Breaking Bad: Every Major Death Ranked

The quiet, skittish corporate face of Gus Fring and later Walter White’s drug empire, Lydia is low-key perhaps the most evil figure in the entirety of Breaking Bad - which is saying something! No character exhibits less humanity, turns to murder more quickly, orchestrates villainy at such a high level.

Her death, the second to last we see on the show, is a final piece of karmic realignment from Walter, who wasn’t about to leave this world without dispatching everyone who had ever wronged him. It’s also a payoff to one of Breaking Bad’s longest-running Chekovian tools - the ricin, which Walt had always intended to use on a foe, but never got the chance... until now.

There’s certainly a fantastical element to his chess grandmaster murder of Lydia - knowing she’d be at a specific table at a diner at an exact time, and would grab for the spiked packet of Stevia before anyone else would - but after all we’ve seen of Walt by the finale, we can roll with it.

The death is unglamorous, horrifying even, and yet after what we’ve seen of Lydia, it’s one of the show’s most satisfying. Maybe second only to...