I Was Alive
Never before has a show so grim generated so many hysterical memes.
Before I even start this spoiler-tastic update about the
finale of Breaking Bad, I just want
to say how proud I am that a substantial portion of the American public is
nerding out over a television event that…
1)
Was not sports
2)
Did not involve Kardashians or storage unit
auctions
3)
Was scripted, and
4)
Was scripted very well.
Sure, our entire federal government may be held hostage by
about 30 country-dwelling mouthbreathers, but damn if we haven’t begun to cultivate a refined taste in
television! We may never stop being a nation of couch potatoes, but at least
now it’s because there’s something good on TV.
*
I thought the finale of Breaking
Bad was amazing. Yeah, motherfucker, I did
just use the word ‘amazing’, and I used it correctly, because I was quite
honestly amazed by how good that episode was. It’s not like I had low
expectations or anything – my reaction to pretty much every Breaking Bad episode is ‘OMG WTF SO GOOD
NEXTONE’ – but I’ve been burned by finales in the past.
I tend to hate endings that try to tie up every loose end.
Case in point: Battlestar Galactica,
where the writers capped off four dark, intense, complex seasons with a Wayne’s World-style “mega-happy ending” that
put a nice friendly bow on several unresolved subplots and then filed
everything else under “God did it.”
I’m a sucker for realism, and real life is often confusing
and devoid of closure. For that reason, I loved the incredibly controversial
finale to The Sopranos, and I’m
eagerly awaiting a similar mindfuck when Sopranos-alumni
Matthew Weiner ends Mad Men next
year.
But it worked for Breaking
Bad because Breaking Bad, thanks
to its detail-oriented protagonist, has always kind of been a show about tying
up loose ends, usually in such a decisively violent way that they never come
untied. I mean, Walt and Jesse spend nearly half of the first season just
trying to clean up the mess they made in the pilot! And that mess – disposing
of a dead body and strangling a captive drug dealer with a bike lock – seems almost
trivial compared to the messes they get into in subsequent seasons.
And because I’m a sucker for realism it was that ‘devil in
the details’ theme that made it so enjoyable for me. Watching Walt and Jesse’s
Keystone Kops approach to crime was fun; watching them frantically trying to
cover their tracks was damn good television.
*
I remember that in the runup to the last eight episodes,
when Walt had all but become suburban Scarface, the hot question among fans was
“So, are you still rooting for Walt?”
Yes! Obviously! Of course I am! How could there be any other
answer than the one I am giving you right now!?!
Walt’s actions became increasingly reprehensible as the
series went on, but they were reprehensible in such a fun way! He used science
and the occasional wheelchair-bound cholo to kill gangsters and gain power – at
his best, Walt was like Evil McGyver, or Ted Kaczynski The Science Guy.
Debating the morality of his actions was fun, and also
integral to the experience of watching the show, but nothing he did – up to and
including poisoning a child and setting off a bomb in a nursing home on the same day – ever made me say
‘Well, that tears it – now I’m rooting for Hank!’
I was cheering for Walt until the end because I felt sorry
for him from the beginning. Walt, a loving father, dedicated teacher, and
brilliant chemist spent most of his life living with regret and feelings of
inadequacy, teaching chemistry to disrespectful jocks while watching his old
business partner get rich and famous running the company he’d walked away from
years ago. And then, on top of that, he got lung cancer.
Watching Walt decide to quit taking life’s shit and
transform himself into a badass meth cooking, sports car driving, hat-wearing
alpha male was the realization of a certain power fantasy that every guy is
acutely familiar with. Even Walt’s darkest activities were satisfying on some
level, because it felt like he was finally triumphing over a world that had
been beating him down and cruelly mocking him for years.
Walt’s confession in the finale – “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.” – hit the nail on
the head. Walt’s tragedy was that despite his considerable genius and affable
nature, the only thing he was truly good at was being bad. The fact that Walt
was able to be bad for a year, and that he was able to become so successful,
feared, and legendary as a bad guy, was perhaps the best luck he had in his
life.
“I was really… I was
alive.”
*
I watched the finale with my buddy John and his gay dog
Milo, and afterwards we both talked about how surprised – and relieved – we
were that the show had had a happy ending, because we had both feared that
things would be a lot darker.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at what constitutes a ‘happy
ending’ on Breaking Bad:
1)
Dead protagonist
2)
Protagonist’s family hates him and curses his
name
3)
Protagonist’s longtime collaborator, rescued by
protagonist from a squad of neo-Nazis using him as a broken-spirited meth
slave, walks out of protagonist’s life forever
4)
Single mother is fatally poisoned by protagonist
5)
$80 million is lost to the sands of time
6)
Some poor Volvo owner in bumfuck New Hampshire
has his car stolen
I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Truman Capps definitely isn’t the one who knocks.