Editor’s Note: This column contains spoilers for the series finale of “Breaking Bad.” 
Atonement. 
It’s a word that’s difficult to describe, and it’s even harder to say how one earns it. 
But even harder is the task of taking a character so hated, so despised by a fanbase, a character whose moral fabric has been unravelling for six years while the writers slowly turn the audience against him or her, and in the span of two episodes, attempt to regain the sympathy for that character. 
And that’s exactly what the writers tried to do in “Breaking Bad”’s series finale Sunday. 
“Breaking Bad” has always been a show about morality — it basically says it in the name.
Walter White, the show’s protagonist, began as a mild-mannered, every man, who, once he is diagnosed with cancer, begins to cook meth. 
Each season, Walter goes further and further, pushing his own boundaries and leaving the audience wondering just how far he’ll go (in the first season, he kills a man with his bare hands, so that should give you some context clues about the scope of the final season). 
It got to the point where the audience was rooting for Walter to die. But how would he go out? After all of the scheming, the killing and the lying, would it be some universal act of karma (At the hands of Walt’s oft-tortured assistant Jesse? Would the cancer catch up to him?) that did Walt in?
But that’s not what “Breaking Bad” did. Instead of taking a half-measure, the show took a full-measure. Series creator Vince Gilligan didn’t solve all of his problems by simply having someone kill Walt or the cancer catch up to him in some remote cabin in New Hampshire.
Instead, Walt comes back to ABQ, sets up a meth-dealer trust fund for his son and kills a bunch of neo-Nazis using a MacGyvered assault rifle. 
He ultimately dies from a stray bullet from the earlier gun spray. 
Although Walt was ultimately able to die on his own terms, by no means did he get away scot-free. Walt is survived by a woman who is on trial for the crimes he committed. He leaves behind a daughter who won’t remember his face and a son who begged him to die. He is responsible for his brother-in-law’s death. 
For years, “Breaking Bad” was assumed to be a show about good and bad and the lengths that people would go to protect their loved ones, even if that means, you know, breaking bad. 
But in its finale episode, the show became something more. It became about redemption, about atonement for one’s actions.
When Walt walked into Skylar’s house, saying he wanted the chance to have a proper goodbye with his wife, the woman he’d always claimed to have been murdering and drug dealing for, and then proceeded to acknowledge that no, in fact, “I did it for me,” well that was the most shocking thing Gilligan could have done in the finale.