How will Breaking Bad end?

[chani]

In his recap of "Cornered" Matt Zoller Seitz has an interesting take on Skylar and nailed it when it comes to Walter White:

"He's just a brilliant chemist with plenty of nerve and a few clever tricks up his sleeve. Beyond that, he's a mess, and from certain angles rather pathetic. Although he carries himself with a lot more confidence than he did before the cancer struck and unleashed his inner antihero, at times you look at Walt and see not Heisenberg, the dapper wraith, but Walter White, the guy who evangelized about carbon and winced whenever Hank reminded him of what a wimp he was. 

Walt is at once overconfident and hopelessly neurotic. He remembers what it was like to be a white-collar enunch and beta-male punching bag and is terrified that he'll have to return to that place again. So he lets his pride eclipse his rationality and derail his self-preservation instinct. He's got that Willy Loman/Shelly "The Machine" Levine sense of desperation, that secret fear that everyone things him weak and useless, and that each time he opens his mouth he confirms the world's low estimate of his manliness. Sometimes these fears come through even when Walt's coming on like a demonically terrifying alpha male, a Wonder Bread avenger. You can see it in the eyes of drug dealers and crime bosses. They flinch when he's up in their faces, but there's always a bit of bewilderment in their eyes, because no man who looks and sounds like Walt is supposed to be talking to them that way. The experience doesn't compute. Walt's secret weapon isn't that he's scary. It's that he's so weird that he puts truly scary men on the defensive."

But I hope that Seitz is wrong about the way the series will end...

I don't want Jesse to be just another Mike, a company man, obeying Gus, following orders. And of course I don't want Jesse to kill Walt because Gus would have asked him to do so. On the other hand, if the truth about Jane's death finally comes out, Jesse could kill Walt out of rage.

Anyway, I may be wrong but I think that Gus' time as a drug lord in New Mexico has come to an end, given his current relationship with the cartel and especially now that Hank is on the trail of Los Pollos. I'm pretty sure that Walter will die in the end, and possibly be killed instead of dying from cancer, but I bet that Gus will be gone (dead or he will simply leave the place and vanish) or defeated before his final demise.

And now that I think about it, and given that there's a fifth season to end the show, I can see Jesse carrying on his journey and, when his surrogate father is gone, becoming precisely what Walt can't be. It's Jesse who might become a new Michael Corleone eventually, something that nobody would have foreseen in season 1.

Unless Jesse just ends up turning Walt in. I think that Seitz is right when he says "Walt wants to get caught so that the world will find out how amazing he is, and what a bizarre and dangerous secret life he's been living." so perhaps he will push Jesse into turning him in. And then Jesse might kill Gus while Walt will be dying from cancer in prison.