Last night, AMC aired the first of the final eight episodes of “Breaking Bad,” the brilliantly punitive drama created by Vince Gilligan. The previous episode, which aired almost a year ago, ended with one of the show’s trademark cliffhangers—but a Walt Whitman collection went off instead of a bomb. Walter White had finally quit the meth business. He’d gotten away with it: his family was gathered by the pool, cooing over baby Holly. He was rich. His enemies were dead. Then Walt’s brother-in-law Hank, a D.E.A. agent, excused himself to use the bathroom, and the minute he read the inscription written by poor, dead Gale, Walt’s former meth sous-chef—“to W.W.”—he knew that his brother-in-law was in fact Heisenberg, notorious drug kingpin. It was a twist squarely in the acrid-funny tradition of “Breaking Bad”: a flash of illumination achieved while taking a dump, one made possible by Walt’s arrogance, and a loose end he’d created by hanging on to a book, of all things—a trophy that flattered his ego.
Last night, Hank stumbled out onto the deck, dumbstruck, only to hear his wife Marie joking to Walt, “You are the devil.” He made an excuse to leave, then had a panic attack on the way home and crashed his car. A few days later, when Walt went to visit him, he found his brother-in-law in his garage, sifting through the evidence of Walt’s crimes. “Perks of being the boss, huh,” said Walt, laying a hand on Hank’s files. He’d long seen Hank as a pugnacious, macho dope, easily out-maneuvered by his own big brain. Hank, in turn, had viewed his depressive high-school-teacher brother-in-law as a pushover, a beta male in a universe of real men. Now, as in any superhero drama, they stared at one another, struggling to put the other man into proper focus as a nemesis. “I don’t know who you are,” said Hank, spooked. “I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” If so, Walt warned him, he’d best tread lightly.
It was a classic opener for the season: a cowboy showdown that placed Hank, once a minor, comic character on the show, dead center in the role of hero—right down to that cathartic punch in the nose. “Breaking Bad” has always been an elegant and stylized series, a stark chess game rather than a sprawling world-builder with a billion tendril-like side stories. Now it’s narrowing further. When the show débuted, it struck many casual viewers as another anti-hero drama, the latest in a set of vicarious cable thrill-rides that let viewers experiment with how it might feel to be a truly free man, the “one who knocks,” released from society’s corny notions of virtue—the existential winner. For a while, anyone could sympathize with the high Walt felt after he dived into the drug trade, an act that resembled shooting up with off-brand testosterone. “What was that? And why was it so damn good?” wondered Skyler, as they rutted in their car, outside that dull P.T.A. meeting. “Because it’s illegal,” he growled back.
But a TV show is not its first season. This is a show with a long arc, one that has bent, with each season, in some way yet to be determined, toward justice. Over time, “Breaking Bad” has become as much a critique as a participant in the anti-hero genre—or if not a critique, at least a puckish intervention and an extension of the form. It’s the backstory of a villain, one who has only deceived himself into believing he is an anti-hero. (How hard is it to imagine the early Walter watching “The Sopranos,” fantasizing about being Tony?) And each season, the show has pushed back more aggressively at easy audience identification with Walter’s power, a maneuver that’s become the watermark of the most ambitious modern crime dramas. (Lesser imitators, the type of show I’ve come to think of as anti-hero cupcakes with moral ambiguity sprinkles, make mournful feints in that direction, but always snap back to titillation, determined to please, not to challenge—the old style of television. I won’t name names, but “Ray Donovan” and “Californication” and “House of Lies.”)
Still, who would want to watch this show if it were merely a moral primer, a repeated gloss on Walt’s badness? Like all interesting art, “Breaking Bad” is an intoxicant, as destabilizing as it is illuminating. Last night, we got regular splashes of what’s hooked viewers all along, making the show into a classic binge-watch: that gorgeously apocalyptic flash-forward to skaters in Walt’s empty pool and the comic horror of his neighbor dropping her oranges; that wacky, yet relevant, “Star Trek” debate with Badger and Skinny Pete, talking about Uhura’s “big pointies” and the many uses of transporters (“That dude who comes out on the other side, he’s not you—he’s a color xerox”); Skyler’s smackdown with Lydia; Saul Goodman trying to talk Jesse off a philanthropic ledge; that tough-guy smack in the nose from Hank, right out of any action film.
If “Breaking Bad” has long ago departed from simpler bad-boy good times, if it’s made clear that Walt is a monster, if it’s had everyone from Jesse to Skyler to Mike articulate the problems with Walt’s arrogance and his stunning dishonesty, self-pity, and control-freak arrogance—well, to a certain extent, so what? The fascinating ambiguity engineered into the show is not found in the dialogue; it’s in everything else: the sweeping visuals and the speed-racer editing; those cinema-serial cliffhangers; the McGyver-like scientific stunts and black humor; and especially those montages of meth-making, which are as erotic in their way as any sex scene. Is Walter ever happier than when he’s whistling away over his beakers? Have we ever been happier than we were watching smoke rise, bopping to “Crystal Blue Persuasion”? In this episode, there was a replacement for those jaunty montages which was edited in a nearly identical way and scored to the Jim White song “Wordmule”: Hank in his garage, shuffling papers, building the case against Walt.
There was always a subset of “Sopranos” fans that just wanted better and bloodier whackings—and there’s a subset of “Breaking Bad” fans that will always want Walt to wear that hot black hat. (This type of fan materialized, within the show itself, in the form of Walt’s cooking partner Todd, a sociopath who took shooting a kid to be just another kick-ass element in his drug-world adventure.) When I did a Q. & A. session with Vince Gilligan recently at Lincoln Center, he spoke about the lessons he’d learned from “Millennium,” a late-nineties series that was bold and dark and adult—and a ratings flop. Gilligan said that a crucial part of his job was to keep people watching: if he creates something provocative, it also needs to be something that will keep us wanting more. That’s the tricky challenge of the best serial television, and it’s one that “Breaking Bad” has fulfilled, up to this moment, with unusual daring.
Based on that terrifying cold open, it’s a solid bet that Hero Hank is a red herring, and the show’s real endgame will be Jesse, the one most damaged by Walt. (In a show about lies, Jesse has been the most lied to, even more so than Walt’s biological family: he doesn’t know the truth about Jane, about Brock, and now, about Mike. Last night, Walt pushed him to buy his bullshit once again, like some hypnotist with flop sweat, purring, “Jesse, I need you to believe me,” as Jesse stared back in horror.) There’s been a lot of smart talk about Walt Whitman recently, but the final seven episodes also reminded me of a different artist: Georgia O’Keeffe, who created those peculiar paintings of doors, the ones that Jesse insisted were identical, but that Jane knew were each unique. There’s one in which Walt dies and one in which he lives. There’s one in which Skyler dies, or Jesse kills Walt, or Walt succumbs to cancer, peaceful in his hospital bed. Every door leads toward an ending. Seven to go.
Photograph by Ursula Coyote/AMC.