The season finale of Breaking Bad this week was basiclaly like a big ol’ punch in the face.

I don’t mean that in a bad way.

For weeks now, we’ve been teased with images of body bags, a charred pink teddy bear in the White family pool and men in haz-mat suits at their home.

Who was dead?

What blew up?

Did Walt really bring the meth-making into his home?

Were Skylar or – goodness, no! – the new baby killed?

And then, midway through the finale, whammo, the reality became brutally apparent.

Jane’s father goes back to work. He’s distracted.

He’s an air traffic controller.

Boom.

Two planes collide way up in the sky, more or less directly over the Whites’ home.

It is, of course, all because Walter White made a decision. A series of decisions, actually.

A decision to cook meth and sell it with Jessie.

A decision to lie about, well, everything, to Skylar.

A decision to not save Jane.

All the decisions Walter has made over the past two seasons have begun to bear fruit, and it’s all rotten to the core.

When he went to find Jessie, Walter saw the effects of longterm heroin use. Junkies having sex with immobilized junkies. Emaciated junkies. Jessie so stoned he didn’t even know Walter was there.

Walter Jr. goes on television telling people about how wonderful all these anonymous donors are, giving money to help his wonderful, decent, good father.

Skylar, confused because Walter let it slip that he had more than one cell phone as he faded under the influence of anaesthesia, asked one question and then another and another until all she knew about her husband was that he had been lying for months, though she still didn’t know about what. And now she’s leaving him.

And then, finally, a father engulfed in grief, gives a pilot wrong coordinates by saying his daughter’s name instead of another code and two passenger jets collided over Walter White’s house in a fiery ball, killing everyone on board.

And there were children.

The opening scene, where the eyeball in the pool is sucked into the filter and you don’t know yet if that’s a human eyeball, was perhaps the most emotionally brutal thing I’ve ever seen on television.

And yet I couldn’t tear myself away.

Vince Gilligan, thanks for two seasons of this amazing show.