Walter White smiled a a tiny smile when he saw his old cooking setup one more time, all in operating order, all working so well, albeit with slave labor. After all this time, the former teacher could finally be satisfied with the knowledge that he had taught Jesse Pinkman well.
Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” played in the background to represent the primo blue meth they produced. “Breaking Bad” had used the more obvious “Crystal Blue Persuasion” by Tommy James and the Shondells they had used a year ago on the finale of the first half of the fifth season.
Using Badfinger for the series finale Sunday provided some lyric resonance to the messy goings on: “Guess I got what I deserved…”
And with it, another high quality TV series closes to the strains of a classic rock anthem.
Earlier in the episode, it was a country classic from Marty Robbins that set the stage for the tragedy to come. While rifling through a Volvo he finds unlocked in freezing New Hampshire, he comes across the cassette case for a Marty Robbins greatest hits, and when he miraculously finds the car keys above the visor, the song starts playing when he starts the car.
Like Walt, the song’s hero is an outlaw who has murdered and is returning back to a Southwestern town to find his love. “Maybe tomorrow a bullet will find me,” Robbins sings just before the title break. “Tonight nothing’s worse than this pain in my heart.”
Walt does see his loved ones one more time; his wife, his baby, and from afar, his teenage son returning from school.
Walt sings the song softly as he puts together what turns out to be a remote control machine gun that wipes out Jack’s gang while saving Jesse and Walt. And it is bloody aftermath came the show’s third major song, out of Todd’s ringtone: “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
Groucho Marx’ signature song written in 1939 by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, the team that wrote the music for “The Wizard of Oz” (and the latter wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”).
Todd didn’t have the ringtone because he was a fan of Groucho, but because he still had a crush on his boss, the sinister businesswoman Lydia Rodarte-Quayle. Lydia was calling to make sure Walt was dead, but it was Walt who answered, and also informed her that her current illness was because of the ricin he put in her Stevia that would soon kill her. Not a sweet death necessarily, but a sweetener one.