To say that Breaking Bad is on a roll is an understatement. Most televisions shows sort of fizzle out, coming to an end well after their critical and commercial peak. Breaking Bad on the other hand, with only a handful of episodes remaining, is enjoying it's highest ratings ever, and season five has been one of the most critically acclaimed of a series that has enjoyed immense critical success from the very beginning. But just when it seems like things can't get much better for the show that must already be regarded as a contemporary classic, an episode like "To'hajiilee" comes along and takes its place alongside "Fly", "4 Days Out", "Full Measures", and other classic episodes of the series.
Breaking Bad is a show that is to tension building as Mariano Rivera is to closing baseball games: It's simply one of the best ever, and every episode is typically a master class. That said, "To'hajiilee" is arguably the most tense episode of Breaking Bad ever. There is a sense of foreboding that is simply inescapable throughout the episode. The reason this tension is so effective is because of how masterful Vince Gilligan and company have been in building towards the events of this final season since day one. In modern dramas with complicated plots and sprawling casts, maintaining a sense of continuity often proves extremely difficult (unless you're The Wire, which managed to accomplish the feat despite changing casts and settings nearly every season).
In the chase of most long-running dramas, storylines sometimes go nowhere, or are dropped altogether. Characters come and go, often because of commitments to other projects or some other dispute unrelated to the storyline they are involved in. But Breaking Bad does not suffer from this phenomenon one bit. It is a show stunningly free of fat. Nearly every character, every story fragment, every scene has some payoff in the world of Walter White. Throughout the entire series, this show has been building the most impossibly dense and tall Jenga tower the world has ever seen, and we the spectators are simply left waiting with bated breath for it to come toppling over.
Breaking Bad uses this tension to great effectiveness (as always) in "To'hajiilee". We know something terrible is going to happen, we just don't know when and to who. In the final moments of the episode, we finally get our answer. I've wondered each episode just and how when the ongoing story line of Todd and Uncle Jack would converge with that of Walter, Hank, Jesse, etc. and I finally got my answer here. As many people have noted online elsewhere, "To'hajiilee" feels very much like a "Red Wedding"-type episode, with Jack and his crew serving the Lannister/Walder Frey role. Unlike Game of Thrones though, Breaking Bad has the balls to end the episode at the peak of the slaughter, before we even know who lives or dies.
If this were any other show, the cliffhanger approach might have seemed tacky, but Breaking Bad has actually made relatively little of that particular tool during it's run, so it feels earned. As to who will live or die, this show is very smart, and so I tend to think that Hank's emotional phone call to Marie is too big of a hint at Hank's demise to be anything other than a red herring. However, many people do seem to think that Gomez is a goner, and I would be hard pressed to disagree with that prediction.
With some very major characters apparently ready to bite the bullet, the rapidly approaching end of Breaking Bad feels more real than ever. That fact is saddening for a variety of reasons, but right now I'm simply too caught up in the rush of it all to look at it that way. Right now, I'm a full-fledged Breaking Bad junkie, and I just want to devour these final (no doubt excellent) episodes, and save the inevitable feeling of emptiness that will follow for much later.
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