Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at our destination.
For the past five
years, Vince Gilligan and Co. have blessed us with what is undoubtedly the
greatest running program on television, and in just eight weeks—eight short,
fleeting, hell-ridden weeks—the final fade-out will conclude the epic descent
of Walter White. There are a thousand questions surrounding the details of what
is to come, but the one question for you, right now, is this:
Are you effing ready for this?!
You better be
(bitch!).
Few shows are about
The End. More often than not, a television series will hit the prime of its
writing somewhere around the third season. This is when Mad Men hit another level, when The
Office churned out the most laughs, when Lost became more WTF-ey than it ever was, and when The Wire went from
just something different to the biggest trend-bucker of modern media. After the
peak though, comes an almost inevitable decline. The Office, and most other sitcoms, grew considerably less funny. Lost hiccupped and became oversaturated
with questions. Even The Wire is
considered to miss a step in its final season. When this happens, The End is
almost never as satisfying as fans want it to be. Lost and The Sopranos in
particular are notorious for their less-than-stellar endings (although, I have
to defend Lost for a second here and
just ask any fan this, “If you hated the ending, then how would you have ended it?” Seriously, there was
no other way. I loved the ending. Screw you. God.), and it turned a lot of “great
show” talks into “yeah, but” talks.
Breaking Bad, however, is in a brilliant
position, because this show has always been about the ending. We knew that we
were going out with Walter from day one, and wow has it been an insane ride to
the finish (almost like a . . . dead freight! Hey-oh! Sorry. I
challenged myself to see how many little references I could plug in here).
Whether you were with Heisenberg from the beginning on AMC, or caught up on
Netflix, it does not matter, because everything in Breaking Bad has been guiding us to this glorious conclusion. We watched this entire series just for this.
There has never been anything like it.
This show is
unique, too, in that the atmosphere surrounding these final eight hours is not
only full of hype, but it is seriously confident.
No one expects them to flop, and this another by-product of the writer’s entire
countdown to Walter’s death. If this has been what they have been working
toward all along, and all the filler stuff in the middle was of such amazing
quality, can you imagine how freaking awesome the home-stretch is going to be?!
It is unheard of!
Sure, stuff has
changed along the way (fun fact: Jesse was supposed to die in the first season,
but after he emerged as a fan-favorite, the writers kept him in), but adapting
the end goal is considerably better than drumming it up from scratch. This is
why fans of Lost were sweating and fans
of The Office had their fingers
crossed and their eyes shut tight. Only here, in the world of us meth-heads (AMC
calls us “Breaking Baddicts”, but that is a horribly lame pun and much too
long, so suck it AMC, we are meth-heads, like we were supposed to be all
along), is everyone just flat-out pumped. We
cannot wait. We are fully prepared
for The End of this show to blow us away.
No matter what
happens, you can guarantee that not everyone is going to see it coming. The further
beauty of this set-up is emphasized by the insane number of theories being
tossed around by fans. Will Walt just die of cancer, in a hospital with his
family around him? Will he be shot and killed by Jesse? By Hank? Hell, even
suicide is not totally out of the question—he tried that in the first goddamn
episode! Literally anything can happen, because if this series has taught us
anything, it is that these writers will shy from nothing, and that these
characters are capable of some dark, dark things (I have to throw out my
opinion here and present my theory—Walt, whether by accident or on purpose,
will contribute to the death of Jesse, and this will be his final what-have-I-done
moment. As he atones for everything, the cancer takes him . . . yeesh, I have
chills, can we just go to Sunday now?).
We left Walter
White while he was simultaneously at his most sinister and his most vulnerable.
The showdown we have expected all along is here. The revelations, long hidden,
are going to come out and rear their ugly, twisted heads. Friends will become
enemies. Empires will fall. People will die.
Soak it all in.
This is it. Breaking Bad is coming
down to its glorious, disturbing, I-can’t-believe-what-I-just-saw ending, and
you can bet that the rest of the meth-heads and I are going to be right there
with our heroes, antiheroes, and hated psycho-wives until the very last second.
Buckle the hell up, everyone, because the one who knocks is banging on the
door.
His message is
clear, friends: it’s time to cook.
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