Ursula Coyote/AMC
The saga of Bryan Cranston's Walt White on 'Breaking Bad' came to an end Sunday night with plenty of deaths, and a lot of closure.
SPOILER ALERT! DON'T READ BEFORE YOU'VE SEEN THE EPISODE.
You knew AMC’s “Breaking Bad” would have to end with some variation on its long-standing basic theme of “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”
Except that for Sunday night’s finale to a show that kept getting more attention and acclaim as it got darker and darker, creator Vince Gilligan added an amendment that markedly softened the premise.
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A mere bad guy like Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), who only dealt methamphetamine and only killed people who needed killing, got to live.
In fact, he and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) became agents of justice, killing the badder bad guys who murdered people for cheap thrills, sadistic pleasure or simple convenience.
Specifically, Walt rigged up a machine gun that popped out of the trunk of his car and sprayed a building with bullets, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre-style, when he punched the remote.
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Naturally it killed all the bad guys but two — sociopathic Uncle Jack, who lit a last cigarette before Walt personally blew him away, and Psycho Todd, whom Jesse got to strangle.
After that, Walt and Jesse took turns pointing guns at each other and ultimately decided to put them down.
Jesse careened off in a car, driving well over the speed limit, while Walt lay on the floor, apparently to die just as police arrived to arrest him.
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The suggestion was that Jesse also was unlikely to live to collect Social Security, which is presumably part of his punishment.
The real punishment for anyone, though, the show has repeatedly suggested, is living with their own degree of badness. Walt asked Jesse to shoot him, to which Jesse replied, “If you want it, do it yourself.”
As Walt took his final walk around the meth lab, caressing the equipment and remembering that he really did love the art of chemistry, he probably consoled himself by thinking how most of his family ultimately also survived.
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That includes his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), his son and daughter Walt Jr. and Holly and his sister-in-law Marie (Betsy Brandt), none of whose survival had been looking real good going into Sunday night.
None is poised to exactly live happily ever after, of course, even beyond Skyler’s new chain-smoking habit.
Still, Walt did maneuver to keep most of them alive, give or take his brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris).
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That only made it more interesting when Walt admitted to Skyler in their final conversation that his motives for becoming the drug kingpin Heisenberg weren’t quite as noble as he repeatedly insisted.
“I did it for myself,” he said. “I liked it. I was good at it. It made me feel alive.”
That’s not exactly how most of the other characters on “Breaking Bad” ended up feeling.
But that’s God’s problem now.
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