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" Season 5, Episode 14: &amp;quot;Ozymandias&amp;quot; Walter White crashed through the earth. Then he kept on falling. 514 was a touch schematic, but it had the most powerful moments on television since Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale faced off at the end of season three of The Wire. Oh my God, I found myself saying out loud, as Walt told Jesse that he&amp;#039;d watched Jane choke on her own vomit, the least repentant confession since Jeffrey Dahmer explained his taste in meat. How could you? But first, another unanswerable question: Why didn&amp;#039;t the neo-Nazis leave Walt in the hole with Hank and Gomez? They surely would have, with eighty million dollars at stake. Happy Jack doesn&amp;#039;t like loose ends, and Walt knows much too much to be allowed to live. But killing him with almost three episodes to go would have ended the show on an anti-climactic note, so the writers mustered the best excuse they could, that Toddwanted Walt to live. (Not great. Unlike the beautiful moment when Todd told Walt, I&amp;#039;m sorry for your loss. Five words that captured Todd&amp;#039;s utter insanity.) So Walt lived. Then gave Jesse up. A strange moment, on a number of levels. The organic move would have been to have Jack&amp;#039;s men find Jesse hiding under the Chrysler 300. They probably would have checked. Instead, the writers went out of their way to make Walt responsible for Jesse&amp;#039;s death. I&amp;#039;m not sure I&amp;#039;m convinced Walt would have gone that far, especially after seeing Hank executed in front of him. But Walt hadn&amp;#039;t hit bottom yet, hadn&amp;#039;t realized the monster he&amp;#039;d become since that first happy cook two years before. Somehow, Walt blamed Jesse for his reversals (a fallacy a fair number of viewers seem to share, if the comments on the Esquire board are any indication). It was Jesse&amp;#039;sfault. Jesse had to die, and Walt got to go home. Until his Charger ran out of gas. The delay played a crucial role in the episode&amp;#039;s plot, giving Marie the chance to get to Skyler and make her see reason. Along the way, shots of Walt rolling his $10 million barrel through the desert, surely meant to show us Walt remained a prisoner to the greed that has driven him almost since the beginning. To me, the mechanism felt heavy-handed and unsubtle. Not that it didn&amp;#039;t work. It worked, just like those opening shots of Skyler telling Walt what she&amp;#039;d decided to name their daughter worked. Breaking Bad is so powerful now, has so much history and so much momentum, that it steamrolls melodrama into drama. When it&amp;#039;s bad it&amp;#039;s good. And when it&amp;#039;s good it&amp;#039;s great. Walt&amp;#039;s an addict. Make no mistake. Addicted to trying to outsmart everyone from the DEA to Mexican drug lords. Addicted to lying. Addicted to being Heisenberg. He&amp;#039;s been mainlining pride and rage and greed for two years straight. But every addict hits bottom, sooner or later. For Walt the moment came late indeed. Even Hank&amp;#039;s death didn&amp;#039;t do it. Did you fear he might kill Skyler, as they were tussling for the knife? I did. (Just as I feared a few minutes earlier that Skyler might kill her own sister to protect the secret that Hank had called Marie from the desert. Fortunately, Skyler is no longer Lady Macbeth.) No, only when Junior called 911 did the scales finally fall from Walt&amp;#039;s eyes. He had lost his son, the last innocent, the last excuse. Finally he could no longer hide what he had become from himself. So he grabbed Holly, and ran. But I will give Walt the benefit of the doubt on that score, at least. I&amp;#039;m sure he kidnapped Holly planning from the first to turn her in, planning to take the role of villain in his call to Skyler. That&amp;#039;s the old Walt, the Walt who was always a step ahead. Now he has a new name, and a little time left to do what he can, before the cancer reaches out for him. The cancer, or Jesse. I wondered why the neo-Nazis would let Jesse work in a lab filled with dangerous chemicals \u2014 but Walt gave them all the leverage he needed when he told them about Brock and Andrea. Another of his many sins. I know it&amp;#039;s unkind, but I hope like hell Jesse makes him pay. -- Alex Berenson writes the best-selling series of John Wells spy novels. The original, The Faithful Spy, won the Edgar Award for best first novel in 2007. The newest, The Night Ranger, was released in February.  Read Previous Breaking Bad Recaps &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a24688/breaking-bad-season-5-episode-14/>