“Ozymandias” was beautiful; cinematic. It got me so amped up for the final two episodes. I couldn’t wait. Then we had the huge come-down. “Granite State” was not horrible, but it was bland. The entire episode felt like it was just laying there on the screen asking you to care about it, but doing nothing to elicit the feeling. I didn’t hate it, but overall it was my least favorite episode of this 5b season.
I might view “Granite State” unfavorably just because of how great the directing was last week. Rian Johnson took the great Breaking Bad storyline and created art. “Granite State” not only had a much weaker storyline in my opinion, but it was completely devoid of the artistic flourishes that make Breaking Bad so interesting.
I’m not going to go into plot specifics. There are other write ups here and here that do a great job. I would even encourage you to take the time to listen to the Ones Who Knock podcast if you so desire. I did have one observation that I didn’t see pointed out. The timeline seems off to me in this episode. Walt is presumably in the cabin for 3 to 4 months. It didn’t seem like Jesse was trapped for nearly that long. It seems like the two timelines split.
By the halfway point of this episode when nothing had happened I started to wonder if they were going to use the penultimate episode of the entire series just to set everything up for the finish. I didn’t think they would… but they did. And the way they set up the characters was in my opinion, not satisfying. It was just really… really depressing.
I will say, that final shot when the Breaking Bad theme started playing was amazing. It was the first time we’ve heard that iconic music within the episode, and it was perfect. Those few seconds of screen time got me more pumped up for the finale than all the other stuff that happened in the other 52 minutes and 55 seconds.
Filed Under: AMC, Breaking Bad, Television