If someone were to ask you what ‘Breaking Bad’ is, how would you respond? Probably by saying “Only The Greatest TV Show Ever!”
It’s been seven years since Breaking Bad aired it’s finale and it still is home to a new generation as they grow up. And why won’t it be? The show is stunning at a level only few people have tried to achieve and have failed.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Walter White the Hero
- Origin of The Name: Ozymandias
- Everything Great About the Greatest Episode Ever
Even though the final episode of the show was a stunning climax and a powerhouse of emotions, the episode that changed Television history forever was and remains to be the third last episode before the series came to an end, Ozymandias.
Walter White The Hero
Walter White’s journey is of an ordinary human being who went from being a high school teacher to a leader of a drug empire and gripped a worldwide audience for five years.
And it seemed only fitting that an end would be fashioned in the most poetic, most powerful way, an hour of television drama that surpassed in all forms of excellence and that is what Ozymandias is.
Origin of The Name: Ozymandias
The title of this episode is titled after the 19th Century poem:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramsessas II. The sonnet is about the statue of a king who once thought he was immortal. The statue now nothing more than a pile of crumbling ruins.
The sonnet is about the man’s arrogance and the ignorant nature of his own insignificance in the larger scheme of things, the ruler’s decline and inevitable death.
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And leading up to this episode of Breaking Bad, our lead Walter White has tied himself to the story of the Pharaoh as the poem describes a man dying under his own weight much like Walter White.
Everything Great About the Greatest Episode Ever
Even though it was not the final episode, these 48 minutes would conclude a five season story arc in one truly unforgettable episode and the start of the downfall for Walt. Without a commercial break (we remember that don’t we?) the audience was hooked from the second it started.
The episode has a contrast between the early years of Jesse (Aaron Paul) and Walter (Bryan Cranston) in his RV in cooking meth while Walter lies to his wife about why he’ll be home late. And the current situation finds Walter after a shootout with Uncle Hank in the same location as the flashback seen with Jesse.
(very comfortable with the uncomfortable situation he finds himself in) Hank has a bullet in his leg and Walt is offering $80 Million dollars in exchange for Hank’s life. Hank then delivers an iconic line to Walt which still chills us to our bones.
“You want me to beg? You’re the smartest guy I ever met, yet you’re too stupid to see- He made up his mind 10 minutes ago.” And that is Hank’s end.
Walter rats out Jess (breaking our hearts) and Jesse is taken prisoner by the gang. Walter goes back to his Family, takes baby Holly and from the car calls his family, clears Skylar and his family’s name knowing their phones are tapped.
The scene between Walter and his family will go down in his history as something that the audience will never forget. It took us a moment to recover from it, it made us reach a place much beyond just some fiction writing and forever ebbed in us the feeling of dread when we think of it.
That is when the meaning of the poem really comes alive when we see Walter deal with his family as the poem is about seeing through the eyes of others. And only through other characters and their reactions can we really see Walter’s fall from grace and that’s when the dread finally becomes a confirmation. This is Walter’s end.
Critical Acclaim For Only The Best
The episode received critical acclaim for the feat that one hour of television obtained. Directed by Rian Johnson and written by veteran writer Moira Walley Beckett who won an Emmy for her work on it. Bryan Cranston won the much deserved Emmy for lead actor.
It was gut-wrenching, brilliantly executed, actors acted really well, an amalgamation of all the pieces that tied together, horrific and well-planned. A brilliant piece of television that transcended fiction and became immortal in the minds of it’s audience.
It remains at a perfect score of 10 after a survey of 1,00,000 was done. To compare the best TV episodes have a rating somewhere around a 9.7.
By making this piece of television, the creators were aiming for something higher than just a piece of fiction, with almost no contemporary references they were aiming at a piece of timelessness only few even aim to achieve.
Do you think this was Breaking Bad’s best episode of the entire series? Let us know what you think in the comment below!
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