GAIL COLLINS

A friend accused me of writing so much about “Breaking Bad” lately — in two long blog posts and my Sunday column — in order to avoid writing about the House Republicans and their ongoing march of folly. Nothing could be further from the truth: I’ve been writing about “Breaking Bad” so much in order to avoid staking out a clear position in the debates about Pope Francis’s recent interviews! But now the show has ended, so the blogging of evasion must as well — after this one last post, in which I explain why the show’s finale left me somewhat disappointed.

Or rather, in which I let The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum explain it for me:

…halfway through, at around the time that Walt was gazing at Walt, Jr., I became fixated on the idea that what we were watching must be a dying fantasy on the part of Walter White, not something that was actually happening—at least not in the “real world” of the previous seasons.

…I mean, wouldn’t this finale have made far more sense had the episode ended on a shot of Walter White dead, frozen to death, behind the wheel of a car he couldn’t start? Certainly, everything that came after that moment possessed an eerie, magical feeling—from the instant that key fell from the car’s sun visor, inside a car that was snowed in. Walt hit the window, the snow fell off, and we were off to the races. Even within this stylized series, there was a feeling of unreality—and a strikingly different tone from the episode that preceded this one…

…[But] if this episode in fact took place in reality, it was troubling, and yes, disappointing, if only because the story ended by confirming Walt’s most grandiose notions: that he is, in fact, all-powerful, the smartest guy in the room, the one who knocks. Anyone other than Walt becomes a mere reflection of this journey to redemption. … It’s not that Walt needed to suffer, necessarily, for the show’s finale to be challenging, or original, or meaningful: but Walt succeeded with so little true friction—maintaining his legend, reconciling with family, avenging Hank, freeing Jesse, all genuine evil off-loaded onto other, badder bad guys—that it felt quite unlike the destabilizing series that I’d been watching for years. If, instead, we were watching Walt’s compensatory fantasy, it was a fascinating glimpse into the man’s mind—akin to the one in the movie “Mulholland Drive,” a poignant, tragic attempt to fix a life that is unfixable.

Read, as they say, the whole thing, which fleshes out the case for the strange, un-”Breaking Bad”-ness of the show’s final hour: The ridiculously-smooth unfolding of Walt’s final plan, the surprising predictability (in this most unpredictable of shows) of just about everything that happened, and the weird invisibility of Albuquerque’s Most Wanted Man throughout. Given the sweep of the show, it was not a sequence of events that came close to vindicating Walt: After the terrible unfolding of the last season, especially, no mere tying-up of unfinished business could accomplish that. But it was a sequence that could have been scripted by Walt, given how neatly it fit with his own long-running conception of himself — as a genius among lesser men, a master of his fate, and a man who takes care of his family even when his family doesn’t appreciate or understand it.

My Sunday column, which explored the moral coherence and primal appeal of the Team Walt worldview, also argued that the show itself does not actually share that worldview, and that as a work of art “Breaking Bad” ultimately judges its protagonist from within the more universalist/Christian moral framework that he himself rejects. I stand by that view, but after the finale I think the creators may have nursed a little more sympathy for Team Walt’s perspective than I previously believed. It was almost as if, having ruthlessly deconstructed his vision of himself across the final season’s course, they decided to give him (and his admirers) a kind of consolation prize — a last ride in which his plans would all work out, his genius would carry all before it, and his self-image would actually be vindicated by the unfolding of events. And it’s hard not to agree with Slate’s Willa Paskin that this kind of ending necessarily “dampens the moral vision of the show,” and weakens the integrity of its tragic arc.

So I stand with Nussbaum in preferring to interpret the finale’s action as an “Owl Creek Bridge”-style dying dream … though I also think that interpretation is less poignant than hyper-tragic, bordering on horrific, suggesting as it does that Walt died not only with his world in ruins, but still entirely enclosed by his own self-serving fantasies, unchanged and unredeemed. But from a dramatic perspective, better an unredeemed anti-hero, dying in his sins, than the kind of implausible semi-vindication that the finale’s action sometimes seemed to want to offer.