“Breaking Bad,” one of the best TV shows of the past 20 years, finished its epic run Sunday night with a stunning finale that left no stone unturned.
Yes, we had the bloody guns-a-blazin’ shootout most fans anticipated. But not before Walter White (Bryan Cranston) — the chemistry teacher-turned-murderous drug lord — came back home from his New Hampshire exile to tie up loose ends and say goodbye to a friendless world that no longer existed for him.
And what an exit.
As usual, the twists and turns that “Breaking Bad” has taken over the past five seasons were present in the last episode, keeping us guessing right up until the final fadeout as a dead Walter was sent off to kingdom come (or maybe to hell), to the mournful tune of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue.”
A thin, bearded Walter, with a full head of hair — but visibly dying of the lung cancer that was diagnosed in the show’s 2008 opener — made his way back to Albuquerque.
We already knew he was back — based on the show’s 2012 and 2013 season-opening vignettes — but what would he do once he was back in town?
We finally found out.
No, he didn’t kill Gretchen and Elliott, his former business partners, who humiliated him on “Charlie Rose” by questioning his contribution to their billion-dollar company.
But he did break into their house, confront them and leave them more than $9 million to give to Walt Jr. — under the (bogus) threat of death by hit men (Jesse’s old pals Badger and Skinny Pete!) if they didn’t comply.
Walt confronted Todd (Jesse Plemons) and Lydia (Laura Fraser) in their favorite coffee shop — outwitting and slowly killing Lydia, as we found out in the show’s final moments, by finally using the ricin he’d recovered from the wrecked, abandoned house in which he’d once lived happily with his family.
He said goodbye to his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), and baby, Holly — finally admitting what we’d known all along.
“I did it for me,” he told Skyler of his evil, criminal double-life. “I liked it. I was good at it, and I was really . . . I was alive.”
But that was then — before it all went south.
Walt also took his final, life-affirming, Heisenberg-like vengeance on Todd’s Uncle Jack and his white-supremacist crew in typical Walt fashion — with his “smarter than everyone else” ingenuity in the form of a submachine gun he rigged into the trunk of his Caddy, blowing everyone away and being shot himself in the process. But he saved Jack’s demise for himself with one coldblooded shot to the head. It was a vengeful, copycat nod to Jack’s murder of Walter’s brother-in-law, DEA Agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris).
At its core, “Breaking Bad” always revolved around the toxic relationship between Walt and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) as their love, admiration, hatred and revulsion for each other played out over the last five seasons.
So how befitting, and justified that Jesse, freed by a dying Walt after the machine-gun massacre, chose to ride off into the sunset and not kill the man he so despised — leaving Walt behind to take one final, triumphant stroll through memory lane (a meth lab, in this case) before keeling over and dying from his bullet wound.
Great ending to a great show — and just how we wanted it.
So long, “Breaking Bad.”
