Oh, come on now, @avclub-453f2cc28c88e7d65746a7694ddd5d0b:disqus , I don't remotely feel like I'm slogging here among pathetic dullards.

Okay, there's my point just going *whoosh* on by.

Not within Breaking Bad it's not well established. Not within the world of season 5b it's not well established, not even a little bit. (Even if "magical realism" weren't the weakest of weak sauce when we're talking about a show that's focused on science, and on the necessity of accounting for aftermaths rather than…

You can handwave anything you like, but that's why the list.  Walt avoids everything he has to avoid, achieves every aim he's set himself, gets all the revenge and all the emotional satisfaction that remains in this world for him to take.  "It's as if Walt's already dead" is a fine trope, but it's not a license for…

How about we bullet this out, for kicks?

I'm not going to turn this into a disquisition on Shakespeare.  If you guys think that creating a tragedy involves implementing some kind of tragic "template," then you've drawn the wrong aesthetic lessons from Shakespeare (and Hamlet, by the way, is about the last play I'd use for a template even if I thought there…

I've taught Shakespearean tragedy at the college level.  I wrote a dissertation chapter about Macbeth. I get it about tragedy.  It's exactly the tragic potential of BB that I feel "Felina" cheated away from.

@avclub-6e8fb18f4f5788ce09ff72f8fdd81b4f:disqus , you're not reading what I wrote.  I didn't say anything about "transcending genre entertainment."  Shakespeare's tragedies were genre entertainment; but they found a means within genre to honor—and create emotional hammer blows—out of what @admittruth:disqus rightfully…

Walt's "luck" has been tightening around him like a noose this last season.  If anything, that's been the major dramatic innovation of the stretch run, and it's something "Felina" sort of hand-wavingly reverted.

Roteness isn't about whether or not foreseeable things are happening:  there was no way Hank or Gomez were coming out of the shootout alive, but nothing about the way "Ozymandias" played out that inevitability wasn't vivid and deeply imagined.  Mere plot surprise is trite, and people overvalue it.  It's sureness of…

More years ago than I care to think about, I saw the Replacements in one of their last sets of gigs, with Slim Dunlap making it a four-piece.  The show was incredibly on point:  the band sounded fantastic, they played any number of things I wanted to hear, there was a quota of random oddball covers tossed in.…

I taught literature classes in school, ever. One of the things I learned doing that was that complex works of art could sustain multiple different, even contradictory, reactions.

Agreed.  Served the story, but with too much fan service thrown in.  There wasn't the sort of dramatic resonance that's made the episodes leading up to this so remarkable.

He was trying to bargain with Walt for the location of the remaining money.

As @avclub-98470000dfdbcbccf2c7cd42d80955ae:disqus mentioned, that bitch had a daughter who she memorably pled for with Mike last season.  Kind of worth remembering.  Kind of disappointed that the show couldn't find anything more in Lydia's end than, yeah, fuck you bitch.

You don't check the trunk because nothing in it is within his reach, and isn't going to be.

It was fine.  It served the story.  But—maybe because of that—it was just … less than what it has been to this point.

Allow me to innerduce myself.  My name is Mud.

Can't you see that I'm much sweeter?  I'm your little señoriter …

I'm rich!  I'm a happy miser!