After the worst has happened and everything you thought you knew proves to be false, what comes next? That is the question 'Granite State', the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad, tries to answer. In all likelihood, last week's 'Ozymandias' will prove to be the show's undeniable apex but there are still threads that need tying up, and Vince Gilligan is nothing if not obsessive-compulsive about narrative cleanliness. Next week's finale will put a full stop on things, but 'Granite State' has an important role in setting up the post-apocalyptic status quo and positioning everybody for the end.
Walt, Jesse and, to a lesser degree, Skyler are forced to confront their hopelessness near-constantly throughout this episode. Skyler wanted to keep her family together, now she's tuning out lawyers while telling them she knows nothing of her husband's whereabouts; Jesse just wants a life without pain, instead Todd shows him the knife can yet be twisted further. And Walt wanted power and adulation, instead his life's work has amounted to a wooden cell and two copies of Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium. What comes after the worst has happened proves that the worst is actually ongoing and ever-degrading.
We begin with Walt concocting his revenge, having seemingly absorbed the tragedy of the last episode and attempting to intimidate loyalty out of Saul as he has done so many times before. The cancer is ravaging his body, however, undermining his scare tactics. Even with his mortality in plain sight and brought to his knees by a coughing fit, he cannot accept that it is over. Jesse, on the other hand, has been hurt so much over the course of the series that he cannot even fathom how he could endure further injury - physical or emotional. His ignorance to the bottom beneath rock bottom obviously isn't a symptom of Walt-like hubris; he doesn't contemplate greater hurt because the thought is just too grim to bear.
In the most chilling Breaking Bad episode since Gus took a box-cutter to Victor's throat, Todd makes clear to Skyler that her children are not safe just because Walt is out of the picture. In the same doe-eyed, cold-hearted manner, he makes sure Jesse knows he can still hurt more when he puts a bullet in the back of Andrea's head. Skyler and Jesse's worlds have just been blown apart and the scraps of truth and certainty they are trying to cling onto are being stripped away by this "opie, dead-eyed piece of shit".
Meanwhile, failing health, a life in isolation and pragmatic truths spoken by Robert Forster's brusque vacuum repair man would usually be enough to convince a meth kingpin of his failings but Walt persists in trying to keep his fantasies alive. His wedding ring falls off a bony finger, symbolically confirming the death of his marriage and the literal death that awaits him, but he feels he can still get some of the money he's earned to his family even if his plans for revenge look to be in shambles.
Walt makes several attempts to immerse himself in self-aggrandising delusions once again, much as Jesse begs for death feeling he has nothing left to lose but reality is laid bare for them by people like Todd and the vacuum repair guy, agents of brutal truth.
"Just so you know, this is nothing personal", Todd says as he prepares to kill Andrea, and he's right. He is merely a vessel of heartache for these characters that we have followed for the past 61 episodes, and yet his sociopathic lack of emotion would render any revenge plot moot. He wouldn't feel it, he wouldn't know he had been bested.
After putting the fear of God into Skyler, he turns up to his meeting with Lydia all smart and mannered - Jesse Plemons looks more like his nervous Friday Night Lights self - ready to prove himself worthy with a 92 per cent batch. The pair, much like Walt, have eyes bigger than their stomachs. Todd is clearly doing this out of some twisted sense of love, but his words to Jack early on ("No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?") very much apply to his unrequited love.
Now, the fact that almost all of Todd's recent actions have been coloured by his crush on Lydia will probably - somehow - prove his undoing, but for now he is on top, and the series has skewered in his favour. Potential moments of grandstanding catharsis like Jesse's confessional video are butchered, truncated and mocked by the Nazis.
All really seems lost when Junior rejects the small slice of his father's fortune that Walt can get to him, but the original sin is enough for Walt to regret any notion of defeat.
Gretchen and Elliot turn up on TV and proceed to kick Walter in the ribs, belittling his contribution to Gray Matter and labelling his former self as "sweet" and "kind". Walt's face twists in enragement, his jaw clenches and his eyes narrow. This is a reservoir of anger left largely untapped and pretty much untouched since season two, but this revelation opens up a few more possibilities for the final hour, even if now the finale seems to have been configured as a straight-up revenge thriller, limited in scope.
Mr Lambert's heading back to the ABQ.
Words: George Morahan
