Of the many joys I derive from Breaking Bad, the writers’ unwillingness
to go for the happy ending is among my favorites. In the show, as in real life,
decisions have consequences, genies cannot be put back into bottles and once
plans are put in motion, there is no pop music montage or Hollywood ending that
makes the bad things go away. And so it was that in the final ten
pulse-pounding minutes of To’Hajiilee
a stark, frozen in time scene morphed into a Sergio Leone Western featuring two
outmanned DEA agents and a nest of neo-Nazi vipers with assault rifles,
shotguns and pistols.
If there is an Achilles heel common to
all characters on Breaking Bad, it is
their failure to leave well enough alone. Of course, the deeper the hole gets
dug, the less good options become. Once you’ve clipped chemistry equipment from
the school lab and bought the Winnebago, you might as well cook the meth. If a
rival dealer knows your identity, killing him makes sense. Having an affair
with your boss may allow you to cuckold your husband, but when you know your
paramour is a shady businessman, don’t be surprised when you have to pay off
his income tax debt just when your husband wants to use that money to go into
the Saul Goodman Witness Protection Program.
And so, as Breaking Bad careens toward a conclusion, Walt discovers that Jesse
isn’t so dumb after all, that Hank simply will. not. give. up. and that having
a reputation as a merciless killer will cause a weaker link to crack. It was
not just that Jesse knew Walt’s weak spot (the money he curiously called his
childrens’ “birthright”) but that in goading Walt into giving up the location
of his buried treasure, also got a full confession out of him. Huell may be a
bodyguard one level removed from Heisenberg, but he’s not the first small time
con Agent Schrader has conned into flipping on a higher up. Walt thought he
knew a way to go to Jesse, but without knowing Hank beat him to the punch,
Andrea’s voice mail is harmlessly deleted.
Of course, Walt would not have found
himself alone and cornered in the dusty environs of a desolate Indian
reservation had he treated Jesse a little more like the son he claimed him to
be and less like an annoying and doltish sidekick or did not have the arrogance
to leave a Gale Boetticher inscribed copy of Leaves of Grass out in the open. And when that heart-skips-a-beat
moment arrives when Walt lays down his gun and is handcuffed and put in the
back of an SUV for transport, we all learn that once you call in neo-Nazis with
dollar signs in their eyes, they don’t particularly care that you have had a
change of heart.
The direction and cinematography as
Uncle Jack’s convoy kicks up a cloud of dust towards a denouement we just begin
to process is pitch perfect, the consequences for Hank and Gomez immediate and
in all likelihood, fatal. A show whose body count has included everyone from
the arch villain (Gus Fring) to an innocent child (Drew Sharp) would be untrue
to itself if Hank and “Gomey” somehow survived the fusillade of bullets
directed at them. And this is to Vince Gilligan’s everlasting credit. For Hank
had his own chances to leave well enough alone, to accept that Walt was
“retired” and heading for an early grave, to be ok with the idea that he solved
the crime but the criminal got away, to not cleave his family in two, to permit
his wife, her sister and his niece and nephew the opportunity to have a future
unsullied by the taint of what Walt did. But in deciding to pursue someone
whose inner core he could not truly know, Hank likely signed his own death
warrant.
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