Spoiler Alert!

Hello, my name is Erica and I am an addict.

I remember when my addiction first started. It was a warm summer evening and I was with my father watching TV. Instead of letting me pick which show we watched, my dad decided to choose for us. It was a show I had never even heard of and never thought to watch. A show that I didn’t think would trigger as many emotions as it did. A show that single handedly enhanced and destroyed my world.

That was the day I became addicted to a show about drugs.

Breaking Bad is probably one of the best shows I have seen thus far in my life, although it was not clear to me during my first viewing. The beginning of the first episode was presented in a way that filled me with confusion. This feeling of misunderstanding would soon, as each episode passed, transform into intrigue and eagerness.

Breaking Bad is the story of an ordinary high school chemistry teacher. He lives with his pregnant wife Skylar and son Walt Jr. I did not like Skylar as a character (or Walt Jr. for that matter). Apparently, I’m not the only one. The actor of Skylar White, Anna Gunn, received death threats from Breaking Bad fans who could not stand her.

Sounds boring so far right?

Wrong.

During the first episode Walter White (main character) is diagnosed with lung cancer. But instead of feeling sorry for himself and his family, he decides to take action. In order to provide for his family after his passing, he turns to cooking meth with an old student. Many people probably questioned his decisions to turn to drugs of all things. However, I find this unexpected and almost comical.

Mr. White is not one that would strike me as a violent man, but he was certainly my favorite character from any series. His character is almost portrayed as pathetic and/or weak. However, as the series goes on, a violent, almost crazy side emerges from Walter. His transformation throughout the series is astonishing. From the murder of Crazy 8’s to the massacre of Todd Alquist and his family, Mr. White alters from an ordinary chemistry teacher to a powerhouse drug emperor.

Each individual episode begins with a scene that foreshadows the events to come. Or it would start in the middle of the episode and then return to the start. I absolutely loved the formatting of each episode; it allowed me and other viewers to almost become part of the excitement and drama. I found myself guessing what would happen in each critical scene. Boredom was never an issue. The mysterious intros captured my attention and held it until the end of each show and beyond.

There are two types of people in this world. Those who understand how attached I feel to this series and those who believe I’m crazy. I can honestly say that I never expected to feel such a wide variety of emotions from a show about drugs. I felt happiness, anger, sadness, excitement, anticipation, astonishment, fear, love, and depression all in one episode. I became so enveloped in this series that many people thought I had disappeared from the face of the earth when in all reality I was sitting with my dad watching Breaking Bad.

The element I find most inspiring in Breaking Bad is the relationship between Jessie (Walter White’s old student) and Mr. White. Their bond is probably the strongest in the entire series. This is also my favorite relationship because Jessie is almost like the son Mr. White never had. Well the son without cerebral palsy anyways.

It might sound cliché but even though they threaten each other’s lives a countless amount of times over the course of five seasons, in the end they really do care about each other. In the series finale, instead of killing Jessie, like Walter intended to for “stealing” and using his perfect meth recipe, he saves him from his captors and sets him free. And even when Mr. White asks Jessie to kill him, Jessie refuses.

I cannot begin to express my feelings of sadness when the final season started. No doubt I was happy that it finally aired and I had something to do with my free time (which is all the time) but I was sad to see my favorite show in the close of its existence. The final episode was very symbolic in its message. It really reflected on who Walter White really was under all the family guy stuff.

Yes he still cared about his family but he was finally able to admitted to himself that the reason he cooked meth was not for that reason alone. The reason was pure and simple. He loved it. He was good at it. And disregarding the fact that it made him filthy rich, it made him feel powerful.

In all honesty, I was very happy with the way Breaking Bad ended. I have heard many comments about how it didn’t answer all the questions people had. What these questions are I have not clue. I personally don’t enjoy being tortured by open-ended finales. This was not one of those. This was one that came to an absolute close, one that doesn’t leave you wondering what happened next.

This finale was amazing in the fact that Mr. White saved Jessie and his family. Then he died surrounded by what he loved, his meth lab. In the final scene Walter White holds a gas mask in his hands (an item used in the process of cooking) and then he dies. This reminded me of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings.  He held it and looked at it as if it was truly his “precious”. When he died, so did the recipe for the purest meth anyone had ever seen.

In my eyes Mr. White didn’t just kill everyone who went against him (even though he did). He made a complete and absolute statement. He was a threat. He was Heisenberg. He was king.

All hail the king.