![]() (“I’m sorry for your loss,” Todd says blandly to Walt after Hank takes his final breath, as if Todd himself had nothing to do with it. Walt is magnanimously left with one barrel of cash, with about $11 million inside, thanks to Todd’s residual “respect” for Walt, or at least for Walt’s talent. At this point, he might actually prefer having his occiput blasted to smithereens without warning. So Jesse is, more or less, a dead man too, even though he’s still upright and breathing. And all this after Walt has taunted Jesse by telling him that he watched Jane die and could have saved her, but didn’t. Then they chain him up, leaving only his extremities free to cook. They beat him to a pulp, lock him in a cell, and bring him into a lab where a picture of Andrea and Brock leaving their homes is posted right where Jesse will see it (signaling that if he tries anything, those two will get it). But Todd, on the ride home from the desert, apparently has a better idea than killing him after he confesses all: make Jesse cook for them, since Jesse’s meth-making abilities are nearly equal to Walt’s. Jesse, the man whose life those killers came to snuff out, does get out of the shooting ordeal alive, but only because Uncle Jack is in a chipper mood about Walt turning over his buried treasure to them (in a last-ditch attempt to get them not to kill Hank) and because Todd has an epiphany that they should try to get as much information out of Jesse as possible before they “do the job” on him. Once upon a time, Walt wouldn’t have let Hank or Jesse be taken out by neo-Nazi contract killers, either, even by accident. And the way things are going, you wonder how much longer even Flynn is going to live. But the young adult son, named after the man whose name his mother and his aunt will refuse to let pass their lips ever again, will have this burned on his memory for the rest of his life. You wonder, can anyone ever recover from something like this, from not just his dad cooking meth, and his mom covering it up, but a beloved family member getting his brains blown out because of it? Holly, who Walt abducts and then returns in a truly harrowing sequence, is at least lucky enough to be too young ever to recall this turn of events, although she may grow up to have some PTSD about it she can’t explain. When Marie (who doesn’t yet know Hank and Steve are dead) enters that car wash to tell Skyler about Walt’s arrest, they leave a smiling Flynn manning the front desk, and you know those are going to be the last innocent, regular-kid, un-damaged moments of his life. Now Flynn (I guess that’s his name now, huh?) is the last person to have the scales yanked forcibly from his eyes, and once he knows that not only is his Uncle Hank dead but that Walt was responsible for having him killed, it’s all over. “Bad news, honey, I have ten minutes to live, but good news - you guys are set for life! Don’t ask, just enjoy!” They’d take sweet little family excursions, eat pizza, have pool parties with Hank and Marie, and then…what? When was he going to tell them about the money and where he’d gotten it? He obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead at that point, he hadn’t even told them he had a terminal illness, and he thought he could get away with hiding that, too. He believed he could go cook meth in the desert, call Skyler to tell him he’d be, so sorry, a little late because his carwash boss blah blah blah, pile up the bloody dough, and come home like a typical suburban dad, with no one - including his DEA-agent brother-in-law - suspecting a thing. The cold open flashes back to around the time of the pilot, when he and Jesse were so new at cooking that Walt had to remind a bored and irritated Jesse he couldn’t smoke in an RV full of explosive chemicals, and when Walt was first beginning to dream of what might be for his wife, son, and daughter-to-be. But in Ozymandias, the shattering third to last episode of Breaking Bad, it becomes clear that even he can delude himself no longer that he’s any kind of a hero, or any kind of family man. Through all of it, he has somehow maintained the fantasy that he’s doing it all for his family, in spite of the fact that he’s had innumerable opportunities to quit while he was ahead and spurned them all because he just had to have more more more, now now now. Like his fellow schlubby wannabe-alpha-male-at-heart, Michael Ginsberg, Walter White conducts himself like the only words of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” he remembers are, “I am Ozymandias, king of kings/Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” (Above is an AMC promotional video of Bryan Cranston reading the poem the poem itself is here.) But Ginz couldn’t even begin to have night terrors about the things Walt has done, and seen done, out of his screaming need to wear the silver stripe on his back just once before he dies. ![]() – Stan Rizzo to Michael Ginsberg, Mad Men, Dark Shadows You should read the rest of that poem, you boob.
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