Breaking Bad Series Finale “FeLiNa” Recap:

The ride is over. After 6 seasons of momentarily breathing lapses, anxiety attacks, cardiac arrests, and epinephrine shots to revive me from points of near death, it’s finally over. You would think that after reading that last sentence, I’d be glad that Breaking Bad is finally over. You’d be wrong. I regret nothing about watching. You have to understand that even though the show made me feel upset or made me anxious, at least I was feeling. At the end of the day, isn’t that when you are most alive? When you are feeling….something…..anything? Even if it’s a sense of dread, sadness, anger, et cetera. It doesn’t matter. You are the most alive at that moment. Walter alluded to that in his talk with Skyler on why he didn everything. That’s what makes certain things special and important to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re with a person, doing something or even if it’s just watching a television program. If it makes you feel something….anything….it’s special. And Breaking Bad is a special television show.

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The opening sequence of the episode is extremely important in the grand scheme of the finale. Walt has always been a man of science…and science has always taken him to the the brink of greatness….of how he always imagined his life would be. However, that brink was always really a precipice for Walt. There was always a great fall after his climb to greatness. It happened at Gray Matter and it also happened again as Heisenberg. While Walt was trying to use science to attempt to hot wire a car so he can go back to New Mexico, he sees red and blue lights. This is when we see Walt do something that we’ve never seen him do before. We watched the man of science pray. Walter was always a slave to rational thought. However, by having faith in God, the universe, or a higher power of some sort, he placed his hope in someone else other than himself and science that things would work out. It has been a theme that has been subtly looming throughout the series like Walt chilling on a bench while Gretchen and Elliot first walk into their house as they are coming back from their flight. It was that faith that helped him to be patient enough to wait for the police to drive by without incident and to find the keys in the driver side sun visor. It was also this faith that helped him to go about executing his plan alone mostly (Do Badger and Skinny Pete really count?).

A finale is the completion of a series of works…and in order to complete something, you need to tie up some loose ends. What was Walt going to do with the money? Well, give it to Gretchen and Elliot so they can give it to Walt Jr. as a gift and threaten their lives if they don’t stay true to their word. Check. Poison Lydia with the ricin? Find some closure with Skyler by telling her the truth about why he did everything? Check. Kill the Nazis that stole his money and bludgeoned his pride? Check. Save Jesse from the treacherous grasp of the Nazis and have some closure with him? Checkity check.

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There was never supposed to be any room for ambiguity at the end though. Breaking Bad was always a show that was about typing up loose ends and in terms of all the important ones, “FeLiNa” succeeded with flying colors. Even with the spiritual subtext I talked about earlier, this show is scientific by nature. Everything needs to check out and be taken care of. There can’t be anything else left to worry about that will stick out like a sore thumb….otherwise the experiment was a failure. There have been people on twitter and in the blogosphere that have been complaining about how the finale was too clean. I feel like these people are of too much faith and too little science. Even though Walter White finally struck a balance at the end, some of the viewers can’t.

After Walt and Jesse part ways, Walt admires the place where he spent most of his time during the past 5 seasons: the methamphetamine laboratory. While he walks around and says his goodbye to probably the thing that has meant the most to him throughout the show’s run and then dies from the gunshot wound he suffered from the MacGuyver-like machine gun contraption that he created to take out the Nazis, you start to realize how beautiful this scene is. Walt is going to die in a meth lab. To me and you, this may sound depressing. However, this is where Walter found his purpose. This is the place that gave Walter the most feeling in his entire life. What else would have been a better destination to die than the place where you feel the most alive?