Ozymandias

It's the title of Sunday's Breaking Bad episode which we are still recovering from.  Most cable dramas are amoral at their core, however entertaining they may be.  Breaking Bad inhabits a different world, a moral universe in which people are capable of making choices and must pay for those choices if they are morally corrupt.  We didn't realize that was the theme of the show when we started watching but now it is very clear.

While there are only two more episodes before the end of the series, Sunday night had to be the emotional climax of the show - it better be, we can't take much more.  When the murder of a major and sympathetic character early in the hour ends up being perhaps only the fifth most wrenching moment (and no one else dies in those other moments) in the episode it makes for riveting, though hard to watch, viewing.  As a reviewer at the Huffington Post wrote (no link because the piece contains spoilers):

"The thing is, we're at the point in the story where all the chickens are coming home to roost. Every consequence of every single choice Walter White has made is landing with unbelievable force. Given how many terrible things he's done and the awful events he's set in motion, those consequences should land like a ton of bricks. I just didn't expect so much of it to land in such a concentrated way in one episode."

And Walter started the series as a nice guy high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The title of the episode is from the Percy Shelley poem which ends:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.