"Breaking Bad" Finale Goes out with a Bang

Poor Walter. All the guy wants to do is make and sell meth, pay for his cancer treatments, and maybe have some money left over for his family in case he croaks. That being said, his occasional aloofness from Skyler and Walter Jr. doesn’t help his situation. The illicit nature of his extracurricular activities has prevented Walter from cluing his wife in on what he has done to ensure the family isn’t in debt for the next 200 years, and she has been understandably suspicious of him. However, in the last minutes of the season two finale ("ABQ"), Skyler lost it. After ruling out the possibility of Walter having an affair with Gretchen, Skyler found out that Walter is almost all caught up on his gargantuan medical bills, and naturally connects this with Walter’s strange behavior. But rather than ask Walter where he got the money to pay off the expenses, she tells him to move out of his house while she goes to Hank and Marie’s for a few days with the baby. Walter offers to tell her everything if she stays, but she isn’t interested. Doesn’t want to know. Apparently isn’t even curious. She’d rather leave the matter unresolved so she can probably bone her boss and not feel guilty. Was Skyler being a bitch? Feel free to comment.

Remember that Skyler is the one who got Walter into this mess. He heard the words “terminal cancer” from the doctor and was ready to mail it in. No financially-crippling surgeries. No painful chemotherapy. Walter was ready to die instead of gearing up for a long battle he might not win, but one that would definitely jeopardize his family’s financial future. Convinced mainly by Skyler to fight it, Walter started making meth out of practical necessity.

As I mentioned in my review of Breaking Bad, many critics have the awful habit of engaging in haughty moralizations of works of fiction instead of examining them on more aesthetic grounds. A few of the reviews I had the displeasure of reading explicitly blame Walter for the plane crash because he let Jane die, and her death caused her father to screw up in the air traffic control room, which caused to planes to collide in midair. As such, according to one hack, “This is on Walt’s head, every last bit of it, and so it feels right for fiery judgment to be rained down on that head,” in a reference to the hitherto mysterious pink teddy bear in his pool. What a stupidly simplistic view.

It is easy for these amateur ethicists isolate and blame Walter because of the obvious connection that can be made. But why not single out Sklyer for pleading with Walter to fight his cancer? Had he ignored her entreaties, Jane would likely still be alive. Or why not blame Jesse for spilling the beans to Jane about the whole operation? That made her a potential threat to Walter, and given the chance to save her life, he declined on pragmatic grounds.

The critics blame Walter because they are lazy. They see that the show revolves around him, and therefore his entire fictional world must also. But Walter is one man, even if he is the man in the show. To single him out as the primary author of such unforeseen catastrophes is to elevate him to a level of importance that no mortal could reasonably lay claim to. From its pilot episode up until last night, Breaking Bad has been one long chain of causes and events brought on by the capriciousness of fate. The crank critics can engage in their childish game of “what if” in their anemic attempts to sound deep or profound, but their moral indignation only prevents from seeing, with total clarity, that what happened could not have happened any other way.

-Max