Breaking Bad: 12 ways it could end

The hit TV series Breaking Bad is finally coming to an end. So will Walt go out in a hail of bullets. Will it all be a Sopranos Switcheroo? And what is a Felina riddle?
Breaking Bad
This will end badly: Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Breaking Bad. Photograph: Frank Ockenfels/AMC

Spoiler alert: this article contains plot information from episodes up to the season five finale

What kind of sick society would make a hubristic, self-deluded, murdering millionaire drug dealer into a cultural icon? Ours. On some school runs, parents wear T-shirts with Walter White's image above the single word "Cook". You can, if you wish, mail order gift sets of sweets that look like blue crystal meth with a matching pen shaped like a hypodermic. Their sugar rush is, I am told, disappointing.

And if you have come across this thing called the internet, you will know that currently 62.5% (my estimate) of its capacity is taken up with theories from all over the world about how Breaking Bad is going to end on Monday. We are hooked, and poised to suffer horrible withdrawal symptoms come this time next week – not a bad achievement for a TV show that, in the UK at least, cannot even be seen on TV (it's only available here online and then only 12 hours after it's been screened in the US).

Sure, we have fallen for bad men before. We have invited them in when we know we shouldn't. But they were just so damned seductive. We loved watching depressed sociopathic mobster Tony Soprano battle his psychic demons and waste people, many of them blameless. We may even have been smitten by blood-spatter pattern analyst and part-time serial killer Dexter, Mads Mikkelsen's seductive turn as suave cannibal Hannibal, or by self-loathing Hollywood fixer Ray Donovan.

But falling for Walter White is different. He is not a projection of what we might want to be (Tony Soprano, say, indulging his sexual, culinary and homicidal impulses and terrifying the shrink who dared calls him on his "issues"); rather, Walt is the depiction of what we can readily imagine becoming, given unpropitious circumstances. Namely, getting corrupted and (for the most part) loving it.

Walt started his descent in 2008. Then a nobody of a high-school teacher from nowhere (no offence, Albuquerque) had a brush with mortality (thanks for that, cancer) and started using his chemistry skills ostensibly to secure his family's financial future after his death by making unprecedentedly pure methamphetamine. In the process, geeky Walt changed into Heisenberg, the baddest drug lord in the US south-west, if not beyond.

It has been a trip and one that has spoken to the worst in us – to our addictions, our greed, our capacity for betraying everyone we love while believing we are doing the opposite. Now Walt is about to end his journey after a five-year trip down through all the circles of hell. The landing won't be pretty. We won't, though, be averting our eyes.

Only one episode to go and so many questions. Is Jesse Pinkman dead? Or has he opted to cook meth one last time for the Neo-Nazi Yokel Gang? Is little Brock home alone now his mom Andrea has been wasted by venal Todd? Did Lydia really order camomile tea with soya milk in the penultimate episode? Doesn't she realise that's nuts? Like wearing Louboutins when she's walking in the desert? Can Saul really reinvent himself as rugelach baker at a Cinnabon branch in Omaha? If so, isn't that the spin-off right there?

Are we really to suppose that Jesse, a weedy ex-junkie who has just been tortured, would have the upper-body strength to haul himself up to the grille of his underground cage, slide back the grille's bolt while dangling mid-air, lift his scrawny ass out and flee into the desert night before being recaptured by asocial toughs? Unlikely.

But the biggest question of all is: where's Walt? He abandoned a dram of Dimple Pinch at the bar (if he had done nothing else wrong, he would have to swing for that), leaving the tooled-up DEA outside to freeze in the New Hampshire snow. Is Walt going back to Albuquerque to up the body count? Or seek some other sick closure? Anything's possible. Here are some theories about how Breaking Bad might end next week.

1 The Nightmare Dream Scenario

Please God don't let it be like when Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower in Dallas. Then, Bobby's wife Pam revealed that the previous season, in which he had ostensibly died, was just her dream. Don't, similarly, let Skyler send her innocent high-school chemistry teacher husband off to work with a kiss, before recalling last night's disturbing dream about how he contracted cancer, lost his moral compass and decided to cook meth to secure his family's financial future after his demise, thereby mutating into Heisenberg, the US south-west's most compellingly self-deluded villain. Anything but that.

2 The Bulgarian Parallel

Remember dissident writer Georgi Markov? He died in London in 1978 three days after being shot with a ricin pellet shot from an umbrella-gun by a Bulgarian agent. In the flash forward at the start of this season, Walt retrieved ricin from his abandoned house (way to ruin a street's property values, jerk) and in the final episode might well avenge himself by shooting the Neo-Nazi Yokels with ricin, savouring their slow deaths and then retrieving the $70m in barrels they stole from him. I say neo-Nazi, but I'm not certain they have a political credo. Most likely they're nihilists, the worst kind of yokels.

3 Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Or perhaps Walt might use the ricin on himself. Too egotistical to allow himself to be slain by another's hand or to be carried off by his apparently resurgent cancer, he decides to perform one last chemistry experiment – on himself. As he slowly dies surrounded by barrels of dough, we flash-back to his newly poignant chemistry class speech from the 2008 pilot: "Technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change."

4 Or perhaps 2, followed by 3

5 The Fring Detonator Revisited

Forget ricin. Walt has previous with bombs. When he terminated suave Chilean drug lord Gus Fring at the Casa Tranquila, the bomb was detonated by the bell that invalided bad man Hector Salamanca used to summon nurses. In the finale, Walt rigs a detonator to be activated when he sends a text to Todd's cellphone that reads: "Say my name." Cut to: close-up of Todd's face slowly expressing realisation, then mouthing: "Heisenberg!" Kaboom! Nihilist body parts all over the desert.

6 The Felina Riddle

The final episode is called Felina, alluding possibly to one of the many cat-faced women who litter popular culture (Professor Felina Ivy from Pokémon, for instance, or Felina Furr, the real name of DC comic's anthropomorphic heroine Alley-Kat-Abra). Does this suggest that one of Breaking Bad's few compelling women characters, Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, will have a decisive role in the denouement? Let's hope. Here's an ending based on that premise. After 4, cut to: Jesse, sole survivor of the blast, in his subterranean cage wondering what the noise was. Walt arrives to survey the effects of his bomb and frees Jesse. Then the two men argue and fall to a lengthy fist fight with yawnsome Oedipal resonances. Lydia arrives to find the two men beaten, bloody and supine. Seizing the initiative, she, at gunpoint, puts the pair to work again cooking 96% pure meth for the lucrative Czech market. Or maybe Felina is just an anagram of Finale.

7 The Scarface Solution

Forget bombs. Walt bought an M60 machine gun in 2011. Chekhov's Gun principle asserts that any element must have a place in a drama or be excised from it. From this we can infer that Walt is going to use the M60 to bust a proverbial cap in the last episode. Plus, in just the kind of narrative foreshadowing conspiracy theorists plump for when plotting their loony denouements, Skyler once said to Walt while he was watching Scarface: "Everyone dies in this movie." It therefore follows that Walt is going out in a blaze of Pacino-esque glory, snorting a massive line of coke before turning the M60 on those with whom he has a beef, including his wife and son, and then himself. Looks like years of therapy looming for baby Holly White. If she makes it to the final credits. Which she shouldn't, for the sake of the existential deranging moral: everyone dies, and often far too soon.

Skyler White
Wife trouble: Skyler White (Anna Gunn) with baby Holly. Photograph: Ursula Coyote/AMC

8 The Eternal Cook

If you have socks, prepare to have them blown off. Hank isn't dead. Or bald. The DEA agent crawls from his desert grave – like Walt, newly hirsute – and, hours later, is picked up by Marie who has been tooling tearfully round the desert looking for her husband. He looks like a zombie, but Marie's inured to that kind of thing after years of waking up next to him.

Next, alerted by the sound of an explosion, they pull up at the Neo-Nazi Yokel Gang's recently detonated lair to find Lydia enslaving Jesse and Walt in their meth lab. After a difference of opinion with Lydia about the ethics of exporting crystal meth to Prague, they shoot her. Then something interesting happens. Hank and Marie decide not to free Walt and Jesse but to continue the drug-whiz duo's exploitative incarceration, contrary to the ethos of Hank's erstwhile employers and, you'd think, their human rights. Walt and Jesse are thus damned to labour unendingly as Sisyphean meth cook-slaves to support Marie and Hank, an infernal punishment undreamt of even by Dante. What about Skyler and the kids? They get regular kickbacks from Marie and Hank to keep shtum. So everybody's happy. Or dead. Or slaves. Talk about community payback. So Walt provides for his family. And Jesse? He lives for nothing but to kill Walt. You can tell from his expression. Moral? Bad doesn't get broken, it just mutates, ultimately corrupting everyone. Good doesn't stand a chance.

9 The Madison Avenue Shuffle

Flash-forward from New Hampshire to New York. Walt starts a job as a gifted ad copywriter with a sharp line in suits, a dissatisfied wife and a mysterious back story.

10 The Pink Bear Theory

Remember the charred pink teddy bear with one eye missing that was found floating in Walt's pool after the explosion of the plane over Albuquerque in season two? Don't say you nodded off. According to several theories by nerdlingers with too much time on their hands (there's no other kind), the bear has been a recurring motif in subsequent episodes and so is key to explaining how Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has fashioned his conclusion . So what, you're asking, does the pink bear motif signify? Isn't it obvious? Pink bear. Pink man. Even Holly White wears pink romper suits. Pink signifies death and, paradoxically, innocence.

Walt in bedroom
Sick scene: Walt observes Jesse and girlfriend Jane in season two. Photograph: Lewis Jacobs/AMC

This may sound far-fetched, but even now scholarly articles and bonkers bar charts explicating the complex colour coding of Breaking Bad (think: Gray Matter, Walter White, Crystal Blue, how the suits worn when Jesse and Walt cooked meth were yellow and yellow was also the colour of Jane and Jesse's sheets in the dawn of their love – before Walt watched her choke to death on her own vomit while Jesse slept etc) are belabouring cyberspace users. Corollary? Jesse Pinkman is going to survive and everybody else die. Or die and everybody else survive. One or the other. Or, more likely, if my theory is right and pink teddy bear is the new red herring, neither.

11 The Sopranos Switcheroo

Perhaps we're overthinking this (gee – you think?). Remember how the Sopranos ended with a happy family dinner at Artie Bucco's Nuovo Vesuvio restaurant rather than Tony ratting out everyone and relocating to Nebraska – or the whole family slaughtered over tiramisu? Perhaps, similarly, Breaking Bad will end happily with Walt reunited with Skyler and the kids and adopting Jesse. Cut to: Walt, Skyler, Jesse et al singing Crystal Blue Persuasion as they roll in an RV across Mexico. Cut to: the back of the RV, where eight barrels, containing $80m in drug proceeds, keep their counsel.

12 The Ozymandias Effect

Most likely, though, the money gets torched, everybody gets offed and, in the last shot, the camera pans over the New Mexico desert as Bryan Cranston's Walter White intones again, this time posthumously, the last lines of Shelley's sonnet: "Nothing beside remains: round the decay./ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/ The lone and level sands stretch far away." Well, not quite nothing: there are Breaking Bad tours.