FelinaBreaking Bad : Season 5 Episode 16
If you were of the mind to go back and review old episodes, I would be interested to hear your side of the plane crash because I hated it and the subsequent three or four episodes enough that I stopped watching this show and swore it off for about a year. I think the world of this show and have enjoyed it immensely but I would still say it has a series of six or so consecutive episodes that are just a black, sucking disaster.
FelinaBreaking Bad : Season 5 Episode 16
The finale episode was great TV: brilliantly acted, well shot, and fun to watch, but it fell short of the moral vision that Vince Gilligan promised us. The ending felt like a sop to the Team Walt fanboys who tuned in each week to watch Heisenberg be a badass, morality be damned.
But, that being said, this episode was the good kind of predictable, the Pacific Rim kind of predictable. Every moment that I saw coming from a mile away was another moment I could look forward to seeing and being wowed by. The predictability made me excited for what was to come.
In "Madrigal" (S5E02), Mike uses a suppressed Beretta Cheetah to kill his former man Chris. At the conclusion of the episode, he is seen checking it and later threatening the paranoid Madrigal executive Lydia with it.
In "Live Free or Die" (S5E01), Mike pulls a Beretta 92FS Inox on Walt. He previously acquired this weapon in "Salud" (S4E10). He also carries the Beretta in other episodes of Season 5, including "Buyout" (S5E06).
As we promised in "The Ones Who Knock" Kickstarter, I did weekly recaps here for each episode of Breaking Bad. For those of you unfamiliar with my recapping style, it's less of a straightforward plot summary and more a distillation of the most interesting elements of each week's episode. The recaps will spoil everything up through the current episode (S5E16 "Felina"), but won't spoil any future episodes or even scenes from the "Next Time" segment of the show..because that's all over now. So hold on to your pork pie hats, because here we go.
There are a lot of things Walt did last night to redeem himself in our eyes. And many would argue he didn't deserve that redemption. That Walt should have gone out hated. But, like Skinny Pete and Badger, I like my morality plays a little murky. And so my favorite redemptive moment was when Walt was, at long last, honest with his wife and with himself. He wasn't doing this for his family (at least not primarily) he was doing it because it made him feel alive. And if you think back to The Walking Dead version of Walt we met in the pilot (pre-diagnosis), this confession to Skyler feels true. And after five seasons of half-truths, blatant lies and continual delusions, it was nice to hear.
Leading up to the finale, we crackpots had a lot of fun trying to decipher the meaning behind the episode title "Felina." My personal favorite was breaking down the word into its elemental parts: Fe+Li+Na=Iron+Lithium+Sodium=Blood+Meth+Tears. And that works. Oh it works very well. But the other, more straightforward reference proved to also be true. "Felina" is a reference to a song called "El Paso" by Marty Robbins. We saw a clear shot of a Marty Robbins cassette. (You still use cassettes, New Hampshire? Adorable.) Then the song played as Walt got up the wherewithal to drive to New Mexico. "Just get me home" he said to someone (God?), "I'll do the rest." The pertinent lyrics are as follows: 041b061a72