There was a sharp, communal intake of breath at the Rialto cinema in Newmarket early last week.
It was the sound you hear when an unkindness of New Zealand's most ruthless, bitter television reviewers gasp at the final scenes of an episode of a show that cannot be faulted.
And these men and women can find fault where most others would find the sort of televisual entertainment that packs quality and subtlety, imparts genuine wisdom and provides the keys to a final and blissful spiritual enlightenment.
And this was early on a Monday, after the crapulent conventicle of mankind's lowest avocation had lurched and tripped its way to the theatre from a miscellany of Auckland hotels and residences on the sort of Sky TV-funded junket such people feel is theirs by right.
But episode one of the latest series of the show this column has been forcing down the throats of a too often unwilling, frequently unappreciative, sometimes deeply common and lacking-in-taste Dunedin viewing public was just too good.
The start of Breaking Bad's sixth and final episode brought the sort of unbalanced intensity that only the very best quality television can produce.
And the best quality television, it must be said, comes mostly from the United States, and then mostly from HBO.
The Sky programming gentleman who introduced the show at last week's embargoed showing - before which mobile phones were removed from members of the New Zealand television-reviewing community and placed in little plastic bags with their names on them for security - compared Breaking Bad with Madmen and The Wire.
It was, he said, and quite rightly so, a cultural phenomenon.
He could, of course, have added the Sopranos.
The episode screened last night on SoHo.
It began, as many episodes of Breaking Bad do, with an introduction that flips forward in time to tease the audience with a glimpse of the future - in this case an almost post-apocalyptic vision of the deserted home of our anti-hero, Walter White.
We know, of course, that Mr White contracted cancer, and the science teacher began cooking methamphetamine to provide funds for his family after his death.
But Breaking Bad has taken us through the darkest of dark nights that is the soul of Mr White, as an apparently decent man became anything - and I mean anything - but.
And last night's show ended with a watershed moment when all was laid bare, all the lies were put aside, and Mr White laid upon his DEA-chief brother-in-law Hank the most chilling threat.
And now there is no going back.
Come quickly hence, episode two.
- Charles Loughrey