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" Season 5, Episode 13: &amp;quot;To&amp;#039;hajiilee&amp;quot; Vince Gilligan doesn&amp;#039;t want you to call Walter White a hero anymore. Not a hero, not an anti-hero, not a criminal mastermind, not Scarface. Just a high-school chemistry teacher who&amp;#039;s in way over his head. And who has a masterful talent for getting people killed. How else to read this episode? From beginning to end, Walt behaved monstrously. Like Lydia, he hired the neo-Nazis for a job he was afraid to do himself. Like Lydia, he couldn&amp;#039;t even look at what he&amp;#039;s doing. I don&amp;#039;t want him to suffer, he said of Jesse. No, you just want him killed, so badly that you agreed to break your promise never to cook. Uncle Jack and the rest of the Seig Heil gang were practically sneering. Yet Walt&amp;#039;s next move was even worse. He couldn&amp;#039;t figure out another way to lure Jesse? He had to bring Jack to Andrea&amp;#039;s front door? He hadn&amp;#039;t hurt Andrea and Brock enough already? And though he managed to fool Andrea one last time, he couldn&amp;#039;t fool Brock. The kid is only eight, but he knows evil when he sees it. He was just hoping that Walt wouldn&amp;#039;t sprinkle some magic sugar on his cereal and send him back to the ER. So Walt boarded the express train to the tenth circle of hell. Worse, all his plays failed. At every turn, Jesse and Hank anticipated his moves, countered him, and ultimately set him up. For five seasons, Walt has been Heisenberg, a step ahead. Sure, he was an amoral lying murderer, but at least he won. And, though it shouldn&amp;#039;t have, winning made him easier to love. (Charlie Sheen will be glad to explain.) The fact that Walt&amp;#039;s enemies seemed even worse than he did also helped. Walt&amp;#039;s not winning anymore. He&amp;#039;s desperate, angry, maybe even afraid, and as a result surprisingly easy to manipulate. I don&amp;#039;t buy that Hank and Gomez could flip Huell so easily. Huell would almost certainly lawyer up in that spot. But he was the weak link, so going for him was the smart play \u2014 and set up an even smarter play. Ten Gs a minute, bitch. The root of all evil burns with an orange glow. So Walt screamed into the desert. Where he discovered he&amp;#039;d been worked. Time to change his nickname from Heisenberg to Hindenburg. In the immortal words of Roberto Duran, No mas. No mas. He had the nerve to call Jesse a coward \u2014 and Jesse, beyond words, could do nothing but spit in his face. (I&amp;#039;m guessing that was a single take.) Then Walter \u2014 and all of us \u2014 discovered that a Nazi genie isn&amp;#039;t so easy to put back in the bottle. I will confess to realizing what would happen a couple minutes before it did, in part because the scene seemed to be taking a long time, and in part because it had to happen, because if Hank found the money and had Walt in custody, the show would be over. Hank and Gomez had to die. We haven&amp;#039;t seen their deaths yet, but they&amp;#039;re dead. Any other outcome would be supremely unbelievable. Five guys with automatic weapons against two without is not a fair fight. And Breaking Bad isn&amp;#039;t in the miracle business. Awful. And agonizing. We are so used to the triumph of good over evil, in Hollywood if not in life. One of the few comparable moments comes late in Saving Private Ryan, when the Jewish soldier and the Nazi are locked in hand-to-hand combat on the steps. Private Mellish has to win. Only he doesn&amp;#039;t. Instead, we watch him die, inch by inch. Some of you may think Walt had this ending planned all along, that he figured the Nazis would come even after he called them off. No. He promised Saul he would never hurt Hank (though, to be sure, he also promised he would never hurt Jesse). More importantly, when Walt saw that the Nazis have shown up, he tried desperately to warn Hank. That moment hardly squares with a vision of Walt as mastermind. I would like to believe that Walt, finally, is horrified by the depravity that he has unleashed. But it&amp;#039;s much too late for him to be saved. All he can do is try to erase some of the evil he has inked onto the world. At least we know why he has that M-60 in his trunk. -- 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/a24587/breaking-bad-season-5-episode-13/>