An important chapter of my life is closing upon itself, and it’s really fucking scary. It’s not college yet, and even though that’s intensely paralyzingly scary (I AM NOT EMOTIONALLY PREPARED SO I’M PRETENDING IT’S NOT HAPPENING), that’s not why. No, it’s something greater, more terrifying, more finite.
Breaking Bad is ending in the fall. September 29th, to be exact. The last episode.
I’m not okay. I’m not going to be okay for a very long time.
I am the kind of person that gets very attached to things very easily. I’m clingy and codependent and I need consistency. Unlike most things, Breaking Bad has never disappointed me. Across five seasons, I have never been let down, left out in the cold. Sure I’ve been hurt, I’ve been shocked, I’ve been confused (those legendary cold opens are an article all on their own), but not once have I ever been disappointed. Not once has a scene fell flat, nor a character been shortchanged. Never, at any point, have I felt that Vince Gilligan has stuffed a plot point into a wet suit, strapped a pair of jet skis upon its hypothetical feet, and made it leap over a tank of sharks.
Breaking Bad, or BrBa, for brevity’s sake, has done what seems to be the impossible in today’s crazy modern times of piddling character development and ineffectual story arcs. It’s stayed consistently good. Even in moments where it’s not earth-shatteringly, orgasmically fantastic, is still really good. This is not to say that other shows aren’t as good; that reality television, the ever reliable scapegoat for the decline of television quality, isn’t as valuable or interesting or captivating. This is just to say that in an ever changing world, in a world fraught with impermanence, the one thing you can rely on, more than death and taxes, is that the new episode of BrBa is going to be really damn good. You can watch the entire series, soup to nuts, and not find one episode that isn’t doing something great. I mean, goddamn, the premiere of the second half was probably the most excited I’ve been in the entire month of August, and it did not disappoint.
Maybe that’s why it has to end. Because, as we all know, you keep a good thing going for too long, and it very quickly degenerates into a bad thing (coughSUPERNATURALcough, I’m pretending it ended after season five), and, while I do want BrBa in my life forever and always, what I don’t want is for it to turn into a shell of its former self (coughLIKEDOCTORWHOcough; I’m bitter and waiting very impatiently for a new showrunner). I’ve suffered the indignity of watching a good show die an agonizingly slow, painful death, trudging on tirelessly, limping doggedly toward the next season without a care, and I’ve still watched it, ashamed in my passivity, wanting with all my power to take it out back and shoot it to put it out of its misery. I don’t think I’d be able to stand BrBa going down that road. I’ve mixed metaphors in my grief, haven’t I? I dunno, I’m in a Heisenberg induced haze.
I’ll put on my big girl pants, curl up with my favorite episodes, and watch the last few episodes of the last season of one of the best shows on television.
And then, I’ll cry after and spend the next two weeks waxing poetic about the camera work.
Farewell, Jesse Pinkman. I really hope you don’t die. You too, Skyler White.
Go fuck yourself, Walt.
Antoinette Kwadzogah