Recently, I experienced moments of awe and anguish so unexpected and profound that I had no idea how to go on with my life from there. I think the closest I can come to properly describing my mental and emotional state during these moments is to say I was gobsmacked, but my mind is too muddled to say for sure. I’m pretty lost here. Why don’t I just tell you what happened.
I saw a shooting star. I’m not from the City, but I’m close enough to render that phenomenon invisible at home, so this felt like the universe revealing to me some fabled wonder. Of course, there was no way to predict it was going to happen. I was just lying on the grass, not so much staring at the sky as gazing vaguely into the great expanse, when a small string of white light streaked an inch through black. Though it was a wholly new experience, I understood it instantly, exhilarated that after 21 years, I was finally seeing a long overdue marvel. And then it was gone. It took me a few seconds, so about twice as long as the star shot, to register my first coherent thought.
“Wait, that was so fast. How the hell do people wish on those?”
The star had cheated me. Suddenly deeply superstitious about such things, I felt I had missed an important opportunity. The cosmos had given me this special occasion, and I squandered it out of blank-minded astonishment. I had so much I wanted to say, but the words never came. If only that inch had been a foot or a mile or more, more than that brief blip in time and space that I could never get back.
But a shooting star is special precisely because it is so infinitesimal. If that moment had lasted a moment more, the effect would have been ruined. We wish upon shooting stars as a way of being spontaneously in commune with the entropy around us. To cling to that would be to render its remarkable existence ordinary and extinguish that which makes it beautiful.
A night later, I witnessed a scene of harrowing violence that shook me to my very core. My heart stopped, my head pounded, my lungs gasped for breaths I could not feel. Then there was darkness, and from the darkness the following appeared: Executive Producer Vince Gilligan.
So let me just say the obvious now. I’m a huge “Breaking Bad” fan. I first came to the show as a Netflix binge-watcher in the summer of 2012, and I reprised that thrill ride in the weeks before these final episodes. I am downright giddy every Sunday at 9:00 p.m., knowing what lies ahead is an hour-long adrenaline rush, filled with unparalleled acting, outstanding writing, and extraordinary visuals. I am an addict and I don’t mind that one bit.
Yet when the TV cuts to black and Gilligan’s name appears, I’m an absolute mess, more so in this last run of the show than ever before. In a phrase, my spoiler-free, surprise-free explanation of the five new episodes that have just aired: shit is going down. It is everything I could possibly want from “Breaking Bad,” which is attempting something truly rare in the world of television: showing an interest and an investment in ending.
We’ve known for a while now that 2013 would be the end. As the cast and crew took a network-mandated midseason break, postponing Walter White’s fate for a full year more, the audience became desperate. We took to the Internet with our .gifs, our memes, and most of all, with our theories and predictions. Ranging from the thoughtless to the meticulously researched, these speculations on the show’s endgame came with a common hopeful disclaimer: Vince Gilligan is a goddamn genius, and whatever he comes up with is going to blow this prognostication out of the water.
Against my better judgment, I have been sucked into this practice along with the rest of the diehards. The fatalism of it all, the last chance to play Gilligan’s guessing game, is just too tantalizing, but I have zero emotional stock in the show proving me correct. In fact, the soul-crushing content and themes this show is built upon lead me to actively rooting that I will be wrong. “Breaking Bad” has already made me feel so deeply connected to the fundamentally flawed characters that populate its Albuquerque, men and women for whom we know there can be no happy endings. So my reluctant prophecies are of downfall, destruction, devastation, demise…and I want none of it. I want Walt to keep getting away and the people he has wronged to keep chasing him. I want the show to flaunt its signature style and layer montages upon montages, time lapses upon time lapses, to keep this story alive in perpetuity.
However, that was never an option. Even more vital to the show’s DNA is its tag phrase for these final episodes: All Bad Things Must Come to An End. This was never a traditional TV show because it is a self-contained serial, with a gripping beginning and middle that keep you watching all the way to the bitter end you always knew was coming. No one knows yet what that end will be, but we have some guesses. I just can’t see how it will be satisfying to subvert the electrifying uncertainty, spoiling oneself with an unwitting pre-discovery of the way this awesome world will fade to black.
Cohen is a member of the Class of 2014.