Gomie is dead and Hank is bleeding profusely from a leg wound, but the message of the edit is that we don’t even need a full dissolve to bring us to the present because so little has changed in the grand scheme of things. Then, we’re slammed back into the present as the same shot is repopulated with the gunfight. In a signature Breaking Bad editing move, the flashback ends with Walt, Jesse, and the camper dematerializing one by one. Walt and Jesse saw this place on the way up, and they’re seeing it again on the way down. By the end of the episode, Walt’s delivering the performance of a lifetime in another phone call to Skyler, having evolved into an adept liar. “Ozymandias” the episode opens in flashback: Walt is standing in the clearing at To’hajiilee, “ the very first place cooked, like, ever,” haltingly rehearsing a cover story aloud before calling Skyler to explain why he’ll be home late. By the end of the episode, the last vestiges of Walt’s empire lie in ruins, but Walt will keep trying to control how people remember him. The monarch taunted posterity with the inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” It so happens that “Remember My Name,” is the tagline for the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad. “Ozymandias,” the poem about a long-forgotten ruler of Egypt, a cruel tyrant whose colossus lies in ruins, is a metaphor for the transience of worldly power. The lone and level sands stretch far away. Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
He's no longer Heisenberg in this scene he's come out the other side and has regained a modicum of Walt-ness, as he explicitly pins all the blame for his and Skylar's criminal misadventures on himself for the benefit of the listening police.Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone At first he seems like he's gone totally off the reservation, growling and threatening and aggrandising, but the second he starts welling up - while maintaining his furious tirade of threats - is the second you see him start to regain his humanity. Walt cracking up as he regains his senses, far too lateĪnother unforgettable sequence is Walt's final monologue to his wife. In the context of this episode, it's just one more brutality about which to feel numb. This is quite the masterstroke on the parts of its writers, who have effectively managed to turn the most blameless and ordinary of the main characters into someone everyone dislikes and mistrusts, but when she finally finds out her husband is dead, her slide from elation at his success to utterly defeated sobs would in any other show be the climax. Hank's wife Marie is perhaps not the most sympathetic of characters in the show. No, that dubious accolade goes to the moment that Walt finds himself somewhat manically chuntering baby talk as he changes his daughter's nappies.
But even that isn't the worst Holly moment in the episode.