Breaking Bad's clockwork universe seems almost comforting in 2026 (preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion.

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I would never make the claim that "Gliding Over All," the episode that brings the first half of Breaking Bad's final season to a close, is the show's best hour. This, after all, is the series that produced "Sundown" and "Fly" and "Face Off." This, for God's sake, is the series that produced "Ozymandias," one of the handful of TV episodes where absolutely no one will laugh at you if you say it's the best ever made. Indeed, on the initial schedule I made for this series, "Ozymandias" was one of the earliest additions, an episode of TV I love that I had somehow not once written a word about.

The problem is: I love "Gliding Over All" more. It is probably my favorite episode of Breaking Bad, for reasons even I can't quite understand.

In most respects, "Gliding Over All" is an example of a false climax, a serialized TV episode form that usually tries my patience. Essentially nothing happens in it, at least in terms of the characters we know and love, and there are several scenes that exist primarily to have one character or another reminisce about the way things used to be. All of these scenes are quite evocative — indeed, one ends with a character quite reasonably assuming he's about to be murdered — but they're not exactly pulse-pounding. It is a pause, a brief glimmer before the real storm arrives. It even ends on a cliffhanger that promises the fireworks you've been waiting for are just an episode away — or a full year away if you watched this in 2012.

Going into the first half of Breaking Bad's final season — remember when networks split final seasons in two for contractual and awards-baiting reasons? — almost any fan of the show would have assumed the real fireworks would be saved for the back half of the season. Really, only two beats seemed all but certain to appear in the first half: the death of Mike (Jonathan Banks), which occurs at the episode prior to this one; and Hank (Dean Norris) learning that Walt (Bryan Cranston) is the guy he's been chasing all series long, which occurs at the end of "Gliding Over All." If you were simply watching this show waiting for dominoes to fall, then Season 5A (as it's often called) was the part of the series that surely tried your patience most. Indeed, by its end, Walter has more or less vanquished all of his enemies and gone on to fortune and glory, and he is only undone by an act of stupidity dressed up as an act of hubris.

I would not say I was a "let's see some dominoes, baby!" Breaking Bad watcher, but I would also say I loved the show most in its second and third seasons, when the thematic pincers that held its characters tightly in place were not yet so firmly locked as to be immovable. Season 3, in particular, remains one of the most enthralling TV seasons I've ever watched week to week, and I devoured every new screener the second I got it. In Seasons 4 and 5, the show's plot mechanisms didn't become clunky, necessarily — with a few jarring exceptions, the plot machinery whirs silently on Breaking Bad, so you barely notice it's there. But both seasons pulled the camera back and back and back, until the clockwork universe at the show's center seemed to encompass all of human existence.

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