Focus was given to the episode's parallels to its namesake, Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", its depiction of redemption, and Walt's (Bryan Cranston) phone call to Skyler (Anna Gunn).

Knowing police are monitoring the phone, Walt calls and attempts to establish Skyler's innocence by falsely claiming he built his drug business alone and had threatened her into helping him.

[9] This episode marks the final appearance of Hank Schrader (Dean Norris) and Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada).

Hank's death was shot in a minimal number of takes, due in part to the limited time the crew had and the inconvenient weather present.

This coupled with the shooting running late and the erratic weather of the day led to her feeling under pressure and seeking support from Johnson.

[16] Walley-Beckett said that Walt's preceding confrontation was "extremely complicated" to write owing to the characters' differing objectives, the scene's "operatic" nature, and the multiple "crescendos and decrescendos".

[17] Johnson—who had it all "mapped out"[4]—saw the scene as the hardest to film, noting that the line "I tried to save him" underwent multiple takes until Cranston commented that Walt should be, instead of bumbling, exasperated.

[13] The University of Colorado Boulder's Amanda Knopf noted that the shootout aligns with the conventional Western trope of improbable success in a gunfight and is an example of Walt's moral code and belief that dying in this manner would restore his masculinity and heroism.

[18] The lyrics to "Take My True Love by the Hand" by The Limeliters references and foreshadows Walt's isolation from his family, emphasized by Holly's first words being "Mama".

[20] The episode title refers to the poem "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which recounts the crumbling legacy of a once-proud king.

[20] Douglas Eric Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan said that Walt's reaction to Hank's death indicates that he has become the "colossal wreck" of the poem—the empire of Ramesses II, which Shelley alluded to.

[1] Further parallels are seen in both the episode and poem concluding with their protagonists left with little to show for their actions and how the "concept of hubris and being punished for grandiose projects that serve an individual's egotism are central aspects of each work".

[13] It's the hypnotic magic of this show that anybody would sit around parsing the [morals] of Walt's behavior in making that phone call in the same episode in which he sent Jesse off to be tortured and murdered.

[29] The most analyzed and immediately discussed aspect of the episode was the phone call between Walt and Skyler—some viewers felt Walter's rage was false in an attempt to aid Skyler in avoiding prosecution; others saw his anger as genuine.

[29][30] Walley-Beckett "personally [felt] like it wasn't open to interpretation" and hoped that audiences would view it as a ploy and thus sympathize with Skyler, who Johnson framed in a deliberately intimate manner.

[3] In an article for IndieWire, one week after the episode's airing, Sam Adams said that "most everyone agrees that Walt's call to Skyler was...[him] trying to exonerate her".

[19] Drusilla Moorhouse, an online contributor to The Today Show's website, viewed the call as selfless and said it "rewrote the history of [Skyler's] complicity".

[31] Matt Zoller Seitz of Vulture said that "The controversy over Walter's phone call is really about the relationship between viewers and television...It's about the discomfort that ensues when an episode or scene or moment forces us to take a hard look at why we watch a show, what we truly get out of it, and what that says about us".

[61] The Los Angeles Times' Emily St. James described it as "rich" and gave particular praise to how it made Skyler's arc as a victim to willing accomplice "worth it", which she felt had previously been a fault of the season.

[64] Tim Surette of TV.com called the episode "terrific and awful to watch; a powerful piece of television that transcended fiction".

[62] Regular contributor to Paste, Ross Bonaime found Johnson's direction immersive, a sentiment echoed by Bowman.

[9][53] Jagernauth was grateful that Johnson "[served] the script by keeping the stylization at a minimum and letting the emotional scenes carry through with the power that was clearly on the page".

[66] Alex Berenson of Esquire provided limited criticism regarding Todd's request to spare Walt and his delay—noting the latter to be "heavy-handed and unsubtle" but acknowledging that it did work within the story.

[62] Yglesias found Walt revealing his entire fortune and his eventual new life to be out-of-character decisions; the gang's imprisonment of Jesse to continue selling meth and lack of in-fighting also perplexed him.