Best hour of television ever.
best episode in the history! OMG!
Second time I watch this show and for the second time I get chills all over my body. Tremendously awesome!
This is just the best episode ever made! Very dramatic and exciting!
It seems people just give out laud to something once it reaches a pique or a culmination of established storytelling. Revenge of the Sith was not a good film, it just had monumentally important scenes and was the culmination of the Vader story. This was a good episode of Breaking Bad, but I'm not sure I see anything fundamentally different about it than any other episode in which something decisively "final" happens, and it felt almost the same to me as the preceding episode. To me, the last episode with Sarah, and the subsequent episodes with her father (John De Lancie) were much more impactful, and rang more true. I also felt for everyone in those moments. But this episode? It just made me feel like a psychopath. Walt and Jessie were the only ones I even cared about in this episode.
The show has never wavered in its depiction of Hank as an A1 piece of establishment shit. He's a degenerate jackbooter with negative self awareness and the maturity of a six year old, and, though they never show it, his job is terrorizing people and enabling the existence of drug cartels. Did anyone else watching actually care that he was going to get it? To me Breaking Bad's writers have done a great job with making a boorish and non-sympathetic character just palatably sympathetic enough through five seasons to not be hard to watch his character. He was an integral part of the story and ensemble, but I never once cared about him.
That's where the disconnect came for me, right at the beginning of this episode (really, the end of the last). Walter was understandably impossibly conflicted with the situation he was in and not wanting to call down on his brother in law. But I didn't fucking care. I just wanted to see the shit hit the proverbial fan. Yet this episode stole that from us. It cuts straight to the aftermath and Walt being conflicted with the situation and fumbling with the results of his machinations after once again playing the devil but finding himself unprepared and caught unaware with the unexpected outcome. That was in character. It's something we've seen play out time and time again, as it seems to be one of the main ruminations of the plot: How desperation and necessity mold people into certain shapes, and how some people take to the shape more naturally, (Mike, Gustavo) whereas Walt throws himself and Jessie into a world where they're both massively out of their depth, and they're both like plastic figures that are partially but incompletely heated and bent, but snap back toward something resembling their natural shape (Walt), floundering in what they were trying, or, in Jessie's case, breaking in half under the stress.
After this, though? I have no idea what the showrunners' internal perspective or motivation was, but here's where it turned into the blackest of dark comedies to me. I was rolling with how aghast everyone was and how fucking stupid Walt's family became. She pulls a knife?! And then when Walt wrestles it away junior goes full retard and calls the cops saying the opposite of what just happened, like a small child calling for the teachers. I always liked junior, but here he had nothing but my contempt. I don't know it was forced and unrealistic, or just my disgust at how people can act like irrational, frightened animals, but I was laughing when Walt yelled at them, and pretty much the entire phone conversation. Yes, I get the extremely heavy drama with Walt playing the part of the evil, dominating drug kingpin spouse so he would take all of the blame and heat onto himself and off of Skyler, while falling apart from how everything turned out, but it was just so ridiculously tragic that the drama changed states from drama to comedy like a catalytic reaction.
I can't say whether or not that was intentional, but I still find it kind of silly that people call this one of the BeSt tHinGs eVaR FiLmeD when there are several better episodes of BB. Yeah, it's partially subjective. Yeah, you're also probably very easily manipulated and don't know the difference in a good script and a self-serious one. This episode could have used some heavy cinematic scoring for the climactic scenes. The dryness of the dramatic action is my only real criticism of this show overall.
Gomey and Hank will def be missed, they were amazing characters!!
The rutheless way in which Walter told Jesse about Jane's death, he truly has no one and nothing in this world anymore.
Insanity!!
Man, amazing episode, amazing show... it keeps getting better! The way is personality changed over the show... The way they make us like every character and their point of view...
The single greatest episode in the history of television.
I am yet to hear any argument for why this isn't the best thing ever committed to film
my heart dropped and fell through the earth
I mean, this is the greatest episode of anything I’ve ever watched. Just rewatched it for the first time in about 7 years, and it’s even more powerful now.
92 | That was hard to watch. Walt's soul is just lost in that desert. Everything he worked that he think he did for his family, in a matter of fact he actually did it for himself. He was a man with cancer and now he is cancer for his family. He seems conflicted between Walt and Heisenberg. He probably still has Walt's heart but his mind is completely Heisenberg. He wins, but for what.
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Rating: 91.25
Plot
25%: 2.8
50%: 2.5
75%: 2.7
100%: 2.7
Favorite Characters
oh. my. god. this is the greatest thing I've ever watched, damn.
This episode was stressful and sad. The death of Hank and Gomez and the captivity of Jesse and the terrible behavior of Walter, who showed his ugly and evil face.
Season 5 is the best season of anything I've ever watched! I know I'm late in watching this and at the point of writing this haven't finished the show yet, but this episode gave me goosebumps and tears! Amazing episode
The greatest episode of television I have ever watched… my heart absolutely sank about 3 times. This was the most depressing yet most wonderful thing I have ever experienced.
yeah definitely the greatest episode of television ever made. absolutely zero doubt about it.
this episode is so INSANEEEEE
!!!This is the best episode!!!!
oh my god this episode just... just... wow.
Rian Johnson is a genius.
The story which the past episodes are building up has ended.
Walt really didn't know how to deal with these guys,he has no security for himself and that's why all this happened.
This is easily my favorite episode of the show so far. Walter went completely insane at the end.
Best TV episode of all time.
witnessing Jesse's fear without seeing how he was tortured was very disturbing - almost worse not knowing what had to happen & having to imagine what would cause him to be that fearful. and then to witness him being enslaved to the lab with chains & the restricted movement of the overhead bar worse than "prison" is downright ironic & sad!
And this is why Ozymandias is the highest rated BB episode on IMDb.
And the same director (Rian Johnson) also directed the lowest rated episode of BB (Fly)
(I love that episode, kill me for it lmao)
The climax of the whole show, Walt’s chickens coming home to roost, while he tries to do futile right things lives it’s too late and he’s exhausted all the easy bad methods.
The best episode in the series. So intense! My heart was pounding while watching this.
When skyler comes home you can see a giant camera in the reflection of her window lol
The greatest piece of media ever, meaning best of both TV and film. Beyond outstanding episode.
Nothing beats this show particularly this episode
Ready for the most based comment ever?
I enjoyed the season 4 finale episode more.
Not my favourite show, I like a lot of shows better than breaking bad, but I think it is without a doubt the greatest TV show of all time
I felt like they could have ended the show with this episode. I would have been ok with Walter getting away. Sometimes bad people win.
Shout by stormsmBlockedParent2018-01-21T18:57:43Z
this is the worst feeling episode of tv ever. I'm so disturbed and depressed after watching this. simply horrible.
Masterpiece.