What is the saddest moment of everything “Breaking Bad”? Some would say that it is when Walt (Bryan Cranston) steals his little daughter Holly away from his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) in their big fight in “Ozymandias”. Or maybe this is the follow-up episode where Walt is wasted alone in the New Hampshire Rural, dying from his returned cancer and fighting with all the damage he has caused to his family. (You can read our detailed interview with showrunners and writers on how they have prepared the last season of “Breaking Bad” here.)
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But I would say that the saddest moment of the show was the intense death of poor Jane (Krysten Ritter), a woman who seemed really cool before relapting, but then started spiral with Jesse (Aaron Paul). Jane often gets a lot of fans of fans for having presented the heroine to Jesse or for the blackmail of Walt, but she would never have done these things if Jesse had not dropped him from the wagon in the first place. Some viewers may not appreciate this, but Jesse the fact certainly: his guilt and his sorrow on Jane follow him throughout the rest of the show. He even haunts Walt too, despite his growing descent into evil.
Betsy Brandt, who played Marie Schrader in the series, revealed in an interview in 2023 This death of Jane, when she overdose of heroin while Walt stands next to her, refusing to help because he knows that it will be better for business so Jane is out of the image and no longer concentrates Jesse’s attention, was one of the most difficult sequences for Bryan Cranston to film:
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“I saw it right after that. It was a difficult scene. I mean, it’s funny, we would make a class photo every year. Okay, everyone came to take a class photo and he was crying, as … someone hugged him. It was like – it was difficult.”
Jane’s death was the darkest moment in the series
Cranston himself spoke of this moment In a 2016 interview::
“We turn the scene … planted there somewhere as I see it choking on vomit, you know, and asking me” what should I do? “, All of a sudden, his facial features disappeared and that was replaced by the features of my real girl. I saw my real child choking on death, and that frightened me … And then perhaps a few seconds later, he became clearer and his fact that he was away.
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Cranston also explained how he had created a list of advantages and disadvantages for his character before the scene, trying to dive into Walt’s thinking process. The disadvantages of saving Jane were clear: she hampered the Methamphetamine affairs of Walt and Jesse. But the pros to save Jane were also obvious: as Cranston said, “she is just a child. She could be my daughter, she is so young.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dae37dddoq
The notes he noted before the scene certainly seems to bleed in his performance, and the result is one of the most haunting sequences of the whole show. Jane’s death is often considered as Walt’s moral point without return, and he clearly sticks to Walt for the rest of the series. In one of the best episodes of season 3 (if it is certainly controversial), “Fly”, Walt talks about what he thought would have been the best time for him to die, and he chooses a moment shortly before this episode. If he died of cancer there, he would have supported like a good father and an honest member of his community. Instead, he lived to let Jane choke on her own vomit, and everything was down from there.
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