Ulysses goes home

He was like an avenging angel. He answered all our prayers by punishing the guilty and uncaging the deserving. And when he left the world he was happy to go. He had shed his sins, paid his dues and was free. This was Walter White, no longer Breaking Bad.

The series finale was, in a word, uplifting. I don't know what's in Vince Gilligan's brain but it should be patented. It's as though he knew what we wanted. We wanted Jesse to survive, we wanted the amoral gang who had him like a hamster strapped to a wheel decimated, we wanted Todd to die painfully by Jesse's hand, we wanted Hank's body found, we wanted part of the money to go to Walt's family (he had suffered so much for it), we wanted, at long last, the truth to fall from Walt's lips.

We wanted Walt to pay, yes, but we felt his pain, too. How do you reconcile those two things? Gilligan did it by keeping to the tenor of what went before for five years. In the final shots of Jesse screaming in relief and an at-peace Walter White who can now fold his black-and-white wings, Gilligan stayed true to the Breaking Bad motif of madmen, retribution and redemption.

Walt was dying in a cabin in the woods, so lonely as he's plugged into his chemo that he begs The Disappearer to stay for a while. Any alternate scenario would be welcome to this. So he begins his last journey, dons his final avataar. He terrorizes the couple who shafted him on Gray Matter Technologies; they are so loathsome that we, too, enjoyed the mathematical precision of Walt's revenge. Jesse's cohorts make another appearance, as does Hank in a flashback which was a lovely touch; we liked the former and admired the latter and we wanted to bid them a fare-thee-well.

When Walt rigs the machinegun and mows down Todd's uncle's band of unlovelies I, for one, was screaming Yes! They deserved their bloody end, as did Lydia in a ricin denouement that was part of Walt's wonderful orchestra of Judgement Day.

When he tells Skyler that his whole odyssey was not just about family, “I did it for me..I liked it..I was good at it...I was alive”, well, that was it, wasn't it. A man whom destiny led astray twice finally took it in his hands. He could have been rich and accomplished via Gray Matter but he was nobody both at work and at home. So when he had nothing to lose, he became a legend, a man whose brain and talent was nothing short of masterful.

In the final shot where he lay on the ground and the cops moved in, the look of satisfaction on his face and the way the camera angle panned his body surrounded by the law, you immediately thought this was a night they would speak about in whispers in drawing-rooms when they spoke of Walter White, the great Heisenberg. You can't help but feel to your bones for a man like that.

I feel to my bones for Bryan Cranston, bringing Walt to life with a look in the eyes, a swelling of the chest, a pursing of the mouth. And precision. Always precision.

I feel to my bones for Vince Gilligan whose own Gray Matter is a thing of terrifying proportions.

What a trip it's been.

A crowd of cherries

I feel a bit Zen at the moment. As if the world has been balanced. Can you blame me after an embarrassment of riches via the Season 3 premiere of Justified, Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad? But first things first.

Downloaded and watched the full Spartacus series and wept and wailed as the final episode aired. What must it feel like to be Steven DeKnight? To have created something that people will remember forever? I've never seen a cast like this, unknowns for the most part who gave us a piece of themselves and gained immortality because they are so damn good at what they do. After Andy Whitfield I thought Liam McIntyre would “fall from fucking sight”, haha, but one episode in you could tell he had the intensity, not to mention the most sweetly vulnerable mouth, that would see him fly to Olympus. When Manu Bennett's Crixus died, the show almost stuttered to its end right then and there because his persona was always so aggressive that he ruled every frame he was in from the beginning of the series. Gannicus, by the time he was a “martyr on the cross”, had become a hero not just because he had that John Woo thing going on albeit with two swords instead of guns, but because he is so good-looking it hurts. And what a bit of directing his end was: Crucified, there he was reliving his time as a God of the Arena with the crowds going wild.

But the villains in Spartacus, aye, there was a crowd of cherries on top of the cake. Craig Parker as Glaber, Nick E Tarabay as Ashur, Todd Lasance as Caesar, Simon Merrells as Crassus, these are Gods of the Acting Arena. While my heart belongs to Nagron, I will go see anything with these guys in it in the future.

I have had to switch allegiances now that Spartacus is over, and there's nothing better in betrayal than Breaking Bad. Which other show can have an entire episode on a fly (that's not a euphemism) and keep us riveted? Watching Walter White turning from mild-mannered Chemistry teacher to a villain of Heath Ledger's Joker proportions is an exercise in how brilliant television writers can be. Imagine, in the first place, selling this storyline to studios. It is absolutely addictive, ha; such fun to watch a story evolving in an unexpected way: Junkie losers have moral cores, gentle husbands turn into wolves, drug dealers live by gentlemen's codes. I live my days spouting Jesse Pinkmanisms, bitch, and gasping at how easily Walter and his wife cross over to their Bonnie&Clyde avatars. If they can do that, what hope do the rest of us have really.