Breaking Bad goes out in style

“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.”

Yesterday Walter White finally succumbed but not to cancer, and not without tieing up plenty of loose ends first.

Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad have been hailed as one of the finest television series of all time, and few could argue with that.

“Felina” may not have matched the gob-smacking turning points of “Ozymandias” two weeks ago, but it did feel like the kind of finale we deserved after 5 stellar seasons (Dexter, are you gettin’ this?).

Here’s what some of the US media have been saying:

Hollywood Reporter:
There was a lot of closure in Breaking Bad. You can say that Gilligan gave most of the viewers what they wanted (and, impressively, he did that by staying true to himself and the story without selling out or becoming unrecognizably saccharine as he tied the bow). Walt died, played out to the strains of “Baby Blue” by Badfinger (and yes, that certainly felt a bit Sopranos-esque), as the lyrics “I guess I got what I deserved” rang out over Walt touching the meth lab equipment like a midcentury modernist stroking an object of desire from Charlotte Perriand or Eero Saarinen. “Didn’t know that you’d think that I’d forget/Or regret/The special love I have for you/My Baby Blue.” This exclamation point on Walt’s purest of blue meth was an echo of the conversation Walt had with Skyler at her depressing row-house sanctuary, when she began to scowl at the notion Walt was going to say he did it all for his family. Instead, he said: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really – I was alive.”

Variety:
In today’s hyper-caffeinated age, precious little lives up to its hype. But the “Breaking Bad” finale — perhaps appropriately — got the chemistry just right. From the first frame to the last on a series that absolutely belongs in the conversation of the best ever, Vince Gilligan knew what he was doing. The plan wasn’t always evident — indeed, “Breaking Bad” consistently wrote itself into corners with no apparent exit, before devising an ingenious one — but as Sunday’s finale made eminently clear, this was a show whose narrative fearlessness was only matched by its boundless creativity and unpredictability.

LA Times:
“I did it for me,” he says with simple finality, speaking for every mobster, criminal, dictator and king, real and imagined, who has ever used love of family or God or country as an excuse for power-mad murder and ruthless destruction. It is a truth we all know, no matter the man, no matter the crime, but a truth we rarely hear. And it sets this series free. Everything that happened before and after that was just routine cleanup. Splendidly accomplished to a rattling good soundtrack with lovely grace notes throughout, but nothing like that moment of true confession. The narrative was brought full circle, and the financial issues neatly (if a bit unbelievably) solved when Walter paid a little visit to his former business partners, Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz (Jessica Hecht and Adam Godley). Silently following them into their mansion on the mesa while they gabbed in High Yuppie, Walter saw the life he might have had, the life he once wished he had, back at the beginning of the series when he was bitter about having missed the big payday of the company he helped found. With the threat of execution, he persuades them to take his money and give it to his children. “Cheer up, beautiful people,” he says. “This is where you get to make it all right.”

NY Times:
Walter White died, of course, but first he ran the table of revenge, settling score after score with mathematical precision. He went out with a big finish: his ingeniously rigged machine gun mowed down the entire Aryan Brotherhood gang in a fantastical killing spree that was almost like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie. (As bad guys go, the next best thing to a Nazi is a neo-Nazi.) It was a fitting ending, and predictable in only some ways. Crime didn’t pay and Walter lost just about everything, including his life. But it was also, by the show’s bleak, almost Calvinist standards, a relatively happy ending. It wasn’t, as he so often feared, all for nothing – he found a way to get his money to his children. He also saved Jesse, actually taking a bullet for him by throwing himself on top of the younger man to protect him from the machine gun fire. He even made up with his wife, Skyler.

Huffington Post:
From a structural standpoint, it’s hard to be too hard on the “Breaking Bad” finale as a discrete unit. The last hour of the series took all the story threads that were still dangling and wrapped them up, not quite in an elegant bow — more like a blood-drenched metal chain. In the last few scenes, creator Vince Gilligan, who wrote and directed the finale, went with a Shakespearean solution, one of those “and then everybody died” situations that you find at the end of some of the Bard’s plays. Out in the New Mexico desert, the bright, shining exception to the general bloodbath was Jesse, whose deliriously relieved exit from the Nazi compound was the best moment of the finale.

USA Today:
“If you have to go, go out on top. In a stunning 75-minute extended finale, Vince Gilligan brought Breaking Bad to a supremely fitting close, tying up all the loose ends in his modern classic AMC series and killing off his now iconic anti-hero Walter White. And he did so in a way that confirmed Bad’s status as one of TV’s greatest series — and star Bryan Cranston as one of America’s best actors. Tense, witty, violent, oddly tender and, in its own strange way, as close to a “happy” ending as a story this dark could hope, this last episode brought the story to a straightforward, definitive conclusion, without the spirituality of Lost or the ambiguity of Sopranos. If it’s debated, it won’t be for what it meant, but for what it did: Killing Walt, but leaving Jesse alive and Walt’s family rich. So sometimes crime does pay. It certainly did for viewers.

TV Line:
Breaking Bad has gone dark one last time, and after seeing how Vince Gilligan & Co. chose to wrap Walter White’s journey, I say this with all of the sincerity in my being: Yeah, bitch! The amazing series ended with an equally impressive episode, which connected all of the flashforwards we’d seen and methodically led to the story’s conclusion. It gave us closure on everyone we cared about – and satisfyingly finished off the ones we really wanted to see put in the ground.