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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread- Breaking Bad Finale

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101Comments

  6. 6.

    PaulW

    There’s still tweets about whether Huell ever leaves that hotel room… poor guy. We need an epilog episode where Jesse rescues Huell and takes him to Alaska with him to become carpenters.

  7. 7.

    PhoenixRising

    Glad you all hung in there.

    5 years ago, roughly, I was in the main library in Albuquerque, on a week night, and the cast of this new AMC show came in to get library cards. They were tired, frazzled and didn’t expect any special treatment–and didn’t get any–but they did each leave with the right to borrow books locally.

    It’s been a good run, blessing our local economy in ways that in better times wouldn’t have been as visible or as needed.

    Thank you, and remember the simple moral of Breaking Bad: Pay teachers more!

  9. 9.

    PaulW

    Ending was a bit predictable. They could have sweetened it up a little bit by having aliens abduct Jesse and force him to make more meth. …what?

  11. 11.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    Will start the series within the next couple of months. Must finish a couple of other series first (watching series sequentially without interruption.)

  14. 14.

    PaulW

    @PhoenixRising:

    Glad you all hung in there.

    5 years ago, roughly, I was in the main library in Albuquerque, on a week night, and the cast of this new AMC show came in to get library cards. They were tired, frazzled and didn’t expect any special treatment–and didn’t get any–but they did each leave with the right to borrow books locally.

    They got library cards? AWESOME! Yay libraries!

  15. 15.

    Felonius Monk

    I thought the ending was pitch perfect.

    The machine gun in the trunk was a nice touch. I knew Walt was up to something when they kept focusing on his car keys — but I thought it would be a bomb and take them all out including Walt and Jessie. Like that he died with a smile on his face.

  18. 18.

    Punchy

    I will sooooo glad when this show is done. Never seen it and sick of the non-stop hype. Also, get off my lawn.

  21. 21.

    hilts

    Cole,

    Where would you place Breaking Bad on a list of the all-time greatest tv drama series? For me, the top 3 are

    1. Breaking Bad
    2. The Sopranos
    3. The Wire

  23. 23.

    Soonergrunt

    @Felonius Monk: Well, it ain’t fucking sugar, now is it?
    If it’s sweet and it’s not sugar, it probably isn’t real. Like some shit from outer space. Next you’ll tell me it doesn’t cause cancer in lab animals like aspertame.
    It can’t be real. If it’s sweet, natural, and doesn’t kill you one way or the other, it’s fucking artificial. I’ll bet the Vogons planted it.

    Which is my sideways way of saying that you’re right. It’s not artificial, strictly speaking.

  27. 27.

    PhoenixRising

    @J.D. Rhoades: Yeah, the true part is that the oncologists’ office really does have that spectacular view of the mountains and sky. When the series started I didn’t have cancer yet, so that was lost on me, but the first time I went in for my consultation…

    But mainly, our teachers’ union should be fighting for better benefits. To keep chemistry teachers with cancer at home on the patio watching the clouds, where they belong.

  31. 31.

    Felonius Monk

    In an earlier thread commenter dmsilev posted this link which explains why Walter White had such a tough go of it.

    @Soonergrunt:

    I’ll bet the Vogons planted it.

    Well, hurray for the Vogans. And it’s sweeter than fucking sugar. And those of us who have to frequently measure our blood glucose love the fucking stuff. :)

  33. 33.

    PaulW

    @hilts:

    Where would you place Breaking Bad on a list of the all-time greatest tv drama series?

    I’m a little disappointed people can’t see back past 1998 or so for drama shows that were just as good:

    I Claudius, anyone?
    Hill Street Blues?
    NYPD Blue?
    Law & Order – the Lenny Briscoe & Ed Green teamup?
    The first two seasons of Buffy?

  36. 36.

    PaulW

    @Punchy:

    I will sooooo glad when this show is done. Never seen it and sick of the non-stop hype. Also, get off my lawn.

    But you’ve seen The Wire right?

    (breaks out the HypnoToad)
    Narrator: We now return to Breaking Bad. *cue hypnosis* You will recommend Breaking Bad to everyone you know.
    Peter Griffin: I will recommend Breaking Bad to everyone I know.
    Narrator: Breaking Bad is the best show you’ve ever seen, except maybe The Wire.
    Peter: Breaking Bad is the best show I’ve ever seen, except maybe The Wire.
    Narrator: You will never stop talking about Breaking Bad or The Wire.
    Peter: I will never stop talking about Breaking Bad or The Wire.

  37. 37.

    John O

    Watched maybe 75% of it in the last week. Satisfying ending. I had a little trouble with the concept of Walt getting across the country in a stolen Volvo with New Hampshire plates, though.

    Question: Did the Feds think Jesse was dead? Or did the show end with him still being sought?

  39. 39.

    Hal

    There is one thing I tend to notice with shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, or any mob type shows; white men can live horrible, ruinous lives that affect everyone around them and people will spend hours dissecting their motivations. Take a Black or Hispanic person in the same role, they’re just gangbangers. Tony Soprano or Walter White or the Godfather are just unconventionally entrepreneurial.

  41. 41.

    handy

    @PaulW:

    Also, first season of Twin Peaks, early X-Files before it got all It’s Aliens! It’s Aliens! It’s Aliens!, and Homicide.

  43. 43.

    PaulW

    @Hal:

    There is one thing I tend to notice with shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, or any mob type shows; white men can live horrible, ruinous lives that affect everyone around them and people will spend hours dissecting their motivations. Take a Black or Hispanic person in the same role, they’re just gangbangers.

    There were Black characters on The Wire living and planning and scheming like Tony and Walt. Stringer Bell comes to mind. Clay Davis, the politician, is another. Omar Little lived a horrible violent life but wasn’t a schemer like the others, and at least lived by a code that made him one of television’s best anti-heroes.

  44. 44.

    PaulW

    @handy:

    Good point on Homicide. As for the X-Files, it started off as Aliens! Aliens! Aliens! It’s just that the supposed Myth Arc (Fox’s abducted sister and the alien conspiracy/invasion) turned out to be a scheme-as-you-go ill-plotted arc that tuned out viewers when we found out Chris Carter didn’t have a plan. (TV Tropes called it the Chris Carter Effect)

  47. 47.

    handy

    @PaulW:

    Heh. Chris Carter effect. They should add a corollary, the Darlton effect, so named after the two Lost guys, because they cleary had no effin’ idea where they were going with that hot mess.

  50. 50.

    Cassidy

    @Hal: The Shield had strong minority characters who were gangbangers on the surface but had much deeper plot development. It was a interesting how Vic and crew really were just thugs, but their gangbanger partners had lives and motivations.

  51. 51.

    Yatsuno

    @SatanicPanic: Apparently the curse upon my old nym has no effect on you. Lucky stiff. :)

    I have a survival strategy ready to go. As long as the rent is paid (and it will be) I can figure out the rest. I just better get my back pay dammit.

  52. 52.

    maus

    @Hal: “There is one thing I tend to notice with shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, or any mob type shows; white men can live horrible, ruinous lives that affect everyone around them and people will spend hours dissecting their motivations. Take a Black or Hispanic person in the same role, they’re just gangbangers. Tony Soprano or Walter White or the Godfather are just unconventionally entrepreneurial.”

    The Wire. And still on the air: Boardwalk Empire.

  53. 53.

    Irony Abounds

    St. Elsewhere and West Wing (at least the first four seasons) come to mind. Not sure why the best dramas have to have morally depraved people as protagonists. I’m slogging through Breaking Bad, but to be honest I really don’t care for it much. In a world where Republicans have any bit of control over any portion of the federal, state or local governments, I see enough destructive sociopaths – I sure as hell don’t need them on my TV.

  54. 54.

    Craigo

    I must have been watching the wrong Sopranos, because the Tony I saw was obviously just a socipathic gangbanger – as his last therapy session made clear.

  58. 58.

    Keith P.

    I was hoping that Walt would leave to the Pacific Northwest to be a lumberjack. And Skylar would get a surprise blood clot that left her brain dead.

  59. 59.

    Schlemizel

    It didn’t end the way I wanted it to. I was hoping Wally would enter the witness protection program and the last scene would be him in Malcolm in the Middle.

    Still, it was a well written, acted and directed bit of TV at a time when the vast wasteland is chock full of shitty people behaving badly & pretending its reality.

  62. 62.

    TheMightyTrowel

    Don’t forget British TV in your lists of greatest shows ever. The genius that is Fawlty Towers should never be forgot.

  64. 64.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Hal:

    And outside of TV, there’s American Gangster, Boyz n the Hood, Training Day, and Scarface as character studies of non-white sociopaths. I think there aren’t many because there aren’t enough complex minority characters in pop culture, period.

  65. 65.

    NotMax

    Another week and Congress might have voted to delay the finale for a year.

    (Never saw an episode; never cared to.)

  66. 66.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    Must have missed the TV series gene; I just find it impossible to stay with the things. The last one I watched all through was “Longmire” (Thank you, juicers!) and before that it was “Firefly.” Most of the rest of them just don’t suspend my disbelief.

  67. 67.

    Tripod

    @John O:

    Certainly some convenience for the writers room. But the last episode was also a grateful dead parable. Because Walt is returning to give Hank a a proper burial and ultimately gifts him the missing money, he receives Hank’s divine help in smiting the gang and not going straight to Hell.

  68. 68.

    MikeJ

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: I’m just not a fan of soap operas. I sort of prefer the old style where they say, “here’s a bunch a characters, here’s where they are and what they do, and every week you’ll get something new and it won’t really matter if you miss one.”

  69. 69.

    Jane2

    @Yatsuno: And according to some people whom I blocked on feeds of FB friends, it’s about time the damn government shut down because all it does it confiscate money, coerce citizens, and steal. I would have suggested they all go Galt and show us sheeple how it’s really done, but I might have caught them on the way to the bathroom using public sewer lines, or off for a drive on public highways, or out in their Freemen gardens harvesting stuff from seed varieties developed by public scientists.

  71. 71.

    Yatsuno

    @Jane2: Lots of folks don’t get that without my agency there is no military, no courts, no police, nada. My agency generates 93% of the revenue for the federal government and generates $4 for every $1 spent on it. So of course the answer is to massively underfund and understaff us. I’m sure Harper would love to see Revenue Canada whither so he can cut taxes for his rich buddies.

    But yeah, it’s not like the feds control airplanes or nothing. Of course they got excepted so they have to work with no guarantee of pay.

  74. 74.

    fuckwit

    @Schlemizel: Umm, I hate to break it to you, but reality *is* shitty people behaving badly. Great example: look at the teabaggers in the House right now. That’s reality.

  76. 76.

    tarylcabot

    Thoroughly enjoyable, though a few scenes stretched credulity – how did Walt get the ricin in the stevia packet? how did Walt get in & out of Skyler’s without being seen? how did Walt get back to his ‘safe house’ to get all the $$$ without the cops finding him?

    Guess that’s small potatoes compared to the emotional satisfaction though.

  78. 78.

    Suzan

    How did Walt get all the money? He had the money from the safe house with him in the bar but I mean the money the Nazis stole?

  79. 79.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @Jane2:

    Didn’t even know there was a UK Netflix. Cool! Worked IT for a few years so making Netflix think I’m in the UK is not a stretch. As long as I can use my US Netflix login I’m golden.

  80. 80.

    Uriel

    I thought it was good, as far a finales go, right up until the moment Walt started his bittersweet walk through the meth lab, and the inital notes of Badfinger starred up. And then I thought…

    How fucking awesome.

  81. 81.

    Bob's Had Enough

    It’s not TV, but I think some most excellent news has emerged in the last few days that people might want to know about. It looks like the money we’ve spent subsidizing wind and solar is massively paying off. (Unlike the money we’ve spent on fossil fuels and nuclear.)

    “The prices offered by wind projects to utility purchasers averaged $40/MWh for projects negotiating contracts 2011 and 2012, spurring demand for wind energy.”

    http://www1.eere.energy.gov/wind/pdfs/2012_wind_technologies_market_report.pdf

    “The cost of large-scale solar projects has fallen by one third in the last five years and big solar now competes with wind energy in the solar-rich south-west of the United States, according to new research.

    The study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory entitled “Utility-Scale Solar 2012: An Empirical Analysis of Project Cost, Performance, and Pricing Trends in the United States” – says the cost of solar is still falling and contracts for some solar projects are being struck as low as $50/MWh (including a 30 per cent federal tax credit).”

    “Another interesting observation from LBNL is that most of the contracts written in recent years do not escalate in nominal dollars over the life of the contract. This means that in real dollar terms, the pricing of the contract actually declines.

    This means that towards the end of their contracts, the solar plants (including PV, CSP and CPV) contracted in 2013 will on average will be delivering electricity at less than $40/MWh. This is likely to be considerably less than fossil fuel plants at the same time, given the expected cost of fuels and any environmental regulations.”

    http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/big-solar-now-competing-with-wind-energy-on-costs-75962

    4 cents per kWh for wind, 5 cents per kWh for solar. Tease out the 30% subsidy and it’s 5.7 and 7.1 cents. Fixed for at least 20 years. (Wind turbines should last 30 years. Solar panels probably over 40. Both yield almost free electricity after the 20 year payoff.)

    Additionally, projections are that we will lower demand as much as 20% by 2020 with efficiency. That’s half of our coal generation replaced with efficiency and a very affordable way to replace the rest, along with some of our natural gas use.

  82. 82.

    A Humble Lurker

    @Yatsuno:
    Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but I swear I predicted this. Only it was with transporters, not space travel. It was just a regular speculative conversation wherein I said ‘Maybe we’ll get teleporters, but it won’t be like the fly. It won’t do anything to us: what it’ll do is bend space so that our destination is right through the doorway.’

    Or something like that. Also, it totally sounds like how the ships work on Futurama.

  83. 83.

    piratedan

    weren’t you the same group extolling the virtues of Game of Thrones just a few months back? Or was that The Walking Dead? whatever….geez people, no wonder we’re so susceptible to the Republican wayback machine, as it it seems that our working memories only go back three years or so…..

    glad that most of you got your series closure and enjoyed your time with the Breaking Bad crew….

    let this sit and simmer a while before you install it in the pantheon, now if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch up on some other threads and see if I can order some more MST3K episodes from Amazon or Rhino…..

  84. 84.

    NotMax

    @A Humble Lurker

    That type of space truncating point-to-point transport/travel device probably pre-dated by some decades the first time I can recall coming across it in an SF novel, “All the Colors of Darkness,” which came out in 1963.

  86. 86.

    Uriel

    @piratedan:

    weren’t you the same group extolling the virtues of Game of Thrones just a few months back? Or was that The Walking Dead?

    And your point being? I’m pretty sure it’s perfectly rational to like more than one TV series at a time. You know, multitasking and whatnot.

  87. 87.

    Uriel

    @piratedan:

    weren’t you the same group extolling the virtues of Game of Thrones just a few months back? Or was that The Walking Dead?

    And your point being? I’m pretty sure it’s perfectly rational to like more than one TV series at a time. You know, multitasking and whatnot.

  88. 88.

    Console

    Jesse gets freed literally and figuratively (by finally not letting Walt dictate what Jesse should want). And yet Walt, asshole to the end, goes and dies in the meth lab and gives Blue back to Heisenberg for eternity.

    I thought it was Grey Matter that brought Walt back, but the reality is that it was copyright infringement. Blue meth had to die with Heisenberg, and Walt would have it no other way.

  89. 89.

    Console

    And can we stop with the whole “There were always good TV shows” bullshit? No, there are no adequate comparisons to the best TV of this past decade, no matter how cool you thought Mulder and Scully were.

    It’s really pronounced in children’s entertainment. You’ll never hear anyone extolling the virtues of Superfriends over Batman: The Animated Series.

  90. 90.

    Cassidy

    @Console: I prefer the old Spider-man cartoons to the new ones. There were plenty of good shows before Breaking Bad. Personally, I’ve only seen two episodes, the first two, and while they were okay I have yet to feel compelled to burn through them on Netflix. Maybe I will after I’m done watching a few other shows that really interest me, but that’s not today.

  93. 93.

    Betty Cracker

    Overall, a satisfying ending. The story construction was a little sloppy in some places. For example, the robotic arm gun in the trunk: To pull that off, Walt had to make some pretty big assumptions, e.g., that the neo-nazis wouldn’t search his trunk, that he’d be allowed to retain his key fob, that they wouldn’t just shoot him on sight before he could waste them, that he’d be able to park his car at the exactly right angle and elevation to the hideout, that all the bad dudes would be assembled in that one place rather than dispersed throughout the compound.

    Still, it worked. I liked that Walt got to demonstrate yet another transformation when he showed he no longer gave a shit about money by shooting Uncle Jack instead of trying to find out where he’d stashed the stolen millions.

    I liked the final scene between Walt and Skyler, when Walt finally admitted his “I’m doing this all for the family” excuse was bullshit. I wonder if the writers meant that not just as a poignant dramatic scene but also as a fuck-you to all the deranged online Skyler-haters who have spent the last five years screeching that she is an ungrateful harridan.

  95. 95.

    Dennis

    I liked the parallel to the Season 3 finale, in which Walt tells Jesse “you have to save me!”, the ultimate manipulation into doing what Jesse most doesn’t want to do, kill another person face to face. In the finale, Walt again passes the responsibility to Jesse, “shoot me, you want this”, but Jesse saves himself by refusing, “YOU want this, do it yourself”.

    I actually viewed it as Walt’s final act of mercy to Jesse, his apology for dragging Jesse along with his megalomaniacal dreams.

  96. 96.

    Dennis

    @Betty Cracker: Yeah, the whole machine gun thing was a little too “super-genius”, but if it hadn’t worked, Walt was prepared to die anyway.

    One thing I kept expecting to see come back in the final season, but which turned out to be a red herring, was the implication that Gus’s secret family was so important that the Mexican mob didn’t dare kill him when they could have. I thought that would come back on Walt, but maybe they couldn’t figure out how to make the story line work.

  97. 97.

    JimV

    Answers worth at least what you paid for them:

    “How did he drive across country in a stolen Volvo with N.H. plates.”

    Sloppy policework, but bear in mind they didn’t know it was Walter White, aka Heisenberg, who stole the car. Could have been some teenage joyriders. Not worth a nationwide APB per se.

    “how did Walt get the ricin in the stevia packet?”

    He did it beforehand, perhaps the day before, by making a small slit in the package – maybe in multiple packages, which he substituted with some sleight of hand at the table.

    “How did Walt get in & out of Skyler’s without being seen?”

    On the way out he waited until the school bus blocked the view of the stakeout car. May have used a similar trick on the way in.

    “How did Walt get all the money? He had the money from the safe house with him in the bar but I mean the money the Nazis stole?”

    In an unshown scene he got his money from the safe house imediately after stealing the car. It was a barrel-full of money, enough to cover a table top in Gretchen and Elliot’s house. He never got the money back from Jack. That money would have covered the table top about eight feet high.

    “The story construction was a little sloppy in some places. For example, the robotic arm gun in the trunk.”

    Agreed, and there was a lot of luck involved in the above scenes also – sloppy script-writing. (A slightly better plot device would be to have the triggering device be in a fake wrist-watch. No way all the bad guys get mortally shot though.) I can’t place this in the top five dramas for that reason. For the acting, yes, for the writing no. Another example, only after Walt kills Gus do the script-writers realize that, whoops, Gus had video of Walt cooking meth. So they back-tracked to make the video encrypted and stored in a local police station instead of shipped to Quantico. I was mentally shouting at Walt about the video when he bought the gun to shoot Gus with, a couple of episodes earlier.

    Granted, in comparison to make-it-up-as-you-go-along drek such as “Lost”, and “Battlestar Galactica” it was brilliant. But it was no “Stargate Atlantis”.

    Watching a lot of the AMC marathon reminded me that most of the time I disliked Jesse more than Walt. Picking Jesse to partner with might have been Walt’s worst mistake, although a “good” drug-dealer is hard to find. The writers did add plot elements that kept Jesse and Walt together – I’ll give them a B+ overall.

  98. 98.

    Manyakitty

    @hilts:
    1. Deadwood
    2. The Wire
    3. Breaking Bad

    Switch between 1 and 3 is possible only because Deadwood never really got an end.

  101. 101.

    Suzan

    Thanks. Brain fart. Walt got $10M from the bad guys, I was thinking he only got $1M.

    I just hope that when Flynn gets a little older he watches the whole six seasons and is able to forgive (in part) his father.

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