'I was alive.'
After we see Walt steal a car, narrowly avoiding a police patrol and leaving his winter retreat, the Gilligan set up one of the tensest pieces of television that I've ever witnessed. I am, of course, referring to the sequence involving Walt's arrival at the Schwartz household. It was obvious from this point that Gilligan himself had directed and written the episode; the whole scene was pulled off with pure formal mastery and genius and, as per, it was impossible to tell whether Walt would apologise or kill both of them. But he didn't. He asked for Andrew and Gretchen to deliver his remaining nine million dollars to his son upon his eighteenth birthday, but as a gift from them, rather than from himself. From this point there's a real and noticeable absence of pride and egotism in Walt, although not completely; he still exercises a strong precedence of fear of the Schwartz's, claiming to have two world-class hitman waiting just outside with sniper dots on their chests, threatening to have them killed if the money never gets passed on... Which appears to be true. That is, until Walt returns to his car and we discover that the two best hitmen west of the Mississippi are in fact Badger and Skinny Pete, armed with laser pointers.
We then see Walt intruding on a meeting between Todd and Lydia, apparently attempting to set up a business deal that is completely and utter false on his part. But what it does allow him is to swap Lydia's tea sweetener for something a little less savoury, that being a dose of ricin. This is made clear by the slow zoom from above, down into the contents of the cup. After this, we see Skyler leave a conversation with Marie that converges into the slow reveal that Walt is standing across from her in the kitchen of her new temporary home. He gives her the lottery ticket alluding to the location of Hank and Steve Gomez's bodies and asks her to strike a deal with the prosecutors. More importantly, in a very poignant moment, he readily admits for the first time that he has done everything for himself. The execution of this line was one of the best Cranston has ever pulled off in the series, to the point of being captivating as the character himself; there wasn't a trace of the actor beneath the beard and straggly hair. He sees his baby and his son one last time before leaving for Uncle Jack's 'clubhouse'.
Prior to this we see him out in the desert, creating a rotating mechanism that works via transmission of his car keys. Before Jack states that he will kill Walt, he brings in Jesse, chained and scarred, for Walt to see that he is not a liar and is indeed been held captive, rather than working as a partner of Jack's crew. Walt pretends to attack Jesse, landing them both on the floor before clicking his car keys and triggering the mechanism, revealing that it is connected to his previously purchased M60 and acts as a rotating device, firing round after round into the clubhouse. This, combined with Walt and Jesse's subsequent revenge against Uncle Jack and Todd, respectively, made for a final vengeful moment that Walt and Jesse shared, proving that they always beat the enemies in their line of business. More so, it acted to establish that Walt no longer cares about recovering his lost money, after Jack attempts to strike a deal with him before Walt shoots him at point blank range.
There was a real and genuine poignancy in the final moments between Walt and Jesse. After Walt has called Lydia to inform her of her impending and unavoidable fate in the most unsympathetic of ways, they share a moment as Jesse is about to get in the car and leave. He looks at Walt and Walt looks back at him, and all they do is nod to each other. Nothing else needs to be said. We know everything that's happened between them, and so do they, as they both realise how their partnership has come to a necessary end. But there's a real sense of gladness between the two, a mutual understanding about the events that occurred over the past two years that would be hard to imitate in any other franchise. It was wonderful to see Jesse riding off into a more solid future, finally in control of where he chooses to go in his life, and hopefully it's a reflection of the woodworking Jesse we saw earlier in the episode, handcrafting a storage box in a unfilled workshop.
Coming to the end of Breaking Bad, as we look down at Walter Hartwell White, aka Heisenberg, drug manufacturer legend and extraordinaire, and above all, family man, you suddenly realise that this has been a story about the celebration of life. As Walt laid his hand on the canister for the last time, almost a goodbye to an old partner in crime, I thought back to the episodes most beautifully honest line; 'I felt alive.' At it's heart this is a story about life, but it's also about reaching a real form of life by rebelling against societal constraints and really doing something bold and dangerous. It's easy to forget that the entire series only takes place over the time frame of just over two years. It's amazing to think about how far Walt has come in two years and I'm betting that, in the world of the show, he's experienced more in that time than he'd ever experienced prior to one wacky day in which he ended up riding through the desert in an RV in nothing but a pair of boots, his underwear and a gas mask, alongside his unconscious ex-student-turned-dealer, having cooked a batch of illegal substances, all the while with two bodies rolling around in the back. Strangely enough I was reminded of the character of Lester Burnham in Sam Mendes's American Beauty; here we have a man who makes one simple decision to change his life forever, and things are never the same.
For all it's drama and heartache, this has been a genuinely funny and ingenious TV show, and one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of watching. Staring up at the ceiling of the lab in his final moments, I hope and bet that Walter White didn't regret a single thing that he did, because I certainly didn't regret watching it, and most of all I didn't regret going along on this psychotic journey with him.
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