Walter’s clever phone call to Skyler was certainly a fantastic Hail Mary pass, as Saul acknowledges. Jesse’s bold attempted escape from Nazi meth slavery doesn’t buy him freedom it means his ex-girlfriend gets shot, and Brock is left a traumatized orphan. He’s trapped in New Hampshire, paying ten thousand dollars for an hour of poker-alone, powerless, sick.
Walt’s new identity doesn’t leave him safe in the Bahamas, with WiFi, free to plan his comeback. In “Granite State,” after all, each of the show’s action-hero fantasies were punctured, then deflated. Even within this stylized series, there was a feeling of unreality-and a strikingly different tone from the episode that preceded this one. Walt hit the window, the snow fell off, and we were off to the races.
I mean, wouldn’t this finale have made far more sense had the episode ended on a shot of Walter White dead, frozen to death, behind the wheel of a car he couldn’t start? Certainly, everything that came after that moment possessed an eerie, magical feeling-from the instant that key fell from the car’s sun visor, inside a car that was snowed in. And, if that were indeed the case, I’d be writing a rave.
