Part of the immense appeal of “Breaking Bad” (AMC, 9 p.m.), the saga of the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, is how it’s been designed to look like it will all come to an end at any episode.
Now that it’s the second half of the final season, with just eight episodes, that inevitability is upon us and we’re closer than ever to the apocalyptic ending the saga deserves. With a marvelous, beautifully shot setting in arid Albequerque, creator VInce Gilligan again frames the final shows with a flash forward he had earlier introduced, that of a bearded Walt returning to survey the ruins of his shuttered home. Back to real time, it’s the cop brother in law who came closer than ever to finding his mysterious Heisenberg during the last episodes.
A wild card remains Jesse, who seems to be reverting to an earlier cul-de-sac in which he wants nothing to do with Walt or his enterprise. For a time, it seems the car wash Walt and Skyler are operating is running so well, there might be a season when we just see them greeting customers and telling them to have a sparkling day. But things have never been that way on “Breaking Bad” and aren’t about to start now.
And as the series hurtles to its conclusion, its makers are at the full powers of their storytelling strengths. Just from a look at the first of the eight episodes, you know they’re not going to let you down.
Is this the ending that Gilligan originally planned for Walter White?
“I can’t even remember what my original ending was,” he said recently at the TV Critics Association summer press tour.
Bent on creating a character that would go famously “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” he required a lot of actor Bryan Cranston, but never shared the full blueprint of how he’d change.
“We never discussed where it was going to end up,” Cranston says. “It was just too big a subject. And as the season went on, I never found out. I never asked. I never wanted to know.
“The twist and turns of my character were so sharp,” he says, “that it wouldn’t help me to know. So I was just holding on, much like the audience was, almost week to week. I would read a script about five to six days before we shot it, and this was no exception,” he says of the finale.
But, he adds, “in looking into this character and what happens to him and the transformation, I really believe that everybody is capable of good or bad. We are all human beings. We are all given this spectrum of emotions, as complex as they are, and depending on your influences and your DNA and your parenting and your education and your social environment, the best of you can come out or the worst of you can come out. I think, if given the right set of circumstances, dire situations, any one of us can become dangerous.”