Six Reasons Why the Finale of Breaking Bad Could Be Encoded in an Old Country Music Song

So Breaking Bad ends tonight.  What will happen to Walt and the people around him? Why the machine gun?  What’s up with the ricin? Where’s Jesse in all this? And what does his former business partner and his wife (spotted on TV wearing yellow–BB freaks know what that means) have to do with how this will all wrap up?

Perhaps some clues can be found in an old country song.

On October 26, 1958, a new 7-inch single by country artist Marty Robbins appeared on the Columbia entitled “El Paso.”  It told the story of a cowboy and a woman named Felina.  Listen. (Follow along with the lyrics here.)

“Felina” just happens to be the title of the final episode of Breaking Bad.  What can we parse/predict from this?  The theories are many.

1.  “Felina” is an anagram of the word “finale.”  But that’s too simple.

2.  Remember that Walt had a thing for Gretchen, the wife of Walt’s old business partner in Gray Matter, Elliott Schwartz.  Could Walt be gunning for Elliott just like the cowboy went after the his romantic rival for Felina?

3.  In the song, the cowboy heads for the “badlands of New Mexico” after he murders his rival.  Then he’s killed by a bunch of cowboys in revenge. Okay, so Walt is going back to New Mexico from New Hampshire (motto: “Live Free or Die” and also known as the Granite State, the title of the penultimate episode), but maybe the avenging cowboys are a bunch of DEA agents out to get for him for Hank’s death at the hands of the neo-Nazis.  

It could be that the neo-Nazis get to Walt first.  The song speaks of “five mounted cowboys.”  Along with Todd and his uncle, there were three other Nazi freaks in the gang which precipitated the shoot-out that saw Hank and Gomez killed. 

Or–and check this out–will it be Marie (Hank’s wife) who shoots Walt? I mean she’s lost everything because of him. And wouldn’t it be fitting that someone in his family–and remember how deepy Walt feels about family–finally knocks him off?

4.  Is “Felina” a reference to the chemical symbols for iron (Fe), lithium (Li) and sodium (Na)? If so, why? There’s no such chemical as FeLiNa and none of those elements are present in crystal meth.  (There is, apparently, a way of making meth using lithium but if you’ve been paying attention to the chemistry Walt uses, he uses a completely different method.)

5.  Is Felina a metaphor or Walt’s double life? (For a proper breakdown of that theory, go here.)

6.  Now let’s get really weird and get into quantum mechanics. “Felina” could be read as felinae, a scientific classification for small cats. Knowing up much the show has liked to reference famous scientists (hello, Werner Heisenberg!), could this be a nod to the famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat?  Might this foreshadow a super-ambiguous ending where Walt, like the cat in Schrödinger’s box, is both dead and alive?  If this is the case, we’ll all have to bone up on quantum physics to understand the ending.

Oh, and just so you know:  Werner Heisenberg’s theories on quantum mechanics–including the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (read up on it; it might be important when we finally get to the ending) were based on the work of Erwin Schrödinger.  SCIENCE, bitch!  Just sayin’.

Then again, all this could be bullshit.  Let’s not forget that Vince Gilligan dropped one hint on last week’s Talking Bad post-show commentary.  He said “woodworking.”

WTF?  That has nothing to do with “Felina.”  Does it?