Edith Zimmerman has written and editor for the likes of New York, GQ, Esquire, and others. Her big project the for the past year has been helming The Hairpin ...

One of the most widely covered and avidly followed stories of 2011 had to be the worldwide Occupy protests, which spread from New York across the United States and found fertile ground in already fulminating civil protests in Europe, not to mention refracting in intriguing ways across the Arab Spring protests in the Mideast. Fortunately for media coverage, there was no shortage of imagery to go with the endless stories, reports, and talk shows on the movement. However, if you happen to run a website or news operation with no budget for wire photos, or you live in an area with no protests of your own to cover, you can always fall back on stock imagery. Of course, a deep dive into those archives may unearth a few ... disquieting examples of the form.

One distinctive element of Breaking Bad's visual style is to (usually) open an episode with a dialogue-free sequence that establishes the mood of the episode or season in an abstract way. Sometimes it's about the current plot, or otherwise it's part of a season-long mosaic that adds up to a key scene. We though it would be an entertaining tribute to Walt and Co. to compile all the cold opens into single clips, season by season, for fanatics to plow through en masse. I certainly did!

Another season of Breaking Bad goes out with a [metaphor that will surely be abused in other recaps of this episode]. As usual, the finales of this show end not on cliffhangers but at the foot of an emotional cliff we've spent all season falling off of. The startling trick is that you realize this crater is itself on the crumbling precipice of whatever horrors next season will bring. In other words, great television!

KISS HIM! I can't bring myself to Google the possible existence of Gus-Jesse slashfic, but if it didn't exist by last night's episode, it surely does now. (Sorry, my mind always works this way.) Gus really couldn't have gotten more into Jesse's personal space during their little chapel confab, and for the first time we saw Gus deploying his ersatz concern in the tone of an overt threat. The man has somehow weaponized compassion; he's less sinister when threatening to kill someone's children than when he's pretending to care.

Well Ted, you died as you have lived -- twitchy and useless, faintly absurd but mostly just pathetic. Perhaps you're in a better place, but the world and the Internal Revenue Service are materially better for your passing. We all knew you were going to die, and you lived up to that, truly.

DAT GUS. C'mon we all knew Gus Fring wasn't going to roll over for those cartel so-and-so's. Oh yeah, uh ... spoiler alert and so on? Whatever, grow up, this is the internet. So how are things?

It's a known fact that discreetly placed GPS units have led to more domestic violence than alcohol, infidelity, and reality television combined. Still, Walt couldn't help but put the global positioning moves on Jesse's car, thus proving that Jesse hadn't yet slipped his deadly mickey to Gus. Obviously though there's a lot more going on here, and it's not repressed sexual tension. (Note I am not even bothering to google Walt-on-Jesse slashfic because we all know it exists and let's leave it at that.)

Out of respect for the efforts of laborers everywhere, legitimate and otherwise, this recap did not post on Monday, Labor Day, which is a holiday, though something tells me that meth-cooks nationwide were still at their labors anyway. So let's applaud their dedication to their craft. It's not really clear if Walt has weekends off from his own meth superlab, but one assumes he gets a break now and then, especially with Jesse rarely there to assist anymore. Perhaps he can take it up with human resources, which I believe is located in Mike's kicking foot.

Very sorry this week's recap is a day late and $7.5 million short, but I was trapped in the deadly Adirondacks by all the flooding and devastation that was supposed to have hit Manhattan. Of course, my day of mild inconvenience is incomparable to the actual suffering going on up there, so please don't think I'm treating it lightly. I'm merely explaining, not excusing, which is kind of the reverse of what usually goes down on Breaking Bad. SEG-WAY! Now, because I'm a strict perfectionist when it comes to work ethic, I am turning in this recap anyway, even though all the other recappers have already recapped their recaps of this episode. As usual, this one is so, so much better, fortunately for you. Wha hoppen this week, then?