Jason Mittell, Middlebury College: Just to launch the conversation, I’m wondering if people can share what brought them to UnREAL, and what assumptions they brought to the series.

I’ll start: I’m certainly not in the target demographic for Lifetime, so I was unaware of the series until I started seeing some of the early strong reviews, specifically pieces by Todd VanDerWerff and Linda Holmes. Then I heard the segment on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and I was intrigued enough to check it out. Part of that was the praise for the program’s execution and “quality,” part was the involvement of Marti Noxon as a producer with a strong track record, but it was mostly because it was about television. I’m a sucker for the meta, so I’m onboard with anything that provide a window into its own medium. Based on that advanced info, I wasn’t surprised that it was great—but I was shocked by how unrelentingly dark and scathing it was, shattering my assumptions of what tone a “Lifetime series” might offer.

Myles McNutt, Old Dominion University: I came to the series knowing about its development, a byproduct of following the trades too closely: there, it was defined by Noxon’s participation and Appleby’s casting, which joined my Twitter feed’s dissection of the news relative to both the talent involved and—if I recall correctly—the similarly premised (but much lighter thematically-speaking) TV Movie I Want To Marry Ryan Banks, later retitled The Reality of Love, which features a post-Alias, pre-movie stardom Bradley Cooper.

But ahead of viewing it, I had a discussion with a reviewer who was somewhat incredulous to the idea that the show being on Lifetime would be a hindrance to viewers, comparing them to AMC before Mad Men in their lack of significant dramatic programming. And while I admired his optimism, Lifetime has spent the past half-decade developing series that actively played into their “Television For Women” branding, tied unequivocally to its Lifetime movies that so welcome parody Lifetime actually aired one. Despite the fact that Lifetime—albeit with an acquired network castoff, The Days And Nights of Molly Dodd—was the first cable channel to earn a lead acting nomination at the Primetime Emmy Awards, and despite the fact they went through the same experimentation phase of sitcoms, dramas, and reality as original cable programming expanded exponentially in the late 2000s, it was all done under the auspices of that “Television for Women” brand, which perhaps explains the way critical discourse has overenunciated its (deserved) praise of the show in an effort to cut through the years of delegitimation.

Melissa Lenos, Donnelly College: I heard about UnREAL pretty quickly through other media studies people and the positive NPR press (as someone who is primarily a film scholar, I don’t tend to follow the TV trades; any scoop I get is from Myles on Twitter). I’d been under the impression that Lifetime was moving in the SyFy direction: sort of embracing the popular association with camp and launching their own Sharknados. Everyone I know talked about watching the Flowers in the Attic adaptation. Very few people I know actually watched it.

I wasn’t sure I was the target audience for UnREAL because I have a very hard time watching dating game shows, but I gave it a shot and fell pretty hard on episode one. I then agreed to continue on this journey for another week.

Kristen Warner, University of Alabama: I saw folks on Twitter talking about it after the first episode aired and thought I would give it a try. And the smart marketing move of releasing the first four episodes all at once bound me to the show fairly quickly. I had misgivings about the series as I have a longstanding mistrust of Marti Noxon (I’ll never forget) but I enjoyed the series she wrote for Bravo Girlfriends Guide to Divorce so I thought it could be equally as interesting.

My assumptions were wholly incorrect. Initially I thought it was some kind of horror anthology series akin to American Horror Story. I was (pleasantly) mistaken.

Phillip Maciak, Louisiana State University: I’d heard about UnREAL via Emily Nussbaum and Willa Paskin’s raves. However, as my television slate was already pretty full with fancy serial dramas and, well, this season of The Bachelorette, I took a pass. But my friend Rachel kept texting me about it, so I tried the first episode. After that intro, I shotgunned the first six episodes pretty quick, loved them, and wrote a fast piece on it for The Los Angeles Review of Books. The social media response I got was unbelievable! So many people wanted to talk about the series. I feel like everyone who watched this show quickly became an evangelist for it, which is what happens, I think, when people are genuinely surprised by something on TV. (If not because it’s wholly new, at least because they didn’t expect it.) So I’m very happy to help spread the good—or ambivalent, but mostly good—news here.

Christine Becker, University of Notre Dame: As with seemingly everything in my life these days, I was lured to UnREAL by my Twitter feed. In particular, I saw multiple TV critics tweeting praise about the show’s high level of insight into reality TV production and representation, and especially as a TV studies teacher always looking for meta fodder to bring into the classroom, I was very intrigued. But that critical buildup turned out to be a detriment for my initial viewing. The show’s early points about the sexism endemic to romance competition shows seemed overly familiar to me (an academic who has, for instance, read both editions of Murray and Ouellette’s Reality TV cover to cover). Even the much-acclaimed ironic overhead shot of Rachel wearing the “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt struck me as pouring it on thick. (And my problems with the production-within-the-production contrivances never fully went away, a point for another section). But then the story and character complexity really started to kick in. I think it was episode four that really grabbed me, where the story threads started to coalesce so that I felt like I was experiencing a cohesive narrative, not just contrived plot points. So I’m not sure if my initial resistance was due more to the show’s clunkiness or my own resistant frame of reference, but maybe that’s indicative of how hard it usually is to parse out one’s initial reactions to any show.

Dana Och, University of Pittsburgh: UnREAL was promoted pretty heavily on ABC Family, so I expected that the show would be a combination of savvy soap opera and pretty people. I was a bit reluctant at first because of the dating show angle: while I adore the early cycle of campy dating shows that aired on VH1 and other networks (Rock of Love, I Love New York, Flavor of Love, Temptation Island), I have little interest in shows that promote ideas of traditional romance (or even the facade of traditional romance). Twitter of course played a role in me deciding to watch, as a few of us decided to watch and I am a sucker for group watching.

An Anti-Heroine?

Jason: The inspiration for this forum came from the robust conversations that we all were having about UnREAL on social media, and no topic generated more heat than framing Rachel as an anti-heroine—specifically the “first female anti-hero” of the modern drama age—with explicit ties to Breaking Bad as a reference point. This was fueled by a Vanity Fair article arguing that Rachel was “TV’s First Pure Female Antihero,” and subsequent interviews with producers where they talk about how the writers search for “Walter White moments” in Rachel’s character.

I’m not particularly invested in arguing about “firsts” or the parameters of being an anti-hero—I am more interested in the framing of the character and how Breaking Bad is used as an inspiration and comparison, issues that I’ve explored in a chapter of my book Complex TV. I do find UnREAL‘s investment in Rachel’s moral choices and dissolution to be in keeping with anti-hero model that dominated one vein of prime time television for the past decade, but it is interesting in how her power and persona is quite different than the typical male anti-hero. Rachel’s “superpower” is her ability to manipulate via empathy, spinning a contestant or colleague to do her bidding by creating an emotional bond, a stark difference from the modes of bullying and belittling more common to male counterpart characters. The results are similar—she destroys lives out of rationalized self-interest, and even admits to effectively killing someone in the finale—but the methods and emotional palette are distinct.

I know that many of my colleagues were “vexed” by this framing and comparison. So what vexes you most?

Kathleen Battles, Oakland University: The set-up of this particular issue already directs answers towards thinking of Rachel in terms of male anti-heroes. The origins question is an important one to a lot of people, myself included, because the show is in many ways a straight up soap opera. I mean this as a compliment. Like many good soap operas, a lot of the narrative energy is not tied to heterosexual coupling, rather coupling becomes the springboard to represent the relationship between women. I also don’t know why it would be striking that a female anti hero would NOT be different than a male one. Men and women (and right now we are speaking primarily of white, heterosexual, men and women) operate under different sets of conditions. To me one of the best parts of of UnREAL is precisely its consideration of the ways that patriarchy shapes the lives of women, from its unrelentingly cynical take on romance to its consideration of workplace politics. But more than that, I find some of the discourse in these reviews troubling as the reviewers themselves seem to want to work hard to like Rachel, like the review that mentioned her “doe eyes” over and over.

The other thing about the anti-hero focus (as the marker of “quality”) is that it ignores the other terrific character, Quinn. To my mind, Quinn is one of my favorite television characters in a long while. Her talents, command of her world, intelligence, and cynicism make her a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute she was on screen, and I suspect I’m not the only one. #quinning

Melissa: Kathleen, by the time the finale rolled around, Quinn was my favorite part of the show. And I agree that the anti-hero argument is beside the point—for me mostly because the writers went out of their way to drive home that Rachel is a complex character who is (among other characteristics) struggling with possible (likely?) mental illness. By the end of episode nine I felt guilty for my level of frustration with her—that she simply seemed to be bouncing back and forth between Jeremy and Adam and unable to do anything on her own—or in her own self-interest. That tension as a viewer—for me—was heavily dependent on the focus on Rachel’s mental health, something that the Vanity Fair article, if I remember correctly, doesn’t even mention. (Although they do mention the “doe eyes” at least once.) If Rachel’s hyper-empathy and ability to manipulate people are—as her terrifying mother claims—actually part of an illness, can we really tag her behavior as “anti-hero”? Even if she seems to be getting pleasure from her destructive influence? Or is she a character who suffers, and then causes suffering and feels incredible guilt for what she’s done? She’s so very well-written.

Jason: Melissa, I’ll jump in here just to say that mental illness doesn’t disqualify a character from being an anti-hero—after all, the current wave of prime time anti-hero dramas was launched by The Sopranos, whose concept was defined as “gangster in therapy.” Which of the prominent TV anti-heroes couldn’t be diagnosed with some sort of mental illness?

Melissa: Sure, Jason, I can see that. But my question is something like, “do we have a responsibility to reconsider a character’s agency when writers pointedly foreground serious mental illness?” And I’m sure someone’s already written something very brilliant on this idea that I should go look up. Something I am very interested in, though, that the Vanity Fair article mentions, is the move away from the focus on “feminine likeability.” But UnREAL feels more like that glorious Amy Poehler “I don’t fucking care if you like it” moment than anything to do with Lena Dunham.

Kristen: I’m the one who was vexed by the anti-hero discourse emerging about this show. I get why the comparisons are there and it makes sense. But it vexes me because 1) the whiteness of anti-heroness (the Vanity Fair article suggests that Empire‘s Cookie Lyons and Scandal‘s Olivia Pope can’t be anti-heroines because they’re really heroes fighting men. HAAA. Christ. Deliver us.) and 2) if you’re going to make an anti-heroine for WOMEN why on earth would you parallel it to characteristics of the anti-hero placed on a man?! Those comparisons assume the author is only familiar with those examples when, in fact, we have tons of prime time and daytime soap characters who embody the essence (even at a “proto” level) of women we love to hate who do what they do because they get off on causing havoc and yet also have feelings and want love and also to destroy everyone who has hurt them and maybe possesses mommy/daddy/social issues. For example, during a Twitter conversation, some were asking for early analogs of Rachel and the first person who popped in my head was All My Children‘s Kendall Hart aka Erica Kane’s illegitimate daughter (the child she conceived after being raped and subsequently giving up for adoption). While Appleby’s character certainly has nuances and tonal shifts that strongly differ from Sarah Michelle Gellar’s daytime character, I would argue that she still serves as part of the “proto” anti-heroine genealogy that this newest descendant benefits from. I point that example out because it is absolutely absurd that an entire genre is continually left out of the conversation and reinforces that television criticism always needs to legitimate these kinds of texts as “masculine” and “non-histrionically, soapy.”

Which brings me to this point: I feel like the analysis of UnREAL is going to push us all into our separate camps like The Killing did but in reverse. For me The Killing felt like a feminine text–it had the ambience and affect of what soap tries to generate (maybe unconsciously; maybe unintentionally) with something of an antiheroine in its lead (and as its showrunner). While UnREAL placing itself in the genealogy of Breaking Bad is a smart self-fashioning auteuristic tactic in this contemporary era where awards and critical praise demand such lineage, the core of the series is female melodrama AND fantasy. As I said elsewhere in response to this lineage thing: Daytime soap is to many who do TV criticism as the grandchild of a stereotypical downtrodden prostitute. The grandchild is cool; the grandma? Not so much. Popular TV criticism says, “oh that child looks just like his respectable on the up and up granddaddy.” But that baby looks (and acts) like his grandma too. It’s crude but it is the best metaphor I can draw to describe how legitimation and bastardization work. Lastly, I would submit that female audiences who recognize feminine texts in “wolf’s clothing” KNOW how to root for a lead despite everything that suggests they shouldn’t. Female audiences know how to deal with Rachel AND Quinn and it’s certainly not biologically inherent knowledge. On the contrary, it had to have been a knowledge gleaned from texts they’ve seen before and I think it most certainly is that.

Phillip: I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that that Vanity Fair piece is less about anti-heroines and more about anxiety! The anti-heroine discourse as it’s presented in Vanity Fair piece strikes me as really condescending for a few of reasons. The first is the one Kristen rightly points to here: the rhetorical gymnastics the writer goes through in order to disqualify legions of previous anti-heroines kind of enacts the absurdity of its own critical project. Why do we need to immediately find this show’s precise position in the line of succession from Tony Soprano to Arya Stark? All hail her grace Rachel Goldberg, first of her name—long may she reign!

The second is that it’s such a bald attempt to legitimize a show that doesn’t especially need legitimizing. I understand the impetus on the part of the showrunners to invoke Breaking Bad as a structural model—though I think the better comparisons are Damages and Mad Men—but, as this brief conversation has already shown, there are many more interesting ways to talk about this show than as a Lady-Ghostbusters version of Breaking Bad. To me, the Vanity Fair essay was very similar to a piece in The Atlantic called, I’m not kidding, “How Lifetime’s UnREAL Turned The Bachelor Into Literature.” (The TV-Is-The-New-Novel Discourse is Dead; Long Live TV-Is-The-New-Novel!) The author, Megan Garber, writes, “It does, instead, what the best literature does: It leaves itself open to interpretation and argument. It asks its audience to think, and analyze, and come to their own conclusions. It makes a point of its own ambiguity.” Okay, yes, that’s what the best literature does, but isn’t it also what the best TV does, what the best cinema does, what the best art does? These pieces both seem gripped by the same high-culture/low-culture panic. The invocation of the novel or the anti-hero serves less as substantive critical lens than as permission to write in praise of a show about trashy Reality TV broadcast on the trashy Lifetime Network.

Christine: I’ve seen multiple reactions along the lines of “Who knew I’d ever like something on Lifetime?” or “I’m a guy actually watching a Lifetime show!” Not to unnecessarily muddy the waters here, but it struck me as similar to when someone tweets a link to a smart news piece on BuzzFeed and feels compelled to express surprise that it’s on BuzzFeed and is not a listicle, as if those formats can’t co-exist on one platform. As if newspapers never had comics and as if comics can’t be as profoundly gratifying as something on the front page. But here, of course, it’s the assumption that “television for women” can’t possibly be insightful and must by definition be a guilty pleasure that is only apologetically enjoyed. Though I fully grant the reservations expressed, I can live with the Walter White comparisons, because the creator herself invited it and at least it’s staying within the realm of TV. But the “It’s ambiguous so it’s like literature!” take makes me want to cordially invite that writer to take my History of TV class.

Kristen: Just jumping in here to tag Chris’s point: Lifetime viewers well acquainted with the network and all of its content will be quick to remind you that their “bad women” films are some of the most highly popular programming. How many times have some of us watched Meredith Baxter play Betty Broderick (PLEASE read the comments) and felt like, “I mean … I don’t agree what she did was right but…she kinda had a point.” All I’m saying: The anti-heroine has a LONG history … on Lifetime.

Dana: And this is key to why the Walter White comparison actually does drive me up the wall. Yes, I get why the creator invokes it as legitimation, but that doesn’t mean that we have to also take it up. Walter White is interesting to me for the way that he is introduced in a manner that invites the viewer to assume the best about him: he is a normal guy with a good heart who is forced into unlawful activities due to circumstances beyond his control. Walter White is interesting, that is, for the way that the viewer is manipulated over the seasons to eventually realize that he is much more a villain. Our own assumptions about white male leads (and maybe even patriarchy) are revealed. Now, with Rachel, we are told right off the bat that she is unstable, ruthless, and unethical. And we can roll with that without having to be manipulated (a bit more like Tony Soprano than Walter White considering the habituation of generic structures and types) because whether it is Kendall, Erika, Dorian, Carly, or Alexis—let alone Brenda, Valerie, Amanda, Blair, Alison, Katherine, or Sutter—we fully expect a female character with dimensions, motivations, and the ability to exist as more than just a projection of male desire. The reading frames are already there, so the show can simply signal them and move on.

Jason: I agree with most of what everyone says here about legitimation, but to return to my initial prompt on this issue, I’m curious if others find the “hook” of the show to be framed around Rachel’s morality. One thing I find so compelling is to watch her do things she knows are wrong politically and ethically, but she convinces herself that she has no choice so she rationalizes her behaviors in an assortment of ways. As the season progresses, she becomes more emotionally invested in the show and her role in it, letting go of the rationalizations and just embracing her power to ruin people for fun and profit. Meanwhile, Quinn is the embodiment of Ayn Randian self-interest (but in a fun way, rather than Rand’s own leaden drama), setting up an ethical pole that Rachel wants to distance herself from, but keeps moving toward. This moral dance, which is obviously much more than just the “Breaking Bad but with a lady!” frame, is what kept me rapt throughout the season. And, since I don’t know many of the examples of precedents y’all have mentioned, this figuration of the feminist reluctantly working to uphold the worst of patriarchy seems innovative to me. Do those precedents similarly rationalize their knowing misdeeds as being for the greater feminist good?

Christine: I see that too, and I particularly found the Faith hometown visit episode to be a really interesting pivot point in the season in that regard. (Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also right when I started to get consumed by the narrative, not just the show’s meta elements.) Rachel seems at her most altruistic there, albeit utilizing her usual manipulative skills, but then she gets trumped by the production’s usual larger dark forces. It seemed like a key turning point in her emotional relationship to the show and the other producers.

Kathleen: I see the point about the “dance,” but it’s a familiar one to some viewers. Since the 80s scholars have noted that soap opera viewers prefer their villainesses to other female characters. As Kristen noted, Lifetime viewers (myself included) will prefer the “bad girl” movies. If anything, industrially speaking, Lifetime is already positioned as “darker” than its current actual competitor, the Hallmark Channel (I get that’s not how any of this is being positioned in the trades, as Lifetime wants its reputation stock to rise. But from a viewer perspective, they offer similar kinds of programming with very different tones). The relationship between Quinn and Rachel is a complex one, but I wouldn’t put it in such stark moral terms or such polarized terms. I think the season starts that way, but I think as we see Rachel make increasingly bad decisions, we also see Quinn increasingly humanized. In other words, I enjoyed the dance between the characters, but not as something particularly innovative, but as something very well done in the case of this show.

Next time on AnTENNA UnREAL: Romance and Pedagogy!

Fig. 1 — Mad Men from first …

Fig. 2 — …to last.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

In a manner befitting a series that flourished on its reputation for visual elegance, the finale of Mad Men, “Person to Person,” rewarded attentive viewers with an ending that subtly called upon the pilot episode. The opening of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was a gentle right-to-left tracking shot across a crowded bar, which ends with a dolly-in to the back of Don Draper’s head (Fig. 1). The close of “Person to Person” also begins with a right-to-left tracking shot, across the cliff-top lawns of what is supposed to be the Esalen Institute, and in the final moments there is again a dolly-in – but this time to a frontal close-up of the enigmatically smiling Don, eyes closed (Fig. 2). It is tempting to read the shift from rear to front view as a reification of narrative closure: in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (and in the opening titles of every subsequent episode) the over-the-shoulder shot of Don draws us into the world of Mad Men, into what lies before us and before him. The frontal shot conversely seems to evoke finality; it acts as a caesura, sealing off behind Don all that we have witnessed in the last eight years, compartmentalizing the series as something done and complete.

If such a visual metaphor was intended, it was perhaps the only way of drawing a clear line under Mad Men, a series that was never going to lend itself stylistically to dramatic resolution in the same way as, say, its AMC sibling Breaking Bad. Mad Men begins and ends with Don Draper, and as the frequently reiterated over-the-shoulder shot from the pilot suggests, his experiences willy-nilly offer the dominant point of view for the audience. Yet Mad Men is not Don’s story: it has always been a ensemble piece, and a resolutely untidy one at that. Some characters have abruptly disappeared (Sal Romano, Paul Kinsey), some others have wandered in and out of focus (Ken Cosgrove, Trudy Campbell, Bert Cooper), while six protagonists apart from Don (Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty and Sally Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway) have remained in, or somewhere near, the spotlight throughout. No recurring character had an “arc” in the conventionally understood sense of the word, for Mad Men has remained fundamentally skeptical about its characters’ capacity to grow and change according to some Save The Cat-type screenwriting logic. It is unsurprising, then, that the final few episodes seemed to be casting more lines than they reeled in, with Peggy and Roger embarking on new romantic relationships while Pete and Joan embrace or create new business opportunities. Given what we have seen of these characters over seven seasons, there is no good reason to envisage any of these new departures as “happily-ever-after” scenarios. Indeed, the only real certitude offered by the finale is that of Betty’s impending death from lung cancer. Even the closure of Don’s narrative is provisional: though the narrative does not make it explicit, that final smile seemed to many commentators to suggest that the series ends exactly as Don is dreaming up the famous “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad that served, appropriately, as Mad Men’s coda. (Showrunner Matthew Weiner has since confirmed this.) Earlier in the episode, Stan Rizzo pointed out that Don’s going AWOL is a recurring pattern, while Peggy, in her person-to-person call with Don, underscored the fact that he could easily return to work at McCann. With these cues in mind, the road trip ending with his Esalen revelation should surely be read not as culminating catharsis but as yet another interlude.

Fig. 3 — Spaces of Madernity

So, if dramatic closure of character storylines was not on the cards, what exactly is it that became complete with the finale of Mad Men? Or, to put it another way, how can we understand the series’ structure in retrospect? One obvious way of answering this—perhaps the only incontrovertible way—is to note that the series’ story spans almost exactly a decade: starting in March 1960, the Mad Men narrative apparently ends in late October or November 1970. Mad Men in toto is thus an encapsulation of the Sixties, a fact that is likely to be remembered long after its narrative twists, recapitulations, and volte faces have faded from the memory of all but the most devoted fans. The “Sixties-ness” of Mad Men is in part marked by historical events that variously affect the protagonists’ work, emotional life, and attitudes, from the 1960 presidential election to the 1970 Newsweek gender discrimination lawsuit. More obviously, and from certain vantage points more potently, Mad Men is defined by the 1960s in terms of visual style. Quite apart from offering a much publicized parade of vintage fashions, period props and stylish environments, the show visually evokes late Fifties and Sixties films in its cinematography, and especially its lighting. Evocation is clearly not the same thing as reconstruction, pace detractors who have raised complaints about narrowness of focus or lack of “authenticity.” A good deal of commentary—some neutral and some adverse—has focused on the fact that Mad Men is a show about the Sixties created by a man who is, as Robert Lloyd succinctly put it, “too young to really remember them.” In itself this claim isn’t particularly useful.  It would be hard to mistake any scene from Mad Men, with its wonderfully stately, stylized dialogue, as an attempt to recreate Sixties mass-media vernacular, however sumptuously persuasive the visual recreation of the period might seem. Indeed, the claim that Weiner is “too young” has curiosity value precisely because he was born in the Sixties: observing that Julian Fellowes is too young to recall the era of Downton Abbey would hardly have the same piquancy.

Fig. 4 — Symptoms of Madmenalaria

That said, if the show did not in any absolute sense espouse period authenticity it seems hard to overstate its Sixties-philiac tendencies. Visual pleasure in Sixties styling looms large, as a key part of Mad Men’s identity, not just in the “raw” text of the episodes but also in its astonishingly consistent, cumulatively powerful paratexts, most notably the documentary videos on the Mad Men section of AMC’s website. “Making of Mad Men” and later “Inside… Mad Men” featurettes have appeared on the site throughout the series run, increasingly focusing on the micro-narrative of each episode and the characters’ motivations, as explicated by the actors portraying them, and by Matthew Weiner. After four seasons the “Fashion File” feature that accompanied each episode was replaced by a second regular video, “Fashion and Style,” based around interviews with the costume designer and property master or set decorator. If the “Inside …” videos speak to Mad Men’s “depth,” which is to say the ways in which it can be recognized as quality TV, worthy of the multiple awards and plaudits it has won, the “Fashion and Style” videos correspondingly speak to the importance of “surface.” Mad Men has reworked and mobilized the so-called “mid-century modern” to generate not just media buzz but an extraordinarily influential brand. The series’ fetishizing of Sixties clothes, hairstyles, accessories, cars and interior decoration has spawned an array of imitative or broadly competitive programming in the US and overseas, from Magic City via The Hour and Masters of Sex to Vegas and Aquarius. Mad Men has made a somewhat improbable style guru of its costume designer, Janie Bryant, it has begotten clothing lines for both men and women at Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers, and more broadly it has produced a fad that one commentator drily named “Madmenalaria.”

As Mad Men coalesced into a whole in the only way that television series can, by ending, then in so doing it underscored the fact that like Don Draper it has always embodied—even depended on—a duality. Other film and television texts may have de facto thrived on a tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness on one hand and preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures on the other, but Mad Men is perhaps the first in which this dichotomy has been so smoothly reconciled into a branding strategy. The final ambivalent meeting of inner worlds at Esalen—with Don either/both finding spiritual peace and/or dreaming up the basis for a career-defining ad—could not more perfectly have encapsulated the obverse and reverse of the Mad Men coin.

For me, the main thing that I’m looking for in any finale is for a series to be true to itself, ending in the way it needs to conclude to deliver consistency, offering the type of ending that its beginning and middle demand. That changes based on the series, obviously, but it’s what makes Six Feet Under’s emphasis on mortality and The Wire’s portrayal of the endless cycle of urban crime and decay so effective, and why Battlestar Galactica’s final act turn toward mysticism (and that goofy robot epilogue) felt like such a betrayal to many fans. And it’s why finales like The Sopranos and Lost divide viewers, as the finales cater to one aspect of each series at the expense of other facets that some fans were much more invested in.

“Felina” delivered the ending that Breaking Bad needed by emphasizing closure over surprise. In many ways, it was predictable, with fans guessing many of the plot developments—read through the suggestions on Linda Holmes’s site for claiming cockamamie theories and you’ll see pretty much everything that happened on “Felina” listed there (alongside many more predictions that did not come to pass). For a series that often thrived on delivering “holy shit” moments of narrative spectacle, the finale was quite straightforward and direct.

The big shocks and surprises were to be found in episodes leading up to this one, especially the brilliant “Ozymandias”; since then, we’ve gotten the denouement to Walt’s story, his last attempt to make his journey mean something. It’s strange to think that an episode that concludes with a robot machine gun taking down half a dozen Nazis feels like a mellow epilogue, but emotionally it was this season’s least tense and intense episode. Instead, Walt returned home a beaten-down man, lacking the emotional intensity that drove him up the criminal ladder, but driven by a plan that he had just enough energy to complete. Given that the series premise was built on the necessity of a character arc building toward finality, and that it began with that character receiving a death sentence, we always knew that closure was likely to come in the form of Walt’s death, and this episode simply showed us how his final moments played out in satisfying fashion.

The opening emphasized how Walt’s journey has always depended on dumb luck to help him on the way. Whether this luck is sheer randomness or the assistance from some outside forces or higher powers is left unclear (at least beyond the higher power of Vince Gilligan)—although we do see Walt pray for help before the keys fall into the palm of his hands, it’s not as if the keys being in the car was some unusual miracle, and thematically it’s irrelevant whether fates or luck are driving him forward. This sign (or happenstance) frees him from his New Hampshire exile, as his return to the Southwest is cued by the cassette tape playing “El Paso,” where the episode title comes from. And with that moody but non-suspenseful opening, we are back in New Mexico.

It is unclear at first whether Walt’s visit to Gretchen and Elliot, set-up by posing as a reporter, takes place before or after the earlier flash forwards to Walt fetching the machine gun and ricin, but once he calmly sneaks into their house it becomes clear that he those weapons are not for these old friends. Instead he uses his preferred weapons of lies and manipulation to persuade them to deliver his nest egg to Flynn. Although I interpreted the end of the last episode that Walt was pulled back home to seek revenge, I bought that he was motivated to return after realizing another avenue to get his money to his family—while Walt has always been driven by pride and vengeance, his New Hampshire exile broke down most of his arrogance and replaced it with the desperate search for his crimes to have meant something in his final hours. And it does take some degree of humility to allow his family to think they are being supported by these old friends whom he now views as embodying the wrongs that lead him down this road to ruin; despite Walt’s insistence that only his money goes to his family, nobody will know this except Elliot and Gretchen themselves, assuming they agree to follow his request.

Of course it is Walter White, so arrogance is always in play. He visits Elliot and Gretchen not to ask for their help or compassion, but to bully and terrorize them into being his accomplice. He enjoys showing off his power, demonstrating that while he failed as their partner in the business world, he thrived in another lucrative game for which they would have been ill-suited. When Elliot tries to stand his ground, Walt channels Mike Ehrmentraut (down to Bryan Cranston aping Jonathan Banks’s delivery) in coldly saying, “Elliot, if we’re going to go that way, you’ll need a bigger knife.” The bluff with the two assassins is just convincing enough to motivate them to carry out his plan (presumably), but not enough to fool viewers, knowing that Walt is far too out-of-the-game to hire actual killers instead of giving goofballs Badger and Skinny Pete one last curtain call.

He also takes this opportunity to inquire about something that must have been gnawing at him throughout his cross-country drive: the resurgence of quality blue meth. Knowing that Jesse is carrying on his business with Todd and Jack reawakens his pride and need for vengeance, so he gets the gun and ricin to destroy those who would dare to market his product without his approval. His ambush of Lydia and Todd demonstrates how her repeated attempts to be careful during these teatime meetings was overridden by her “schedule driven” nature, and Todd and Lydia are way out of their depths in trying to fool the master deceiver. The act-out image of her pouring Stevia into her tea is a bit too obvious in signaling the presence of the ricin, but I think that will play better without so much time between episodes to hypothesize who might be the recipient of the long anticipated poison.

While Walt’s mission to destroy the remnants of his business occupy the bulk of the episode’s plot, its emotional centerpiece is his meeting with Skyler. As always, Cranston and Anna Gunn make the scene crackle, conveying the both the bonds and fissures between the two characters that make their final goodbye neither reconciliation nor retribution. He visits her as one of his more selfless acts we have seen. He has no illusions that he’ll resolve things or get her back on his side; he simply wants to give her two things. First, the coordinates for Hank and Gomie’s grave, offered to provide closure to Marie and others, as well as assuaging Walt’s guilt over this one act of violence he caused but could not stop. Second, the closest he’ll ever come to an apology—after starting like a typical rationalization about “the things I’ve done” that Skyler rightly attacks him as another deceptive rationalization about family, Walt finally admits the truth. “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was alive.” This is not easy for Walt to say; it is his most brutal penance, having to admit his own selfishness to both his wife and himself. But in the end, Skyler returns the favor with the gift of a final moment with Holly, the child that Walt used as a bargaining chip the last time they spoke, as she remembers the part of him that still loved his children despite his abusive treatment of them. And Walt takes his own moment to observe Flynn from afar, looking at a child who rightly despises him, but he still loves. When I look back on this finale, this will be the scene I replay in my mind.

Of course the episode and series climax is the final confrontation. I fully believe that Walt intends to kill Jesse alongside the Nazis, as he fully believes that his protege has both betrayed him and stolen his formula—and based on Badger’s testimony, the student has surpassed the teacher. Many fans were speculating that Walt sought to “save Jesse,” but up until he sees his former partner in chained servitude, Jesse is an equal target of his wrath. Yet again, Cranston conveys Walt’s emotional shifts wordlessly, as he devises a plan to spare Jesse from his robo-gun once he sees that Jesse is yet again a victim of men with larger egos and more malice than him. While this final confrontation was a satisfying moment of Walt putting the monsters that he had unleashed back in the box, it was almost entirely suspense free. I never doubted that Walt would successfully kill the Nazis and spare Jesse, that he had poisoned Lydia, and that Jesse would not pull the trigger on Walt. These were the moral necessities of a well-crafted tale; Breaking Bad was done playing games with twists and surprises, but ready to allow Walt to sacrifice himself to put down the monsters he had unleashed. Yet the scene was constructed to create suspense with the potential that Walt might not get the remote control in time, creating a rare moment of failed tension in the series—I awaited and anticipated the emotional confrontation between Walt and Jesse without ever doubting the outcome or tension about what might happen.

The “how it happened” was quite satisfying, however. I saw the robo-gun as an homage to one of my favorite Breaking Bad scenes: in “Four Days Out” when Jesse thinks Walt is building a robot to engineer their rescue. This time he does, and it works in an appropriately macabre and darkly funny payoff: the excessive gunfire mirrors Walt’s frequent insistence to maximize his inventions (as with the overpowered magnets, insistence to capture every last drop of methylamine, etc.), and it keeps firing blanks as Kenny’s body receives an endless massage. Although Jesse is no cold-blooded killer, killing Todd was a line he was happy to cross in payback for months of torture and Todd’s own heartless killings of Drew Sharp and Andrea. However when given a chance to kill Walt, Jesse takes a pass; instead he forces Walt to admit that Jesse killing him is what he wants, and then denies him that pleasure. When Jesse sees that Walt was shot, Jesse thinks leaving him to die alone is what Walt deserves, especially given what happened with Jane.

What Walt deserves matters in Breaking Bad. I’m reminded of an important scene in the penultimate episode of The Wire, when one character wonders why another has plotted to kill him, asking what he’s done to deserve it (keeping names vague if you haven’t seen it). The would-be killer’s reply quotes the film Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” But on Breaking Bad, deserve’s got everything to do with it, as it has always been a tale of morality and consequences. Jesse deserves his freedom, even though he is a broken-down shell of who he was—and while we want to know what’s next for him, I’m content with the openness that allows me to imagine him driving to Alaska and becoming a carpenter, perhaps after rescuing Brock and Lydia’s daughter from orphanhood.

Walt deserves to die, and we deserve to see it. The final musical cue in a series that excelled at their use was Badfinger’s “Baby Blue,” another classic like “Crystal Blue Persuasion” that the producers have probably been hanging onto for years. The opening line of the song is as essential as the color-specific romance: “Guess I got what I deserve.” In this final glorious sequence, Walt gets to die in the lab, as the music sings a love song to chemistry—which in this context, serves as an ode to his own talents in perfecting the Baby Blue. His tour around the lab has prompted some debate as to what Walt is doing: is he strategically leaving his bloody fingerprints to claim ownership, a sort-of turf-claiming mark of Heisenberg Was Here? I think not, but rather that Walt is admiring the precision and craft of the lab, both as a testament to his own pedagogical prowess that yielded Jesse’s talents, and as his natural habitat where he “felt alive,” as he told Skyler earlier. To the soundtrack romanticizing Walt’s own greatness, it’s a final moment of pride and arrogance that he seizes to overshadow all the carnage he has caused, an acceptance that more than his family, he did it for the chemistry.

“Felina” is far from Breaking Bad’s best episode, but it is the conclusion that the series and its viewers deserve. I think it will play even better both for viewers bingeing the season in quick succession and upon rewatch without the trappings of anticipation, hype, and suspense. Jesse escapes, Skyler and her family survive, and Walt and his one-time minions die. It all happens with less emotion and drama than what we’ve come to expect from the series, but given the strain of the journey up to this point, we’re as emotionally drained as the characters. So a low-key bloodbath is an appropriate way to exit this wonderful trip.

Random Bullets Fired By a Garage Door Opener:

• I was disappointed that the highly Walt-centric finale denied Jesse and Marie much time to shine. Marie’s phone call with Skyler was effective in showing that unlike her sister, Marie was starting to rebuild her life and family after tragedy. And Jesse’s woodworking fantasy was yet another reminder of how broken the poor guy has become. But I wanted more of both.

• The worst moment in the finale for me was the replay of Hank’s first suggestion about the profitable industry of cooking meth at Walt’s 50th birthday party from the series pilot. I understand that Hank’s presence was needed in this final episode, and calling back to the parallel birthday and origin story was a neat way to do it. But the use of the footage seemed forced and out-of-place within the series’s intrinsic norms—not to mention that the footage looked so different next the richer visual palette established from the second season onward. I wish they could have accomplished these goals by actually filming a new scene from the initial moments in the story, much like the opening sequence of “Ozymandias” fills in a narrative gap from the pilot.
• Directed by Vince Gilligan, the episode was compositionally exquisite, with lovely framings via windows and doorways conveying distance and divides. And the slow pull-in at Skyler’s apartment to reveal Walt was one of my favorite shots in a series full of visual beauty.
• Todd’s ringtone for the win.
• One last time, let me thank Taylor Cole Miller for late-night image gathering for these posts and troubleshooting technical issues at a moment’s notice. It’s been fun writing these reviews, but I’m ready for a calmer Monday morning next week!

Paratext of the Week:
So many to choose from! I could go for this great satire of Skyler-hating, or the compilation videos of Walt’s lies or Jesse’s abuse. But instead I’ll opt for the sentimental with this tribute to the people who made the series, and clearly had a great deal of fun telling a pitch black story.

“Granite State” was an unusually structured episode—even though it was an extra 15 minutes long, it still felt oddly compressed and limited. We got ample time to be told the limits on Walt’s exiled existence, but no time to really experience what life might be like for him. With a larger episode order, we might have gotten an episode that served as the parallel to “Fly,” with Walt trapped in a wide-open space and no sidekick to spar with—imagine a really dark remake of Castaway. But what I liked best about the structure was how we got to experience the publicity frenzy over the Hunt for Heisenberg solely from Walt’s highly limited perspective of monthly newspaper clippings. Now that Hank is gone, we have no hook into law enforcement’s perspective, so we’re left only with Walt’s disorienting confusion in being unable to play mouse to the DEA’s cats. This meant that we fast forwarded through a few months without much knowledge of Skyler or Marie’s situation, which I missed, but it works well to convey Walt’s lack of knowledge and sense of total helplessness and isolation. It’s all almost enough to make you feel bad for the poor bastard.

Almost. When he finally does get the wherewithal to leave his compound to send his family a package of money, Walt flexes his old manipulative cleverness to call Flynn and arrange the delivery. But in a cathartic scene, Flynn tells his father where to stick his money and puffed up rationalizations about doing it all for the family; this pushback highlights how Saul’s sage advice that turning himself in would have actually been a much better deal for Skyler and the kids, but of course such conventional defeat is unacceptable to Walt. Again, R.J. Mitte gets some meaty action in these final episodes, offering the world’s most justified petulant teenager rant against a parent.

Walt follows this familial rebuke with his first television viewing in months—which coincidentally includes Charlie Rose interviewing his former business partners Elliot and Gretchen. I’ll forgive this contrivance, as I was just so happy to see them return as a reminder of what has long fueled Walt’s quest to build an empire: spite, retribution, and pride. The television presents a string of slights that pick at the scabs of his emotional wounds: his contributions to Gray Matters being presented as “no more and no less” than the company name, Gretchen saying that Walter White is gone and replaced by some monster, and word that Heisenberg Blue is still on the streets and therefore Jesse is probably alive and sullying his reputation. And such whiskey shots of humiliation, served neat, are enough to provoke Heisenberg to return to action, connecting the dots to the flashbacks and setting the endgame in motion for the final episode.

Of course Jesse is alive, but just barely. I was disappointed in Jesse’s storyline this week, where he is being tortured even more by the writers than by his Nazi captors. I will reserve judgment until next week, as it feels like the calamities are piling up to create a glorious payoff of redemption for poor Jesse (please please please!), but pretty much every episode this half-season could be summed up by repeating “poor Jesse” endlessly. Watching Todd gun down Andrea (although it wasn’t personal, he assures her!) as a punishment for his attempted escape was simply the latest and worst way that his sensitive soul was ripped apart for other people to manipulate him. Poor, poor Jesse.

The other main criticism of this season is that too much time has been spent with Todd, Lydia, and Jack’s gang, but I found this episode paid off those arcs remarkably well. Ever since Walt killed Mike and took over sole control of the business, Walt found himself allied with far worse colleagues than Mike, Jesse, Gus, Gale, or maybe even Tuco. When Walt retired from his drug empire, his former colleagues came to embody the worst elements of Heisenberg: Todd is distilled, unremorseful menace in a polite candy coating, while Lydia is pure, uncut greed in high-strung heels, and the two together in the café was just a sociopathic delight. For someone obsessed with chemical purity, Walt always had emotional soft spots that could cloud his judgment and actions; Lydia, Todd, and their band of neo-Nazis are pure in their determination, focus, and actions, emerging as the refined amoral byproduct of Walt’s personal chemical transformation that he fails to control in the final season. Lydia’s quest to continue the business because no amount of money is ever enough is the same logic that led to Walt’s storage locker full of cash. Todd and Jack’s belief in White Supremacy is the legacy of Walter White’s supremacy—they reek havoc on his family through the chilling scene where Todd threatens Holly as a sociopathic extension of Walt’s own use of Holly as a bargaining chip last week, and destroy his extended surrogate family through the torture of Jesse and murder of Andrea. These are the forces that Walt unleashed that he cannot control, at least not without a machine gun.

The introduction of these bigger bads in the final season could be setting up a huge copout, where Walter redeems himself by killing the monsters that he conjured. But I’m hopeful that the series knows how unredeemable Walt is, and refuses the easy path toward a moral realization—and the reemergence of Elliot and Gretchen is a good clue that the scores Walt hopes to settle are not the same that the audience might be rooting for.

I left “Ozymandias” ready for Breaking Bad to end, feeling that two more hours of emotional torture was more than enough. Now with only one episode left, I’m nervous about how this might all wrap-up in a way that justifies the series that I feel I’ve been watching. Of course every one of the program’s season finales thus far has been brilliant (save for the unintended finale of strike-shortened season one), so I have faith that the set-up will be paid off in unexpected but rewarding ways. Yet a little nagging doubt remains, leaving me to stew for a week as I think about who might be the target of Walt’s arsenal of machine gun and ricin, and what fate I hope befalls this horrible man. See you then.

Random Packages of Ensure™:

• In addition to Elliot and Gretchen’s much appreciated return, which I had half been expecting (although not with Charlie Rose), the surprise curtain call of the episode was Carmen, the Assistant Principal whom Walt awkwardly attempted to kiss back in the third season. While she didn’t get anything to do, it’s always nice to be reminded that regular people still exist in this world.
• Skyler, as played ferociously by Emmy Winner (!!!) Anna Gunn, had little to do this episode, again confined to the role of reacting to other people’s prompts. With the police, she was stuck with no way out of the numb, disorienting hole that Walt dug for her. In the episode’s most disturbing scene, Todd’s threats to Holly raised her hackles, but she was forced to parrot his demands to back her into even more of a corner. I do hope that the finale offers Skyler one last moment of agency, as she has earned more than perpetual victimhood.
• Wouldn’t you love to see a scene between (should-have-been Emmy Winner) Jonathan Banks and Forster, two old pros sitting at the bar comparing notes on what a rancid piece of shit that Walter White is?
• “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium? Two copies.”
• One of the most pleasurable moments in this season came at the end of the episode, as the musical cue incorporates Breaking Bad’s theme music as the cops search for Walt in the bar. The moment evokes the mood of a full-tilt Western crime caper, but also reflexively calls our attention to the series itself, coming to an end in a climactic moment signaled by the familiar sounds of slide guitar.
• – Like many viewers, I toggled between Breaking Bad and the Emmys last night. While Banks was robbed and Michelle MacLaren was unduly denied by David Fincher’s big cinematic reputation, Anna Gunn’s win was so deserved as a validation for how much she has suffered as both a character and actress. And the joy of the whole team accepting the long overdue recognition of the series as television’s Best Drama helped buffer the sorrow inflicted by “Granite State.”

Paratext of the Week:
My favorite bit of Breaking Bad criticism this week was Todd VanDerWerff’s piece on the show’s racial politics, articulating what I have long argued: the series is about white male privilege, not simply reiterating it. I’d even take it a step further by emphasizing how the character names (White and Pinkman) highlight their typically unmarked racial identity, and that the result of Walt’s selfishness is fueling white supremacy, but it’s great to see such analysis in a high-profile site like Salon.

And for a more upbeat way to end, Hank lives!

One of the greatest, and truly unique, strengths of serial storytelling is the use of time to build anticipation. This week’s episode harvests so many narrative seeds that were planted years ago, but the emotional fruit that they yield went far beyond my expectations. Thus I spent the entire episode with my hand over my mouth, with my gut in my throat, and with an ever escalating sense of skepticism that things could get any worse. A bit of anecdotal evidence of how much this episode floored me: I buffer everything on my TiVo to fast-forward through ads, but three times in “Ozymandias,” my wife and I sat through the muted commercials just to give us time to recover before the next act began.

I have been waiting for years to see Skyler stand up to Walt (with a knife in hand!), for Flynn (whom I assume outright refuses to be called Walt Jr.) to learn about his father’s crimes, and for Jesse to discover the truth about Jane’s death. I’d played through the dramatic possibilities of these moments in my head, and never came close to the powerful triple punch this episode delivered, with many other unexpected harrowing moments layered on top of them. As I joked on Twitter, this episode felt like encountering a dementor, and I did eat some chocolate to recover.

The first harrowing moment was the most expected: the aftermath of the shootout leaving Hank as a dead man, not-walking. Hank knows his fate, Jack knows his fate, only Walt thinks he can reason, rationalize, and lie his way out of it. But as we have witnessed for six years, Walt makes decisions that he believes will offer short-term expediency, but come bundled with unavoidable consequences. When he first allied with Jack’s White Power army, he let loose a force of pure criminal malevolence, showing no concern for pragmatism or compromise. So when Jack does what Jack does, Walt collapses under the realization that he has been dragged across yet another moral line by directly causing the death of a family member. As he lies there while Heisenberg’s buried treasure is unearthed, he abandons the ruse of rationalizing pseudo-morality that he’s just trying to protect his family, and internally says what Jesse proclaimed back in season 3: “I’m the bad guy.”

This unapologetic craven selfishness manifests itself by topping Jesse’s spit-in-the-face from last episode with an even bigger projectile: “I watched Jane die. I was there and I watched her die. I watched her overdose and choke to death. I could have saved her. But I didn’t.” Unlike nearly every other act of evil we’ve watched Walt commit, this confession has no underlying rationalization. It is said simply out of spite: to show Jesse that Walt had betrayed him long before Jesse became a rat, to restore Walt’s upper hand, to make Jesse hurt. In a season (well, really a series) dedicated to Walt topping each evil action with yet another, this is near the peak of Walt’s fuckery, spiteful and petty with no strategic reward.

Jack has enough of a soft-spot for Todd to let Walt live and get a cut of his own treasure, leaving him to yet another caper in the desert that calls back to previous adventures like in “Four Days Out.” Meanwhile, Marie’s visit to the car wash shows off another pair of Breaking Bad’s strengths. First, it never forgets to ask how other characters might be reacting to the main action—lesser shows might keep the focus on Walt and Jesse, not mining the possibilities of the extended family’s involvement in the drama. Second, the series is expert at exploiting narrative knowledge differentials between characters and viewers. As Marie tells Skyler that Hank has arrested Walt, we squirm in agony knowing what has really happened, at the same time feeling so much empathy for Marie trying to make amends with her sister and restore the family—and anticipating her grief and anger upon learning the truth. This scene is exquisite in delivering the sincere family melodrama that Breaking Bad has always incorporated into its mixture of violent crime drama and pitch black comedy.

Marie’s insistence that Skyler tells Flynn is a brilliant bit of plotting, a development I’d never anticipated, but one that makes complete sense in terms of character motivation. While R.J. Mitte is often dismissed as a weak link in an ensemble of brilliant actors, his performance here is excellent, capturing the teenage anger and outrage toward his mother lying to him, and confusion inherent in having such a story dumped on him in such short order. As we watch them drive home, we know that they soon will face the revelation of Walt’s freedom and Hank’s absence, but are still emotionally invested in their attempt to regroup as a family.

And then the fight. Last week’s desert standoff and shootout felt like the series climax, but the scene in the White’s home might be the most emotionally harrowing moment of a series specializing in harrow. Walt’s lying mojo has dried up, so all he has left is to assert his patriarchal power as the head of his household. Once he realizes that Flynn knows, all he can do is try to gain control by asserting that everything will be alright if only they just follow him. Skyler’s approach to the counter, posing the visual question of “knife or phone?”, is a brilliant moment of filmmaking from director Rian Johnson, about whom not enough praise can be said. The entire fight is just emotional torture, with Skyler finally confronting Walt with the violence he deserves, with Flynn making the leap from disbelief to aggressively defending his mother against the monster of the house, and with Walt’s impulsive trump card by abducting the one family member who doesn’t despise him (yet). The scene reminds me of the wonderful cult-classic film The Stepfather, where the horror of patriarchy becomes literally embodied by Terry O’Quinn—how much would you pay for Rian Johnson to remake that film with Cranston?

After regrouping during the ad break, I wondered how the last 10 minutes might approach the exquisite agony of the first 50, but the next sequence matched those heights. It’s hard to steal a scene from Bryan Cranston, but Elanor Anne Wenrich, the very young actress playing Holly, manages to do it. Of course, Cranston (who I’ve heard is renowned for being amazing at working with children) makes every “mama” meaningful in his reaction, as any illusions that he might escape into a fresh start with Holly get submerged into a stew of guilt and longing. As is so often the case on Breaking Bad, the program’s best lines are those that are left unspoken in Walt’s internal monologue.

Which leads to what may be the most complex scene yet featured on the series. Walt phones Skyler to berate her for betraying him, for telling Flynn, for standing up to him with a knife—his rage call is pure Heisenberg id, fuming about the lack of respect he has been given and blaming others for the trouble he has only brought upon himself. He is also calling to exonerate her, to offer the police evidence that he is the monster and she is just the victim of his abusive bullying—it is a parting gift to Skyler that he hopes will allow her to live free while he escapes to die alone in New Hampshire. He is also calling to implicate the viewers, showing us the monster that we have been rooting for (at least up to a point), and particularly portraying the ugliness and bile frequently spouted by the Skyler-hating contingent of Breaking Bad fans—the series is saying, “this is what you sound like,” with as much strong condemnation possible without going so far as to break the illusion of fiction.

What is truly amazing about this scene is how these different layers of meaning can be perceived by different viewers. In my first viewing, I mostly saw the evil Heisenberg letting loose months of resentment and contempt, and the meta-commentary by the series itself in indicting those who have called Skyler a “stupid bitch.” This is what I wanted to see, validating my own interpretations of the series as serial melodrama, rebuking the Skyler hating that I have looked at with disgust, and proving the pure evil in Walt’s heart. It was only via Twitter conversation with my friend Nina Huntemann that I began to seriously consider Walt’s underlying strategy to save Skyler, as I was too consumed by my loathing to consider Walt’s motivations charitably. But just because his call was strategic—and rewatching the final act confirms that interpretation to me, via Cranston’s brilliant performance of subtly letting us in on his internal monologue—doesn’t make what he is saying untrue. Walt’s greatest lies have always been built on truth, and here he does resent Skyler’s judgments, her lack of respect and gratitude, and her decision to tell Flynn; he hates and blames her even as he is trying to apologize and save her. And the series is still condemning the Skyler-hating, even as it represents it via performative, melodramatic excess. It is all these things at once, paying off so many long-planted seeds in a sequence that still makes me anxious after rewatching it four times.

The most recent seed is planted in the episode’s teaser, with Walt’s phone call to Skyler in a flashback to the series pilot with his first cook. Upon first watch, the teaser seemed to be a nice if underwhelming callback to the series origins, highlighting the parallel use of location between past and present. But upon reconsideration, it is clear how much the teaser sets up the thematic and emotional weight of the final sequence—even the image of Skyler choosing between the knife and phone is prefigured, here selecting the innocuous way to communicate with her husband. Back when Walt had to coach himself on his lies, when Skyler was still obsessed with eBay, there was a casual lightness in their affection—rewatching the opening, Skyler’s tossed off “hey you” moves me as a encapsulation of all their love that will be lost. Walt’s not a good liar yet, but Skyler’s bullshit meter is still stored away, so she’s happy to accept him at face value. When Walt suggests they take some family time together, he means it—the cook is still the means to that end, not the end itself. He’ll go on to do horrible, unspeakable acts, some of which he speaks in this episode, but his partnership with Skyler always functioned as an ideal image in his mind as what he was cooking for, willing to sell his soul to protect.

And those memories, which might as well have been Walt’s own recollections while lying in the aftermath of the To’hajiilee shootout, make the final phone call all the more agonizing. Now Walt can only express his love through lies, horrible abusive lies that speak truth about his anger and hostility toward his wife, his family, and himself. The genius of Breaking Bad and Bryan Cranston’s performance is that he is both the man and monster simultaneously, the family man desperate to find the way out of his predicament and the bitter fallen emperor blaming his partner, his family, and his “stupid bitch” of a wife. Walt both loves and hates his wife, and himself, and expresses all of this at the same time. None of this forgives or exonerates him, and I come away from this episode despising Walt more than ever. But it does explain him, and I feel like I know him more intensely than ever before, despite already being the most deeply rendered fictional character I have ever encountered. And we all get to spend two more hours with him.

Random Notes Pinned to Abandoned Babies:

• Poor, poor Jesse. First Walt sees his hiding place, then he learns that his mentor had effectively killed his beloved, then he is tortured and forced to be Psycho Todd’s meth monkey. I fully expect next episode to heap new agony upon poor Jesse, but in true melodramatic form, his suffering will lead to a triumph. (I hope.)
• Hank’s death was arguably the least dramatic event of the episode, as it truly was inevitable that neither he nor Gomie could get out alive. He got to live his own moment of triumph last week, dying on his own terms rather than forced out of the DEA in scandal. I’ll pour out a bottle of Schraderbrau in memorium.
• Lots of meta-moments abound this week, from the teaser callback to the pilot, to the embedded commentary on Skyler hate. But one Easter Egg moment someone caught and shared on Twitter was while Walt was rolling the barrel through the desert, he passed his long abandoned pants that were discarded in the pilot episode.
• Just a final shootout to Rian Johnson, who directs emotional confrontations as well as anyone working today, and writer Moira Walley-Beckett, one of Breaking Bad’s long-time writer/producers who has scripted so many gems along the way. This was certainly her finest yet, and quite probably the best episode of the series, as Vince Gilligan had teased. It’s all down hill from here.

Paratext of the Week:

We need something fun this week, so here’s a double-shot. First, a knock-off Lego version of the Super Lab, which I would love to own—except that my Lego-obsessed son named Walter does not need such inspiration. Second, Jimmy Fallon did a must-watch parody/homage last week. Enjoy!

This week’s Breaking Bad ends the conversation by putting some explosive Nazis under the table. Of course, Hitchcock never worked in serials, where we have to wait a week to see who actually gets blown up.

The desert scene offers moments that many of us have been waiting for. Jesse trips Walt up on his own ego, getting him to confess to murders as a way to boast how much Walt has done for Jesse (Hank & Gomie were recording that call, right?). Hank achieves his ultimate goal: slapping the handcuffs on Heisenberg, and even calling Marie to celebrate. Walt finally must face his reckoning, not only getting caught but being schooled by the two allies he always felt were easiest to manipulate; he sheds a single tear over being shamed, for being outsmarted with no way out, for having no more lies to spin.

But of course, it’s Breaking Bad, so it’s not that simple. The final 20 minutes of “To’hajiilee” might be as good as any sequence the series has ever aired, and may be revealed as the series climax. As soon as Walt gets the photo from Jesse, he stops having an A1 day and all the main threads from this season get tied together in a messy knot: the buried money, Hank and Jesse’s dual attempts to take down Heisenberg, Saul’s culpability in helping Walt, Todd and his Nazi army. Even though he tells Uncle Jack not to come, we know better, both because we know from the flash-forwards that Walt does not go to jail, and because you don’t introduce a white supremacist militia just to tell them to stay home. Bryan Cranston’s delivery in calling off the hit on Jesse is so insistent that we believe Walt, but overlaid with tense anger that I certainly believe Jack would interpret as the lies of a man being held at gunpoint. So we watch Walt in bracelets knowing that this will not end well, anticipating a violent stand-off to come.

And when it comes, the scene gives Michelle MacLaren a curtain call, as this is the last of the 11 episodes that she directed. I fully expect and hope that in ten years, one of the ways Breaking Bad will be best remembered is as the show that launched MacLaren’s directorial career, as she shoots both high-tension action and emotional reckoning as well as anyone in the industry. She has helmed some of the most explosive and emotionally wrenching episodes in the series, including “One Minute,” “Four Days Out,” “Madrigal,” “Salud,” and “Gliding Over All,” but this episode’s final sequence might be her greatest moment yet. If there is any justice, she will be directing major Hollywood action films soon enough—personally, I’d love to see her version of a Western, as she has a way of making the mundane feel epic and confrontations feel massive.

What is so effective about the final scene is how everything builds in the anticipation. The actual shoot-out only lasts for 45 seconds, but it feels weighty because of how much time we spend waiting for it, with the tension drawn out via Hank’s deliberate process of putting Walt into custody, and everyone’s excruciating hesitations in firing the first shot. Second only to MacLaren’s directorial work here is Dave Porter’s score throughout the episode, which creates so much of the program’s tension and unease, a tone that is heightened through the contrast to the brilliant use of silence. Porter’s work throughout the series is an unheralded secret weapon, effective because of its moderate use and willingness to let a scene play without music to make the moody score stand out when it is used.

I haven’t really discussed the plot so far, as it’s pretty straightforward in its drive toward the ending. Unlike my prediction from last week, Jesse has no master plan to undercut Walt’s pride, but feels like attacking his money to lure him into a trap is a safer bet than walking into a meeting on Walt’s terms. Todd’s crew needs Walt’s chemistry more than his money, so Walt’s phone call gives Jack an upper hand to bring Walt back into the lab. While their house is still being repaired, Skyler aims for some normalcy by getting Junior to work at the car wash. And that’s about it—everything leads to the final scene, lulled into a tense but languid pace for the episode’s first two thirds. Breaking Bad’s use of pace is one of its most remarkable features, as many of its greatest episodes light a slow burning fuse toward a climactic explosion. Its rhythms and structure remind me of many songs from my favorite band Wilco, especially as they perform them live; for instance, this performance of “The Art of Almost” lingers on an escalating, complex rhythmic groove only to explode into a chaotic wall of throbbing noise until stopping at an almost arbitrary peak. Listening to this performance captures the rhythm and feeling of “To’hajiilee” better than any plot recap could.

But unlike a Wilco song, Breaking Bad will continue after a week’s break that already feels interminable. The episode invites us to speculate who will survive the shoot-out, and play the game second-guessing expectations, conventions, and rule-breaking. When Hank gets to carry out his long awaited arrest of Heisenberg and then calls Marie, it feels like a dramaturgical death sentence, almost as much of a cliché as a cop catching his most dangerous case a week away from retirement. But when is the last time Breaking Bad played such a narrative convention straight? Vince Gilligan knows that we’ll think the episode signals Hank’s demise, so he’ll probably turn away from that convention. But he also knows that we know that he knows this, so maybe it will be a double-feint and Hank will actually die? Perhaps I’m over-thinking it after watching The Princess Bride with my kids a few days ago, but I really hope Gilligan finds the narrative equivalent of poisoning both of the goblets to outthink us all.

Random Organs in the Garbage Can:

• In my chapter about serial television endings, I discuss how often final seasons become more reflexive in their storytelling, commenting upon the series itself. While thus far Breaking Bad has not embraced the reflexivity of The Wire or Lost as I analyze there, it has used the common device of calling back to previous moments, images, and places. “To’hajiilee” explicitly references the pilot, both in Jesse’s comment that Walt buried the money in the precise place where the two of them first cooked, and with specific landscape shots to begin the episode’s final act that are identical to the landscape shots that start the pilot, albeit without ending with a slow-motion image of pants flying in the wind.
• Another one of this season’s meta-pleasures is scenes pairing characters who have never met before. Last episode it was Marie greeting Jesse with a cup of coffee in a DEA mug; this week, Junior becomes starstruck upon meeting Saul at the car wash. While his goofy grin offers some needed comic relief, it also reminds us how out of the loop Junior really is—how might he react if/when he learns that his loser dad is a criminal genius? Will he be around for such a moment?
• I must admit that I was frustrated to not see Jesse’s end of the phone call while Walt raced to the desert, if only for his facial reaction to finally catching Heisenberg. Maybe the series will continue the temporal layering its been using this season, starting next episode with Jesse, Hank and Gomie’s perspective on laying the trap? And while they’re at it, maybe we’ll see Hank put on a bulletproof vest, echoing Saul’s preventative measures? Fingers crossed.
• Huell got a nice moment, getting played by Hank but not in a way that made him seem like an idiot. Huell’s freakout upon seeing Jesse’s dead image reminds us that in the criminal world, there are different levels of cold-blooded and violent, and Huell is really a low-level muscle and pick-pocket man, not a murderer.
• Amazingly, I almost forget this week’s installment of “The Unthinkable Fuckery of Walter White,” where he visits Andrea and Brock to set a trap for Jesse. I have to think that even if Hank hadn’t intercepted Andrea’s call, Jesse would be wise enough to see it as a trap. The knowing looks Brock gives Walt suggest that he can smell the stench of inhumanity coming off his erstwhile poisoner. I hope their brief appearance this week gives them a little curtain call, but that both Brock and Andrea stay out of range of the shrapnel going forward.
• This week was directed by series MVP MacLaren, and next episode comes from stellar guest star Rian Johnson, the feature film director behind the great Looper who helmed two of Breaking Bad’s most distinctive hours, “Fly” and “Fifty-One.” It’s called “Ozymandias” in reference to the Shelley poem about fallen empires and hollow reputations, which also anchored the season’s most memorable trailer. Are your expectations high enough yet?

Paratext of the Week:
I’ll use this space to plug the In Media Res week on Breaking Bad that starts today. I’m concluding the week with an entry on Friday, and I promise not to end with an abrupt cut to black.

Can an episode be simultaneously very good and disappointing? That’s what I was left feeling after “Rabid Dog,” especially coming down from last week’s phenomenal “Confessions.” There was nothing wrong with this latest installment, but it didn’t quite hit the heights of stunning surprises, character depth, and visual splendor that previous episodes had reached, making the episode a casualty of the season’s heightened expectations.

In large part, this letdown is because much of the action takes characters to places they had previously seemed to be going. At the end of “Buried,” we anticipated that Jesse and Hank would team up against Walt, and “Confessions” delightfully thwarted those expectations. In “Rabid Dog,” we arrive at that pairing, with the surprising reveal that Hank interrupted Jesse’s attempted arson and took on a new house guest. We knew from the flash forward in “Blood Money” that Walt’s house was not burned down, so the real suspense was how and why Jesse failed to light the fire. The reveal of Hank’s intervention was well done, effectively built up through the previous scenes where Walt and Saul could not find Jesse. But even though Jesse’s emotional journey provided better motivation, in the end we got Jesse’s confession to Hank just as we’d been expecting in the previous episode.

Breaking Bad has always been exceptional at playing with pace while maintaining momentum. There are episodes in early seasons 3 and 4 that felt slow and some fans complained that nothing happened, but I always felt the momentum building from episode to episode no matter the varying pace—slow and deliberate moments and even episodes usually feel linked into something larger. I’m sure “Rabid Dog” will feel more focused and driven upon re-watch, but on my first watch, I felt like it was a bit too much piece moving and delaying inevitable confrontations, lacking sufficient narrative progress.

As always, individual moments are quite enjoyable and provide many of the pleasures we’ve come to expect from the series. Walt’s failed attempts to clean-up the gasoline, and then deciding to lean into the deception are a nice callback to his ass-covering scrambling from earlier in the series, back when Skyler was slightly suspicious rather than fully attuned to his particular bullshit frequency. I enjoyed Junior finally calling Walt on his bullshittery, although of course the “truth” that he’d imagined was cancer-related rather than a vengeance-seeking arson attempt from his father’s discarded protégé and surrogate son.

We also finally meet Marie’s much-touted therapist Dave, who seems to be pretty unhelpful to Marie, but useful for us to hear of her attempts to plot Walt’s death by untraceable poison, making her another candidate to use (or ingest) the ricin. I have enjoyed Marie’s increased prominence this season, finally getting into the A plot line as Hank’s primary ally and anti-Walt cheerleader. Likewise, seeing that Hank opened up to Gomie was a relief, making him less of a lone wolf in the DEA and hopefully helping to protect his reputation if his pursuit of Walt falters.

And then there are the two characters I care most about. Skyler had her moment in the hotel room, first calling Walt on his lies and forcing him into a rare moment of truth. But then she pressures him, like Saul, to put down the rabid dog, with the chilling question, “What’s one more?” I’m quite mixed on Skyler’s arc over the past few episodes—I buy that she sticks by Walt in the hope that his cancer cleans up the mess he created with as little trauma to the kids as possible. But I have always felt that her willingness to support him was based on limited knowledge of how horrible his actions truly were, how many lives he’d destroyed. Yet here she sees Jesse as just another casualty, and one that she is willing to actually demand rather than simply tolerate. As always with a highly serialized program like this, we cannot really assess a character’s arc like this midstream, but as of now I’m skeptical that her story will cohere as much as I’d thought it would a year ago.

As the title references, this episode is about Jesse, with virtually every scene either portraying or discussing him. Jesse’s arc from the beginning of last week, where his emotional numbness and contempt for what Walt had done to him did not override his loathing for Hank, to his willingness to testify against Mr. White, felt well earned. As he awakes at the Schrader’s Jesse finds himself in the familiar position of needing an older man to guide him forward. But just as Jesse has been let down by many men before him, Hank ultimately thinks of him as no more than a lever to open up his case against Heisenberg, content to sacrifice Jesse if it means catching Walt. And thus he’s willing to roll the dice by wiring up Jesse and sending him into a parlay at the plaza with Walt that looks like a scene from a 1970s paranoid thriller.

What I found most disappointing was how Jesse backed out of the meeting—not that he backed out, but how his reluctance was triggered by mistakenly assuming that a bald muscly dude was Walt’s bald muscly dude. There’s an often repeated maxim about effective dramatic writing that coincidences should be avoided if they help the protagonist, but they can work if they hinder the hero. At this point in the story, Jesse is Breaking Bad’s protagonist, the character capturing my moral allegiance (especially now that Skyler has embraced her “by any means necessary” philosophy), so the coincidence with the bald bystander feels too neat to inspire Jesse to take the lead in his partnership with Hank. The moment where the bald dude greets his daughter to highlight the coincidence was a bit too cute in feinting that he was Walt’s muscle, underscoring the clunky coincidence.

Of course, we still do not know whether Jesse would have been better off meeting Walt and recording the conversation. His turnaround does inspire Walt to call for the services of Todd’s uncle, so that cannot be good news for Jesse. But Jesse taking control of the plan from Hank seems like it should lead to a better outcome than the wire would—Jesse has proven himself as a successful idea man in recent capers, such as the magnets and train siphoning, so I have no doubt that Jesse does know how to catch Walt better than Hank does (see below for my hypothesis on what that plan might be). Every other character sees Jesse as a disposable pawn in their games, and even Walt finally has seemed to give up on him by calling Todd, so Jesse taking over the game feels like a real win for him. And thus the episode ends in a showdown that it felt like we’d been going for awhile: Team White, with a neo-Nazi army at his back, vs. Team Pinkman, backed by a renegade lawman and his poison-Googling wife. My money is on the rabid dog.

Random Pieces of Gasoline-Soaked Clothing:

• Saul gets the line of the night: “Let’s say that, just for the sake of argument, the kid’s not in the mood for a nuanced discussion of the virtues of child poisoning. His plans are running more toward stabbing you to death with a pointed stick.”
• After a string of perfectly-directed episodes, this one felt a little less compellingly paced and shot (by writer Sam Catlin). Overall, the visuals were not noteworthy, aside from nice use of hallways in both the White and Schrader homes. Again, this episode is probably more visually vibrant and tautly-directed than anything else on television this week, but Breaking Bad’s track record sets a very high bar for itself.
• Fans have taken note that Deadwood was seen on Hank’s bookshelf. Remembering that Anna Gunn was featured on that series, can we imagine what Hank and Marie thought of Martha Bullock?
• While Walt’s scheming brilliance peaked with last week’s video, this week he seemed more flustered, as reacting to Jesse weakens his abilities. If Heisenberg were on top of his game, I think Walt would have reacted to the gasoline-soaked house by dropping a match—not only would it cover up an unexplainable situation, but it would allow Walt to upgrade his house to a more fitting castle for an emperor.
• The episode ends with Jesse telling Hank that he knows how to catch Walt where he lives. I have a theory about what that plan might be—skip ahead if you don’t want to read such speculation. Jesse knows that Walt’s real motivation is to be an emperor, feeding his ego off the legend of Heisenberg. So if Hank arrests Jesse and publicly declares that this ne’er-do-well kid is the almighty Heisenberg, Walt’s ego might not be willing to take a backseat to his protégé. Of course, I can’t quite see how that would play out exactly, but I’ve long learned not to try to outthink or out-scheme Breaking Bad’s writers’ room.

Paratext of the Week:
Last week’s scene of Hank and Marie watching Walt’s fake confession video has spawned a lovely meme of “Hank & Marie Watch Horrible Things,” where fans edit other videos into the scene to prompt the Schrader’s disbelief. Variety highlights some examples, starting with the originating Miley Cyrus VMA clip and going on to other clips of both fictional and factual footage, but my favorite is a bit more meta: presumably Walt gives them the wrong DVD, letting them witness a mortifying moment of Walt’s younger days (courtesy of Malcolm in the Middle):

1) The NFL season kicks off this week, but the organization has been in the news for less-positive reasons as of late. First, ESPN cut ties on an upcoming collaboration with PBS’ Frontline for a special investigating concussions (“League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis”) after allegedly bowing to pressure from the NFL, an accusation ESPN denies. The special was meant to include ESPN images and logos in a co-branded production. While it is not clear exactly why ESPN pulled out, though ESPN president John Skipper claims his viewing of a promotional trailer that appeared “sensational” made him turn sour on the deal. PBS plans to move forward with the special, condensing the two-part series into a single broadcast backed by a massive media blitz. While the NFL can deny involvement in ESPN’s decision, they cannot deny the recent $765 million settlement to thousands of former players over long-lasting injuries (including Alzheimer’s, dementia, and encephalopathy) caused by concussions. The agreement avoids the hassle of addressing all the individual claims, but may set a wide-reaching precedent for future lawsuits against them or in other sports.

2) Turning to what I’m calling the “Story of the Summer,” Time Warner and CBS are still fighting over retransmission fees, with the CBS blackout in three major markets lasting over a month hurting consumer perception of both brands. In the meantime, CBS has extended its deal with Verizon’s FiOS, with CBS CEO Les Moonves claiming Time Warner Cable has been offered and rejected a similar deal. There was a brief détente when Time Warner agreed to suspend the blackout in New York City for the airing of two high-profile political debates, making this the biggest news a comptroller debate has ever made (Thanks, Spitzer!). Both sides have taken strides to curry favor, with Time Warner offering a free preview of the Tennis Channel during the U.S. Open as well as offering free antennas, as well as providing a $20 credit through Best Buy to buy their own. CBS, on the other hand, has begun airing ads in the three major markets featuring NFL stars Peyton and Eli Manning emphasizing the lack of NFL coverage should the blackout continue. And if you are wondering what the FCC is doing, they have finally stepped up to help end the dispute in a limited capacity.

3) From the “Story of the Summer” to the unofficial “Song of the Summer” (though I give it to Daft Punk if only for the Stephen Colbert clip), Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” has come under attack from the estate of Marvin Gaye over the song’s similarities to “Got to Give it Up” and Funkadelic’s “Sexy Ways,” leading the song’s producers (Thicke, Pharrell, and T.I.) to file a pre-emptive lawsuit. Thicke’s side offered a six-figure settlement, which Gaye’s family allegedly declined. You can judge for yourself, with this YouTube mashup featuring a guy’s cat playing with fish:

4) Speaking of YouTube and copyright infringement, Lawrence Lessig has filed a lawsuit against Liberation Music Pty Ltd after a video of a lecture of his featuring a set of clips to the song “Lisztomania” by Phoenix was taken down from YouTube with the claim it violated Viacom’s license. The founder of Creative Commons is now fighting for the very thing his organization strives for: more open creative uses of licensed content.

5) Ok, one more music-based lawsuit. Satellite radio powerhouse SiriusXM is being sued for compensatory damages by SoundExchange (a nonprofit music royalty collector), alleging SiriusXM has been underpaying copyright owners, especially those from pre-1972 recordings. The suit claims between $50 million and $100 million in back payments. In a hilarious quote from SoundExchange’s attorney, he states, “This is serious. Pardon the pun.”

6) Another large lawsuit just ended, with the MPAA winning its copyright infringement case against cyberlocker Hotfile, a site that allows for the uploading, storing, and then downloading by other parties of copyrighted material. This looks to be a landmark case, as it is the first time a US court has held a cyberlocker like this accountable for copyright infringement.

7) In an update on the Fox Searchlight/intern lawsuit from a few months back, in which interns on the film Black Swan filed a class action suit for fair labor, Fox Searchlight has won the next battle, with the judge granting a limit on the time period others can join the suit, limiting the scale Fox will have to deal with and possibly pay/settle.

8) One last lawsuit, I swear. In this one the newly launched Al-Jazeera America is suing AT&T for not carrying the network for its U-Verse subscribers. Al-Jazeera America is claiming AT&T wrongfully terminated an existing contract that existed prior to Al-Jazeera’s purchase of Current TV possibly for religious reasons, with the high number of U-Verse subscribers in conservatives states in the South.

Because it is a slow news time, here are two silly stories to lighten the mood as summer unfortunately comes to an end.

9) Hopefully you have been following Jason Mittell’s weekly feature here on Antenna, Breaking Bad Breakdown. If so, you’d be happy to hear that after last week’s episode, the Mexican restaurant featured prominently in one scene (Garduno’s Dip) reports a surge in orders for table-side guacamole (It’s made in front of you!), due in no doubt to the server in the episode’s insistence upon its deliciousness.

10) In an update to our last edition’s story of Michael Jackson’s glove, which the US is currently suing for against the son of the dictator of Equitorial Guinea, I am pleased to report that while the case is far from over, the US will get to retain the glove during the trials proceedings. U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

None of those things happened in the episode. While it featured many confessions, none were what we would have expected based on the title. This is what Breaking Bad does better than any series I’ve ever watched: create expectations and completely undermine them with twists that are more satisfying, compelling, and “Holy Shit”-inducing than anything I could have imagined. The title, coupled with last week’s final scene, was a little bit of trickery for viewers, setting up these expectations just to have Jesse shut Hank down quickly, but I forgive the series for how it deceived me because what it delivered instead was just so gloriously, deviously unexpected.

There were a number of confessions in the episode, but few were “true confessions.” Obviously the centerpiece was Walt’s fake video confession, the follow-through to his “tread lightly” warning to Hank. In a series full of jaw-dropping, mind-boggling moments of Walt’s immoral acts of deception and cruelty, this felt like one of the biggest. Even though there was no threat of physical violence, the video was just so brutal in how it threw Hank under the bus for all of Walt’s misdeeds, even though Hank has already suffered endlessly at his brother-in-law’s hand. The video served as preemptive retribution for Hank just trying to do his job, rather than in reaction to any actual questionable acts or lapses in judgment. The video forces Marie to make her own confession about Walt and Skyler paying for the medical bills, layering another level of shame and complicity upon Hank, who calls it the final nail in his coffin. And on top of what it did to Hank and Marie, the video felt like an almost boastful assertion of Walt’s mad skills as a liar, showing off how much of an immoral bastard he is largely just to strut his stuff in front of his hyper-macho brother-in-law who just a year ago, made Walt feel like less of a man.

This scene is also quite reflexive and playful. The video itself calls back to Breaking Bad’s pilot, which opens with Walt stating his name and address in his first self-shot video. Hank and Marie stand unmoving in total shock and disbelief, functioning as audience stand-ins, certainly accurately capturing the emotional reactions experienced on my couch. While we have watched Walt’s lies and manipulations for years, Hank and Marie are only seeing his true talents for the first time—and yet I was still dumbfounded that Walt could be this cruel and callous to his family members. Walt’s confession functions as a counter-narrative for the series, spinning a tale of a corrupt cop and desperate chemist caught under his spell that is much more plausible to anyone who has not been on this serialized journey, highlighting the unlikeliness of Breaking Bad’s actual story. Making the scene even more powerful, Breaking Bad’s regular cinematographer Michael Slovis directed the hell out of the episode, creating tremendous visual dynamism out of a sequence featuring two people standing still watching another still person on a television screen.

Walt makes another confession in the episode as well, when he admits to Walt Jr. that his cancer has returned. In what might be the most subtle surprise of the episode, Walt manages to manipulate a family member to do what he wants—in this case, keeping Junior from going to Marie’s house—by actually telling the truth. Obviously it’s not the whole truth, but he leverages his cancer to draw in Junior using honest emotions and legitimate familial concerns, and then forces Junior to make the decision that he needed him to make without resorting to his standard repertoire of lies. Of course, at this point in Walt’s devolution, the difference between lies and truths has become completely moot, as he says whatever is necessary to get what he wants, whether it’s the reality of his cancer or the petty lies about the soda machine that Skyler couldn’t care less about.

Walt’s inability to distinguish between lying and speaking honestly comes out in the desert scene, as Walt tries to convince Jesse to call the vacuum salesman and reboot his life. In a highly gratifying moment, Jesse calls Walt on his bullshit, asking him to provide a moment free of manipulation and deception. Walt responds with silence and a hug, prompting awkward confusion from Jesse. The ambiguity of the hug suggests that Walt just doesn’t know what to say honestly, responding with a hug that is neither real nor fake—he still feels some fatherly affection toward Jesse, but also needs to convince him to leave town. And Jesse’s request for honesty of motives is the one confession that Walt can never make, either to others or himself. So he embraces Jesse in a moment that layers silence with affection, condescension, contrition, and an implied threat.

Less of a confession than another statement of partial truths and strategic emphasis, the tease portrays Todd telling his uncle Jack and Kenny about the train heist. By notably omitting the story’s coda of killing young Drew Sharp, along with Todd’s fannish phone message to Mr. White, we see Todd’s own self-delusions and attempts to frame his role as swaggering thief and chemist, not heartless murderer. Todd’s two scene were the episode’s only weak links, although I fully expect that they are laying ground for something major to come, and I hope they’ll play better upon rewatch.

And most significantly for what is to come, Saul confesses his role in manipulating Jesse when Walt poisoned Brock, triggering Jesse’s gasoline-soaking rampage in Walt’s house. There has been some doubting among fans and critics that Jesse would have put the pieces together from Huell pickpocketing the pot, but I find it completely plausible—Jesse has spent months obsessively mulling over his own actions and picking at the threads of Walt’s lies, so it only took one extra piece of evidence to put it all together about Brock’s poisoning. Jesse’s desert confrontation over Walt’s lies and his realization of what Walt did (or at least, some of it) function as self-confession, finally admitting to himself what a monster his former partner and mentor truly is. Plausibility in Breaking Bad is less about the plot logic of cause and effect, than the character logic of emotional experience and motivation, and in this way Jesse’s revelation feels fully justified.

The larger character implausibility for me is that Skyler would go along with Walt’s video deception, as it seems like a step too far in aggressively confronting Hank and Marie. The fact that we see her trying to process what they’ve done, experiencing the type of regrets and doubts that Walt has long moved beyond, allows me to accept this leap, at least contingently until we see how it plays out. While many are suggesting that Skyler is now Walt’s equal in evil-doing, I think she is far from that—she has obviously made immoral choices, but she clearly regrets them and, like Jesse, is stuck in her own head wondering where things went wrong and what she could do differently. This is the key difference between Walt and most other characters who have broken bad: Walt never looks back at his crimes with regret and guilt, making him much more like Todd than Jesse or Skyler.

Next week’s episode is called “Rabid Dog.” Since a season three episode was called “Problem Dog,” named after Jesse’s therapy metaphor for how he killed Gale, my expectation is that Jesse is the rabid dog that Walt will have to put down. But because it’s Breaking Bad, it’s more likely that an actual rabid dog breaks into the house and bites Walt Jr.

Random Mobile Phones in a Drawer:

• The dinner scene is a perfect encapsulation of Breaking Bad’s tonal juxtaposition of intense emotional drama and ironic humorous counterpoint. The cheery waiter pushing guacamole on the feuding, fuming Whites and Schraders was one of the most Coen Brothers-like moments in a series full of them.
• Marie telling Walt to kill himself was stone cold awesome.
• Based on the video scene, I want to see a remake of Videodrome with Bryan Cranston playing Brian O’Blivion.
• Maybe it’s just because I’ve recently written about this with Homeland, but part of me thinks that a video like Walt’s doesn’t get made without being shared with more people than just Hank and Marie. Call it Chekhov’s Confession.

Paratext of the Week:
It’s gotta be Anna Gunn’s New York Times editorial decrying the misogynist vitriol directed at Skyler, and often Gunn herself. I won’t get into it here, but I’ve written some about this Skyler hate and I’m planning on expanding and updating that discussion at next year’s SCMS conference. While you’re at it, critic Maureen Ryan’s discussion of Gunn’s piece and how it’s part of a larger issue with TV wives and women is a must-read as well.

The cold open doesn’t play much with time or narrative—although I suppose it rewinds a little from the end of “Blood Money” to Jesse’s nighttime door-to-door cash machine—but instead focuses on style and character. While we spend the first few minutes with a mystery man following Jesse’s lucrative breadcrumb trail, it’s all leading up to that final shot, with Jesse lying on the carousel numb, broken, and literally spinning inward out of control, fitting for a series that always seems to offer centripetal complexity by pulling each new event into the core of its characters. The overhead shot echoes the image of Jesse’s heroin experience, reminding us of everything he’s gone through since and how stuck on the ground he is now. Aaron Paul doesn’t speak a word in this episode, but his shattered presence in the bookending scenes sets the tone for the very downbeat and heavy drama throughout.

While last week it felt like the series would just fast-forward through Hank and Walt’s cat-and-mouse, rejoining Walt leaving Hank’s garage highlights how much the two still must do to capture or escape respectively, shot as a wild West showdown with a garage door opener as weapon. If “Blood Money” focused on Hank’s emotional reactions to uncovering Walt’s secret identity, “Buried” explores the ripple effect that this discovery has on Skyler and Marie. Hank gets to Skyler first, but misreads how to play her—one of Breaking Bad’s challenges is to keep track what each character knows about various secrets, and reminding the audience about these knowledge differentials. Skyler’s knowledge of Walt’s violence and deceit is more limited than Hank’s, but he has no idea how involved Skyler has become in the drug empire. The restaurant scene is a masterful example of how such knowledge differentials can be played to create viewing pleasures, as we know more than both of them, and desperately want each to reveal enough key information to help each other take down Walt. If only Hank told Skyler more about Walt’s murders and how he tricked Hank with the fake call about Marie’s accident, she would be much more likely to want to help him rather than the monster who dug the hole she’s stuck in; if only Skyler asked Hank for immunity for her role in money laundering, he could surely get it for her. But as the scene played out, Hank assumes Skyler was just Walt’s prisoner whom he can set free, and Skyler thinks that she is as guilty as Walt—and we’re forced to powerlessly watch with suspenseful delight.

I have written a good deal about Skyler’s story as serial melodrama, and how the final two seasons have shifted our perspective on her as an abused spouse imprisoned both by her husband and her lack of full knowledge about his actions. One the one hand, her refusals to help Hank and communicate with Marie makes it feel like she is protecting Walt, choosing the monster over the heroic knight. But I read Anna Gunn’s brilliant performance in this episode as motivated far less by protecting Walt than fearing for her own safety and the relative stability (and ignorance) of her children—when Marie tries to take Holly away from what she sees as an unsafe home, Skyler insists on retaining control of one of the few aspects of her life that still feels innocent, flexing her agency wherever she can. She’s not looking to retain her criminal power or the money; she’s looking to avoid her guilt by doing what she’d planned on back in “Fifty-One”: waiting for Walt’s cancer to take him away and wipe the slate clean. But in my favorite exchange of the episode, Walt asks the cancer’s return makes her happy, while she clarifies how little her own emotions matter anymore: “I can’t remember the last time I was happy.” She’s still a victim of Walt’s crimes (as are all of the other characters), but no longer a passive one, and given the limits of her own knowledge, she appears to have dug in and gambled on the wrong side (at least morally, if not strategically).

Lydia also gambles on what is likely the wrong side as well, enlisting Todd and his uncle’s neo-Nazi militia to take out the Phoenix gang and reclaim the means of production. Throughout the series, many scenes have shown how ill-fitted Walter White is to the seedier sides of the drug game, outfitted inappropriately to tangle with hardcore hoodlums like Tuco—but even Walt never wore high heels to a desert bloodbath. Lydia’s insistence that she not see the carnage she ordered is an effort to bury her head in the sand, or at least in the underground meth lab, but Breaking Bad never ignores the consequences of violence. Both Lydia and Walt have hired Todd’s army to do their dirty work, but I fully expect that they’ll both learn that working with neo-Nazis comes with strings attached, and debts will need to be paid.

While the title “Buried” certainly refers to Walt’s underground bank account, it more conveys the state of characters pushed down under massive amounts of pressure, whether from guilt or evidence. As is typical of Breaking Bad’s vibrant visual storytelling, especially when the brilliant Michelle MacLaren is directing, the shot composition highlights the episode’s emotions—we see broken Jesse laid out from above, just as Walt’s bathroom collapse is framed in a bird’s eye shot and we see Todd guide Lydia through a field of death in an aerial shot, not to mention Huell and Kuby luxuriating on a money bed. Whether these parallel framings are meant to suggest how death already possesses Walt and Jesse—the former via cancer and the latter from an almost catatonic emotional state—or more literally to foreshadow the deaths to come for the erstwhile partners (or Saul’s henchmen), we cannot yet say. But clearly much more than just a van fully of money is being buried over the course of this episode.

Random thoughts while lying on a bed of money:

• The episode’s emotional centerpiece is Marie confronting Skyler, a harrowing scene that serves as a counterpoint to Skyler repeatedly telling Marie to “Shut up!” back in “Hazard Pay.” Both Anna Gunn and Betsy Brandt have gotten far less praise for their performances than their male co-stars, in large part because they are rarely given the dramatic meat to chew on that Walt, Jesse, Hank, and others often get in this male-centered crime story. But both are phenomenal throughout this episode, and the scene might be one of my all-time favorites for portraying emotional violence and its consequences.
• In his desire to maintain utmost secrecy for where the money is buried, Walt digs the vault himself, rejecting Huell & Kuby’s offer to help. But Walt is a dying man who is clearly not up to such physical labor, marking another time that his pride and obsession for control have paid off with unhealthy consequences. I assume it will not be the last.
• When Walt was brainstorming options with Saul, I was surprised that the “vacuum cleaner salesman” didn’t come up, as the option to buy a new identity seems like Walt’s only way out now, and would help connect the dots to his New Hampshire relocation. It definitely seems like a more sensible option than sending Hank “on a trip to Belize.”
• In the cold open, I exclaimed with fear when the old man sees the car’s lights blinking, fearing that Jesse had run himself off the road. But when I saw him on the carousel, my thoughts turned to The Wire, when Nick Sobatka fled to his playground haunts to console himself after Ziggy’s impulsive actions. Alas, Jesse seems in even worse shape than Nick and Ziggy.
• The final scene with Jesse in the interrogation room both brings back two of my favorite bit characters, sarcastic Detectives Kalanchoe and Munn from “Face Off,” and delays the confrontation between Hank and Jesse that I’ve been anticipating for quite awhile. I only hope that Hank manages to play Jesse better than he played Skyler, although he faces similar but inverse challenges: with Skyler, his profile of her as a moral family member blinded him to the the possibilities that she might be culpable in Walt’s crimes, and with Jesse he needs to look beyond his picture of him as an immoral dirtbag and connect with his moral center. That should be worth the wait.
• I’m sure it’s not going to happen, but I would be in rapturous joy if next week’s episode is nothing but Hank, Jesse, & Walt in the box, paying homage to one of the all-time great television episodes, Homicide’s “Three Men and Adena.” Maybe there should be a fly buzzing around the room too.
• And kudos to Antenna editor Taylor Cole Miller for being my image jockey, and going above and beyond this week with his GIF of despondent Jesse!

Paratext of the Week:
While Breaking Bad does not inspire the puzzle-solving forensic fandom that I’ve discussed with Lost, How I Met Your Mother, and others, its fans are equally obsessive and detail oriented. Thus Wired’s list of seven “theories” of how the series might end is quite interesting, as the fans are not just conjecturing finales but analyzing allusions, patterns, and references. I’m particularly impressed with the color chart of character wardrobe change, as Breaking Bad is clearly invested in conveying narrative information through visual style more than nearly any other television series. We’ll check back to see what they got right in seven weeks.