Because of them, Walt has lost the last thing he was holding onto: His family, and more specifically his son and daughter’s belief that he was a good man. Uncle Jack and Todd took those things from him, and now Walt’s on the hero track again as we’ve seen in the flash-forwards: Gearing up to come back to the ABQ and set things, if not precisely right, at least back into recognizable shape.
That’s skills, friends. To take a character who was a sympathetic mensch in the beginning, transform him into a sympathetic ass-kicking anti-hero, then transform him into, in Pinkman’s words, “The Devil,” then transform him into a hero of sorts again — holy shit. That is excellent work. Just fucking excellent.
And that doesn’t even touch on how well the sequences themselves were rehearsed, blocked, filmed, and edited. I was stressed after watching this episode. And jazzed. Because it was just good writing, and I’ll wrestle anyone who says otherwise.