Breaking Bad Ended and I Feel Weird

I finished Breaking Bad last Wednesday. Weirdly enough the end of that television show had more of an impact on me and my mental state than anything I've ever seen before. It wasn't just the last episode, it was the accumulation of the entire series that all of a sudden just hit me at the last moment, and watching Walter, in his final moments, made me rethink everything and I can't really explained what happened to me after that. I started crying but I was fully conscious that I could stop at any moment because I didn't know what I was crying about. That's a strange feeling. We cry about bullshit all the time, but we are always aware of the reason why we are crying, or so torn up in the emotion that the reasoning doesn't matter to us. Being in this awkward middle section makes for an uncomfortable feeling, and one that still hasn't really totally gone away.

We make connections to everything. It's in the human mind to do so. So saying that I made a connection to a drug dealing villain isn't so odd when you think that we can be easily deceived by the tricks of creepy woman with the magic ball who sells her services on the second floor of a pizza place in Jamaica Queens. My mind made my life feel like Walt's. Every little lie that I told all of a sudden felt like some huge secret, where the consequences where huge. In reality my life is nothing like Walt's, and I saw that in the last couple of episodes of the series. 

I was always a fan of Walter White, even after all of the terrible things that he'd done. In my mind, I can root for him because he isn't real, and nothing he does will affect anyone. But it kept becoming harder and harder for me to do that. That show pushed the boundaries of what I would find acceptable in another person. I would never do what Walt did, but that would mean that I would hate someone who did. That was my mentality throughout the majority of the show. I thought that Walt would kill and do these awful things, but in the end of the day he wasn't so bad that I would hate him, and even after I realized that he didn't do these things for his family, but because he liked it, I still rooted for him because if I knew I was going to die in a couple months then my mental state wouldn't be so perfect. But those last three episodes killed me. They killed Walt as a person for me, and I hated him, I saw all the awfulness that could exist in a person come out of Walt, and I was looking forward to him losing everything and hopefully die. But then the last episode came. Out of nowhere, I felt sympathy. I think that's where my mini breakdown came from. The fact that I felt sympathy for one of the only villains I've ever truly hated. And that I couldn't hate this character anymore. The show took my beliefs and turned then upside down, and then back right side up again. I believe in every person, and that no one can truly be a bad person. I stopped believing that, only so that a couple hours later I can believe it again. 

We live in a golden age of television and Breaking Bad is the crown jewel of this era.