‘Breaking Bad’: There Will Be Blood
As Walter White’s final stand approaches, the question isn’t who will end up dead, but who won’t (spoilers)
“If you don’t know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.” —Walter White
If there were ever any doubt that Breaking Bad is a Shakespearean tragedy, gorgeously reinvented for the small screen, then last night’s final season premiere made that fact crystal clear. The opening scene of Walt’s family home, abandoned, fenced in, chained and bolted, the empty swimming pool claimed by a bevy of skateboarders, served as a striking portrait of the American dream shattered. The spoils of the middle-class suburban life—the lawn, the cars, the pool, the comfortable rooms—have been gutted. The family is missing. The walls have been spray-painted. The neighbor doesn’t smile and wave. Walter returns not for a photograph or a teddy bear or some sentimental treasure, but for his hidden stash of poison.
We knew that Walter White would land in a hell of his own making eventually. This flash forward, though, serves not just as a foreshadowing but as a warning: Things are about to get very, very ugly. In case you’re wondering what the moral of this tragedy might be, Walt’s soliloquy, delivered on his visit to Jesse’s house, lays it out beautifully:
“Son, you need to stop focusing on the darkness behind you. The past is the past. Nothing can change what we’ve done. But now that’s over. You’re out and so am I. That’s right. I’m done. I’ve been out for about a month. But there is nothing left for us to do except to try to live ordinary, decent lives.”
(Walt’s idea of decency? Lying to his only loyal friend.)
We are seeing Walt at the height of his arrogance. He believes that his participation in countless atrocities will have no bearing on his future. He can simply walk away from his meth empire and live an ordinary life, enjoying the spoils of his criminal past without ever having to pay for his sins. But we already know, from that first shot of his house, that Walt is wrong, dead wrong. The past is never behind you—particularly when your name is Walter White.
From the start, Breaking Bad has served as a human experiment. Over the course of five seasons, Walt has transformed from an ineffectual, doomed chemistry teacher into a merciless drug kingpin. Like those bodies dissolving in hydrofluoric acid, the structure of Walt’s personality was radically altered by his rise to power, his humble, pragmatic nature gradually replaced by the ego-driven, casually vengeful aggression of a lunatic. What has been surprising about Breaking Bad in its last few seasons, given its stylish visuals, its wicked sense of humor and its unapologetic nastiness (which often bordered on the macabre), was that the show has been driven all along by a stark and unforgiving moralism. You might’ve imagined, at the outset of the series, that this depressed teacher and his deadbeat student would fumble and flail their way into the big time, alternately sweating and snickering as they went, but always escaping punishment. Back then, Breaking Bad looked like your typical dark comedy, where bad people outdo other bad people and no one pays a price.
After the recklessness, ugliness, and almost smug nihilism of the first few seasons, we actually started to crave the emergence of some moral payback. When Jane died and the planes collided, spewing wreckage all over Walt’s neighborhood, that wasn’t just another melodramatic season finale fishing for eyeballs. That was an omen of ill weather to come, a signal to viewers that hellfire and damnation would rain down on those who had come to define themselves as ethically irreproachable.
So how will Breaking Bad end? The answer lies in Walter White’s tragic flaw: He’s a control freak. He believes he can control every variable in his grand experiment. His cancer diagnosis made him feel out of control, so he seized power over his own fate by acting out as a criminal. He kept pulling Jesse back into the business in part because he couldn’t resist feeling that he could control the kid. He couldn’t tolerate Gus trying to control him, so Gus had to go. He couldn’t let Skyler live without him anymore, so he forced her into a sort of hostage living situation. He couldn’t let Mike drive away with a bag of passports, because then Mike would be free from his control. Even when Hank essentially threw him a bone at the end of their breathtaking stand-off on Sunday night, Walt shut him down. “Have Skyler bring the kids here, then we’ll talk,” Hank said. “That is not going to happen,” Walt replied. He refused to let Hank call the shots, even when Hank was holding all the cards.
“I am not in danger,” Walt told Skyler at the end of season four, and this belief has echoed throughout season five. “I am the danger.” Walt, as Heisenberg (a name inspired by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, of all things), believes that he is omnipotent.
The train heist gave some indication where this tragic flaw might land him. Even when Walt designs and enacts the ultimate crime, where no one gets hurt and every aspect of his plan works out (almost) perfectly, there’s no way to account for random variables. The world is not a sterile, controlled environment. The young boy rides up and sees the crew, high-fiving over their success. Todd, the soft-spoken sociopath, steps forward and kills the kid. No matter how much control Walt believes he has, he can’t fix everything.
When you break into the international drug trade, you can pretty much bet you’re not the only danger. Walt’s arrogance has left him blind to his circumstances, sloppier and more reckless than ever. Throw in the return of his cancer, and you’ve got a man who’s destined to destroy everything he touches.
In predicting the final seven episodes of the season, you only have to ask, “What would make Walter feel the most out of control?” Under pressure from Marie and Skyler, Hank might agree to keep Walt’s secret hidden for a little while, which would be provide a little warm-up torture for Walt. Eventually, though, Walt will consider Hank’s eradication necessary. As a fellow self-interested sociopath, Todd will have to go. Saul signaled his own fate when he said something like “When they start killing the lawyers, I’m out.” It’s easy to see Saul, poised to sing like a bird (which was written in the stars from the start), being cut down by Walt. Lydia could end up killing Skyler (which would be the natural move for a deeply corrupt woman like Lydia, who’s used her own status as a mother to snake out of getting her just desserts more than once). On the other hand, Skyler could end up in jail, paying for Walt’s sins while Walt is on the run. Based on his guilt-plagued existence in Sunday’s episode, Jesse seems likely to kill himself in some gruesome Shakespearean manner.
Will (gasp) Junior and little Holly wind up dead? It’s possible, though I like to think that Marie, at least, will live happily ever after (sort of), dressing Holly in purple until she’s old enough to shun the sight of that color forever.
Only one thing’s for certain: Walt will not go down in a blaze of glory. The illusion of control that he’s nursed from the start—that he could take his destiny into his own hands and create a different ending to his story—will have to be toppled. That means he’ll have to stick around to see everything he’s ever loved ripped to shreds. His son will eventually discover that he is to blame for Skyler’s demise, and he’ll refuse to look Walt in the eye again. His sister-in-law will spit in his face. And Walt, who is clearly the unintentional prophet of his own downfall in this episode, will die of cancer from inside a jail cell, the exact fate that he tells Hank won’t come to pass. He’ll dodge the law up until the last possible moment, then use the Ricin to poison someone (Hank?) and get nailed for it.
Hank isn’t the only person who doesn’t know who Walt is; Walt himself doesn’t know who he is. Maybe his best course would be to tread lightly.
No chance of that. Instead, this mesmerizing Shakespearean tragedy will end in a bloodbath. Whatever the particulars happen to be, it’s clear we’re in for seven of the bleakest, most unsparing TV episodes ever made. And thanks to Breaking Bad’s exceptional storytelling, we’re looking forward to it.
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