Breaking bad finale party games

Follow Us. Part of HuffPost Entertainment. All rights reserved. It probably doesn't help that I watched the finale at a cemetery. Tell us: How did you celebrate the end of "Breaking Bad"? Maggie Furlong. Suggest a correction. What's Hot. Fauci Has Ever Said. It's a fitting punishment for a man who pretended to do everything he did out of loyalty and filial piety. Walt is so lonely that he ends up paying Ed thousands of dollars just for an extra hour of his time.

He's alive and rich but all alone. The only thing that brings him out of his mountain retreat is the possibility of passing on his ill-gotten gains to his family. Walt literally tries to buy his way back into his son's affections, and of course, it doesn't work. However, he's given one last goal when he sees Gretchen and Elliott on television, downplaying Walt's contributions to Gray Matter Technologies.

It's reasonable that they would. After all, it's not exactly good for a company's stock to have a co-founder become a murderous drug kingpin. Walt, unsurprisingly, does not see their side of things. Instead, he thinks they're disrespecting him by not giving him the credit for what he's earned. So naturally, Walt decides it's time to set things right.

He gets to accomplish everything that he left his mountain retreat to do. He threatens Gretchen and Elliott into giving all of his money to his family under the guise of a charitable donation. He kills all of the white supremacists that stole his blue meth recipe. Walt frees Jesse from slavery, and he even gets a kind of closure with Skyler and his infant daughter.

Plus, he poisons Lydia with a whole lot of ricin, and he successfully evades the police all the way to the end. Even when he dies, it's on his own terms. He's not rotting of cancer but dying in the arms of his true love—the chemistry lab that produces his blue meth. Walt is infamous, which as we know from The Three Amigos , is when you're more than famous. It's almost a fantasy of Walt's ideal ending, and there are plenty of bizarre coincidences that would seem to back up that reading.

How many actual, real people keep their car keys in the sun visor for anyone to find? Throughout the episode, Walt is a monstrous presence. He moves through scenes like a horror movie slasher. When he talks to Skyler, he appears like a ghost—the scene is even blocked like a jump scare. When he brags to Lydia about how she's dead by his hand, it's a moment that wouldn't be out of place in a Final Destination movie.

Walt gets his victory lap in the final episode, but it's only because he's chasing his enemies around the track. Even when Jesse escapes the white supremacist compound, finally free of Walt and his vindictive torturers, he lets out a guttural scream straight from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If there's anyone in the show that knows what kind of monster Walt was, it's Jesse. When he drives out of the show, it's as viscerally satisfying as seeing the final girl in a horror movie survive the killer.

As for Walt, most monster movies end with the monster dead before a last-minute revival , so it's fitting when Walt finally bites the dust. Walt starts Breaking Bad by telling his family that he loves them, and that everything he did was for their sake. He ends the show hobbling out to the meth shed to be with what he truly loves—a meth lab. It's clear even more so than when he admitted to Skyler that he did it for himself that he was never really Mr.

Whatever falling out happened between him and his partners before the show started was a symptom of something deeper. Walt's cancer was just an excuse for him to be the power-hungry villain he'd always wanted to be.

As Vince Gilligan once put it , "We always say in the writers' room, if Walter White has a true superpower, it's not his knowledge of chemistry or his intellect, it's his ability to lie to himself. He is the world's greatest liar. Walt lied to himself for so long that he believed his own lies for most of the show. He lied to the audience, too. How much you want to believe that Walt was a good man is dependent on how much you want to believe his lies.

Was he a good man who "broke bad," or was he always a twisted monster who finally got the excuse to behave like Scarface? We're leaning toward the latter. What if Mr. Chips became Scarface? Chips was already Scarface? In many ways, that hour felt like the show's final destination; the story and the people went furthest they could go in a dozen ways.

It placed many viewers including myself into an emotional and psychological vise and made "Game of Thrones'" Red Wedding look like a cocktail party. It braided together everything that makes "Breaking Bad" phenomenal and was nearly toxic in its crystalline purity. It was majestic, cathartic, harrowing and great. The last two episodes, for all their good moments and sturdy attributes, feel like mopping-up exercises, to some extent.

Perhaps the choices made at the start of Season 5 ultimately constricted and constrained what the last hours could do. I wasn't expecting another "Ozymandias," but a finale that was often concerned with logistical details and a plot to get rid of minor characters wasn't quite what I was expecting either. In the first third of the finale, there were some well-constructed twists and turns; the sequence at the Schwartz house was its own little effective thriller. In the middle, there was an elegiac spareness and a quiet grief in the final scenes of the White family.

The reveal of Walt in Skyler's kitchen was a terrific -- and chilling -- moment, and Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn played a full range of emotions from both characters -- especially Skyler -- with fantastic restraint and an ever-present tinge of sadness. Still, there are some nagging areas of disquiet in the back of my brain, especially as the endgame played out.

For one thing, the finale spent a lot of time on the resolutions of characters the Nazis, the Schwartzes, Lydia I barely knew and I didn't care much about. More importantly, it did not spend much time on Walt and Jesse's final moments. Jesse's absence was especially pronounced in the finale, and that may partly account for why the last hour felt kind of lopsided and off. Without Jesse, and with so much attention paid to structural detail, "Felina" ended up coming off as a bit mechanical and remote.

The final pieces that the puzzle that "Breaking Bad" has been assembling in Season 5 were slotted into place, but the kind of brain-melting impact of the show's best episodes wasn't present in this hour. I will admit to wrestling with how much Walt got to control his own narrative again , and that's what accounts for the fact that I didn't post this until 4 a.

I'm betting I'll be wrestling with that for some time to come Ryan McGee and I will publish a Talking TV podcast about the finale Monday evening, in which we'll discuss these matters once again. Update: The podcast on "Felina" is here and below. Did the fact that Walt had finally stopped lying to himself and his wife, and the fact that he had one final reckoning with Jesse over the barrel of a gun, make it OK that he got to arrange his last hours to his own satisfaction, more or less?

When Walt left this Earth, he was on generally civil -- if not friendly -- terms with Skyler and Jesse. Going from the events of "Ozymandias" to these resolutions is not necessarily illogical, but it is fairly swift, all things considered.

Given how much he's wanted to control events and other people, I thought the finale might find Walt struggling at times with forces that tried to overcome him.

To not have the upper hand rankles Walt to no end, and he mostly got to have the upper hand here. Now, much of what he controlled and directed benefited others, and there was an evolution in his ability to be self-aware and honest. But I wrestle with the fact that Walt got to call the shots, for the most part. The case for that scenario: It was Walt being Walt -- why would he change who he basically is at this late date?

That makes sense, believe me. The case against Walt having the upper hand: It allows a man who's done many bad things to control key outcomes yet again, and it's perhaps not as dramatic if Walt encounters no real obstacles in his endgame.

He ticks items off his list and that is basically that. I think I can kind of buy the way things were left in the case of Skyler. Walt giving her the grave site of Hank and Gomez, providing her with a way to avoid prison and making that admission -- "I did it for me.

I liked it. Thank goodness he didn't try to apologize again, and thank goodness he finally admitted the truth about what's made him tick all this time.

In the past, Walt's often portrayed himself as being driven primarily by a desire to help others, when the truth was, benefiting other people usually came lower on the priority list than helping himself. But not everything Walt did in his final hours was driven by a rampant ego hiding behind self-serving lies. Selfless impulses had drifted up the list though the list of priorities, let's face it, is still a mixed bag.

Will those relatively peaceful resolutions with Skyler and Jesse allow some "Breaking Bad" fans to banish Walt's previous actions from their minds and present the man's moral ledger as balanced or in the black? Will some viewers walk away from the Albuquerque saga thinking that Walt's slate -- as a human being, a father, a friend, a relative and a partner -- has been wiped clean? I think so, and I know I shouldn't care about that, but I do.