#OZYMANDIAS BREAKING BAD REDDIT FULL#

Gomez is dead, Hank’s shot in the leg, and Jesse’s nowhere to be found: but Walt still insists there is a solution to the issue. When it returns, the final gunshots of last week’s shootout ring in the air, and we return to the heart-pounding gunfight between Hank/Gomez and Todd’s crew. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare ‘Ozymandias’ then fades out the scene before going to credits: the ghosts of the van and the younger, slightly more innocent Walt and Jesse fade from the shot, leaving nothing but the desert – a reference to the final line of the poem tonight’s episode was titled for: By the time he’s on the phone lying to Skylar, it’s already too late for Walt: as he tells Jesse just moments before, “the reaction has begun”. Walt was never really a man driven to help his family: he wanted to make that money to help himself pay for cancer treatment (something he’d never tell his family). Simply put, Walt is the sad clown: by the time he finally gets the attention he wanted, the power and money he always thought he deserved from himself, he failed to realize that he had corrupted his very soul with the rage building in him since he lost the company he co-founded (and the woman he loved). For those unfamiliar, the story of Pagliacci is simple: it’s a play about how revenge and jealousy destroys everything one loves (a fact it states in the prologue and displays over its two acts). In it, Skylar describes the “ugly” item of Walt’s that she’s selling on eBay (remember the 50th birthday handjob scene?): it’s of the sad clown Canio from Pagliacci (and also Walt’s favorite piece). Now, normally I’m not a fan of the “amended flashback” sequence – but in ‘Ozymandias’, the conversation between Walter and Skyler is arguably the most important of the series. After rambling to a still-green Jesse, Walt steps outside and (with some careful editing and great makeup) show Walt calling Skylar on the phone to tell her the first of his many lies. The episode begins just as Walt is finishing his first cook, the exact moment where he went from being a chemistry teacher to the finest skante chef in the Southwest.

#OZYMANDIAS BREAKING BAD REDDIT FULL#

In keeping with this half-season’s theme of coming full circle, ‘Ozymandias’ opens the same place the pilot opened and last week’s episode ended: the fateful spot of Walt’s first cook in the desert. For a man who purported his criminal activities as something he was doing for his family, Walter White revealed himself to be one of the most selfish, self-preserving humans on the planet, relying on a combination of brains and luck to keep himself afloat over the years.

Over the five seasons since the pilot, that illusion’s slowly been stripped away as we learned the story of Gray Matter, and saw Walt’s increasing addiction to the two things eluding him through his entire life: power and money. He has finally hit rock bottom, and spends the bulk of the final 2 episodes attempting to redeem himself.When Walt began cooking meth at the beginning of Breaking Bad, we saw him as a desperate, dying man doing the only thing he knew how (chemistry) to leave his family with money after his death. This modicum of mercy is the frail wraith of Walter White reaching out from the core of the demonic Heisenberg, which has essentially subsumed him entirely. She almost instantly ascertains his motive under intense observational scrutiny while attempting to curtail an internal emotional supernova. Bryan Cranston killed it as usual.īut this penultimate exchange between them really underscores how deep their connection to one another is. Meanwhile Walt has to act like an even more evil piece of shit than he usually is, while stifling his tears and maintaining a façade of deranged, psychotic anger. Anna Gunn's acting is incredible in this scene. At the same time she NEEDS to know where Holly is. As she realizes what Walt is doing, she must without hesitation, without missing a beat, play her part in his ruse. She initially fires back angrily, demanding that he relinquish their daughter.īut he presses on, in a rage so subtly out of character that only Skyler would recognize its inauthenticity. He then rips into Skyler about her disobedience. He knows the authorities are listening, but makes sure Skyler denies this in order to establish that what he is about to say is genuine (from the perspective of the law). His phone call to Skyler is so nuanced and layered.

Ozymandias breaking bad reddit