AMC’s released a new trailer for the final season of Breaking Bad, and while the tense clip is short and ambiguous, it provides some fuel to the idea that Hank will be the person who brings down Walt (in my dream theory, he does so with the help of the long-awaited team-up of a green-beat-eating, Walt-hating Skyler and Jesse):
I’ve always been fond of the theory that Breaking Bad is actually a straightforward hero’s story, told from the perspective of the villain. Hank is in no way cool. He dresses badly, has a crude sense of humor, and is at least marginally racist. He’s short, he’s squat, and after he was shot, Hank doesn’t move particularly well. As we saw in the Breaking Bad pilot, he’s condescending to his brother-in-law Walt, whose move into the meth business is significantly about proving that he’s smarter than everyone else, including Hank, who gets more respect from their friends and neighbors for being in law enforcement than Walt has for teaching chemistry. But the finale of Breaking Bad’s last season suggested that despite all the ways in which Hank is not a conventional hero, without any of Raylan Givens’ cool or Tyrion Lannister’s biting wit, he’s still the only person who’s coming around to the right answer on the mysterious meth dealer blowing up his city. That, in and of itself, is a nice little bit of subversion, a celebration of ordinary doggedness in the midst of television’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily deviant, crop of anti-heroes.