The end of Breaking Bad has always been with us, since the very beginning. The show, like Walter White, has always been on a clock, counting down its own mortality episode by episode like a digital display of a bomb. That’s the impulse—the rationalization–that compelled Walt down each terrible step on the path from Mr. Chips to Heisenberg: There wasn’t any time. And this episode doesn’t waste any. There’s a terrible urgency to it, the same one that has compelled us all to watch this five-year slow-motion car wreck, whose potential energy has always been barreling towards a final, kinetic release.
And the flash-forward that begins the episode doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know: that it ends with a wall. And now, we know what it looks like.
Photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC
In the opening sequence of “Blood Money,” we jump forward again to Walt’s 52nd birthday, where we last saw him during the Season 5 premiere picking up a mysterious bag and Chekov’s machine gunfrom a gun-runner at Denny’s. Now, we see him return home to 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, where he stands in the ruins of his former life, like Ozymandias in the desert, reading the inscription on his own statue.
It seems clear now that Walt will be revealed as Heisenberg. He wanted people to remember his name—to inspire awe, or fear, or anything that might outlast him—and it seems like he’s finally gotten his wish. And didn’t we always kind of know that it was going to end like this? Not only that it had to, but that Walt needed it to?
As Walt leaves the house–after ominously retrieving his vial of ricin from its hiding spot behind an electrical outlet–we see his neighbor, Carol, freeze in terror, dropping a bag of groceries to the ground in shock. Oranges have appeared several times in the show before, including in the room of the now-dead Don Salamanca, and on the counter where Ted Beneke hit his head and went into a coma. They’re also a clear call-out to The Godfather, where they represented impending death. Here, the oranges spill into the suburban street, signifying two things: The secret is out. And someone is going to die.
Major spoilers for Breaking Bad follow.
If you consult the other great gangster film the show is fond of referencing, Scarface, then the “who” seems obvious: Walt is going down. Of course, there’s the larger question of whether or not Walt–the man who once wept his regrets into a handheld camera during the series premiere, telling his family “I only had you in my heart”–died a long time ago. We can debate when, perhaps, he crossed the point of no return: when he let Jane die, when he ordered the hit on Gale, when he poisoned a small child to coerce Jesse into yet another murder, or even when he killed Krazy 8. But the man we met in Season 1 isn’t here any more; he’s simply hiding in the husk of a smiling, suburban father. Walter White is the Clark Kent to his sociopathic Superman: the “true” identity hidden now inside the false one. Don’t cry for Walter White. He’s already dead.
There’s a moment in Jesse’s living room where Skinny Pete and Badger resurrect the old Star Trekargument (by way of The Prestige) that every time Captain Kirk used the transporter, he was actually killing himself and creating himself anew. It’s not a difficult analogy to grasp, in terms of the way Walt methodically destroyed the man we saw in season one and replaced him, piece by piece, with Heisenberg. Who is he now? That’s the true Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the part of you that he leaves not knowing.
For viewers—and many of the show’s primary characters, like Skyler and Jesse–Walt’s transformation has been possible, or at least palatable, specifically because it has so gradual. Walt has always tempted us to rationalize—to make ourselves complicit in his crimes with our willingness to excuse them. But while we walked down the garden path towards Heisenberg one tiny dose of evil at a time, Hank was forced to drink all of it in at once, as though the last five seasons of the show were instantly downloaded to his brain in one shocking, electric moment by a single epigraph that was as terrible as it was obvious. (Walt remembered to throw away the Lily of the Valley, perhaps, but not the Leaves of Grass.)
I suspect the ending will feel that way as well: like something half-forgotten and remembered, a name on the tip of the tongue that we knew how to say all along. The feeling that we always knew it was going to end this way, even if we didn’t want to admit it.
The look of horror in Hank’s eyes is devastating, but if you look closely, you can see a flash of it in Skyler’s eyes too–that one fluttering moment of fear when Walt suggests they buy a second car wash and she doesn’t know quite what that means (because how can you ever be sure what Walter White means?). She projects it, naturally, onto Lydia, marching over to order Walt’s former “business associate” off the lot while Walt lingers in the background, fully aware that he flicked that row of dominos.
Photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC
And you see it in Jesse’s eyes as he sits numbly on the couch while Walt insists that he needs Jesse believe he didn’t kill Mike, and how Jesse forces himself to mouth the words, fully cognizant of the lie. And that’s all Walt really wants: Not necessarily for Jesse to actually believe him, but to be willing to go through the motions of pretending he does. Walter White does not require your love, or your sincerity. Merely your acquiescence.
Jesse has always been the conscience of the show, or at least a barometer of the damage that Walt inflicts. It’s been a long ride for our boy Pinkman, and it’s left him with nothing but two duffel bags containing $5 million dollars and a gnawing pit of guilt his stomach so deep that it threatens to swallow him. When he isn’t sitting around his living room in a semi-fugue state, he’s driving around the bad part of town, hucking huge wads of hundred dollar bills out the window of his car like desperate, apologetic Molotovs.
That’s the true horror of Walt: not only what he is, but what he makes us. It’s the horror of our complicity, of our ignorance, and the part of us that will never be exactly sure how willful it was. By the time you realize what he really is, you’ve already been corrupted. By the time you draw the line, you’ve crossed so many others that you already feel compromised. “You’re the devil,” jokes Marie to Walt just as Hank returns to the patio, and she’s right.
And Hank is the final piece of that puzzle: the overbearing, hyper-masculine brother-in-law who always treated him as a nebbish dork, not an equal—and certainly not a worthy rival. Wouldn’t he be the sweetest of all for Walt to corrupt?
When Walt goes to confront Hank—to force him to acknowledge, face to face, what they both know–we see a little boy playing with a remote control car in the street behind him, a recurring image throughout the series that symbolizes Walt’s pathological need for control. That’s why he comes to meet Hank in the garage: not only to tell Hank that he knows that he knows, but also that it doesn’t matter.
He might be right. Even though the bathroom revelation of Heisenberg left audiences biting their nails and very likely ruined Hank’s life, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all. Or at least, that’s what Walt wants Hank to believe. Now that his cancer is back, he’s just a dying man with only (supposedly) six months to live. Given the likelihood that he’ll never see the inside of a prison cell, is it really worth destroying their family for what—the principle of the matter? Each sentence a careful stroke of the brush painting Hank into a corner.
Hank makes a last grasp at negotiation, at regaining the upper hand: If Walt brought him Skyler and kids, he says, they could talk. Walt, naturally, refuses to yield even an inch of ground, because Walt is the Leonidas of suburban Albuquerque, New Mexico: “Give them nothing, but take from them everything.”
Of course, we know something is going to go wrong regardless, not only because we’ve seen the flash-forward but because we’ve watched this show before, and the next seven episodes will be all about how creator Vince Gilligan gets us from here to holy shit. But the biggest question of the episode is really two questions: Who is the ricin for? And who is going to kill Walter White? The answer seems likely to be one in the same. While a few potential stragglers remain, Walt has largely cleared the decks of all his enemies; and with all the villains of previous seasons already in the ground, the most likely enemies that remain are Skyler, Jesse and Hank, the loved ones he swears so often and so disingenuously that he has done all of this for.
Family has always been the great fig leaf of Breaking Bad, the pretense that permitted nearly any form of evil. (And it’s no accident that Hank, the one person who might be ethical and tenacious enough to take Walt down tries to deflect his manipulation by shouting, “I don’t give a shit about family!”) Walt would do anything to protect his family, of course, perhaps even destroy them. Those are the difficult choices that men like Walter White often have to make: sometimes to save the city, you have to burn it to the ground.
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