Sunday night saw the conclusion of the first half of Breaking Bad's season 5 (the rest will air next summer). This season has certainly been the darkest and most violent, but is it the best season so far? Walt has completed his downward spiral in these past eight episodes and become a power hungry villain so evil it's hard to remember that he started out as a man trying merely to save his family. Sklyer, his long suffering wife, has finally taken action, getting their two children out of the house with a perfectly timed "mental break" and telling Walt she is waiting for his cancer to return. Hank Schrader is as obsessed as ever with discovering who Heisenberg is and has gone from a character we didn't really like to one we're rooting for. Perhaps the most disappointing feature of the season has been that Jessie has been, relatively, sidelined. While it could be clever writing, since Jessie is literally detaching himself from Walt and metaphorically removing himself from the show, it is still disappointing. Jessie's character always had an emotional range that Walt's doesn't. But even he is becoming jaded. Although he is visibly outraged when Todd kills the little boy in the episode with the train heist, his response lacks the sorrow, for example, of Jane's death or the near death of Brock. Although Season 5 had a slew of great episodes, I don't think I was the only one let down by the finale.The episode begins with Walt enlisting Todd to clean up the mess from the previous episode where Walt killed Mike. Next Walt takes care of the ten guys that Mike was protecting, enlisting the help of Todd's neo-Nazi uncle to coordinate their murders. The scene is a great musical montage, as we've come to expect from Breaking Bad, and shows just how villainous Walt has become. With the help of Lydia, Walt and his new second-in-command, Todd they expand their business to the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, Skyler shows Walt the great amount of money that he has accumulated, asking him when it will be enough. Surprisingly, he tells her that he is out of the business. Whether he is really out or not we will have to wait till next season to find out but there was something rushed and confusing about this episode. While the rest of the season, and indeed the show, has moved along at a methodical pace, this episode seemed like it had a lot crammed into it. We are already aware that Walt is a super villain so the killing of Mike's men was not necessary and the sudden expansion of his business to the Czech Republic seemed to come out of nowhere. Certainly so did his confession that he is no longer in the meth business. If Walt has secretly been wanting out of the business, he hasn't shown any signs of it, so I guess we can only wait and see what happens. Finally the big cliff-hanger felt like a bit of a letdown. Hank discovers Walt's book from Gale in the bathroom and we know he's putting two and two together. It seems that Hank has suspected Walt, or at least been suspicious of him, for a long time so this didn't seem that shocking to me. Furthermore, would Walt leave that book around on purpose? Perhaps he wants to be caught but again, he hasn't shown any signs of that this season. Whatever the case is we'll have to wait till next summer to find out and hopefully the writers will have something great in store. I, for one, can't wait to see how the show ends.
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