I’m not even going to say spoiler alert. Don’t pin this on me, guys. You know for a fact that the finale of “Breaking Bad” aired last Sunday night; one of the series-record 10.3 million viewers had to have mentioned it to you. So if you see an article with this seminal television show’s title in the headline, you have to know to tread lightly. You can’t read “Breaking Bad” commentary now and expect to remain unspoiled. No half measures.

Besides, if you’re behind and you’re foolish enough to still be reading, I have some news for you: the saga of Walter White ended three weeks ago.

That episode was titled “Ozymandias,” named after the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem on the inevitable fall of kings and crumbling of their empires around them. Beloved characters were brutally murdered; a husband and wife fought with a knife in front of their teenage son; a kidnapped baby, with no way of conceiving the breadth of the horrors around her, murmured for her mama. Rian Johnson, Moira Walley-Becket, and Dave Porter wielded camera, pen, and music, respectively, as though they were torture devices against the audience’s emotions, but there was no malice involved. No “Breaking Bad” viewer deserved to share the anguish Walt felt when he saw his brother-in-law killed in the middle of the desert; there was simply no alternative. Walt lost his family, fought his family, and left his family in that brutal, extraordinary hour of television, ending the episode by stepping into a van with a man who could give him a new identity, leaving behind Albuquerque and the pain he caused there.

In both content and form, “Ozymandias” was the series’ climax. From there, a writing staff obsessed with tying up loose ends did so for the next two plus hours: revealing Mr. White’s transition to Mr. Lambert in the New Hampshire wilderness, his motivation to come back home a hollow husk of his former self, and his execution of his final wishes before succumbing to death by his own device. All that brought audiences to the true end of the “Breaking Bad” plotline, but the dramatic arc of the show trended downward through “Granite State” to reach the relatively tidy last rites of “Felina.”

The final two episodes were still fulfilling on their own merits, but they necessarily pale to the peak that was “Ozymandias.” No one had much of an issue with the shift from tension to somberness in “Granite State,” but the clean catharsis of the finale just rubbed some people wrong. Where’s the collateral damage that has always made this show so compelling? After 61 episodes of Walter White causing untold damage with his megalomaniacal scheming, he’s just going to roll back into town and have everything go easily?

Clearly Walter didn’t care about how he died at the end of “Felina,” only that he died somehow. Mr. White asked Jesse Pinkman to shoot him dead, finally admitting the selfishness behind his requests for Jesse. But Jesse refused Walt, leaving him to suffer from a stray bullet he had caught in his side. It was a poetic way to go, but Walt didn’t build a remote-controlled,  oscillating machine gun to give him a single shot to the stomach. That last flourish of science riddled a half-dozen other men while Walt tackled Jesse to the floor to protect him. If Walt really wanted his invention to end his life, all he had to do was stand up and step back to the line of fire. Jesse refused to put him out of his misery, so Walt finally became the collateral damage of his own experiment.

Content-wise, that’s how “Felina” functions as an end to “Breaking Bad,” but Walt’s victory and death did not pack the same dramatic punch that “Ozymandias” did. You could argue that the series would have ended on a stronger note if nothing followed Walter and the red van driving away; that’s the powerful finish audiences have come to expect from finales. That said, the two-episode denouement would make perfect sense if television had a concept of an epilogue.

Of all the novelistic qualities employed on “Breaking Bad,” the epilogue does not translate from literature to television nearly as well as some other tools of storytelling. To viewers, the aftermath of a TV plot remains largely unseen; maybe a brief scene or a montage reveals a bit in the finale, but the rest is unwritten and unfilmed, left up to the imagination. “Ozymandias” fit that traditional idea of a television ending: we knew Walt’s future was wildly different, but we didn’t know what it held, nor did we know how the characters left in Walt’s wake would deal with the devastation. The next two episodes added unprecedented context, even if they subverted some of the importance of “Ozymandias” by belaboring the story. Considering “Breaking Bad” was the story of Walter White following his death sentence in the pilot, it was necessary to keep tracking him to his demise; the fact that he died months after that epic showdown in the desert is irrelevant.

We’re conditioned for the big finish, and the clinical execution of “Felina” did not supply one. That’s on us as viewers if we can’t appreciate the finale for what it was. Meeting our expectations won’t always produce the best possible outcome. Walt could have come back with a much more explosive plan, but the emotional stakes of Hank dying were much higher than those for avenging his death. Ditto for Walt leaving his family versus returning to them one last time. “Felina” never could have matched “Ozymandias” for sheer dramatic intensity and would have paled in comparison. There is no reason for that to be a problem. Walter White died alone in the meth lab he designed, police sirens in the distance, but the damage already done. “Breaking Bad” went out the same way, echoing the chaos of “Ozymandias” through the final hours of the show.

The 19th episode of “The Wire” is titled “All Prologue,” implying the story would really start at the show’s 20th hour. We’re used to seeing the past on television, so this does not strike us as that odd. “Felina” may have seemed like an unsatisfying ending, but that’s because the end came earlier. Rather, “Breaking Bad” was showing us the future.

Cohen is a member of the class of 2014.