"It's over. We're safe. I won."

If you haven't watched Breaking Bad yet, you need to start. For all the people out there who think television is a pulp medium and a vacuous waste of time, take notice. I'm not saying there isn't a truly depressing amount of total shit on the airwaves right now (the E! network relies on such shows to feed their families), but if you sift through all the awful, there are some absolute gems. Right now? None rises higher on my list than Breaking Bad, which, after completing four seasons, is better than ever.

This show keeps you on your toes, even when you don't realize your on them. It's like when you've been tensing a muscle for so long that you forget about it until the tension releases. With Breaking Bad, the knots grow tighter and the water gets hotter so gradually that by the time you reach the end of the season, every single moment, no matter how seemingly calm or staid, is a blood pressure spiking nail-biter. I think the best part of the show is the many and varied and surprising ways in which it builds the tension.

**SPOILER ALERT**
If you haven't seen the entire series to date, do not read the rest of this post. Trust me, you don't want to ruin it.

Each season examines Walt's and Jesse's descent step by step, but with each new season comes a new focus, a new perspective that narrows the magnifying glass on a new facet of the hell they've created for themselves. When trying to sum of the "theme" of sorts of this season, it was hard for me to boil down. My first thought was, "Well, it's all about seeming compromise and concurrently, a total lack of any compromise at all--the goal is to use the notion of compromise to one-up everyone around you." I think AV Club summed up that murky notion of conflicting agendas well with a single word: negotiation. Throughout the season, each and every character has to negotiate with the people around them, the forces acting upon them, their own moral compasses, the factors that are out of their control, and even more perilously I think, the factors that are within their control. When it boils down, this show has always been about control and it uses each of its characters to maximum effect in driving home what control actually means and how it creates and destroys.

One of the most powerful aspects of the show is that the characters are allowed to change over time, with the balance of power shifting almost seamlessly beneath their feet. This season saw so many terrifying voltas that my loyalties would almost sneak up on me. Seriously, from one episode to another, the game can change so entirely that I the viewer could barely keep up with who I wanted to succeed, let alone the players on the board. As the characters were negotiating their own existences, I was negotiating my allegiances. "Wait a minute, am I really pulling for Gus Fring all of a sudden? When did that happen?" It's the hallmark of an amazing show when each character is so layered that he or she is both beloved and loathed at any given time. Breaking Bad has such characters in spades. By the end of this season, I found myself hoping Walt, the shows seeming protagonist, would get the worst of it, and somehow ended up hoping Gus Fring, so feared and hated just a few episodes back, would rise the victor. My emotions were entirely fluid though, and these fleeting acknowledgments would flit in and out of my conscience almost the moment they were acknowledged. When I tried to reconcile how my desperate hope that Walt would go undetected had morphed into a begrudging tolerance of his existence, and how, conversely, my fear and loathing of Gus Fring had somehow transformed into a sort of respect, I found myself ending up at the same place. Jesse.

When I watch Breaking Bad, I see the world through Jesse's eyes and view the succeeding events in terms of how they affect Jesse specifically. For me, he's the heart and soul of the show. Over the past four years, the writers have done an amazing job of formulating two characters who aren't what they seem. When the show began, we had a desperate, dying, reluctant chemistry teacher who got caught up cooking meth with a low-life addict. As the show as gone on, however, it has become more and more painfully and terrifyingly apparent that while both of these characters have gotten in over their heads, Walt is at home here, Jesse isn't. In the panoply of dark, crazy shit that goes down on this show, Walt emerges as the character who drives the risk higher and higher, even when it's unnecessary. He feels alive doing bad, bad things, probably for the first time in his life, and he'll tighten the noose around his own neck if it means he gets to be the big, bad, powerful Heisenberg rather than the weak, ineffectual, insignificant Mr. White. While that progression is thrilling and terrible to watch, it puts a certain bent on his character that makes him the bully, the bad guy, the architect of destruction that's hard to pull for. Jesse, by sharp contrast, never really wanted any of this at all. Where Walt exerts control (even when he only thinks it's his to exert), Jesse seems eternally subject to the forces around him. Sure, his behaviors are self-destructive most of the time and his decisions affect his well-being in a direct way, but when it comes to Jesse, there just doesn't seem to be much of any control at all. Even at his most powerful, it seems he's being manipulated by the alpha males around him. I think that's where the turn came for me between the two father figures in his life. I pull for whoever treats Jesse the best because Jesse has no power to control his own destiny. In my negotiation with my own loyalties, Jesse's best interests always prevail.

Playing Jesse as the heart of the show, the lost boy, the son, comes to into deadly focus in the finale when it's impossible to fully comprehend in just how many ways he's being manipulated by his fathers. The more caring and fatherly Gus became, the more suspicious I became, but by that same token, the more confident and assured Jesse became. I found myself slipping into Gus' web in much the same way Jesse did. When Jesse found a shelf full of blood bags intended for him in Mexico (preparations to save his life), it was like he felt truly valued and cared for for the first time in his life. After several episodes of watching Jesse spiral completely into the abyss, seeing anyone, even Gus Fring, pull him back from the edge was endearing. In the back of my mind, I always felt that Fring was manipulating Jesse is some grand way, but it was hard to argue with the day-to-day improvement in Jesse's well-being (even if, when being totally honest, I think Mike had a lot more to do with Jesse's rehabilitation than Gus ever did). At the end of the day, while Walt and Gus were hurtling toward each other on the evil expressway, Jesse pretty much just needed a hug most of the time. Indeed, even when Jesse is at his most badass, he's one small step from being completely horrified by the people around him. Seeing the absolute panic on his face when the Mexican cartel started collapsing and Mike garotted that one guy served as a potent reminder that in spite of all this, Jesse is a sensitive kid who's mixed up in a whirlwind he can't get out of. It should be noted, however, that in spite of Jesse's innate constitution, he's in the thick of things, he knows it, and he does his best with it. Both he and Walt have murdered people at this point, they've both done a lot of things to hurt the people around them, and they've both gone against the other at times. The big difference in my eyes is that Jesse has an innate goodness and Walt... well, who knows what's at his core these days, but I don't think anyone would characterize it as "good." When Heisenberg kills someone, it's in his own self-interest. When Jesse kills someone, it's for the sake of others.

Walt and Gus are more alike than Walt would ever like to admit and more than Jesse will probably ever know. That's how Walt used Jesse to such a spectacularly bloody end. We, the audience, know more than Jesse does about Walt and that leads our negotiations to other ends. Jesse has this almost childlike view of the world. His morals are black and white in theory, but he's so impressionable and susceptible to outside influences that it takes a real shot across the bow to bring his resolve to the surface. From early on in the show, we've known how much Jesse cares for children. Nothing brings out his rage or wrath like acts against kids. We know this, Walt knows this, and Jesse suffers for it. Walt, that soul-sucking, game-playing bastard, knew full well that the way to get Jesse to turn of Gus would be to exploit Jesse's love of children. Jesse would never kill someone who had wronged him solely. Jesse has had the crap kicked out of him in every way possible for years. If he killed the people who had wronged him, no one would be left. No, Jesse acts out when people even more helpless than he is get hurt. He's all to aware of what it's like to be the victim in this way. He's the little guy, but not the littlest guy, and watching the helpless get screwed is more than Jesse can bear. Walt knows this. When Jesse had the gun to Walt's head and was (as it turns out, quite rightly) accusing him of poisoning the boy, Walt plays on Jesse's goodness and convinces him that he isn't capable of hurting a child. "Do you really think I could do that?!" As an audience member, who watched him actively let Jane die a couple of seasons back, the answer is a resounding, "Yes." Having seen the entirety of Walt's digression in vivid technicolor, there isn't anything I wouldn't put past him at this point. Jesse doesn't know this, however. What he does know, is that Gus is someone who hurts kids. In Jesse's black and white logic, it must be Gus. At this point, I honestly wasn't sure who had poisoned the boy. While in the back of my mind, I didn't want to believe Walt had done it, his moral compass points any which way but north these days, so he had to be a possibility. On the other hand, I couldn't see how Walt had access to the Ricin. Also, when Gus takes a stab at someone, it cuts to the core, so he was just as likely a suspect. Geez, I feel like I'm picking Iocaine here and I clearly can't choose the baddie in front of me.

In the closing scenes, when it's revealed that it was actually berries from Lily of the Valley that poisoned the boy, my theoretical mind splintered. I still thought Walt was a fair candidate, but I also know that the writers are just ballsy enough to have the poisoning have nothing to do with anything. While the reveal that it really was Walt made for a searing WTF moment, in a weird way, I think it almost would have hit harder if the boy's illness really had been an accident. When you're in the middle of a shitstorm, you can't see accidents for what they are and that has deadly consequences. In the end though, I was absolutely thrilled by the closing shot of the pot of flowers in Walt's yard. Some critics have felt it was a little too explicit, I appreciated having definitive proof. This show leaves a lot of things up in the air, makes the waters murkier and murkier with each successive episode, and shifts the balance of power often enough that it was nice to have something more grounded, more, well, explicit. It lacked some the nuance of the show's greatest moments, but it hit hard and worked extremely well. Had they not been so explicit, viewers would have been left with some thrilling uncertainty, but that would have sapped some of the mega impact of learning that yes, Walt is willing to kill children if it accomplishes his own ends. If it, in effect, helps him "win." The best part of it all was that it called back to Walt sitting in the backyard earlier, spinning the gun. I can usually see a plot point telegraphed from a mile away, but with Breaking Bad, I oftentimes read it wrong. When he was spinning the gun, and it pointed at him twice, and then at "nothing" the third time, I thought that was telling Walt that there was only him left. Little did I know that it was actually pointing to that potted plant-- that seemingly innocuous, random set dressing. Masterfully done, show.

There are a million other things to talk about with this show, the final story arcs, and the finale itself, but this is getting interminably long and difficult to organize. Here are my other random thoughts on the closing episodes of this season:

• We may have gotten closure on whether or not Walt poisoned the boy, but there's still a lot up in the air. Did Ted actually die? What's going to happen with that? Where does Gus' empire go from here? Does Jesse suspect Walt after all? Does he really believe it was an accident? Will he ever learn the truth? And so on...
• For as many times as my loyalties shifted from character to character, I could never bring myself to root for Hank. I know I'm in the minority here, and I honestly can't put my finger on why, but I've hated his character since minute one and haven't been concerned for his well-being or reputation for even a second. Most people wanted his theories to be proven and vindication to be had. I kept hoping he'd throw a clot and die. Even at his most awesome, he's the last person I'd want to spend a day with. I think the final straw for me came with how he treated Marie after he was injured. Ugh. I can see the reasons behind it, but that doesn't make me love him anymore. The problem with Hank is that I get the feeling I'm supposed to love him, but I don't.
  
• Skylar, Skylar, Skylar. I love her, I hate her. It was when I realized that I was supposed to kind of hate her that I started to appreciate what she brings to the show. Most recently, her bid to save herself by pretending to be Ted's dingbatty accountant was pure gold. "Do you use Quicken? That program is amazing. It's like there's a calculator in the computer." Awesome. She has her issues to be sure, but she has some true moments of badass in her own right. I wish Anna Gunn had laid off the plastic surgery/botox though. Skylar was downright difficult to look at this season.
• Best. Death scene. Ever. It may have strayed from the gritty reality of the show's core and aesthetic, but when you're as supremely awesome as Gus Fring, you deserve better than a conventional death. Calm, cool, composed, and well-dressed, even when half his face has been blown off. Badass in every regard. I'm sad to see him go.
• I've very glad to see that Mike was conveniently recovering in Mexico for all of this though. Mike is probably my favorite character on the show and the only true father figure among them. I can't wait to see what they do with him in season 5--which had better come soon, dammit!
• Speaking of people I can't wait to see again, Saul Goodman is fantastic. It's not easy to inject a believable amount of levity to a show like this, but Saul cracks me up at every turn. I'm so glad he survived the finale and I'm really hoping we get to me his guy who can disappear you if you order the right vacuum part.
  
• I love Jesse so much. And I have a ridiculous crush of Aaron Paul, who is just so unbelievably talented. Even when he knows damn well that telling the doctors about the Ricin possibility will likely land him in jail, he doesn't hesitate for even a moment. He runs into the hospital to make sure the boy is okay. Walt, even if he hadn't poisoned him himself, would have stood in the parking lot weighing the pros and cons and ultimately deciding that it wasn't in his own best interest to save the boy. He would have watched him die to save himself. As always.
• Hats off to the show, the writers, the producers, the directors, and the entire cast and crew. All the actors do such a fabulous job that there's no point in singling people out (although Aaron Paul breaks my heart, Bryan Cranston pisses me off, and Giancarlo Esposito scares the hell out of me). That said, the man who played Tio Salamanca gets extra points for being just as amazing as everyone else without saying a single word. Truly inspired. You know you have an amazing show when the death of two of the shows super-villains isn't met with a cheer. He and Gus will be sorely missed.