![]() ![]() The last episode foreshadowed Jack’s realisation that the great Heisenberg is actually a bit of a dweeb, and his new manner towards Walt here is classic bullying stuff, demonstrating the balls to act magnanimous while simultaneously giving him a derisory pay-off mere minutes after icing his brother-in-law. In the midst of all this, Walt lost the majority of his fortune to the neo-Nazis, the money that he has spent these final episodes fighting so hard to protect. As a result, the unluckiest character in television is spared and only has to contend with being brutally tortured and coerced into meth-lab slavery. Luckily for Jesse, however, Todd has a change of heart about the execution at the last second,and asks for his uncle to save his life. This is classic Walt reasoning – laying Hank’s death at Jesse’s door due to his informing, rather than shouldering the burden himself. After Hank’s death, Walt goes into full-on retaliation mode, pointing out a cowering Jesse to the neo-Nazis and demanding his murder presumably out of spite. The show has little time to hang around mourning Hank before moving on to the next terrible, terrible thing that happens, though, so neither do we. He’s responsible for many of the series’ greatest moments – the parking lot showdown with the Twins, the Danny Trejo/Tortuga incident, Walt Whitman on the toilet, Schraderbrau – and if he never works again he will still have created a character that will stay in people’s memories for years and years to come. So goodbye Hank, and goodbye Dean Norris: this was, by any measure, a remarkable evolution both in terms of character and performance. Hank’s death is a tough one to frame as truly noble – he dies in a drug money ditch in the desert, after all – but at least he demonstrates in his dying moments that he understands Walt’s world better than he does: it is populated by men that you can’t reason with, and sometimes you just have to quit whining, shut up and take your punishment like a man. The loveably loyal Gomie didn’t even get killed onscreen, but Hank at least got to go out – like Mike before him – with one of Breaking Bad’s rare F-bombs, deployed for maximum effect against the loathsome Uncle Jack. ![]() The tone of the episode was set when Hank and Gomez were killed before the opening credits even had a chance to roll. Only the scene in Crawl Space lasted just a couple of minutes in Ozymandias we were in the hole for the full fifty minutes. It was – again – physically punishing, with a surreally nightmarish quality that recalled something like the last ten minutes of Requiem For A Dream or, closer to home, the last scene of series four’s Crawl Space, which until this episode was probably the series’ highpoint in terms of evoking queasy horror. It clung to its theme of decline and collapse with the same kind of intensity that it has lent the tense games of cat and mouse between Walt and his nemeses in previous series the difference here being that instead of going after your nerves this went for straight your heart and your stomach. You have to wonder what they would have made of Ozymandias – as visceral and upsetting an episode of television as I have ever seen – and whether they would consider returning for another hour of soul-crushing misery next week. But Walt emerging from the chaos relatively unscathed was always going to be out of the question, dramatically speaking, and I’m sure most of us have long suspected that Walt has only been deferring his comeuppance, in the process building up a sizeable karmic debt that was always going to have to be repaid.ĭid you honestly think it would ever get this bad, though?Įarly reports say that Ozymandias was the most watched live episode of Breaking Bad ever in the US – presumably, this mainly encompasses those who have caught up with the previous episodes of the show through DVD boxsets and Netflix, but there are also probably more than a few people who dropped in for the first time out of curiosity. Unless you’re Walt, of course, who, thanks to his intelligence and supernatural ability to lie to both himself and everyone around him, has up to this point managed to navigate his way through this hellish landscape relatively unscathed, the moral logic that has dictated the fates of his various enemies apparently not applying to him. The world of Breaking Bad as imagined by Vince Gilligan has always been an intensely moral one, a world of fire and brimstone and Old Testament justice, where no bad deed, display of hubris or even lapse in concentration goes unpunished. Oh, and there’s the previous sixty episodes as well. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.” “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains.
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