He was like an avenging angel. He answered all our prayers by punishing the guilty and uncaging the deserving. And when he left the world he was happy to go. He had shed his sins, paid his dues and was free. This was Walter White, no longer Breaking Bad.
**
The series finale was, in a word, uplifting. I don’t know what’s in Vince Gilligan’s brain but it should be patented. It’s as though he knew what we wanted. We wanted Jesse to survive, we wanted the amoral gang who had him like a hamster strapped to a wheel decimated, we wanted Todd to die painfully by Jesse’s hand, we wanted Hank’s body found, we wanted part of the money to go to Walt’s family (he had suffered so much for it), we wanted, at long last, the truth to fall from Walt’s lips.
**
We wanted Walt to pay, yes, but we felt his pain, too. How do you reconcile those two things? Gilligan did it by keeping to the tenor of what went before for five years. In the final shots of Jesse screaming in relief and an at-peace Walter White who can now fold his black-and-white wings, Gilligan stayed true to the Breaking Bad motif of madmen, retribution and redemption.
**
Walt was dying in a cabin in the woods, so lonely as he’s plugged into his chemo that he begs The Diasappearer to stay for a while. Any alternate scenario would be welcome to this. So he begins his last journey, dons his final avataar. He terrorizes the couple who shafted him on Gray Matter Technologies; they are so loathsome that we, too, enjoyed the mathematical precision of Walt’s revenge. Jesse’s cohorts make another appearance, as does Hank in a flashback which was a lovely touch; we liked the former and admired the latter and we wanted to bid them a fare-thee-well.
When Walt rigs the machinegun and mows down Todd’s uncle’s band of unlovelies I, for one, was screaming Yes! They deserved their bloody end, as did Lydia in a ricin denouement that was part of Walt’s wonderful orchestra of Judgement Day.
**
When he tells Skyler that his whole odyssey was not just about family, “I did it for me..I liked it..I was good at it…I was alive”, well, that was it, wasn’t it? A man whom destiny led astray twice finally took it in his hands. He could have been rich and accomplished via Gray Matter but he was nobody both at work and at home. So when he had nothing to lose, he became a legend, a man whose brain and talent was nothing short of masterful.
In the final shot where he lay on the ground and the cops moved in, the look of satisfaction on his face and the way the camera angle panned his body surrounded by the law, you immediately thought this was a night they would speak about in whispers in drawing-rooms when they spoke of Walter White, the great Heisenberg. You can’t help but feel to your bones for a man like that.
**
I feel to my bones for Bryan Cranston, bringing Walt to life with a look in the eyes, a swelling of the chest, a pursing of the mouth. And precision. Always precision.
I feel to my bones for Vince Gilligan whose own Gray Matter is a thing of terrifying proportions.
What a trip it’s been.
**
Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian Express andCosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/