Best Villain Death Walk? The Breaking Bad Soundtrack Carries the Title.
“Goodbye” by Apparat featuring Soap & Skin is the Breaking Bad song that immortalized Gus Fring.
In a cage match, it’d be a brutal fight to pit the best TV villains against the best movie villains. It’s a truly inspiring question all pop culture nerds should consider daily before bed. Who wins the cage match and who gets blindsided in the back of the head with a folding chair?
See, for television, I can run through a list with my eyes closed the way a little bratty kid recites the names of all the Power Rangers to his parents:
Boyd Crowder (Justified), the Billy Bob Thornton character in Fargo: Season One, The Yellow King in True Detective, Al Swearengen in Deadwood. You can just go in every direction. Newman in Seinfeld, if that’s your thing. Movies - you’ve got The Eye in LOTR, Heath Ledger’s Joker. The grasshoppers in A Bug’s Life.
So while some of you wander off to argue about this life-altering topic over an IPA and a vegan pizza, the rest of us will stay here and discuss just one villain:
Gus Fring of Breaking Bad.
If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, I’ll begrudgingly say: SPOILER. Go watch all 60 episodes and come back and contribute to this scholarly discussion. For everyone else, the music to which Gus walks towards his death by wheelchair bomb is one of the greatest two and a half minute build-ups in television history.
The Breaking Bad soundtrack is at its peak in this scene with “Goodbye” by Apparat featuring Soap&Skin.
I’ve played this song in every scenario, and it’s always incredible. Waiting in line at the grocery store and you just want to stare down the cashier as they bag your groceries: “Goodbye” by Apparat. A herd of wild stallions is stampeding through your neighborhood, neighing and trampling the neighbors with gleeful abandon? “Goodbye” by Apparat. Or maybe you’re just laying in bed and you want to stare into the ceiling and contemplate your mortality. “Goodbye” by Apparat works there, too.
Gus Fring deserved a dramatic death. He was completely unique in his character development for his emotional pendulum, which swung from quiet professionalism to throat-cutting rage. A meticulous dresser. Chilean soup maker. A selective killer.
The “Last Walk” scene is the definition of expanding the moment. The song lays the foundation and the Breaking Bad crew does the rest, with the slow zoom-in on Gus’s face as he sits in the car, relishing the expulsion of the long-contained vengeance stored in his body’s pores and every vein and bone and nerve.
One negative comment:
the henchman
in the Gus car.
This has to be the most generic henchman of all time. This is a Sam’s Club Great Value Walmart henchman. You find these henchmen in little boxes at Costco in groups of six, powdered or glazed. Zero props for original henchmen.
I’d consider The Breaking Bad soundtrack elite throughout the series. Of course, it was. The show was complete in all facets. The Breaking Bad music supervisor was exquisite, like an aged cheese from caves in Spain, except, you know, a live human being.
In fact, let’s single him out, Mr. Thomas Golubic. He won the Guild of Music Supervisors award for both of the last two seasons delivering songs for the Breaking Bad soundtrack, and was nominated for an Emmy for Season Three of Better Call Saul. Well-deserved.
Pulling off the atmosphere of death is a feat. Lean one way and it’s heavy-handed and bordering on cheese (see sporadic moments through all seven seasons of Sons of Anarchy). Lean the other way and you miss out on the opportunity to land a devastating emotional blow to your living room couch crowd.
“Goodbye” by Apparat feat. Soap&Skin is gorgeous without the support of one of the best shows of all-time. It stands alone in any environment, at a funeral, or as you enter the coffee shop in slow motion to break up with your significant other and leave them sobbing in the café. It all works.
Argue there are better villains in television history – I’ll wait for your thesis. Try to assert there’s a better villain/soundtrack death scene combo in television history?
You’ll have to show me the science.
***
Artist Links:
Soap&Skin Bandcamp
Soap&Skin Insta
Shows with Great Soundtracks:
Better Call Saul
Stranger Things
Atlanta
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