When he realized he was fatally wounded, Walt went to die in the bikers’ lab, with a serene expression on his face and his trademark respirator by his side. Walt wanted people to remember him as vital and powerful, not sick and diminished. Walter White got so much better than he deserved, including the death he’d wanted from the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The last two episodes, “Ozymandias” and “Felina,” felt like rush jobs to rehabilitate Walt just enough so we could root for him as an avenging angel of justice. But the final episode did not give us the moral clarity that Vince Gilligan had been promising. Sure, it felt good to watch Walt’s homemade machine gun turret mow down unsuspecting Nazis in Uncle Jack’s living room. The ending felt like a sop to the Team Walt fanboys who tuned in each week to watch Heisenberg be a badass, morality be damned. The finale episode was great TV: brilliantly acted, well shot, and fun to watch, but it fell short of the moral vision that Vince Gilligan promised us.
The series should have ended there, with Walt suffering the full consequences of his actions.
Walt’s humiliation is only matched by his horror as Hank is murdered by a force Walt set in motion but failed to control. As far as I’m concerned, Breaking Bad ended in the wilds of To’hajilee, with Hank slipping the cuffs on Walt and Walt realizing that he had been beaten in a battle of wits with men he regarded as his inferiors.