Television's Best Has Its Best Night Yet
[Editor's Note: This story reveals details of Sunday's Sept. 15 episode of Breaking Bad.]
You'd think there was only one show currently running on television, given all the space TVWW has devoted to Breaking Bad. And in a way, it simply does stand all on its own, as one of the most memorable series ever.
Immediately after it aired, some folks at TVWW discussed last night's gripping episode, Ozymandias, and it was unanimous. We just could not recall another scripted series that has left us so electrified, and accomplished such dizzying narrative heights. And there are decades of television behind us.
As creator Vince Gilligan had mentioned at a press conference last July in New York City, "The third to last episode will knock your socks off. It may be the best episode we’ve ever done... Unfortunately, there’s two episodes after that.”
He was not selling Ozymandias short. As palpitating as the the September 8 episode To'hajiilee was, this hour went higher, further and more thrilling than any episode previous.
First, there was the interruption of the gun fight with a bittersweet flashback to the innocence of Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse (Aaron Paul) at the same desert spot two years earlier, when the they began their illegal drug operation, thinking of the easy money ahead. They were blissfully unaware of the dangerous and ugly road just ahead of them.
When we returned to the gunfight, it was only to the sound of it in the distance. Then, via a slow, soundless zoom over the hood of Hank's SUV, we learned Agent Gomez (Michael Quezada) had been killed.
Hank (Dean Norris) was bleeding from the leg, and his demise, too, seemed inevitable – but it was still unspeakably sad, as was Marie's (Betsy Brandt) complete shock at the news at the end of the hour.
As Marie crumbled, it was after sixty minutes where everything the series had been building towards for five seasons finally unleashed – all of it hyper-suspenseful, all of it hyper-sorrowful.
Jesse was found by Walt and turned over to Uncle Jack's (Michael Bowen) crew -- he was located not fleeing across the desert, but hiding in plain sight under Walt's car. Later, Jesse was caged as a prisoner, then shackled like an animal in a new meth lab, forced to show the new crew how to cook Walt's brand of crystal blue meth. It was a purgatory like no other.
Skyler (Anna Gunn) finally had to relent and admit the truth to Marie, that she had been helping Walt. Then Marie forced Skyler to tell Walt, Jr. (RJ Mitte) that, indeed, his Dad had been a gangster and a crook the entire time.
We saw Walt's biggest fears finally come to fruition – ones against which he had been guarding scupulously throughout the entire series. Most of his money was gone, claimed by Uncle Jack's crew. And worse, Walt's son, Walt, Jr., learned of his father's activities as a criminal, and called the police on him.
Walt's ultimate hell was not his manipulating and lying, his arrogance, or his foolish choice to become a drug chemist when he learned of his terminal cancer. It wasn't the blood of his murders on his hands, or putting his brother-in-law in mortal danger, or sacrificing his surrogate son, Jesse, who had always trusted him and even loved him.
It wasn't even Walt's spite, as he told Jesse he had been there the night that Jesse's girlfriend Jane overdosed – and had done nothing to save her, instead seeing her as a liability, and letting her die.
Walter White's ultimate hell? His family's complete scorn of him, and Walt being in the world alone.
Perhaps most poetically, we saw the return of the mysterious man in a van that was to pick up Jesse, take him off to a new life, make a new identity for him, and make it impossible for him to ever be found again. This time, though, it was Walt making the call for himself, and the recent flash-forwards of Walt with hair, beard and a New Hampshire driver's license now make perfect sense.
There wasn't a segment of Ozymandias that wasn't pitch perfect, bringing this epic story towards its crucial climax.
Incidentally, I'm still sticking to the idea that the M60 heavy-caliber machine gun previously shown in Walt's car trunk is still meant for a showdown with Uncle Jack, similar to how Al Pacino went out in Scarface after introducing his gangster rivals to "his little friend."
Last night's episode title, Ozymandias, is after a 19th century poem of the same name by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It references Walt's tragic ego as it recalls a fallen statue of King Ozymandias toppled in pieces in the desert, abandoned. It mocks his hubris with a quote of the long-gone King etched there at the stone base pedestal: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
And so, in this most recent, most intense Breaking Bad episode, Walt, too, was toppled in the desert. He lay in dirt in a close-up – handcuffed, mouth agape, weeping silently at the loss of Hank. All that is left of the series is the end-game of his demise – and what happens to Jesse.
The only thing we could possibly have issue with is Gilligan's observation that Ozymandias was so good, that it's unfortunate there are two episodes after it. Somehow, we're not buying that this series isn't going to surprise further.
Or that it doesn't still have room, in the coming final two shows, to soar even higher.