Originally published in print September 2020.
Spoilers ahead for season two of Breaking Bad.
A car crash is a great cliff-hanger for your season finale. Castle, Grey’s Anatomy, The Vampire Diaries, and a million other shows have used this trope in the past. It allows showrunners to shock viewers without having to come up with something new, getting them invested in watching the next season to see who survives. It also gives the writers easy story hooks for the next season: maybe somebody gets addicted to the pain medication they’ve been taking after the crash, maybe a couple gets together after they realise just how suddenly everything can change, or maybe a character who feels responsible for the crash goes off the rails. A car accident can happen at any time, so no matter what your characters have got up to in the rest of the season, you can throw one in.
Season two of Breaking Bad took the crash trope to a new level, and I don’t just mean thousands of feet in the air. The plane crash had been foreshadowed since the beginning of the season, where due to the black and white filter our eyes were drawn to the pink teddy bear floating in Walt’s (Bryan Cranston) pool while a number of police sirens sounded in the distance. Specifically, the first thing we see floating in the pool is an eye. That could have been the end of the stinger, screaming at us “well, whose is it?!”, but instead the camera pans down to underneath the water, where the bear, missing an eye, is revealed. I’ve never been a fan of this specific kind of in medias res opening, where you start in the middle of the action and then flash back to where it all began, knowing what’s going to happen but not how. I’m not saying that they can’t be well utilised, I just think they are often a symbol of lazy writers who can’t keep you engaged in a series without constantly reminding you that you don’t need to worry, something really interesting will happen eventually.
That’s not what we saw in season two of Breaking Bad. In this season Jesse (Aaron Paul) and Walt begin to grow their meth business with the help of amoral lawyer Saul (Bob Odenkirk), while Hank (Dean Norris) becomes traumatised through his dangerous work with the DEA and Skyler (Anna Gunn) gets involved in a money laundering operation. Conflicts that play out over the course of an episode, such as when Walt and Jesse get stranded in the desert, never feel like filler, which would otherwise make the season a joy to watch, without the constant reminders of what’s to come. At the beginning of multiple season two episodes we see this opening scene expanded upon, with people in hazmat suits bagging and tagging what seem to be random objects floating in the pool, photographing Walt’s shattered windshield, and removing two body bags from the driveway. The opening of the finale reveals that Walt’s home isn’t the only one being searched for evidence – there are people in hazmats all over the neighbourhood, and two pillars of black smoke are drifting up from nearby houses. They could have shown this dramatic scene from the beginning, but instead they build up to it.
This build up is why I think these hints at what’s coming work so well. This crash is not an accident, a fluke or even the result of one bad decision.The writers want to remind us that throughout the season Walt is always moving towards this outcome. Again and again Walt makes decisions that hurt others in service of himself, and the writers want to make it clear that every time he did this he became closer to the man who would eventually let his partner’s girlfriend die,resulting in her grief-stricken air traffic controller father letting two planes crash. It all happens right after Skyler discovers that Walt has been cooking meth, further emphasising his connection to the crash. Breaking Bad is not a show averse to blood or gore, which is why the finale’s sedate explosion, especially when compared to the car crash trope, is so effective. After all that build up, Walt looks up to see a far off explosion, and watches puzzled as the bear from the first episode falls into his pool. The episode then ends before anything else hits the ground. Usually, we delight in the carnage of a scene like this: the mangled vehicle, survivors calling out for their loved ones, sparks flying from a machine being used to cut someone out of the wreckage. But here, we don’t need to see anything else. We don’t need a spectacle to marvel at; we have great writing.
Breaking Bad’s season two finale took a popular, if slightly stale, trope and breathed new life into it, the writers adapting it to fit the story they were telling. The story of Walter White will live on, and it’s not just because of masterful season finales like this one, but because of the show’s consistently high quality.
