El Paso (Breaking Bad Thoughts, or the Continuation of Sporadic Television Ramblings)

It took me a long time to get into Breaking Bad.

I downloaded the first few episodes of the first season from iTunes way back in 2008, when I was working at the student union and my job basically consisted of watching seasons of television for 30+ hours a week, while sporadically lending out billiards equipment to foreign students.

I'd been spending most of my time watching middling-to-bad shows like Dexter, Weeds and Lost, and when I started Breaking Bad, I just didn't see what the hubbub was about. You may not remember it now, but the pacing of the first season was laboriously slow (in part due to the writer's strike). I didn't care about Walt, I thought Skyler was overbearing and I saw no redeeming qualities in Jesse. I also didn't like the direction - I found all the shots of the New Mexico landscape indulgent and I hated the stylized use of color. I made it through three episodes before I determined to turn my attention to something more pressing (probably World of Warcraft).

For the next several years, I carried around that image of Breaking Bad in my head. In my mind, it was a plodding show with an uninteresting protagonist and irritating visuals.

The next year, when I was free of the union desk, is when I really started to get into television as a transcendent medium. I started watching The Wire (which I loved from the get go) and Mad Men (which, as noted in another blog, I didn't care for at first), and yet, as critical acclaim was building for Breaking Bad, I still couldn't be bothered. I was happy to sit with my headphones in while my taciturn roommate, Joe, watched it as it aired on our little TV.

I didn't give the show another shot until the summer of 2012, when it became clear that this was "an important show," and I was a boob for not keeping up with it.

I started watching it on my phone at the gym (not the best way to take in a show as dedicated to visuals as BB is) and made it through slowly but surely.

I still found the show a bit of a slog, and it wasn't until season two's finale, ABQ, that my thinking on the show changed.

In case it's been too long or you don't recognize episode titles, ABQ, is the episode where a midair collision occurs over Walt's house, just as his whole enterprise is beginning to fall apart. It turns out, that the collision is the result of an inattentive air traffic control, who failed to perform his duties due to grief over the recent death of his daughter. The daughter happened to be the girlfriend of Walt's partner, Jesse Pinkman, and she died due to asphyxiation after overdosing - a death Walt witnessed and allowed to happen. Not only that, but Walt, in his own moment of desperation, happened to share a drink with said air traffic controller earlier in the episode.

If you read that summary with no knowledge of the show, you'd think it was pure hackery - a series of absurd coincidences that have no place in a plotted piece of drama.

Twenty-twelve Kyle would agree with you (and in some ways still does). However, rather than reject the show as pure silliness, I realized that I was wanting it to be something that it fundamentally wasn't. Breaking Bad wasn't The Wire or Mad Men, Breaking Bad wasn't trying to elevate television as a medium. It was, instead, pure pulp fiction - remarkably acted and compelling pulp fiction - but pulp all the same. Walt is more akin to a comic book villain than he is to Charles Foster Kane.

The pieces started to fall into place for me there. I still didn't really care about any of the characters (a hurdle Gilligan never ended up helping me over), but I could appreciate the over-the-top plot, and I could especially appreciate where Gilligan was taking his characters. Whatever Walt did had ramifications, ramifications that debilitated not only his own soul, but the souls of any innocents in his area. I admired that the only grounding in reality that Gilligan left in his fantastical show was the one aspect of reality that is rarely seen on screens both LCD and silver - on Breaking Bad, actions have consequences.

The absurdity of Walt and Jesse's adventures only served to make this one uncomfortable and rarely confronted truth all the more mesmerizing.

All of this leads up to my critique of Felina, the final episode of the series, which aired this past Sunday.

But, before I get to Felina, I want to briefly touch on another phenomenon that has been buzzing around the tweet-o-sphere, and that is the concept of the "Bad Fan."

A few weeks ago, New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum (whom I agree with almost all the time) published this piece about Breaking Bad and the fans' interaction with the series:

A few weeks ago, during a discussion of “Breaking Bad” on Twitter (my part-time volunteer gig), we all started yakking about the phenomenon of “bad fans.” All shows have them. They’re the “Sopranos” buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and who posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else). They’re the “Girls” watchers who were aesthetically outraged by Hannah having sex with Josh(ua). They’re the ones who get furious whenever anyone tries to harsh Don Draper’s mellow. If you create a TV show, you’re probably required to say something in response to these viewers along the lines of, “Well, you know, whatever anyone gets out of the show is fine! It’s not my place to say. I’m just glad people are watching.”

Luckily, I have not created a show. So I will say it: some fans are watching wrong.

Nussbaum's conclusion is not dissimilar to what I wrote about Mad Men a few months ago:

So if we reduce all of this down, what Weiner did with the past two episodes is basically tell the audience that they've been watching Mad Men the wrong way this entire time.

Because I have nothing approaching Nussbaum's clout (probably Klout as well), I didn't opt to call out bad fans personally, I instead used Weiner as a surrogate, but our points are basically the same (they also point out a fundamental difference between Weiner and Gilligan, one is obsessively guarded, the other self-sacrificially eager to please).

This Bad Fan concept took the internet by storm, to the point that the term is now a part of the lexicon of the great and omnipresent commentariat.

The beauty of the climax of Walter White's story is that it refused to deviate from the fundamental truth underlying the show - actions. have. consequences.

Despite all of the buffoons championing #teamwalt (undoubtedly between posts railing against Skyler on various mens' rights advocacy websites), Gilligan and co. steadfastly destroyed Walter (and Jesse and Hank and Walt's entire family).

Walter Hartwell White was a fundamentally selfish man, who elevated his own ego above anything else, while simultaneously perverting the concept of family by invoking it as a justification for his amoral actions.

The episode that Nussbaum is critiquing when she posits the Bad Fan Theory is Ozymandias, the third to last episode of the series. Ozymandias is the logical termination of Walter's journey, the episode ends with Hank, Gomey, Walter and Jesse pinned down by a pack of neo-nazi's with no chance for profit, justice or redemption.

Granite State, the series penultimate episode, is even more bleak. Hank and Gomey lay in a shallow grave in the desert, Jesse is enslaved and Walt is a shell of a person, dying alone in a cabin in New Hampshire, offering $10,000 for an hour of poker, while his family suffers the consequences of his actions back in New Mexico. It was the nadir of Heisenberg.

I loved those two episodes. They were entirely consistent with the reality that Gilligan had built over the previous five seasons, and they were everything I wanted from the show.

These two episodes make what transpires in the finale truly baffling.

Felina drew a 10.8 on its initial viewing - astronomical numbers for a niche show on a niche network. The great oracle of Twitter portended this level of viewership in the week leading up to the finale, and there was no doubt that Gilligan must have had some inclination about just how monumental his series' ending would be - even some months ago when he and his staff were writing it.

Undoubtedly, he felt that he owed the viewers for sticking around for so long, and wanted to craft an episode that would satisfy them and make them feel like the five years (or four or three or a few months or a week [depending on your netflix alacrity]) had been worth it.

In the final episode of the series, Gilligan threw out everything that made Breaking Bad so remarkable. Rather than living out his miserable fate, Walter White goes out on his own terms. Not only that, but somehow manages to rectify almost all of his past misdeeds. His family walks away with ~$10m, he has some sort of resolution with Skyler, Jesse is freed, and anyone who ever crossed him (or abetting crossing of him) is blown away in a hail of gunfire or addiction to artificial sweetener. The series ends with Walt in repose, his death mask a smile, as he is surrounded by the laboratory that he loved so much.

There are no consequences for Walter White. He isn't brought to justice, he doesn't die a lonely, miserable death from cancer, he never has to witness what his actions do to Skyler, Marie, Holly, Flynn, and Jesse (and presumably the Gomey family). Instead, death comes to a dying man a little more quickly and he gets to go out a hero, rescuing Jesse, providing for his family and avenging Hank. Heisenberg's legend is secure.

The finale seems to posit that the Bad Fans were right all along. This wasn't an exploration of the pernicious effects of violence and moral compromise, this was the epic story of Walter White, unconquerable badass. #teamwalt, I guess?

There is no way that this ending doesn't fundamentally alter how I interact with the show. Everything that comes before has to be seen through the prism of Walt's final victory. It doesn't necessarily take away from the sublimity of Ozymandias and Granite State (the text is the text and the text in those instances is unflinching), but it does leave me awful confused.

Other, better critics have tried to come up with ways to reconcile this ending with the show as a whole. Nussbaum posits that it may have been a fantasy sequence, and Walt actually died in cold back in New Hampshire.

 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.

Nussbaum herself admits that this is probably grasping at straws, but it's a way to have Felina exist within the same established universe as the 61 episodes previous.

However, Nussbaum specifically mentions a moment in that episode that struck me, as well as TV Club patriarch Todd VanDerWerff - that is, the moment when Walter, trapped in an iced in car, prays for the opportunity to make things right (his version of right, anyway) and he is delivered:

There was a good reason for Breaking Bad to be able to do this: It is, fundamentally, a religious show. I don’t mean that Walter White needs to find Jesus or Buddha or Allah (though he probably would have been better off if he turned to anything that wasn’t his own hubris). I mean that this show occupies a world with the concepts of good and evil, where “the right thing” and “the wrong thing” exist.

I agree with TVDW on this one, Breaking Bad opens with a moral choice. Walter could have easily avoided all of this if he had only taken the money from Gretchen and Elliot. Once he rejected that initial "right thing," the show tackled the consequences of compromise and the moral fracture that inevitably occurs when one gives over to darkness. By the end, there are no opportunities for good, only different paths to destruction.

Because like it or not, something like God exists in the Breaking Bad universe. He’s a vaguely deist sort of god, keeping his hands clean, mostly, but he’s there to rain down fire from the sky upon Walter White for daring to disturb the universe, and he’s there to tell Skyler White to run from New Mexico, only to have her ignore it. When Hank does the right thing and accepts punishment for beating Jesse Pinkman in season three, he’s saved from death via fairly unlikely means, and when Jesse becomes just another pawn to him, he’s marked for doom. And finally, in the finale, when Walter earnestly entreats whatever this moral force is to survive just long enough to complete his life’s work, he’s like Samson, crying out to God for his strength one last time, that he might pull the temple down upon his enemies’ heads (though a machine gun would have worked just as well).

If we reject Nussbaum's theory (which is more fantasy than actual argument, really) and we're left with just the text that we have, then I think VanDerWerff's position is the only one that can ultimately satisfy.

When the events of ABQ cease being the result of some wildly unlikely coincidences, and instead become the act of some divine intercessor, it's actually a little more palatable. Breaking Bad becomes a sort of twisted morality play, where a divine (and decidedly more Old Testament skewing, judging from the final body count) being intercedes to ensure that everybody gets the comeuppance they deserve - and is even willing to grant a little grace to make that happen.

It certainly ties into the particular look of the series - the filters, the landscapes, the many, many crane shots (particularly the final one of Walt).

Maybe we were never watching pulp to begin with, maybe the story of Walter White is a modern day myth. A myth with a messy, unclear message, to be sure, but at least one that has an internal consistency.

Or maybe the Bad Fans were right.