"This is where you get to make it right."

The last few episodes of Breaking Bad have conditioned us to expect chaos. The very worst will happen, brutally and bluntly and without explanation. Evil, base men will triumph and innocent bystanders will be gunned down, and every character you've grown to love will suffer unimaginable horror. Whatever ending was in store, it was going to be ugly and violent and cruel. And then Vince Gilligan turned around and blindsided us with kindness.

While it would be a stretch to describe the conclusion of Walter White's story as redemptive, the focus of the finale was very much on making things right, just as he says to Gretchen and Elliot. It was cathartic. It was karmic. It gave us what we wanted. Compared to the nihilistic bent of 'Ozymandias' and 'Granite State', 'Felina' borders on comfort viewing. Walt dies, as we all knew was inevitable, but he dies on his own terms, and only after tying up every last loose end and piece of unfinished family business he left behind in Albuquerque.

First up were Gretchen and Elliot, and at first it looked like cruelty was very much on the menu as Walt prowled around their stunning art deco house, taking in the life that could have been his before ominously ordering them out to his car. But as it turns out, he doesn't care about vengeance on Grey Matter. The part of the Charlie Rose interview that spurred him on last week wasn't their dismissal of his work - although he doubtless enjoyed making them sweat as payback for that slight - but the reminder that they are the kind of people who routinely pay out large sums of money. Through them, he can finally get the money to his family, and all this will not have been for nothing.

"It's over, and I needed a proper goodbye," Walt tells Skyler, and what's significant is that he actually gets one. That phone call in 'Ozymandias' could easily have been Walt and Skyler's last conversation, in a bleaker and more jagged-edged version of the show, but Gilligan wants Walt to have his goodbye. It was pretty far from a blissful lovers' reunion, pointedly devoid of any physical contact to the point where a pillar literally divided the pair in one shot. But Walt did give Skyler possibly the most significant gift he could have, when he finally acknowledged that his "all for my family" justification is bull. He finally told the truth, as much to himself as to her.

"I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really... I was alive." Two years on, clad in the same green shirt he wore in the pilot, Walt has finally come face to face with himself. And it's impossible not to recall his invigorated words to a baffled Jesse, back when this all began: "I am awake." This man didn't sell his soul to save his family, or save his reputation; he sold his soul just to feel alive. It's far from heroic, but it's undeniably tragic.

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After making things right with Skyler by giving her the coordinates, and saying a wordless goodbye to Holly and Junior from a distance, there's still one piece of family business left for Walt to tie up. And this breathtaking final 20 minutes is where Walt gets both his victory and his unexpected redemption, as he throws himself onto Jesse and shields him from the rain of bullets that's taking out Jack's entire crew. In the moment Walt takes in what has been done to Jesse, everything changes: he has family to protect again.

Walt and Jesse's relationship is the twisted heart of Breaking Bad, and the ending was always going to come down to these two men, but their ties were so thoroughly severed earlier this season that it was hard to imagine how. Following the revelations about Brock and Jane, many fans predicted that Jesse would kill Walt, and Walt does give him the option. But Jesse refuses. Setting aside Todd, whose death was an absolute cathartic necessity (admit it, you cheered), Jesse does not want to kill any more. All he wants is freedom, and after trapping and manipulating him for so long, Walt can finally give it to him.

That final look between the pair - teacher and student, abuser and victim, father and son - spoke so many volumes and felt steeped in so much history and emotion that it would take days to unpack, but it felt more than anything like acceptance. With all their secrets out in the open, they acknowledge that they have shared something powerful, and terrible, and now it is over. And Walt dies protecting the one person he's wronged the most.

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'Felina' isn't the first time Walt's plans have gone off without a hitch, but there will be those who find its series of escalating victories too seamless. But every step feels utterly in keeping with what Gilligan and his writers have done before, and it avoids the kind of off-screen shortcuts that cheapened Walt's plotting in 'Face Off'. As Marie rightly predicts, Walt's final plan isn't that of a criminal mastermind. It's outsmarting Gretchen and Elliot with one great lie and a pair of laser pointers. It's jerry-rigging an automated killing machine in the trunk of his car. It's making a heat-of-the-moment decision to save Jesse's life.

It reminded us of everything we love about Breaking Bad, and everything we're going to miss so terribly now that it's over. It's a beautifully crafted, compassionate ending to one of the finest, boldest, most emotionally daring shows in television history.

Other thoughts:

- Unsurprisingly given just how conscious this show has always been of its own mythology, the pilot callbacks were coming thick and fast. 'Felina' begins, as did the pilot, with Walt mistakenly believing that the police are coming for him, only for them to drive on by. We've mentioned Walt's shirt and "I'm awake/alive", but there are doubtless other pilot nods we've missed. Let us know in the comments!

- After four full seasons of trying and failing to poison enemies with ricin, Walt finally deployed that particular Chekhov's gun, and it couldn't have gone to a more deserving target. Should've risked the calories and gone with sugar, Lydia.



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- Jesse lovingly crafting his wooden box in that daydream was a heartbreaking callback to his speech in season three's 'Kafkaesque', where he recalls working hard on a Peruvian walnut box in high school woodworking class. "It even smelled good, you know, you put your nose in it and breathed in, and it was perfect." That story ended with Jesse trading the box for an ounce of weed, despite how much he loved it. But now he's older, and wiser, and sadder, and has spent enough time longing for his freedom not to squander it. We like woodworking as a future for Jesse.

- We really like the interpretation of the episode's title as being made up of elements: FeLiNa, meaning iron, lithium and sodium on the periodic table, or blood, meth and tears according to one Twitter user's translation.

- The lyrics to Badfinger's 'Baby Blue', which plays over the final sequence, play a little like Walt's dying thoughts. Jesse does have some pretty nice baby blues on him, if you want to take it as one last ode to their twisted love story, but it also works as a reference to Walt's pride and joy: his product. Of course he had to die in the lab.

- Season four's 'Crawl Space' was always going to go down as one of the show's finest hours, but its final shot will have an added layer of significance now: Walt melting down in the crawl space is a near-perfect mirror of Walt dying in the lab.

- One of the most satisfying moments was Jack trying to save himself by offering Walt his money, and Walt cutting him off with a bullet to the face. Greed has seemed to be Walt's driving force throughout most of season five, and now money is meaningless to him again.

- We're grateful to Vince Gilligan for a lot of things, but chief among them is the fact that we got to see Badger and Skinny Pete one last time. A small but genuine surprise. Can't we get these guys a spin-off show, since that's apparently how stuff works now?

- While Marie only appeared in a single scene here, it spoke volumes about where she's at emotionally - she looks pale and drawn but she also seems strong, and like she hasn't been entirely broken by Hank's death. It also feels like she and Skyler will be able to reconcile going forward, and provide something resembling a family unit for Junior and poor Holly.

- We want your theories on the significance of Walt removing his watch and leaving it behind on the payphone. This, of course, is the watch that Jesse gave him for his 51st birthday, exactly a year prior to this episode. Had he simply forgotten that he'd been wearing it up to this point?

















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