Breaking Bad Season 5 Thread

That only works for girls from Nebraska.

To me, this gave just enough resolution. I find myself wanting to know who painted Heisenberg on the living room wall and for Marie to get arrested for stealing shoes. The fact that I don't know is realistic enough to match the real world that it doesn't take away from the ending. What an awesome show.

 

In "Granite State," the vacuum cleaner guy tells Walt the feds had to put up a fence around his old house because it had become a "tourist attraction" with "neighborhood kids breaking in." Did you really need to see one of the skater punks with a can of yellow Krylon in his hand?

 

What I take from it is we saw the limitations of television when it comes to a dark drama. For as much as we celebrate the "golden age" you still can't do what the Coen Brothers or Lynch do in their films . David Lynch found it out when the network derailed Twin Peaks. I'm assuming Chase realized what he could and couldn't do with Tony Soprano at the end and decided to simply punt. You can't leave with a whirlwind ready to swallow up a school playground or Chigurh walking away on television. Gilligan understood this, probably wisely.

 

Thinking about the multiple endings, I think that the last few episodes collectively give you any kind of ending you could want. Super bleak scorched-earth ending? Ozymandias. The Michael Corleone ending where Walt lives in solitude and realizes it was all for nothing? Granite State. Redemptive ending allowing Walt to go out on his own terms? Felina.

 

Absolutely, 100 percent thought he was going the Lawrence of Arabia route as well.

 

The more I think about it, the more I don't think Walt intended on ducking the M60 at all until he saw Jesse in the state he was in. He was going to stand there and eat the bullets with the rest of them.

 

Why not? I have a hard time believing HBO and AMC didn't let Chase and Gilligan end those shows exactly the way they wanted to. Citing Twin Peaks as an example is hardly fair because network TV of 20 years ago is a whole different ballgame than cable dramas today. Oz ended with pretty much no redemption or happy ending for anyone. The Wire ended with nothing changing. So it can be done.

The thing you'd have to realize as a showrunner with just about any ending is that some people aren't going to like it and they'll be vocal about it. It's different than movies because huge numbers of people experience it at the same time and then start discussing it among themselves. This, after investing the equivalent of days of their lives to watch the entire story. If somebody doesn't like the end of No Country for Old Men they might feel like it was a waste of a few hours, but no big deal. If you don't like the end of one of these shows you can't help but feel, at least a little bit, like you wasted every Sunday night for five or so years.

Most people get over it though.

 

For me, the coolest moment of the episode was when the red laser dots showed up on Walt's former business partners.

 

Reading reviews and pondering it, I can't help but think Felina might have been the greatest episode title ever.


As for the criticism that the show never dealt with how the actual drugs hurt people, I don't think that's true. It did it in small ways throughout the series. Skinny Pete plays piano for a few minutes and you realize he has an incredible talent that's wasted because he's always wasted. Same with Jesse and woodworking. All the people at Jesse's support group have sad lives because of chemical dependency. They showed what happens in poor neighborhoods when kids are recruited to be low-level dealers. The methhead couple that stole the ATM machine with the little boy.

If you think about the entire run of the series, they didn't shy away from that angle at all, even if they didn't hammer us and Walt over the head with it.

 

You mean that silly-assed machine gun on a wheel set off by a car key wasn't contrived?
I'm also fuzzy on something and someone feel free to help: What was the whole deal with Walt accusing Jack of being partners with Jesse? Why would that set him off like that. Didn't really get that.

 

Because he took Walt's money to kill Jesse.