By Pieter Ziegler
One poignant scene in the Breaking Bad finale Walter comes face to face with who, supposedly, was the reason he started this adventure: his wife Skyler.
He hands her a lottery ticket containing the coordinates to Hank and Steve Gomez’s graves, and leaves his wife with one last sentiment:
“I did it for me, I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really, I was alive.”
Its a moment of redemption that closes the whole shebang, atoning for all the past evils.
We get to see Walter for the power hungry guy that he was aside all pretentious reasons of providing for his family.
Here is a man who saw an opportunity, chased it, felt the taste of power, relished it and couldn’t let go.
Whereas his customers where drug addicts, he himself had become a power addict.
The difference was the same.
A Never Ending Soap
The land baron season here is never over, it’s a tragic soap forever caught in a time loop.
The Walters are no time conscious anti-heros with epiphanic moments in the cycle of time.
Their season goes through time without any Damascus.
Saul remains his old murderous self.
It glides through cycles, snatching victims, panelling them to the same bloody walls of past victims.
No one learns a lesson or reclines back to assimilate the many episodes of the past into surreal moments of revelation.
After previous demolitions in Glen View, Budiriro, Melfort, and bloody hell Murambatsvina no one is wiser.
According to government, Harare Metropolitan Province has 52 000 houses built in illegal settlements with 25 000 of the structures being in Chitungwiza.
The pattern of the script is soporifically similar and surreal.
There is a wave of land allocations massaged by political rhetoric on the fruits of the liberation struggle.
Under the same blanket, politically exposed briefcase land developers create new locations.
No water, no roads, no electricity, no sewage systems, drainage, no nothing.
Just vast swamps of virgin forest deflowered brutally with no romantic reflection for proper intercourse with land development.
Then election episodes come in with all the thrills of new adventures and opportunities beckoning for everyone around.
In the many wetlands and forests disguised as new suburbs everyone is happy.
Until the election winner announces himself and suddenly morphs into a legalistic apparition from a previous and similar season.
And the demolitions begin.
Again!
