was the ending as good as it should have been
did u want a better ending
shareIt was as good as it could have been.
share
MovieChat Forums > Breaking Bad (2008) Discussion > was the ending as good as it should have...
They completely dropped the ball with the ending. There needed to be an epic showdown which brought together the main players - think Hank ready to shoot Walt, but then Walt Jr picks up a gun and doesn’t know whether to shoot Hank to save his dad, or shoot his dad for all the lies - they could have written four episodes based on that Mexican stand-off alone. Everything is laid bare and all the deeper themes of the story collide. Throw in Jessie (Walt’s surrogate son) Skylar and Marie for extra tension/drama.
Instead they rushed Hank’s revelation and confronting of Walt, then had some random neo-nazi villains kill him off. Then they skipped over Marie’s reaction to Hank’s death after making us waste hours of them bickering at home while Hank collects rocks. Worst of all they never even showed Walt Jr learning about Walt’s true identity, it was done off-screen then a brief shot of him exasperated. All that dramatic potential wasted.
People trash the ending of Game Of Thrones. I thought it was weak but just got the ball over the line. Breaking Bad fumbled it big time.
Breaking Bad fumbled it big time.
I disagree. Vince Gilligan could have easily gone the "over the top, mexican stand off" direction you suggested, but what he chose to do IMO comes off better. Dragging it out over 4 episodes as you suggest would've killed the momentum for me & been pretty predictable. share
RJ Mitte most likely wasn’t a skilled enough actor to portray the part good enough to show his reaction to learning of his fathers actions.
Nothing against the kid but think about his resume on the show. What scenes was he in? Eating breakfast, sitting in a car, walking up and down the hallways. The most emotion we got out of him was calling his mother a bitch. The scene of him learning of his fathers actions may have come across as ham-fisted.
I’d rather they rolled the dice and showed something rather than leave it off-screen. Mitte may not have been up there with the best of Breaking Bad’s cast but he’s a serviceable actor, let the guy act.
Holy shit that would have been AWESOME.
...for people who like typical cliche crap written by talentless hacks.
Actually it would have appealed to people who enjoy Shakespeare, in which the character emotions and themes drive the action, and the main characters collide meaningfully in the final moments.
Obnoxious simpletons like yourself will accept any old arbitrary crap, and since stupid people account for most of the population, Gilligan knew he could get away with his rushed, lazy ending.
I’m glad you’re happy with what he squatted out, but have some consideration for discerning viewers with taste.
That was really snobbish and it would be a nice gesture if you apologized to that guy, but I understand where you are coming from: Breaking Bad really needed big dramatic moments in its final episodes between the major players, not these goddamned neo-Nazis thrown out as villians at the last minute. When Hank dies, I always thought it would be far more tragic in a Shakesperean sense if Walt had done it and felt some Macbeth-type guilt afterward. Instead they had a white trash nobody do it just so we can clap like maniacs when Walt kills all of them in "Felina". It makes me wonder sometimes if Vince Gilligan is a reincarnation of PT Barnum.
shareThe snobbery came from Druff, my reply was a corrective measure to put him back in his place. Snobbery and ignorance will not be tolerated, and any apology will need to come from him.
The rest of your post is full of good analysis, it’s encouraging to see other people who understand that the ending completely squandered the enormous dramatic potential that Gilligan had built up.
Breaking Bad’s failed ending is an even more depressing story than the one they were telling.
I also agree with your idea that it did not work dramatically to have Walt Jr. Discover the truth of his dad offscreen. RJ Mitte showed dramatic talent at certain points throughout the series and could have handled acting in a scene we are sort of expecting to happen.
shareYes, that alone was unforgivable. Assuming Gilligan was forced to condense his plans for the final season, there were plenty of things he could have axed to make way for Walt Jr’s reaction.
If he wasn’t forced, then you have to ask what the hell he was thinking.
Either way, he really screwed his own series 😞
The ending was dumb, that Rube-Goldberg machine gun moment would never work like it’s supposed to, it was utterly contrived.
Still, great show but they should have ended it around s3 or s4 at the latest.
The Mythbusters might disagree with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06t_KP7y8Ao
I'll have to watch that later ...
but the other posters are right - it was a dumb "Science" solution with a million variables to go wrong
starting with where he could park the car.
Yes, the car parking was erratic and he was lucky to get away with it. But I always think about the part where he had to grab his car keys on the pool table, that was another moment when it could have all fallen apart. As you suggest there were several other problems with the scenario.
But, I suppose if we pretend for a moment someone was really in this situation and had to "go for it" then you make a plan and . . . go for it. Then hope through execution and luck it all works out.
Yes, I wanted to see Walt Jr. open up a pancake house franchise.
shareshould have gone with the "Bob Newhart" ending
https://youtu.be/oVdB36lmbII
I thought it was one of the better endings to a series. Somehow TV shows are not good at finales.
shareThe ending was a cringe moment for me. For one, the backwoods neo-nazis were my least favorite characters of the show and completely unnecessary imo. Handing Todd off as the third wheel to their latest meth operations was enough. There was no need to evolve any of their characters moving forward. The MacGyver stunt seemed a little over the top and realistically I felt a of of things had to go right in the moment for Walt to pull things off the way he did. There seemed to be a need for a villainous enterprise in each season. I would've been completely fine with them coming full-circle with the original cast in the desert without the hicks interfering.
shareI thought it was a satisfactory way to end things. The neo-nazis being taken out, Walt dying, Jesse being freed by Walt and therefore making peace with one another; they were all things that felt like the right conclusions for those characters. Perhaps it could have been done a different way and still worked but I'm not sure how? People have talked about us being deprived of the reactions from the rest of the family to Hank's death etc...I guess they could have shown it but we can more or less work it out for ourselves. It was never going to end well for them or for anyone. It's an understandably bitter ending given the nature of the activity Walt was involved in.
If you're talking about the ending as in the events through the whole of the last season, as opposed to just the last episode or 2, then I think they went in the right direction.
Given the way something like Game of Thrones ended, I appreciate that they managed to maintain a consistent quality through to the end that didn't damage the show's legacy.