Saturday 28 September 2013

It'll Be Okay If You Don't like the Ending to Breaking Bad

First off, no, I don’t except the Breaking Bad finale will be bad. I think it’ll be awesome! The show’s been excellent from the start and these final run of episodes have been incredible, delivering one amazing moment after the other.

But look, everyone won’t be happy with how things end Sunday night. That’s just how it is. Some fans will wish Walter White’s story wrapped up in a different way than Vince Gilligan gives us, whether they think the ending was too kind to Walt, too cruel to Walt, too disturbing, not disturbing enough, etc., etc… You can’t please everyone and it’s already clear looking at how some Breaking Bad fans view certain characters and plotlines vs. how others do that people are reacting to Breaking Bad in their own ways.

But no matter how it ends and how satisfying you find the ending, I hope Breaking Bad fans can look back and appreciate the path the show took us on, rather than concentrate on the end alone. In recent years, a lot of very acclaimed and beloved shows have had some fans judge the entirety of the series rather harshly because of how they ended. Lost is of course a big example, with plenty jumping to an extreme, “I wasted six years of my life!” place because they didn’t like how the show concluded. Battlestar Galactica had some similar reactions as well.

Hell, there are some people mad about The Sopranos, as a whole, because of the way the final scene of the show went. But even when I can understand why people are unhappy with the ending of a show, I never can almost never, with rare exceptions, get my head around the ending having ruined the entire experience for them.

Obviously, we all want what a good ending. Everyone is hoping for a story we’ve been following to conclude in a manner that really pays off. But in TV, where a story can last for years and years, it’s especially important to look at the entire journey and not focus on the final episode as the only barometer of how the show worked or didn’t work. People like to accusingly say, “They’re making it up as they go along!” sometimes with a TV show, as though that’s implicitly a bad thing, when, really, it’s just how TV works.

Before Breaking Bad: Bryan Cranston's Power Rangers Past

If you created a TV show, you work so hard to get the network to pick up your series in the first place and then to get a new episode finished every week, if you’re one of the lucky ones who do get past the pilot stage. You’re rarely able to, from the beginning, have your exact ending mapped out – especially when you are almost never aware of how long your show will last when it begins, because almost no network will make that sort of commitment ahead of time (though, encouragingly, at least FX looks to be planning to do just that more going forward).

All that being said, Breaking Bad is a meticulously plotted show that has managed to masterfully pay off a ton of storylines through the years. But let’s go to the worst case scenario and imagine watching the Breaking Bad finale and feeling it doesn’t work in a big way– that it chickened out or it took the characters to a place that didn’t tonally fit or killed a character they shouldn’t have or let a character off scott free who should have paid for their actions.

What Would a Breaking Bad Animated Series Be Like?

There’s any number of ways that the story could go that won’t sit right, especially given different how fans bring their own perceptions to the series. But would that suddenly invalidate all of the incredible TV you’ve watched up until now? The moments that had you on the edge of your seat, the character twists (deaths or otherwise) you felt emotionally connected to or the shocking, “I can’t believe that just happened” scenarios we saw occur? Of course not. If you’ve been loving watching Breaking Bad all this time, even if you felt profound disappointment with the final episode, one would hope you’d look back on Breaking Bad as a truly great show.

So for those of you who end up unhappy with Breaking Bad’s ending  ---- and that’ll be some of you, even if it’s just a few -- remember all that came before it and how special this show was, regardless of how those final 75 minutes (minus commercials, that is) play out on Sunday night.

…Even though I’m still pretty sure the ending's going to kick ass.

Breaking Bad's final episode airs Sunday, September 29th at 9pm on AMC... but you already knew that!

Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @EricIGN, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman.


Source : ign[dot]com

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