I write these reviews in a vacuum, without looking at anybody else’s reactions to the episode in question, so I have no idea whether or not any other viewers found the conclusion as side-splittingly funny as I did. Doesn’t matter. I laughed uncontrollably at that final scene, and it could not have felt more fitting to me as a longtime viewer of the show. Because while Breaking Bad is many, many things, it has always had a darkly comic core, and though there has hardly been any humor in these last eight episodes – understandably so, given that the power of this final season came from seeing Walter White’s crimes taken to their natural, horrific endpoint – it felt unspeakably right for that humor to return in the show’s final minutes.
This is especially true when one considers exactly how humor functioned over the life of the series. Breaking Bad was often compared, in its early years, to the works of the Coen Brothers, and that is an apt comparison, because this story, like many told by the Coens, is rooted in the notion of crime as something ‘absurd.’ And many crimes are absurd, when you get right down to it, even as they are also terrible and disturbing and life-destroying. Walter White’s sins hurt many, many people, including those he loved the most, but to properly study the scope of his transgressions, we must also be willing to admit that there is something inherently funny about what he did. A middle-aged Chemistry teacher, stricken with cancer, choosing to cook meth to earn a living for his family? That’s funny, as are many of the actions he and Jesse took after making that fateful decision. And while Breaking Bad could alternate brilliantly between soul-crushing darkness and riotous black comedy, those two tonal realms never existed separately. They are two sides of the same coin, and Vince Gilligan is a great writer in large part because of his ability to analyze a criminal life such as this holistically, never pulling a single punch in the tale’s darkest moments, but also allowing the brevity to surface when the absurdity rose naturally to a fever pitch.
This is why I love that final scene so much. On one level, it is very dark, and I can easily understand someone walking away feeling disturbed, rather than laughing like a maniac. Trust me, even as I did the latter, I absolutely felt elements of the former. But that humorous side does exist, and it is intentional, and it is just as organic a part of the Breaking Bad story as the incredibly dark material immediately preceding it. Because by allowing us to laugh at Walter White, to see him for the pathetic, insular man he truly was and find humor in his lonely, deluded death, we take away his power, just as laughing at the absurdity of crime helps to reduce the sway those crimes hold over us – and, by extension, understand it better. If the series ended with Walt getting murdered, or going out in a blaze of glory, or any number of the other ‘serious’ ways it could have ended, Walt would have retained at least a modicum of his power. But because he dies smiling in a meth lab, accompanied by the sounds of a corny love ballad, he is exposed for what he truly is: Sad, pathetic, and, yes, funny. Not on his terms, but on ours.
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