Thoughts, John?

Gould: Good observations. I agree, Chris, that, however this final season ends, the show seems now to be driving Walt and Jesse toward two different kinds of failure. Maybe Jesse ends up killing Walt, maybe not. But it's hard to imagine either of them coming out of this as anything other than wrecked (whether or not also dead).

Maybe, just the same, Jesse's state of being is now, as Spencer suggests, more obscure than Walt's. But the show has, I think, always considered their two very different stories of corruption equally important—and has always emphasized the interplay between those two stories: Walt's acute degeneration from bitterness and self-loathing into more-and-more lethal monstrosity, and Jesse's sad stumbling from insecurity and heartbreak into more-and-more crippling guilt.

I guess I'm not sure how or why we should think Breaking Bad is no longer a show about Walter White, though. Perhaps that's right. Or perhaps it's more that the show has finally, deliberately, unsparingly dropped the idea of Walter White (per Chris, "perhaps the most villainous character a television show has ever dared us to root for") as antihero?

Either way, I like the thought that the show is now about Hank—or alternatively, that it now lets us know it's always been more about Hank than it let on. From the beginning, from the time it started drawing us into Walt's story and inviting us to identify with him as a protagonist, the show let us think of Hank in the way Hank presented himself outwardly: as a crass wag, an unreflective soldier in the drug war, and a fool who couldn't see Walt for the criminal he is.

Four-and-a-half seasons later, how superior to Hank does anyone out there in TV Land really feel? It was always easy for us to see what Hank couldn't; the writers showed us every week, after all, and kept it from him. He had to do the detective work. But the more we saw him do it, the more brilliant he showed himself to be at it. And the more we got to know Hank as a person—through his panic attacks, through his depression—the more complex he appeared. (Not to say, the more badass: Hank's thwarting of the cartel twins' attack on him in Season 3—that scene alone was one of the best thrillers I've ever witnessed on television.)

Meanwhile, we were the ones being captivated by Walt and his story. We were the ones identifying with him, however haltingly. When the detective who finally figured Walt out stands face-to-face with him at the end of tonight's episode, that detective knows exactly what he's looking at—just as he knew, the whole time, what he was looking for. He just didn't know that it was Walt. Hank's unsentimental clarity of perception now is the other side of his mournful claim not to know Walt anymore—and cues the menacing irony in Walt's response: "If you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly."

It could be that Hank's finally caught up with us; or it could be that, by the second half of Season 5, we've finally caught up with him.