That’s All, Folks: Breaking Bad’s Series Finale Perfectly Ended TV’s Most Epic Tragedy
Photo Courtesy of AMC TV Features AMC
Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.
I’ve been wondering about why tragedy so transfixes us for a long time. You can’t help but wonder such things during all that Shakespeare they make you read. The best explanation I’ve heard is that we can’t look away from the fall of someone great—the destruction of a MacBeth or a King Arthur is fascinating. Crucially, we need to see the flaw before it unravels the main character: their violent ambition, or hypocrisy as they build a blameless kingdom, or being two dumb horny teenagers in a bad play nobody likes.
Breaking Bad is not Peak Post-Sitcom Super Serialized Hyper-Scripted Prestige TV’s only tragedy, but it’s my vote for its best, a show that didn’t have itself completely planned out to the most minute detail from the beginning by any means, but which knew where it was going when it began and delivered on the premise. Walter White is as prideful as he is doomed, and like great tragic heroes in Shakespearean or Arthurian tradition, his downfall comes entirely by his own hand. We see it coming from the jump. But we can’t look away.
The Show
Walter White (Bryan Cranston, in the role that ensured he would never have trouble landing roles for the rest of his natural life) is a high school chemistry teacher struggling in America. Like some young teachers I knew when I was still in school, I would see them working a second job during off hours, earning peanuts in part-time work because that’s the only way they could make ends meet despite all the lofty rhetoric about how kids are our future and education is the key to equality and opportunity. We see just how thankless and scorned Walt is, and then we see him collapse at his part-time job at a car wash. Walt’s got inoperable lung cancer. He’ll die any minute now.
Suddenly freed from the burden of having to survive, Walt hatches a plan, unknowingly planted in his head by his DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank (Dean Norris). Walt realizes there is an absurd amount of money to be made making and selling methamphetamine, and while riding along on a drug bust with Hank, he discovers that he knows a meth cook. He witnesses a former burnout student of his, Jesse (Aaron Paul), fleeing the scene. Walt coerces Jesse into helping him enter the drug trade, and the two discover that they make an amazing team when it comes to meth and a disastrous pairing when it comes to doing literally anything else right.
The show slowly and methodically takes Walt from a man pressured into an extreme course of action to a coldhearted criminal mastermind who doesn’t think twice about lying, stealing, money laundering, peddling a product that legitimately ruins people’s lives, and of course, murdering the shit out of dozens of people over the course of the show through direct action or by his orders. Bodies are dissolved in acid, people get mass-murdered in prison or have their decapitated head put on a turtle with a bomb in it. It’s a show where the violence is always shocking and stark and interesting, because it’s almost never perfunctory or meaningless or done for the convenience of the writers.
The cast, from the series regulars to the guest stars, all shine, with special mentions for Walt’s family, who both had the weightiest roles as the series came to a close: wife Skyler (Anna Gunn, who got a load of shit for turning in a performance that is basically exactly how any self-respecting woman would react to her husband becoming a criminal sociopath) and their son Flynn (RJ Mitte, whose performance in the last handful of episodes alone broke audiences’ hearts).
Most astoundingly, series creator Vince Gilligan has revealed that the show originally planned on killing Jesse off early in the run, but audiences responded so enthusiastically to Paul’s performance that they kept him on and he became the unquestionable co-lead and the heart of the series—the person for whom Walt’s actions cause the most suffering, even compared to his blameless young son. The show had a morality to it, a retributive poetry to the way characters would meet their ends, almost always as a result of their personal flaws or weaknesses somewhere. And every dropped body came with attendant problems for Walt and Jesse, whether the unhinged Tuco, the silent assassins known only as the Cousins, or Giancarlo Esposito’s all-timer villain Gus.
Eventually, though, the mayhem and hubris had to come to an end. Through the show, Jesse and Walt had a form of camaraderie, but it never let you forget that Jesse was essentially being forced into his situation, driven from his family, dragged further into a life of violence and crime, and always, always subordinate to Walt’s will. It had to end, and everybody who had been watching the show knew it had to end in the worst way possible. Walt’s insurmountable ego, the betrayals (of which he’s on both sides) have set everything up for a classic catastrophe.
The Finale: “Ozymandias,” “Granite State,” and “Felina”
Maybe more so than almost any other show I have highlighted here so far, the finale to the Breaking Bad saga doesn’t really happen in its final episode, or even its final two or three. The truth is that there are elements from the show’s very first episodes present in its final stretch. To properly go into the story and why it’s such an unforgettable ending, though, it helps to start a few episodes back: at the third-to-last episode “Ozymandias,” as things truly pass the point of no return.
Hank and his partner Steve (Steven Michael Quesada, who is also great) have caught Jesse and gotten him to cooperate with them. Hank has discovered Walt is “Heisenberg,” the meth king who has been flooding Albuquerque’s streets with blue meth, but Walt has him in a stalemate: if Hank arrests him, he’ll just pin it all on Hank, claiming that Hank is using his position as a DEA agent to orchestrate Walt’s drug trade. Jesse has the means to destroy Walt, and is willing to do it. The only trouble is that the conspirators haven’t told anybody at the DEA their plan.
Jesse, Hank, and Steve lure Walt out into the New Mexico desert by tricking him into thinking they have found his stash of buried cash. When they arrive to arrest him, however, Walt has called in his own cavalry, and the neo-Nazi drug dealers he’s recruited as muscle show up (it’s a very complicated show). As “Ozymandias” opens, they have shot Hank and outright killed Steve even as Walt cries out to them to stop. Walt pleads, offers money, tries to get Hank to swear he’ll walk away from the situation, but as Hank stoically says, the Nazi crew leader has made his mind up. Hank dies, the Nazis steal all but a single barrel of Walt’s money (containing a paltry $11 million), and also drag Jesse back to their compound with the promise of torturing him to death at Walt’s orders.
Walt rushes back home to Skyler and Flynn, who have already been told by Hank’s wife Marie (Betsy Brandt) that Walt has been arrested and the game is up. (Brandt, incidentally, should win the David Hyde Pierce Medal for convincingly playing a lead character’s sibling, and a separate award for killing it as a character who is just the worst.) When they discover him there shouting at them to pack up and flee the law, they already know what must have happened. Walt lets slip that Hank is gone and in one scene, his family is utterly destroyed. The episode’s starkest image (courtesy of director Rian Johnson) is the moment where Flynn and Skyler have been thrown to the floor and are looking up at Walt, terrified, Flynn putting his body between his father and mother. I mean it as the greatest compliment when I say it is just awful to watch.
Walt takes refuge with a fixer played by Robert Forster (because the show half-asses nothing). While waiting for his ride out of town to a life of lying low from the law, Walt is cooped up in a basement with his former lawyer Saul (Bob Odenkirk—who got his own show out of the deal that people keep telling me is just as good if not better than this one). Face the music, Saul says, don’t leave your family in the lurch. But Walt won’t do it. He opts to run with his barrelful of money, telling himself that he’ll engineer some sort of revenge against those who have laid him low.
But he’s dying. And “Granite State” shows this decline, with Walt hiding up in a cabin somewhere in snowy New Hampshire for an entire winter with no connection to the outside world, avoiding a nationwide manhunt with Forster as his only conduit to learn about anything. Jesse, meanwhile, is imprisoned by the Nazis, and made to cook meth when he isn’t sleeping in a hole in the ground by their leader’s aw-shucks psycho son, Todd (Jesse Plemons, another face you have seen a lot off the back of his success here).
Walt is determined to get his ill-gotten money to his family, and so hikes eight miles into a small town to make a furtive phone call to Flynn at school, intending to give him directions on how to receive the money while the entire law enforcement apparatus of the United States is tapping their phones, spying on their internet, and having them surveilled 24/7. And that’s when he’s brought to his lowest point, or perhaps his truest.
The thin justification Walt has used throughout the entire show has been that he’s doing this for his family. Skyler has been out of the job market since she had their first son, who has medical needs. They have a newborn. Walt has never earned enough to save. It’s America, where we can pour billions into a war on drugs and basically nothing into a war on poverty or disease or illiteracy or not knowing how to zipper merge. He must do this for his family, he reasons, or when he dies he’ll be leaving them to the wolves.
Just as “Ozymandias” opens with a flashback of Walt making a loving phone call to Skyler while he waits for his very first batch of blue meth to finish cooling and crystalizing so that we see what he had, “Granite State” shows why he’s lost it. Not because of the horrible circumstances he’s found himself in, but because of his pride and ego, his need to be respected.
Because, after Flynn screams at him and hangs up on him, Walt calls the police on himself and sits down for a last drink at the bar, only to see two of his former colleagues on TV. Gretchen and Elliott (Jessica Hecht and Adam Godley) co-founded a company with Walt and, due to a falling out, they have become billionaires and he’s been left with nothing. This was established in the first handful of episodes, during which Walt essentially rejects any charity from them—charity that would have eliminated the need for him to do, well, everything he does in the show.
As the two of them disavow his part in their company, his face curdles into rage. It was never about getting money before he dies of cancer. It was about being the Big Man. Being “the one who knocks,” as Walt puts it sinisterly to Skyler in an earlier episode, where he explains that he has murdered his competitors. And since he’s not done doing that, when the police show up to arrest him, he’s already fled.
“Felina” is almost a denouement by comparison, and as a finale episode, it’s not as interesting or as heart-wrenching as the ones that come immediately before it. It’s better that way, though: Walt gets moments of savage brilliance and triumph, unadulterated by any desperation about living to tell about it. The show is (pardon the pun) just letting the man cook. Jesse gets out alive and free, Walt’s family will get his money (in a way that deliciously shoves it in Gretchen and Elliott’s faces), and the Nazis are all really, really dead.
Epic tragedy, one college professor argued to me, is about the great suffering a fall. Not the good: Lear wasn’t good, and Walter White sure as hell wasn’t good. Breaking Bad is fascinating because it begins with Walt’s completely understandable and thoroughly petty desire for greatness, shows him achieving it, and shows the tragic flaw we’ve seen in him from the very beginning unravel all of it for him.
Making a story of a rise and fall that cogent and convincing and impeccably performed across five-but-actually-six seasons of television remains one of the medium’s all-time greatest achievements. Look upon it, and despair.
Tune in next month for That’s All Folks’ last trip around the Bearimy with The Good Place.”
Kenneth Lowe is the one who knocks. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.
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