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" [Warning: spoilers from previous episodes.] We never had to worry that Vince Gillian would end Breaking Bad on a moment of coy ambiguity like The Sopranos. Breaking Bad is not that kind of show. It doesn&amp;#039;t pull punches. In fact, Breaking Bad has gone out of its way in these last couple episodes before this Sunday&amp;#039;s finale to make it clear that it&amp;#039;s sparing mercy on no one, including the audience. Gilligan and co. have pulled out all the stops: Boogeymen in the baby&amp;#039;s room. Gunshot to the back of the head. The tortured prisoner who almost gets over the fence. If some of these scenarios have verged on ghoulish, they at least don&amp;#039;t feel entirely unearned. This is a show in which every action has a consequence. Loose ends don&amp;#039;t stay loose. Bad shit has to happen. And that bad shit, let&amp;#039;s be clear, is why we keep watching. I confess I do not entirely understand the condescension some critics take toward &amp;quot;Team Walt&amp;quot; fans who watch hoping that he&amp;#039;ll be victorious, as when Matt Zoller Seitz wrote at Vulture: &amp;quot;There is no Team Walt, really, unless you&amp;#039;re a sociopath, or somebody who&amp;#039;s unreasonably attached to the sorts of frustrated little boy Alpha Male fantasies that got Walter in trouble in the first place.&amp;quot; After all, Walter White is the protagonist in a fictional show, which qualifies, I think, as a fantasy, and a pretty &amp;quot;Alpha Male&amp;quot; one at that. This is one of the many things that separates Breaking Bad from The Wire, a show that at every turn dispelled fantasies in order to show us how systems destroy people in truly unglamorous and unheroic ways \u2014 real-life thugs don&amp;#039;t usually die in a hail of gunfire; they die in convenience stores from bad circumstance.  Walter White, on the other hand, is a hero, one with deviously genius ideas up his sleeve, whom we follow with the same awed curiosity we have for the cowboy heroes of Westerns. Watching his plans unspool, often with dire results, gives us a pang of satisfaction, even if it&amp;#039;s mixed with dread and a certain sick-in-the-stomach feeling. We want to know, How&amp;#039;s he going to get out of this one? Who&amp;#039;s going to get it this time? Think of Walt&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;business meeting&amp;quot; with Tuco all the way back in season one, when he came up with that silly nickname, Heisenberg, and blew out a wall to get his money. It was horrible and frightening, but also thrilling to watch.      Walt is not a character whose thought process changes much throughout Breaking Bad&amp;#039;s five seasons, as Stephen Marche pointed out on this site. He does not contemplate what he&amp;#039;s done much. This is not a show about a character&amp;#039;s moral questioning. Even when he&amp;#039;s stuck in a freezing cabin to face his impending death, Walt finds a way to get out there again, to attempt one more hit.  Another way to put this is that Breaking Bad, at its heart, is trash. Great trash. In her influential essay, &amp;quot;Trash, Art, and the Movies,&amp;quot; the critic Pauline Kael argued that you shouldn&amp;#039;t be ashamed of enjoying B-movies with no artistic merit, and you should be wary of any art that&amp;#039;s not enjoyable. Breaking Bad may or may not be art, depending on your arbitrary definition, but it is extremely enjoyable and has plenty of the tendencies of the best &amp;quot;trash&amp;quot; pictures. Kael wrote one line that applies very nicely to exactly what draws the show&amp;#039;s fans in: &amp;quot;We sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet.&amp;quot; There is no question that what Walt does is heinous. But it&amp;#039;s so compelling you can&amp;#039;t help but watch it, and the writers and directors of Breaking Bad revel in every detail. The show is engineered with perfect cliffhangers and twists and ticking time bombs, and seeing how they \u2014 and Walt \u2014 pull it all off is how we derive our basic satisfaction. It&amp;#039;s how we get off. This is a fantasy, and that&amp;#039;s ultimately what the &amp;quot;Team Walt&amp;quot; critics miss. Movies and TV shows like Breaking Bad have always been about identifying with desires you&amp;#039;re not supposed to admit in polite company. Like the desire to own and operate a multimillion-dollar meth operation. (C&amp;#039;mon, the thought has at least crossed your mind.)  But Breaking Bad is far too smart to just be fantasy. If it only played up Walt&amp;#039;s scheming as triumph, then it would be cheap trash. Instead, Breaking Bad plays off our identification with Walt in brilliant ways. It neither obviously judges him nor obviously gloats in his wins. And while Walt doesn&amp;#039;t seem to spend much time thinking about all the horror and destruction he&amp;#039;s caused, we do spend a lot of time thinking about it. And about all the times we cheered when we probably shouldn&amp;#039;t have. Think back again to the end of season four, when Walt calls Skyler to tell her he&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;won.&amp;quot; There is a brief relief in seeing him beat Gus, until the show cuts to a shot of the Lily of the Valley plant used to poison Brock, sitting in Walt&amp;#039;s backyard. It&amp;#039;s at that point we realize how low Walt has sunk, the small compromises and rationalizations along to way to poisoning a child, and how we&amp;#039;ve been there for every one, anticipating the next move.      We can never feel too good about what happens on Breaking Bad for too long, which is why there can be a &amp;quot;Team Walt&amp;quot; and an anti-&amp;quot;Team Walt&amp;quot; at all. The show is a constant mix of gratification and revulsion. It doesn&amp;#039;t tell you what to think of its monstrous hero. Instead, it sets all the deathtraps and forces you to decide why you like watching them. A Lot More Breaking Bad Coverage Here &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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