Breaking Bad: Felina/Finale

[SPOILERS]
This won't be the last Breaking Bad post here.  There are still a few things I wanna do.  Had a career crisis I had to deal with this past week which fucked my shit up — and I'm not out of the woods with that, either, but I had a good talk with my manager last night and I... well, you don't care about that, do you?

With its finale on Sunday, BREAKING BAD cemented itself as the greatest show in television history!

I feel that very few shows manage to stick the landing.  There are some shows with such awful endings (LOST, DAMAGES, DEXTER) that actually manage to retroactively drag down the entirety of the series.  It's not easy crafting an ending to a long-form drama.

What so peculiar about Breaking Bad is that they made it look easy.  I was thinking the last episode was going to be packed but... it wasn't.  It touched all the bases it needed to touch and it walked home with an unhurried pace.  It did everything it needed to do and better than expected.  For me, it joins THE SHIELD and SIX FEET UNDER as one of the strongest series finales ever.  More than either of them, though, I feel like the show never suffered a dip in quality.  It remained so strong from beginning to end that it's a show I feel you can revisit and TEACH with.  It's a fucking clinic on dramatic writing.  I don't know how they managed to keep it so strong and sure-footed all the way through.  Was it all the guidance of Vince Gilligan?  Was it the specific group of writers he managed to find?  We'll see with their future endeavors...

Breaking Bad tops my all-time favorite list.  And it does that even though I think it took a few missteps.  But that's for another day.