High noon as Breaking Bad hits 'consequences'

VINCE Gilligan's Breaking Bad is a wonderful example of how far television crime has come.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White, left, and Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman in a scene from Breaking Bad. Picture: AP

VINCE Gilligan's Breaking Bad, which finishes tonight with the most anticipated finale since The Sopranos, is a wonderful example of how far television crime has come. It has captured the high cinematic end of the market, exploring the subtleties of character against the dynamics of the social world in a compelling long-running series that plays cunningly and subtly with genre and expectation.

If you haven't seen it, you will; it's now an inescapable part of popular culture and box sets will proliferate like triffids. Gilligan takes an endearing and sympathetic character and turns him into someone so morally bankrupt that no one with any sort of conscience can help averting their eyes at his actions -- yet they flick back quickly to ensure they miss nothing.

Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the beginning of the series who turns to a life of crime, producing and selling methamphetamine to secure his family's future before he dies. Walt discovers that he is exhilarated by the existence he creates for himself; once rather doughy and ineffectual, he becomes intimidating and hard. When halfway through his journey his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), confronts him about being in over his head, he snaps. "Who do you think you see? I am the danger; I am the one who knocks," he says, referring to doors being opened and people shot.

The moral for all of us is once you do the wrong thing, there's rarely any turning back. Walt, like all tragic heroes or heroines, embodies our own conflicting motivations and feelings. The ironies and complexities of life place all of us in situations where a single choice can be all-important.

One thing we can be sure of is that Walt won't be simply rushed off-stage at the end. It has been an engrossing journey tracking the progress of a victim towards his own demise -- maybe -- one to which it now seems Walt consciously assents. In last week's penultimate episode we saw a broken man alone with himself and feeling the pain for all the people whose lives he has ended directly or indirectly. It raised a lot of questions. Is there anything left that won't turn to ashes in his hands? Has Walt really begun to realise who he is? Is everything about our resilient hero finally lost, and will he go into the night without hope?

Last week suggested the violence, so grossly realistic in this series but never arbitrary, simply reflective of the corrosive nihilism that infects its lead character, had finally taken its toll. The end has always been nigh with this show, 61 hours so far of cliffhangers.

At the end of season four Walt again spelled it out for terrified Skyler, "I have lived under the threat of death for a year now and, because of that, I've made choices. I alone should suffer the consequences of those choices, no one else. And those consequences -- they're coming."

We can expect a combination of something that we will never have guessed and the most obvious thing we could think of, the "I kind of saw that coming" realisation. Well, I can't believe he'll go out in the long johns we saw him wearing last week. Why do I keep seeing an M60 machinegun in the boot of Walt's car?

Breaking Bad, tonight, 6.35pm (repeated at 10.35pm), Showcase.