[Hopefully, we don't have to point out that a piece about the Breaking Bad finale contains information about the Breaking Bad finale. But here we are.]
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan signaled in interviews leading up to Sunday night's series finale that those who craved some redemption for Walter White were the ones most likely to leave happy.
"We feel it's a satisfying ending," Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. "Walt ends things more or less on his own terms."
For Gilligan, those things were self-evidently connected: the satisfaction of the ending and the degree to which the terms of that ending are set by Walt. And that's probably true for broad segments of the show's legions of fans who continued to root for Walt at some elemental level, or least to root for him to become root-able again.
It's not just true for the darker elements of "Team Walt" — the holders of the unsettling view that Walt was always simply killing people who deserved it, a brilliant and good man forced into bad deeds by the foolishness of others. It's also true for fans who fully recognize the monstrousness of Walt's deeds but craved a glimmer of hope that even people guilty of the worst deeds can find a modicum of grace, perhaps grace in love and death.
This is, for instance, the view taken by Emily Bazelon in Slate, who sees in the finale repeated acts of love: Walt figuring out how to get the money to his family, Walt accepting that he can't be forgiven, Walt saving Jesse. It doesn't make up for his misdeeds, but it represents redemption of a kind and the reassuring flicker of his humanity.
I think that's what Gilligan saw in the finale he wrote: no undoing of consequences, but moments of grace and mercy nonetheless. The show was, to the end, a Western of sorts, and Walt ended his life as the lonely cowboy, the desperado finally able to come to his senses, tragically alone but no longer lost — now found.
I wish I'd been able to love it on those terms. I wish I'd been able to respond to how fundamentally sympathetic the finale was to Walt. I wish I'd felt like I was vibrating on the same frequency Gilligan was. Because normally, I do crave those moments of grace — in fact, here's what I said about the finale of Lost (which I consider woefully over-loathed and underappreciated):
There is emotional heft to the idea that after all your struggles and battles and mistakes, you will have the opportunity to give and receive love and to gain perspective on what you've experienced. And while there have certainly been missteps in the final season (and in previous seasons) and not everything worked in the finale, that last sequence in the church is based on a very old and widely honored idea of grace in death.