(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)
This week’s cold open is very straightforward, with no major temporal
or spacial shifts or impressionistic flourishes. Instead, it shows us
more of Mike takin’ care of business (and working overtime). I liked it
more than last week’s episode because he is more purposeful, snazzy in
his suit, and clever in his posing as a paralegal so that
attorney-client privilege blocks the cops from recording him. It does,
interestingly, end with him giving a surveillance camera a nice direct
shot of his face. Not that it will mean much to the APD, but if Hank or
Gomez ever catches sight of it, they would be very interested to find
out he’s falsifying his identity to access suspected fellow criminal
conspirators. Could be nothing, but it’s also the exact kind of little
detail that this show likes to return to (remember Hank tracking down
the Crystal Ship from an ATM camera?).
No movement on the Madrigal front this week, or sign of Lydia, but in
the exchange we get extended sequences with Walt, Jesse, Saul and Mike
all together, so whose going to complain? And their new scheme is
deliciously devious, setting up temporary shop in tented houses under
the guise of exterminators. Also Badger! Skinny Pete! Landry! Even
with no Hank, it was a great episode for the men of Breaking Bad.
Less so for the women, although we did get our first Betsy Brandt
sighting of the year and Skyler finally edged her way north of 5 lines.
Skyler’s storyline is obviously building toward something big, though,
so it’s not a big deal that she hasn’t got much screentime yet. And
both women make the most of their short scenes.
My biggest reservation with this season has been the low stakes for
Walt and Jesse, and “Hazard Pay” is still without the pressure-cooker
intensity that has marked even the least eventful episodes of the first 4
seasons. On the business side of things, Walt comes up with a new
scheme and the guys pull it off without any hitches or the horrifying
twists that marked even the most basic tasks in years past. And on the
domestic end, there’s a moment where it seems like Marie is going to
demand answers, but Walt has gotten so adept at telling just enough
truth to divert suspicion and paint Skyler as the villain that he’s
convinced her he’s the wronged husband practically before he’s exhaled.
But Walt is such a bastard in this episode that that’s not even the
worst of it. And it’s not even the scene where Walt subtly plants
doubts in Jesse’s mind about Andrea, as tremendous as it is. The way he
couches it in compliments, and compliments that have some core of truth
to them, is evil genius, and I love how Jesse is sort of instinctually
afraid the second Walt brings up honesty vis a vis the business, quickly
assuring him that Andrea doesn’t know anything. But no, Walt’s most
douchebaggy moment in my opinion is the amused little smirk he gives
upon finding a copy of Leaves of Grass, the book that
he talked about with Gale back in S3. He’s so far beyond feeling
remorse for the gentle soul he had murdered that he looks back on it as
nothing but an amusing anecdote.
Anyway, the lack of intensity is much less noticeable in this episode
than the last because it’s just so much fun to watch the boys get back
to business, scheming and cooking up a storm. Adding Saul to the mix
always makes things 88% better (I checked the figures), but it’s also
just that we got more with our main characters and they are on the fast
track back to trouble even if they aren’t there yet.
And it’s not just me feeling restless with how easy Walt has it these
days. He seems to be a little antsy without any imminent threats to
his life and freedom, and to be, if not consciously then unnecessarily,
courting new enemies. He’s practically giddy at the prospect of butting
heads with Mike, smugly telling Saul “he handles the business, I handle
him” 5 seconds after agreeing to stay completely out of the
distribution side of the business, and seeming to end the episode
pondering if it would be too gauche to start plotting the murder of a
guy within a week of becoming partners with him. And there’s also the
Brock/Jesse situation that he decides to meddle in despite his appearing
to be completely in the clear. Sure, having another wife who might
know something sensitive is potentially a problem for him, but they’ve
barely got this thing going and he’s a terminal case; none of this will
be Walt’s problem a year down the line no matter what. Hardly seems
worth kicking sleeping dogs over.
But Walt is kicking dogs and poking nests all over the place. He
seems so desperate for a challenge that he’s actually developing a
rivalry with the ghost of Gustavo Fring, in an impressively
self-defeating move. Mike, in his typically blunt fashion, explains
that “Just because you shot Jesse James, don’t make you Jesse James.”
Walt disagrees, though. In his mind, shooting Jesse James proves he’s better
than Jesse James. But of course he’s not, so what does that make him?
Is he the slasher villain that the show frames him as when he stalks
around his own house? One of the three stooges he watches with Jesse?
Scarface?
The last one seems to be the most pertinent, as it has always been
the logline of the show. And the scene of the Walters watching Scarface
was not exactly subtle in what it portends, coupled with the flash
forward to the machine gun in the trunk. Walt has risen meteorically
through the Southwest drug trade, but he is dissatisfied with just
sitting on top. And he seems dead set on turning everyone in his
criminal and familial circles against him before long.
“Everyone dies in this movie, don’t they?” That they
do. Now would be the time to start being very afraid for the fictional
denizens of Albuquerque.
Estimated Profits: -$40,000 + $13700 = + $97000
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his
job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a
guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved
to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for
Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two
planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact
(or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken
Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to
kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their
coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping
bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that
investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a
long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is
murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.
Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his
hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and
Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt
purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in
an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from
Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself
up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an
industrial laundry is out of their jobs. Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal
prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence
locker. Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to
apprehend Fring or Heisenberg. Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman
get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to
Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death. Walt manipulates Jesse
into breaking up with Andrea.
Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “He handles the business. I handle him.”
Best Lie – Definitely Walt “accidentally” spilling
the Beneke beans to Marie. Credit to Chud boards genius Syd for calling
it a few hours prior to airing. Betsy Brandt’s wide-eyed, slow motion
reaction is also a highlight. It’s chilling how good Walt has gotten at
telling just enough truth to sell his lies. His talk with Jesse
wouldn’t be half as effective if there wasn’t a good deal of honest
affection woven into the manipulation.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 14
It’s The Little Things – The entire cooking montage
is wonderful, particularly the Christmas-y look (augmented by the
music) of the aluminum shavings being shaken into the vat and the
beautiful shot of the smoke being sucked into the ventilation tube.
Jesse burning himself while sneaking a fresh tortilla off the factory
line. Saul still trying to find an illicit use for the Lazer Tag
arena. The little guitar lick Badger punctuates his one line to the
music store salesman with. The patter of Scarface’s little friend (the
second time in the episode Walt watches someone on TV firing a machine
gun) transitioning into the sound of the bill counters.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
BREAKING BAD 5.02 - "MADRIGAL"
(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)
One of the strangest cold opens we’ve ever had this week, with a long prelude to an unknown executive, presumably played by Bill Nighy’s non-union German equivalent, committing some form of electric hara-kiri as the police close in on Los Pollos Hermanos international connections. I don’t know what exactly we’re supposed to take away from this, and in fact I have a suspicion that it was written solely to get a guy to say “Cajun Kick-Ass” in a heavy Teutonic accent.
From there we have one more bit of clean up, as Walt has to help Jesse find the ricin cigarette (even though it’s not actually the real one). While it was overshadowed by the flash-forward opening, last week’s premiere was essentially a clean-up episode, dealing with the loose ends from Gus’s murder. This one is the opposite, something we don’t normally get with this show, an episode that is devoted almost exclusively to setting up the major storyline of the season involving Madrigal Electromotive. This results in a clunkier experience than we are accustomed to with BB, which is usually so great at spinning one crises organically out of the solution to the previous one. But with last season ending with the decapitations of the biggest meth operations north and south of the border means that we need to drop in some major new characters basically out of the blue, so we get an odd episode that feels more like a backdoor pilot for a BB spin-off, or in today’s vernacular, a collection of webisodes with a couple scenes of our main characters grafted on.
Those main players are typically great in their short scenes, particularly Aaron Paul in his Roomba-induced breakdown. But Colonel Saltstache actually gets more dramatic material than Sklyer, Saul, Walter Jr. and Marie (who doesn’t appear at all) together. It’s not a terrible hour of television or anything, it’s just odd that with the end firmly in sight, things have never felt less urgent. Walt and Jesse are on the inevitable path back to cooking, but there’s a leisurely feel to the proceedings. They make an important step of getting Mike on board and acquiring their methylamine, but not through any really zealous pursuit of those ends; by the end of the episode they have just sort of fallen into their laps, which is where we knew they had to end up when the episode started.
Rather, most of the episode is the Mike Show, which is great for Jonathan Banks fans (and I know many of you get super hard for the old bulldog), but as I said, feels a little off-task when taking into account that we have a time gap the size of the first 4 seasons to fill in with only a single season to to do it. Contributing to this feeling is that although he meets with Walt and Jesse and Hank, the conclusions of those meetings are foregone. We know from the non-stop promo spots featuring the time bomb comment that Mike is going to turn down their offer, just as we know that he won’t be able to avoid their orbit once they get to cooking again. And as much fun as it is to watch Hank in his element and Banks mine new depths of deadpan in his responses, did anyone really think that former-cop Mike was going to crack under the pressure of a single interrogation? Not really, which makes his biggest scenes the ones focusing on newcomer Lydia.
Lydia has potential as a character, but it’s mostly tied to her as a reflection of Walt, to whom she is completely disconnected throughout this episode. Her frayed nerves are reminiscent of Walt’s early criminal stages; when Mike explains to her that “in the real world, we don’t kill 11 people as some sort of prophylactic measure,” it’s exactly the type of impatient corrective he might have directed at our hero a few seasons ago, while her plea to have her body found so that her daughter doesn’t grow up thinking she was abandoned is the type of thing Walt would have done in earlier days, when he was more concerned about the family “missing you after you’re gone” than that they respect/fear him while he’s still there.
Which is fine for a certain type of reflection, but it’s hard to get too wrapped up in this character who didn’t exist last week fretting over a list of names of people we don’t know (I know we’ve met Chau and Dennis the laundry manager before, but come on) who might pose a hypothetical threat to her. It is in some ways necessary to get through this stuff quickly, as these Madrigal folks have to fill the enormous shoes of Gus Fring and we don’t have a ton of time to do it, but it’s makes for an episode that is a long way from the shocking, white-knuckle, emotionally devastating ride that BB is at its best.
Get back to cooking, boys. This episode was mostly just ketchup, and I know you are capable of much more inspired, Franch-y concoctions.
Estimated Profits: -$40,000
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs. Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker. Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg. Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – Mike approaches a door with a gun pressed against the peephole, then gets the drop on his ambusher and quietly interrogates him with Chau’s demapped head separating them in the frame.
Best Lie – Gotta admire Walt’s commitment when he helps Jesse search his house for the cigarette for hours before gently pointing him toward the Roomba.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 14
We Are Done, Professionally – Mike rejects Walt and Jesse’s offer of partnership, astutely noting that Walt is time bomb waiting to go off.
It’s The Little Things – Mike deadpanning that Hank’s accusations have him “very stirred up”. The more realistic cracking sound of Mike’s silenced pistol as opposed to the traditional high-pitched squeak. Jesse named the RV “The Crystal Ship”. Mike asking the hitman if he’s ready, but not waiting to hear his final plea.
One of the strangest cold opens we’ve ever had this week, with a long prelude to an unknown executive, presumably played by Bill Nighy’s non-union German equivalent, committing some form of electric hara-kiri as the police close in on Los Pollos Hermanos international connections. I don’t know what exactly we’re supposed to take away from this, and in fact I have a suspicion that it was written solely to get a guy to say “Cajun Kick-Ass” in a heavy Teutonic accent.
From there we have one more bit of clean up, as Walt has to help Jesse find the ricin cigarette (even though it’s not actually the real one). While it was overshadowed by the flash-forward opening, last week’s premiere was essentially a clean-up episode, dealing with the loose ends from Gus’s murder. This one is the opposite, something we don’t normally get with this show, an episode that is devoted almost exclusively to setting up the major storyline of the season involving Madrigal Electromotive. This results in a clunkier experience than we are accustomed to with BB, which is usually so great at spinning one crises organically out of the solution to the previous one. But with last season ending with the decapitations of the biggest meth operations north and south of the border means that we need to drop in some major new characters basically out of the blue, so we get an odd episode that feels more like a backdoor pilot for a BB spin-off, or in today’s vernacular, a collection of webisodes with a couple scenes of our main characters grafted on.
Those main players are typically great in their short scenes, particularly Aaron Paul in his Roomba-induced breakdown. But Colonel Saltstache actually gets more dramatic material than Sklyer, Saul, Walter Jr. and Marie (who doesn’t appear at all) together. It’s not a terrible hour of television or anything, it’s just odd that with the end firmly in sight, things have never felt less urgent. Walt and Jesse are on the inevitable path back to cooking, but there’s a leisurely feel to the proceedings. They make an important step of getting Mike on board and acquiring their methylamine, but not through any really zealous pursuit of those ends; by the end of the episode they have just sort of fallen into their laps, which is where we knew they had to end up when the episode started.
Rather, most of the episode is the Mike Show, which is great for Jonathan Banks fans (and I know many of you get super hard for the old bulldog), but as I said, feels a little off-task when taking into account that we have a time gap the size of the first 4 seasons to fill in with only a single season to to do it. Contributing to this feeling is that although he meets with Walt and Jesse and Hank, the conclusions of those meetings are foregone. We know from the non-stop promo spots featuring the time bomb comment that Mike is going to turn down their offer, just as we know that he won’t be able to avoid their orbit once they get to cooking again. And as much fun as it is to watch Hank in his element and Banks mine new depths of deadpan in his responses, did anyone really think that former-cop Mike was going to crack under the pressure of a single interrogation? Not really, which makes his biggest scenes the ones focusing on newcomer Lydia.
Lydia has potential as a character, but it’s mostly tied to her as a reflection of Walt, to whom she is completely disconnected throughout this episode. Her frayed nerves are reminiscent of Walt’s early criminal stages; when Mike explains to her that “in the real world, we don’t kill 11 people as some sort of prophylactic measure,” it’s exactly the type of impatient corrective he might have directed at our hero a few seasons ago, while her plea to have her body found so that her daughter doesn’t grow up thinking she was abandoned is the type of thing Walt would have done in earlier days, when he was more concerned about the family “missing you after you’re gone” than that they respect/fear him while he’s still there.
Which is fine for a certain type of reflection, but it’s hard to get too wrapped up in this character who didn’t exist last week fretting over a list of names of people we don’t know (I know we’ve met Chau and Dennis the laundry manager before, but come on) who might pose a hypothetical threat to her. It is in some ways necessary to get through this stuff quickly, as these Madrigal folks have to fill the enormous shoes of Gus Fring and we don’t have a ton of time to do it, but it’s makes for an episode that is a long way from the shocking, white-knuckle, emotionally devastating ride that BB is at its best.
Get back to cooking, boys. This episode was mostly just ketchup, and I know you are capable of much more inspired, Franch-y concoctions.
Estimated Profits: -$40,000
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs. Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker. Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg. Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – Mike approaches a door with a gun pressed against the peephole, then gets the drop on his ambusher and quietly interrogates him with Chau’s demapped head separating them in the frame.
Best Lie – Gotta admire Walt’s commitment when he helps Jesse search his house for the cigarette for hours before gently pointing him toward the Roomba.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 14
We Are Done, Professionally – Mike rejects Walt and Jesse’s offer of partnership, astutely noting that Walt is time bomb waiting to go off.
It’s The Little Things – Mike deadpanning that Hank’s accusations have him “very stirred up”. The more realistic cracking sound of Mike’s silenced pistol as opposed to the traditional high-pitched squeak. Jesse named the RV “The Crystal Ship”. Mike asking the hitman if he’s ready, but not waiting to hear his final plea.
Monday, July 16, 2012
BREAKING BAD 5.01 - "LIVE FREE OR DIE"
(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)
No one does cold opens like Breaking Bad. Not The Shield. Not Lost. Not Buffy. Not The Wire. Those all did them well, don’t get me wrong. But we never know what we’re going to get from the opening of a BB episode. It could be a flashback. It could be a flashforward, either to the episode’s climax or the end of the season. It could be a brief, impressionistic image foreshadowing something indeterminately awful. It could be a video for a Spanish-language drug ballad. Often times it’s more like a conceptual teaser trailer for what is to come than the actual beginning of a story. But it’s pretty much guaranteed to be striking and ominous and to have me muttering “oooohshit…” when the smoke and periodic table and western guitar music comes up.
The opening of “Live Free Or Die” certainly lives up to this tradition. Much like season 2, we are catching a glimpse of a grim future, but we have a lot more concrete facts to go on than when we were just seeing charred stuffed animals floating in a pool. We are roughly one year from the “present day”, based on Walt’s 50th birthday being in the pilot (where one of our first scenes had Skyler presenting him with his veggie bacon arranged in a “50” shape) and him talking about having been doing this for a year at the end of last season. We see that he has grown a full beard and head of hair, suggesting that it’s been some time since he was riding high as Heisenberg. This assumption is bolstered by the fact that he seems to have actually driven in from New Hampshire; his car has plates sporting the state’s famous motto, and he doesn’t seem to be reaching for a story when he responds that it takes 30 hours driving with no stops.
And less tangibly, but significantly, observe Cranston’s body language. He looks worn down, resigned, but not sickly to the point of being physically infirm. Walt carries himself completely differently after embracing the Heisenberg persona than he did in the first season, but this is a completely new bearing for our man. I’d like to watch it again to try to articulate exactly what he was doing, but I don’t have a DVR, so suffice to say that I was left with the impression that whatever failure or defeat has knocked Walt from the saddle he’s riding in throughout the episode proper, it occurred a good while before the Denny’s scene.
My guess at this point? When the cartel and/or DEA heat comes bearing down on the Heisenpire over the next 8-16 episodes, Walt decides to call up that vacuum cleaner salesman that Saul turned him on to. He converts the Whites (or what’s left of them…) to the Lamberts and sets them up with a new life in sunny NH. With the clock on his cancer running out, Walt decides to come back to the ABQ to help Jesse out of one last jam and check out in proper Scarface fashion. Furthermore, I believe this plan will go off exactly as planned, with no collateral damage, and Walt and Jesse will ride off into the sunset as noble outlaws, because I’ve been watching this show carefully for several years and have a pretty good bead on its M.O. at this point.
Okay, 1000 words or so in, maybe time to move past the opening credits. I’ll move through this quicker, as brevity is the soul of wit (or so some old British pervert says), and this is actually a fairly mellow episode of BB, despite including the boys’ biggest caper yet. By BB standards, it’s a light-hearted romp, with absolutely no intentional harm to the well-being of innocents. Which is not to say it is not incredibly destructive, dangerous, and damaging to the well-being of the entirety of Albuquerque, but we grade on a curve these days.
Point being, the stakes, while ostensibly life and death for our leads, never feel as tense as something like the Winnebago scene in “Sunset” or even Hank interrogating Jesse in “Bit By A Dead Bee”. Part of that comes from knowing that it’s the season premiere and the guys will definitely be getting at least a temporary reprieve, but mostly I think it comes down to Walt’s cocky attitude. “Box Cutter” was a season premiere too, but Cranston’s palpable desperation in the superlab sold that as a legitimately harrowing experience. But with where the character is at now, it doesn’t make sense for Walt to be a ball of frayed nerves even while carrying out an electro-magnetic assault on a police station that I fully expect to reenact beat-for-beat as a mission in Grand Theft Auto V.
Which brings us to the most distinctive aspect of this premiere, that for the first time we’re starting the season with Walter in triumph. The arc of previous years has always had Walt slowly embracing the badass Heisenberg persona, but then the next season has to quickly humble him so he can go through a similar transformation over the next 12 episodes. Heisenberg makes his first appearance in “Crazy Handful of Nuthin”, but the following episode makes it clear that his chemistry sneak attack has not given him the upper hand in dealing with Tuco. In season 2, he enjoys his time as a drug lord, has his “stay out of my territory” moment and becomes a millionaire, but in the end his minions are dispersed, his partner is catatonic, his wife takes his children away from him and his pool is befouled by Insta-Karma Brand’s patented Accusatory Stuffed Animal Eyeballs (give me a drowned opossum any day of the week). He spends several episodes in season 3 denying that he’s a criminal and refusing to cook, but of course by the end he’s capping dealers in the head and out-maneuvering Mike and Victor. Then Gus quickly brings the hammer down and Walt spends the majority of 4 impotently rattling the bars of the cage the Chicken Man has constructed.
This year looks to be very different. Rather than immediately knocking Walt down a peg so he can spend the year transitioning from a reactive role to a more assertive one, we have him in Heisenberg mode from the get-go, with the cold open to suggest that we will be seeing an opposite trajectory. It seems that we will be going from a premiere with Walt as a crime boss smugly in control of his little empire to a finale where he is a beaten down, desperate shell. Conjecture? Sure, but again, the way he carries himself and looks at that machine gun does not look to me like a guy slotting one piece into some brilliant master plan. It looks like a guy who has already checked out.
Also starting off the season in the catbird seat? Hank, who barely appears, but does look more mobile than we last saw him. Which is fitting, since it was clear all along that at least a portion of his difficult recovery was psychosomatic. I’m very interested in where they take Hank in the home stretch, as his character is the one whose handling I’ve most been impressed with over the years. I didn’t find space in the previous season reviews to mention how brilliantly the show has positioned Hank, so let’s do that now.
Hank’s an incredibly difficult character to handle properly in concept, as his story potential seems major but limited. It ratchets up the tension to have him be the one chasing Heisenberg, but if he ever actually figures out the truth then the entire show comes crashing down. But the longer he can’t figure it out, the more he loses potency as a threat and becomes Wile E. Coyote. How is it that we still view him as a credible lawman after 5 years of failing to see what’s right under his nose?
A few ways. For starters, he’s come out on top of the two biggest shootouts in the show’s run, taking out 2 of the biggest 3 threats to ever come at our heroes in the process. It doesn’t hurt our ability to take him seriously to see that when it’s time to showdown, the man can handle himself. But mainly, the show has been great at finding ways for him to be good at his job without actually accomplishing his primary goal.
It does this by making the rest of the DEA much more credulous about all the smokescreens the meth-makers have thrown up, so that he has spent most of the series running his investigation all on his own. His having to drag his colleagues kicking and screaming along for the blue meth ride makes his constantly coming up just a little short much less damning of his capabilities. Basically, the show won’t ever let him win, but it always allows him to be right. Most excitingly for this year, we’ve reached a point where the DEA has no choice but to recognize that this Cassandra in their midst has been proven completely correct about every “wild hunch” they have dismissed over the previous year. He didn’t buy that the guy they sent to jail as Heisenberg in S2 was the real deal, and he was right. Excuse or no, he was right about the blue coming back to ABQ in S3, and while his assault on Jesse created a legal clusterfuck for the department, the fact that the Marie misdirection occurred at all strongly suggests that he is involved in some fairly high-level dirt. And of course, Gustavo has been posthumously outed as the biggest meth dealer west of the Rockies. I have a hard time seeing Gomey or Colonel Saltstache poo-pooing any of Hank’s hunches this year. It just remains to be seen what that will be now that the laptop is trashed.
Is it Sunday yet? Is it? Now? What about now? Huh? Man.
….Now?
Estimated Profits: $400,000 ahead. But Walt says he doesn’t have any cash for a magnet? Of course, he’s probably lying, because he’s a lying liar what lies at midnight and also before and after. But he may have been hit harder by S4’s expenses than I estimated. Let’s say $200,000 ahead.
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Lesser Included Offenses - Possession of illegal firearms, breaking and entering (police station), obstruction of justice (normally I don’t list stuff like evidence tampering, but in this case they screwed up all kinds of cases that don’t have anything to do with them)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs. Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.
Heisenberg Certainty Principle - “We’re done, when I say we’re done.”
Best Lie – Mike impersonating a US Postal inspector while talking to the cops.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – The boys improvise a giant magnet device to wreck up the evidence room from outside.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 13 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”, “Cornered”, “Salud”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Both Mike and Saul attempt to extricate themselves from dealing with Walt. Both fail to do so.
It’s The Little Things – Walt and Horace Shapiro, Landfill Attorney* assuming that Jesse has a cock ring. Mike named his favorite Mexican chicken Wendell (for some reason, this is funnier than if he had given them Hispanic names). “Yeah, bitch! MAGNETS!!!”
*I’m sure that the character has an actual name. Just as I am sure that name will never appear in this blog.
No one does cold opens like Breaking Bad. Not The Shield. Not Lost. Not Buffy. Not The Wire. Those all did them well, don’t get me wrong. But we never know what we’re going to get from the opening of a BB episode. It could be a flashback. It could be a flashforward, either to the episode’s climax or the end of the season. It could be a brief, impressionistic image foreshadowing something indeterminately awful. It could be a video for a Spanish-language drug ballad. Often times it’s more like a conceptual teaser trailer for what is to come than the actual beginning of a story. But it’s pretty much guaranteed to be striking and ominous and to have me muttering “oooohshit…” when the smoke and periodic table and western guitar music comes up.
The opening of “Live Free Or Die” certainly lives up to this tradition. Much like season 2, we are catching a glimpse of a grim future, but we have a lot more concrete facts to go on than when we were just seeing charred stuffed animals floating in a pool. We are roughly one year from the “present day”, based on Walt’s 50th birthday being in the pilot (where one of our first scenes had Skyler presenting him with his veggie bacon arranged in a “50” shape) and him talking about having been doing this for a year at the end of last season. We see that he has grown a full beard and head of hair, suggesting that it’s been some time since he was riding high as Heisenberg. This assumption is bolstered by the fact that he seems to have actually driven in from New Hampshire; his car has plates sporting the state’s famous motto, and he doesn’t seem to be reaching for a story when he responds that it takes 30 hours driving with no stops.
And less tangibly, but significantly, observe Cranston’s body language. He looks worn down, resigned, but not sickly to the point of being physically infirm. Walt carries himself completely differently after embracing the Heisenberg persona than he did in the first season, but this is a completely new bearing for our man. I’d like to watch it again to try to articulate exactly what he was doing, but I don’t have a DVR, so suffice to say that I was left with the impression that whatever failure or defeat has knocked Walt from the saddle he’s riding in throughout the episode proper, it occurred a good while before the Denny’s scene.
My guess at this point? When the cartel and/or DEA heat comes bearing down on the Heisenpire over the next 8-16 episodes, Walt decides to call up that vacuum cleaner salesman that Saul turned him on to. He converts the Whites (or what’s left of them…) to the Lamberts and sets them up with a new life in sunny NH. With the clock on his cancer running out, Walt decides to come back to the ABQ to help Jesse out of one last jam and check out in proper Scarface fashion. Furthermore, I believe this plan will go off exactly as planned, with no collateral damage, and Walt and Jesse will ride off into the sunset as noble outlaws, because I’ve been watching this show carefully for several years and have a pretty good bead on its M.O. at this point.
Okay, 1000 words or so in, maybe time to move past the opening credits. I’ll move through this quicker, as brevity is the soul of wit (or so some old British pervert says), and this is actually a fairly mellow episode of BB, despite including the boys’ biggest caper yet. By BB standards, it’s a light-hearted romp, with absolutely no intentional harm to the well-being of innocents. Which is not to say it is not incredibly destructive, dangerous, and damaging to the well-being of the entirety of Albuquerque, but we grade on a curve these days.
Point being, the stakes, while ostensibly life and death for our leads, never feel as tense as something like the Winnebago scene in “Sunset” or even Hank interrogating Jesse in “Bit By A Dead Bee”. Part of that comes from knowing that it’s the season premiere and the guys will definitely be getting at least a temporary reprieve, but mostly I think it comes down to Walt’s cocky attitude. “Box Cutter” was a season premiere too, but Cranston’s palpable desperation in the superlab sold that as a legitimately harrowing experience. But with where the character is at now, it doesn’t make sense for Walt to be a ball of frayed nerves even while carrying out an electro-magnetic assault on a police station that I fully expect to reenact beat-for-beat as a mission in Grand Theft Auto V.
Which brings us to the most distinctive aspect of this premiere, that for the first time we’re starting the season with Walter in triumph. The arc of previous years has always had Walt slowly embracing the badass Heisenberg persona, but then the next season has to quickly humble him so he can go through a similar transformation over the next 12 episodes. Heisenberg makes his first appearance in “Crazy Handful of Nuthin”, but the following episode makes it clear that his chemistry sneak attack has not given him the upper hand in dealing with Tuco. In season 2, he enjoys his time as a drug lord, has his “stay out of my territory” moment and becomes a millionaire, but in the end his minions are dispersed, his partner is catatonic, his wife takes his children away from him and his pool is befouled by Insta-Karma Brand’s patented Accusatory Stuffed Animal Eyeballs (give me a drowned opossum any day of the week). He spends several episodes in season 3 denying that he’s a criminal and refusing to cook, but of course by the end he’s capping dealers in the head and out-maneuvering Mike and Victor. Then Gus quickly brings the hammer down and Walt spends the majority of 4 impotently rattling the bars of the cage the Chicken Man has constructed.
This year looks to be very different. Rather than immediately knocking Walt down a peg so he can spend the year transitioning from a reactive role to a more assertive one, we have him in Heisenberg mode from the get-go, with the cold open to suggest that we will be seeing an opposite trajectory. It seems that we will be going from a premiere with Walt as a crime boss smugly in control of his little empire to a finale where he is a beaten down, desperate shell. Conjecture? Sure, but again, the way he carries himself and looks at that machine gun does not look to me like a guy slotting one piece into some brilliant master plan. It looks like a guy who has already checked out.
Also starting off the season in the catbird seat? Hank, who barely appears, but does look more mobile than we last saw him. Which is fitting, since it was clear all along that at least a portion of his difficult recovery was psychosomatic. I’m very interested in where they take Hank in the home stretch, as his character is the one whose handling I’ve most been impressed with over the years. I didn’t find space in the previous season reviews to mention how brilliantly the show has positioned Hank, so let’s do that now.
Hank’s an incredibly difficult character to handle properly in concept, as his story potential seems major but limited. It ratchets up the tension to have him be the one chasing Heisenberg, but if he ever actually figures out the truth then the entire show comes crashing down. But the longer he can’t figure it out, the more he loses potency as a threat and becomes Wile E. Coyote. How is it that we still view him as a credible lawman after 5 years of failing to see what’s right under his nose?
A few ways. For starters, he’s come out on top of the two biggest shootouts in the show’s run, taking out 2 of the biggest 3 threats to ever come at our heroes in the process. It doesn’t hurt our ability to take him seriously to see that when it’s time to showdown, the man can handle himself. But mainly, the show has been great at finding ways for him to be good at his job without actually accomplishing his primary goal.
It does this by making the rest of the DEA much more credulous about all the smokescreens the meth-makers have thrown up, so that he has spent most of the series running his investigation all on his own. His having to drag his colleagues kicking and screaming along for the blue meth ride makes his constantly coming up just a little short much less damning of his capabilities. Basically, the show won’t ever let him win, but it always allows him to be right. Most excitingly for this year, we’ve reached a point where the DEA has no choice but to recognize that this Cassandra in their midst has been proven completely correct about every “wild hunch” they have dismissed over the previous year. He didn’t buy that the guy they sent to jail as Heisenberg in S2 was the real deal, and he was right. Excuse or no, he was right about the blue coming back to ABQ in S3, and while his assault on Jesse created a legal clusterfuck for the department, the fact that the Marie misdirection occurred at all strongly suggests that he is involved in some fairly high-level dirt. And of course, Gustavo has been posthumously outed as the biggest meth dealer west of the Rockies. I have a hard time seeing Gomey or Colonel Saltstache poo-pooing any of Hank’s hunches this year. It just remains to be seen what that will be now that the laptop is trashed.
Is it Sunday yet? Is it? Now? What about now? Huh? Man.
….Now?
Estimated Profits: $400,000 ahead. But Walt says he doesn’t have any cash for a magnet? Of course, he’s probably lying, because he’s a lying liar what lies at midnight and also before and after. But he may have been hit harder by S4’s expenses than I estimated. Let’s say $200,000 ahead.
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Lesser Included Offenses - Possession of illegal firearms, breaking and entering (police station), obstruction of justice (normally I don’t list stuff like evidence tampering, but in this case they screwed up all kinds of cases that don’t have anything to do with them)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs. Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.
Heisenberg Certainty Principle - “We’re done, when I say we’re done.”
Best Lie – Mike impersonating a US Postal inspector while talking to the cops.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – The boys improvise a giant magnet device to wreck up the evidence room from outside.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 13 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”, “Cornered”, “Salud”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Both Mike and Saul attempt to extricate themselves from dealing with Walt. Both fail to do so.
It’s The Little Things – Walt and Horace Shapiro, Landfill Attorney* assuming that Jesse has a cock ring. Mike named his favorite Mexican chicken Wendell (for some reason, this is funnier than if he had given them Hispanic names). “Yeah, bitch! MAGNETS!!!”
*I’m sure that the character has an actual name. Just as I am sure that name will never appear in this blog.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
BREAKING BAD SEASON 4 REVIEW
(This piece was orginally published on Chud.com on 7/12/12)
Season Four does something new, and actually opens with a clean up episode. And a great example of how the show builds tension out of long, quiet stretches and stillness. The scene in that episode? Nearly ten minutes, uninterrupted, with no dialogue from anyone but Walter. Most shows would cut to commercial on the look of shock on the characters’ faces once the murder was committed, but Breaking Bad, oh man, Breaking Bad not only shows the victim bleed out in agonizing real time, but watches Gus wash up and unhurriedly change back into his street clothes before ending the scene. Breaking Bad may not move slowly overall, but it sure as shit is methodical. And it is riveting for it.
You know what’s less riveting? Hank collecting rocks. Moving on…
I guess it makes sense to have Hank being in a funk for a few episodes in that it allows the Heisenberg investigation to be the thing that revives him. And I suppose the writers like exploring how the terrible medical adversity can bring out the worst in people as well as the best (sometimes I wonder if the whole show wasn’t inspired by one of the best Onion articles ever), but man it is unpleasant to watch him take out all his frustrations on his wife.
You know what else is unpleasant? The facework Anna Gunn had done after season 2. It’s…simply unfortunate. It actually pulls me a bit out of the incredible, intense conclusion of “Crawl Space” how along with the angle and make-up job, it has her looking more like Pennywise than her S1 self.
The plot mechanics get a little convoluted this season, even before we get to Walter’s circuitous plan in in the climax. A fair amount of this comes from Mike and Gus being written to be “cool” for such a long time. Gus has always been coldly logical and inscrutable, which is what makes him so imposing as an antagonist. But his whole decision-making process re: keeping Walt and Jesse alive and trying to turn them against each other is so complicated and counter-intuitive that we do need to understand what he’s thinking to a degree. I know that to some extent we’re supposed to be in Walt and Jesse’s shoes, anxiously trying to decipher his motivations and predict his moves, but it’s not like the show keeps us exclusively in their headspace. We see just enough to understand more than our main POV characters do (which can make for some good stuff, like the parallels between his partnership and Walt/Jesse’s, and how the cartel “can’t” kill Gus just like he “can’t” kill Walt), but we still have to connect a lot of dots ourselves.
The vague outlines are there, what with the cartel attacking Gus’s trucks and sniping his employees, but things don’t feel as urgent as they need to be to motivate him to keep the guys alive. And that’s in part because there’s one too many scenes of Mike being an unflappable badass for the threat to register as truly dire. Yeah, those sequences wouldn’t be as exciting if he had back up, but when Mike hardly breaks a sweat taking out the first 6 soldiers the cartel sent all by himself, it’s hard to take them seriously as a mortal threat to Gus’s entire empire. Mike being such a supersoldier makes for fun action sequences, but it’s bad for the show’s greater narrative. It’s an issue the show has run into from the other direction too; scenes are funnier when Jesse is dumb enough to think “wire” is an element, or building a robot out of RV parts is a viable option, but eventually the show is going to need an entire season to hang on his being the 2nd best chemist in North America. Scene vs season, micro vs macro…you get the idea.
That stuff never really sinks the show, though, because Jonathan Banks is so fun to watch and holy god damn, Aaron Paul is so, so good. He has all kinds of great scenes in this season, but the most amazing has to be the “Problem Dog” monologue, which demonstrates why for all the terrible shit both characters do, I continue to find Jesse a much more sympathetic character that Walter. While Walt continually makes excuses and evades responsibility for all of it, Jesse is begging to be held accountable for his actions, and incredibly frustrated that the universe refuses to punish him in a tangible way (he can’t even get himself killed, no matter how many hardened murderers he pisses off!). He doesn’t want to be “the bad guy”, but he lacks licit skills and the world seems to constantly conspire to push him back into that role.
The most controversial aspect of the season was Walt’s Machiavellian plot to turn Jesse back to his side by framing Gus for poisoning Brock. And yes, it is complicated and improbable; just look how many different names are in the previous sentence for crying out loud. But I’ve come around on it in rewatching. I do have the caveat that I think it would’ve been even more of a gutpunch if Brock actually did die, to underline just how heinous Walt’s action was. As an audience to a piece of fiction, it’s fairly easy for us to take a “no harm no foul” approach to the reckless endangerment of ancillary characters, regardless of age. And so I’m not sure if this registers as worse than what Walt had done to Jane or Gale in previous seasons to everyone, although there was a degree of premeditation and absolute innocence on the victim’s part that wasn’t there with those who had to some extent willingly involved themselves in Walt’s drug dealings. I will probably take that back in season 5, though, when Jesse starts thinking back on what a coincidence it was that his poison cigarette disappeared the same day that the kid just happened to eat poison berries. Having Brock around to confirm certain details could be crucial to the final split between Walt and Jesse.
What I do not have trouble with is the logistics of the thing, which are convoluted, yes, but make sense when you keep two points in mind. 1) This was an utter desperation move on Walt’s part, so even if it’s a bit leaky, I can buy that it seemed like the only option at the time. 2) For all the logical leaps and reversals of blame Jesse goes through in “End Times”, the plan didn’t need him to go through them. It only required that he end up blaming Gus; if he jumped to that conclusion initially, then maybe he comes straight to Mr. White for his help. Or maybe he makes a suicide run at the Chicken Man all by himself, which is win-win for Walt. If he gets lucky and takes Gus out, problem solved, and if he gets himself killed then all of a sudden Walt’s value to the Fring empire shoots back up. If he jumped to the conclusion that Walt did it, then we get exactly what we got. Yes, Walt has to talk him around while he’s pointing a gun at his head, but see point 1.
The only other issue I have with it is that the “twist” that Walt was actually responsible is gotten to by the show playing less fair with its audience than it has traditionally. BB has evolved into something of an ensemble piece, as all shows must by their 4th year, but Walt has always firmly been our protagonist, and we’ve never been left out of his decision making process mid-crisis to such a large and crucial extent. So yeah, as a “surprise” moment, it’s a bit cheap. But it’s so much fun watching Walt scramble around and trying to figure out his angle with Tio that I don’t mind that the show broke its own narrative rules to get there.
Let us conclude this portion of the program by paying homage to one Gustavo, oh, let’s say “Elezier”, Fring. Esposito is incredible in the role, holding the screen and dominating scenes with little dialogue and even less facial expressions. It seems like between this show, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and Sons Of Anarchy, the default mode for a mob boss character is becoming to go completely cold and affectless, but as good as even Michael Stuhlberg is as Arnold Rothstein, none of those performances are as effortlessly compelling or instantly iconic as Gus Fring. The biggest problem facing the final stretch is finding a new threat to Walt that will not completely pale in comparison, no mean feat with only a single season to develop them. I do not envy the actor charged with filling Giancarlo Esposito’s shoes. I have doubts that even an entire cartel can fill the void.
Estimated Profits: ~$1.25 million – ~$5000 (38 Snub) + ~$1 million (various cooks over a period of roughly 2 months) – $800000 (car wash) – $62000 (car destruction and replacement) + $274000 – ~$100000 (Hank and Walt’s combined medical expenses) – $622552.33 (Ted’s taxes) – $25000 (bribe to Saul’s secretary) = approximately $1 million ahead, but then Walt wasn’t able to scrape together half of that for the vacuum salesman, so I must have been underestimating the combined costs of Walt and Hank’s treatment, Saul’s cut for the money he laundered, replacement Aztek windshields, Walt’s new condo and random start up costs for the car wash (or overestimating the amount of cooks in the superlab). Let’s call it $400,000 ahead.
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Lesser Included Offenses - fraud in service of breaking and entering (Walt’s condo), possession of an unregistereed firearm, fraud/impersonating a government official in service of extortion (car wash), misdemeanor trash burning, breaking and entering, extortion (Ted), attempted murder (Brock), destruction of property and reckless endangerment (Casa Tranquila), destruction of property and reckless endangerment (the laundry)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Gus suits up in “Box Cutter”, the final scene of “Crawl Space”, the parking garage scene that closes “End Times”.
Heisenberg Certainty Principle - “I am the one who knocks.”
But honorable mention to Gus walking directly into sniper fire and dare it to come at me, bro.
Best Lie – A crowded field this year. I have to give it up for the wonderfully protracted sequence of Walt and Skyler having a script reading of their gambling cover story, with Walt as the worst sort of primadonna actor, objecting that the writing isn’t believable when he really just doesn’t want his character to look uncool (which is ironic, because although it’s tremendously showy and awards-bait-y material, Cranston himself is not the least bit vain in his performance). It’s a great scene, but only a passable fiction. Though in Skyler’s defense, she had to work within the basic contours of the plot Walt’s actions had established.
I’m also partial to the careful recalibration of reality that is Walter’s recounting of Mike beating him up. He certainly didn’t get roughed up by a professional killer to discourage a plot to assassinate his drug overlord, no sir. He “had an argument with a co-worker” over a “particular business strategy” which “got a little heated” leading the guy to “hit me, once”, and of course he didn’t retaliate because he’s a “much older man.” But it’s good, really. It cleared the air. It’s a great bit because Walt knows he’s lying but is still trying to convince himself, but it’s a relatively trifling matter overall.
No, the best has to be Gus’s alibi for why his fingerprints were found in Gale’s apartment. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, with airtight execution, even when Hank throws him a curveball about his past. Brilliantly conceived and impeccably performed, this is the Abbey Road of criminal alibis.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt once again cooks up ricin to try to take out Gus. He builds a pipe bomb in his kitchen, and works up both a remote detonator and one linked to Tio’s bell. Uses his botanical knowledge to fake ricin poisoning with (the incredibly-fake-sounding) Lily of the Valley berries. Rigs the superlab to self-destruct using only it’s contents.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 13 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”, “Cornered”, “Salud”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Break up number five occurs in “Bug” (this time with more violence than ever before!), but the boys are back together within three episodes.
It’s The Little Things – The incredible performance Aaron Paul gives throughout “Box Cutter” without saying a word for 40 minutes. The performance Giancarlo Esposito gives in “Box Cutter” while uttering only a single sentence. The ill-fitting Kenny Rogers truck stop clothes Walt and Jesse are suddenly wearing after disposing of Victor’s body. The way Gale is continually developed even though he’s dead from the get-go, keeping him alive in the audience’s memory as he continues to haunt the characters. Saul recounting his 5th grade romantic history to Brock. Bimbo Skyler referring to “the Quicken” when talking to the IRS. Tyrus making a point to smuggle Walt into the laundry in a cart of dirty sheets. The way Huell says “reasonably”. Walt crawling back out the broken bottom pane of the glass door after being shaken down by Saul’s secretary. The hilariously protracted scene of Tio dictating his phony message to Hank and the DEA.
Random Bits of Business: I’ll be doing posts about each episode, but I don’t get screeners or anything and I have to work like the rest of you shmoes, so I’ll have to just take some notes as the show airs and hopefully shape them into legible if not complete thoughts on Monday night.
Check out this great video, highlighting the show’s magnificent cinematography. If it weren’t for the huge, massive spoilers in the last two minutes, I’d recommend it as a perfect trailer to rope in new folks.
I hope we see Jim Beaver’s gun dealer again for at least one scene.
Jesse Plemmons is going to be in season 5! This makes me inappropriately pleased, as he was always one of the best parts of Friday Night Lights. My best guess is that Skyler hires him as a manager at the car wash, but how hilarious would it be if they gave him a terrible spray tan and had him as a new cartel boss? What? Only to me? Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair.
Random predictions for the final season: Hank and/or Marie find out the truth about Heisenberg relatively early (i.e. the mid-season finale at the latest), Walt is entirely insufferable in his triumph, the Beneke situation becomes a major issue, as does the fact that Walt and Skyler don’t have much in the way of cash reserves left, and Jesse unravels the Brock situation by episode 8. Walter Jr. eats at least one flapjack. Gus shows up again in at least one flashback.
Season Four does something new, and actually opens with a clean up episode. And a great example of how the show builds tension out of long, quiet stretches and stillness. The scene in that episode? Nearly ten minutes, uninterrupted, with no dialogue from anyone but Walter. Most shows would cut to commercial on the look of shock on the characters’ faces once the murder was committed, but Breaking Bad, oh man, Breaking Bad not only shows the victim bleed out in agonizing real time, but watches Gus wash up and unhurriedly change back into his street clothes before ending the scene. Breaking Bad may not move slowly overall, but it sure as shit is methodical. And it is riveting for it.
You know what’s less riveting? Hank collecting rocks. Moving on…
I guess it makes sense to have Hank being in a funk for a few episodes in that it allows the Heisenberg investigation to be the thing that revives him. And I suppose the writers like exploring how the terrible medical adversity can bring out the worst in people as well as the best (sometimes I wonder if the whole show wasn’t inspired by one of the best Onion articles ever), but man it is unpleasant to watch him take out all his frustrations on his wife.
You know what else is unpleasant? The facework Anna Gunn had done after season 2. It’s…simply unfortunate. It actually pulls me a bit out of the incredible, intense conclusion of “Crawl Space” how along with the angle and make-up job, it has her looking more like Pennywise than her S1 self.
The plot mechanics get a little convoluted this season, even before we get to Walter’s circuitous plan in in the climax. A fair amount of this comes from Mike and Gus being written to be “cool” for such a long time. Gus has always been coldly logical and inscrutable, which is what makes him so imposing as an antagonist. But his whole decision-making process re: keeping Walt and Jesse alive and trying to turn them against each other is so complicated and counter-intuitive that we do need to understand what he’s thinking to a degree. I know that to some extent we’re supposed to be in Walt and Jesse’s shoes, anxiously trying to decipher his motivations and predict his moves, but it’s not like the show keeps us exclusively in their headspace. We see just enough to understand more than our main POV characters do (which can make for some good stuff, like the parallels between his partnership and Walt/Jesse’s, and how the cartel “can’t” kill Gus just like he “can’t” kill Walt), but we still have to connect a lot of dots ourselves.
The vague outlines are there, what with the cartel attacking Gus’s trucks and sniping his employees, but things don’t feel as urgent as they need to be to motivate him to keep the guys alive. And that’s in part because there’s one too many scenes of Mike being an unflappable badass for the threat to register as truly dire. Yeah, those sequences wouldn’t be as exciting if he had back up, but when Mike hardly breaks a sweat taking out the first 6 soldiers the cartel sent all by himself, it’s hard to take them seriously as a mortal threat to Gus’s entire empire. Mike being such a supersoldier makes for fun action sequences, but it’s bad for the show’s greater narrative. It’s an issue the show has run into from the other direction too; scenes are funnier when Jesse is dumb enough to think “wire” is an element, or building a robot out of RV parts is a viable option, but eventually the show is going to need an entire season to hang on his being the 2nd best chemist in North America. Scene vs season, micro vs macro…you get the idea.
That stuff never really sinks the show, though, because Jonathan Banks is so fun to watch and holy god damn, Aaron Paul is so, so good. He has all kinds of great scenes in this season, but the most amazing has to be the “Problem Dog” monologue, which demonstrates why for all the terrible shit both characters do, I continue to find Jesse a much more sympathetic character that Walter. While Walt continually makes excuses and evades responsibility for all of it, Jesse is begging to be held accountable for his actions, and incredibly frustrated that the universe refuses to punish him in a tangible way (he can’t even get himself killed, no matter how many hardened murderers he pisses off!). He doesn’t want to be “the bad guy”, but he lacks licit skills and the world seems to constantly conspire to push him back into that role.
The most controversial aspect of the season was Walt’s Machiavellian plot to turn Jesse back to his side by framing Gus for poisoning Brock. And yes, it is complicated and improbable; just look how many different names are in the previous sentence for crying out loud. But I’ve come around on it in rewatching. I do have the caveat that I think it would’ve been even more of a gutpunch if Brock actually did die, to underline just how heinous Walt’s action was. As an audience to a piece of fiction, it’s fairly easy for us to take a “no harm no foul” approach to the reckless endangerment of ancillary characters, regardless of age. And so I’m not sure if this registers as worse than what Walt had done to Jane or Gale in previous seasons to everyone, although there was a degree of premeditation and absolute innocence on the victim’s part that wasn’t there with those who had to some extent willingly involved themselves in Walt’s drug dealings. I will probably take that back in season 5, though, when Jesse starts thinking back on what a coincidence it was that his poison cigarette disappeared the same day that the kid just happened to eat poison berries. Having Brock around to confirm certain details could be crucial to the final split between Walt and Jesse.
What I do not have trouble with is the logistics of the thing, which are convoluted, yes, but make sense when you keep two points in mind. 1) This was an utter desperation move on Walt’s part, so even if it’s a bit leaky, I can buy that it seemed like the only option at the time. 2) For all the logical leaps and reversals of blame Jesse goes through in “End Times”, the plan didn’t need him to go through them. It only required that he end up blaming Gus; if he jumped to that conclusion initially, then maybe he comes straight to Mr. White for his help. Or maybe he makes a suicide run at the Chicken Man all by himself, which is win-win for Walt. If he gets lucky and takes Gus out, problem solved, and if he gets himself killed then all of a sudden Walt’s value to the Fring empire shoots back up. If he jumped to the conclusion that Walt did it, then we get exactly what we got. Yes, Walt has to talk him around while he’s pointing a gun at his head, but see point 1.
The only other issue I have with it is that the “twist” that Walt was actually responsible is gotten to by the show playing less fair with its audience than it has traditionally. BB has evolved into something of an ensemble piece, as all shows must by their 4th year, but Walt has always firmly been our protagonist, and we’ve never been left out of his decision making process mid-crisis to such a large and crucial extent. So yeah, as a “surprise” moment, it’s a bit cheap. But it’s so much fun watching Walt scramble around and trying to figure out his angle with Tio that I don’t mind that the show broke its own narrative rules to get there.
Let us conclude this portion of the program by paying homage to one Gustavo, oh, let’s say “Elezier”, Fring. Esposito is incredible in the role, holding the screen and dominating scenes with little dialogue and even less facial expressions. It seems like between this show, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and Sons Of Anarchy, the default mode for a mob boss character is becoming to go completely cold and affectless, but as good as even Michael Stuhlberg is as Arnold Rothstein, none of those performances are as effortlessly compelling or instantly iconic as Gus Fring. The biggest problem facing the final stretch is finding a new threat to Walt that will not completely pale in comparison, no mean feat with only a single season to develop them. I do not envy the actor charged with filling Giancarlo Esposito’s shoes. I have doubts that even an entire cartel can fill the void.
Estimated Profits: ~$1.25 million – ~$5000 (38 Snub) + ~$1 million (various cooks over a period of roughly 2 months) – $800000 (car wash) – $62000 (car destruction and replacement) + $274000 – ~$100000 (Hank and Walt’s combined medical expenses) – $622552.33 (Ted’s taxes) – $25000 (bribe to Saul’s secretary) = approximately $1 million ahead, but then Walt wasn’t able to scrape together half of that for the vacuum salesman, so I must have been underestimating the combined costs of Walt and Hank’s treatment, Saul’s cut for the money he laundered, replacement Aztek windshields, Walt’s new condo and random start up costs for the car wash (or overestimating the amount of cooks in the superlab). Let’s call it $400,000 ahead.
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons
Lesser Included Offenses - fraud in service of breaking and entering (Walt’s condo), possession of an unregistereed firearm, fraud/impersonating a government official in service of extortion (car wash), misdemeanor trash burning, breaking and entering, extortion (Ted), attempted murder (Brock), destruction of property and reckless endangerment (Casa Tranquila), destruction of property and reckless endangerment (the laundry)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety. Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse. Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse). Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion. Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons. Brock is poisoned and nearly dies. Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker. The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Gus suits up in “Box Cutter”, the final scene of “Crawl Space”, the parking garage scene that closes “End Times”.
Heisenberg Certainty Principle - “I am the one who knocks.”
But honorable mention to Gus walking directly into sniper fire and dare it to come at me, bro.
Best Lie – A crowded field this year. I have to give it up for the wonderfully protracted sequence of Walt and Skyler having a script reading of their gambling cover story, with Walt as the worst sort of primadonna actor, objecting that the writing isn’t believable when he really just doesn’t want his character to look uncool (which is ironic, because although it’s tremendously showy and awards-bait-y material, Cranston himself is not the least bit vain in his performance). It’s a great scene, but only a passable fiction. Though in Skyler’s defense, she had to work within the basic contours of the plot Walt’s actions had established.
I’m also partial to the careful recalibration of reality that is Walter’s recounting of Mike beating him up. He certainly didn’t get roughed up by a professional killer to discourage a plot to assassinate his drug overlord, no sir. He “had an argument with a co-worker” over a “particular business strategy” which “got a little heated” leading the guy to “hit me, once”, and of course he didn’t retaliate because he’s a “much older man.” But it’s good, really. It cleared the air. It’s a great bit because Walt knows he’s lying but is still trying to convince himself, but it’s a relatively trifling matter overall.
No, the best has to be Gus’s alibi for why his fingerprints were found in Gale’s apartment. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, with airtight execution, even when Hank throws him a curveball about his past. Brilliantly conceived and impeccably performed, this is the Abbey Road of criminal alibis.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt once again cooks up ricin to try to take out Gus. He builds a pipe bomb in his kitchen, and works up both a remote detonator and one linked to Tio’s bell. Uses his botanical knowledge to fake ricin poisoning with (the incredibly-fake-sounding) Lily of the Valley berries. Rigs the superlab to self-destruct using only it’s contents.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 13 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”, “Cornered”, “Salud”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Break up number five occurs in “Bug” (this time with more violence than ever before!), but the boys are back together within three episodes.
It’s The Little Things – The incredible performance Aaron Paul gives throughout “Box Cutter” without saying a word for 40 minutes. The performance Giancarlo Esposito gives in “Box Cutter” while uttering only a single sentence. The ill-fitting Kenny Rogers truck stop clothes Walt and Jesse are suddenly wearing after disposing of Victor’s body. The way Gale is continually developed even though he’s dead from the get-go, keeping him alive in the audience’s memory as he continues to haunt the characters. Saul recounting his 5th grade romantic history to Brock. Bimbo Skyler referring to “the Quicken” when talking to the IRS. Tyrus making a point to smuggle Walt into the laundry in a cart of dirty sheets. The way Huell says “reasonably”. Walt crawling back out the broken bottom pane of the glass door after being shaken down by Saul’s secretary. The hilariously protracted scene of Tio dictating his phony message to Hank and the DEA.
Random Bits of Business: I’ll be doing posts about each episode, but I don’t get screeners or anything and I have to work like the rest of you shmoes, so I’ll have to just take some notes as the show airs and hopefully shape them into legible if not complete thoughts on Monday night.
Check out this great video, highlighting the show’s magnificent cinematography. If it weren’t for the huge, massive spoilers in the last two minutes, I’d recommend it as a perfect trailer to rope in new folks.
I hope we see Jim Beaver’s gun dealer again for at least one scene.
Jesse Plemmons is going to be in season 5! This makes me inappropriately pleased, as he was always one of the best parts of Friday Night Lights. My best guess is that Skyler hires him as a manager at the car wash, but how hilarious would it be if they gave him a terrible spray tan and had him as a new cartel boss? What? Only to me? Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair.
Random predictions for the final season: Hank and/or Marie find out the truth about Heisenberg relatively early (i.e. the mid-season finale at the latest), Walt is entirely insufferable in his triumph, the Beneke situation becomes a major issue, as does the fact that Walt and Skyler don’t have much in the way of cash reserves left, and Jesse unravels the Brock situation by episode 8. Walter Jr. eats at least one flapjack. Gus shows up again in at least one flashback.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
BREAKING BAD SEASON 3 REVIEW
(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)
I mentioned last time that I don’t think of Breaking Bad as a particularly slow show. At least not in the sense that we usually mean when we say that, which is that the overall plot moves slowly, that entire episodes go by just spinning the wheels, and there are sections of a season where you look back and say “nothing happened” (hiya, Lost). What Breaking Bad has is episodes that move very slowly , because it loves to let scenes play out in quiet, languid fashion. I don’t know where I could check up on such a thing, but I’d be willing to bet that BB averages fewer individual scenes or cuts per episode than about any show this side of In Treatment by a long shot.
But stuff is always happening on BB. The episodes themselves may unfold deliberately, but by the end there has almost always been a significant development of some sort, and really the show goes through a tremendous amount of plot in a season without losing the feeling that it is a thoughtful character-driven piece. What I love so much about the pace is that it is completely unpredictable; major storylines will suddenly lurch forward at times when the typical seasonal structure dictates they should be idling. The way it consistently employs those long, quiet scenes builds tension because you are never sure which one is going to suddenly explode into a complete disaster.
But yeah, things do happen on the show. The first season would’ve been about what I expected if Walt had gotten his diagnosis, decided to cook meth, hooked up with Jesse, cooked the first batch, met his first dealer, had them turn on him, and then he managed to turn things around and kill them. But all that happened in the first episode. Our protagonist even attempts suicide to boot (and as an aside, how many shows would have the confidence to not only do that in the pilot but to play it a a comic note?). Then Tuco gets introduced, and it seems like he will be the Big Bad for season 2. But then he’s abducting our heroes in the premiere and dead by episode 2. Walt and Jesse have the Heisenpire up and servicing most of the city by the halfway point, only to have it collapse by episode 10. Skyler deduces Walt’s secret with little prompting in the 3rd season premiere, rather than at the climax as we might expect. Gus shows up at the end of 2 and looks like he might be the new Bad Guy, but he’s actually pretty benevolent as far as drug lords go for a long time. The Cousins pop up and we think “ah, okay, these are the new bad guys, they’ll spend the season slowly circling in on Walt and get taken out in the finale.” Then they’re in his bedroom in episode 2 and out of the picture with 6 episodes remaining.
The unpredictability of the pace keeps you continually off guard. Such that in any other show (okay, except maybe The Sopranos), when the scene in “Fly” comes up where a drugged up Walter looks to be on the verge of helping Jesse take a fatal fall, I would be certain that he wouldn’t do it just because if you were going to go there, that’s a season finale-sized development. But with BB…man, in that moment, I was not sure at all. There are rumors swirling around that the 5th season premiere has some unspecified crazy plot twist, and I’m fairly convinced that either Hank or Marie (I’m hoping for the latter, just so we can have a few episodes of her trying to keep a secret) will find out the truth about Heisenberg right off the bat.
How about them Cousins, eh? I guess some people didn’t particularly like them because they are so arch they feel like they stepped out of a horror movie. I don’t agree, as I found them incredibly scary and a not completely outlandish ramping up of the show’s consistent noir-ish sensibilities. So….yeah, I guess that’s about it. Works for me.
Also ramped up this season are the show’s undertones of black humor. So much so that they aren’t even undertones anymore, but the basis for entire darkly comic setpieces like Walt’s confrontation and macing by the highway cop, or his hysterical, impotent attempt to confront Ted about the affair, or a sizeable portion of “Fly”, or the school assembly. That assembly is fantastic top to bottom, but my favorite bit is probably when the principal, right after telling the students they can say anything, no judgments, quietly admonishes a girl to “keep it secular, please” when she asks how God could let this happen. Hell, in his first scene back our “hero” accidentally sets himself on fire and tumbles into the pool along with a grill and several hundred thousand in cash. It seems like now that they know that we can accept Walt as a badass, the show has more confidence in making him a figure of fun for extended periods. This obviously plays to Cranston’s strengths as a comic actor (his Hal on Malcolm In The Middle is an all-time classic sitcom character, imo).
As far as clean up episodes go, “I See You” is not as good as “Bit By A Dead Bee”, as it tries to build tension out of whether Hank will live, when for all of its unconventional aspects, even this show is not going to have a major character scrape his way out of a climactic gunfight at the end of one episode just to have him die on the operating table in the next one. Also, as much as I love Jonathan Banks’ performance as Mike, it leans pretty heavily on transitioning him from a no-nonsense problem solver to some sort of utterly unflappable, paramilitary Bourne-type. I mean, cleaning up a house after an overdose? Sure, I can buy that a 60 year old ex-cop is suited to that task. But when he’s carrying out one-man raids on cartel strongholds and executing cloak and dagger assassinations under the nose of an entire office worth of federal agents without breaking a sweat? That strains credibility, imo. Still, the episode does allow Betsy Brandt to finally stretch Marie’s characterization, and she makes the most of it.
So, I was saying last time that Walt’s moral failing is how he eschews responsibility for the various atrocities that spiral out from his actions. Season 3 picks up on this, with both Jesse in the early going and Hank after he delivers his beatdown providing sharp contrasts to his prodigious excuse-making abilities. Jesse flat out tells him in the premiere that you have to face the things you’ve done, to which Walter replies that there are too many variables in the plane crash for him to feel responsible, and ultimately, “I blame the government.”
Hank’s crisis in “One Minute” doesn’t confront Walt so directly, but proves him to be a much bigger man than Heisenberg. Marie tries to convince him to lie to make things easier on himself, and it would be all too easy for him to go along with it. Hank, though, is having none of it even if he was initially the wronged party, insisting that however he was pushed, “I’m supposed to be better than that.” Hey, Walt, take note. It really is exactly that simple.
This has been one of the most fascinating angles of the show; watching Hank and Walt slide obliviously past each other on the traditional scale of masculinity. Walt began the show as an ineffectual omega-male, and as he has taken control of his life and pursued his interests more aggressively, he has turned into a massively destructive, increasingly malevolent force in the lives of all who know him. Whereas Hank started out as a caricature of swaggering machismo, but has become more and more sympathetic as his increasing vulnerability and emotional weaknesses were exposed. At his frailest moments, he demonstrates a strength of character that we never would’ve suspected from the blustery, tasteless fool of the pilot. In a weird way, he is the only character on the show who has “broken good”, as they literally had to break him to find out that he is deep down a good person with honest-to-God standards for himself.
Do I need to explain how great the final two episodes are, as things come to a head between Walt, Jesse and Gus? Probably not, as they are as thrilling and twisty and weighty as TV gets. So I will wrap up by pointing out two smaller things that stood out to me. One is how brilliant that final twist is, because having seen Walter’s moral decay in such intimate detail, watched him one-down himself time after time, I fully bought in the moment that he would actually sell out Jesse in a pathetic attempt to buy himself a little more time to live. The other is that they do a terrific job of showing Skyler break bad in a believable fashion on a much more compressed timeframe than we had for Walt. If there was any doubt that she was headed down the exact same path as her husband, it is dispelled in “Half Measure” when she insists on enacting her own money laundering plan rather than just playing dumb, saying that she’d rather everyone know she is a criminal than think that she was just that big an idiot. If Breaking Bad is consistent about anything, it’s that bad, bad things happen very, very quickly when you stop committing crimes out of pragmatism and start doing it out of pride.
Holy shit, did I not even mention how good Giancarlo Esposito is as Gus? Wow.
Estimated Profits: ~$290000 – $10000 (RV disposal) + ~1,000,000 (most of a Walt’s 3 month contract) – $20000 (est. for Hank’s physical therapy = ~$1.25 million
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale
Lesser Included Offenses – Driving with a broken windshield, resisting arrest. Other than the murder and conspiracy and drug trafficking, Walt actually behaves himself fairly well this year.
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Walt takes a shower in “Caballo Sin Nombre”, Hank tries to force his way into the RV in “Sunset” (the bullet holes casting beams of sunlight on Walt as Hank removes the tape is a particularly excellent touch), the titular sequence in “One Minute” (holy shit, that sequence!), Walt is marched to his execution in “Full Measure”
Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Run.”
Best Lie – Skyler’s story about Walt making his money gambling. Even Walt is practically slack-jawed watching her spin this tale, amazed at how much of his strange behavior it accounts for, at least to a credulous person like Marie.
It’s not a lie exactly, but Gus’s speech to Walter about how “a man provides, even when he is not appreciated” is a brilliantly-calculated bit of manipulation. Walt’s pride is extremely bruised at that point, but still a potent enough force to get him to do exactly what he’s insisted he wouldn’t for 4 episodes.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 11 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”)
Also five dinners (“Caballo Sin Nombre”, “I.F.T”, “Mas”, “Abiquiu”, and “Half Measure”), plus one mid-afternoon grilled cheese (“Caballo Sin Nombre”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Walt’s attempt to go clean at the start of the season marks the 4th professional estrangement between monseiurs Heisenberg and Diesel, who are fully at each others throats in episodes 5 and 6. They are back together by episode 7.
It’s The Little Things – Having everyone wearing the blue ribbons to commemorate the 50th (tied) worst air disaster in history for the first few episodes is a great macabre touch. Walt’s incredible pizza toss. The veggie trays Gus fastidiously lays out before each of his drug meetings. Saul’s big bin of neck-braces he keeps on hand for clients. The stupid little dance Jesse does at the end of this clip. The musical montage of a day in the life of Wendy the meth-ed out prostitute.
I mentioned last time that I don’t think of Breaking Bad as a particularly slow show. At least not in the sense that we usually mean when we say that, which is that the overall plot moves slowly, that entire episodes go by just spinning the wheels, and there are sections of a season where you look back and say “nothing happened” (hiya, Lost). What Breaking Bad has is episodes that move very slowly , because it loves to let scenes play out in quiet, languid fashion. I don’t know where I could check up on such a thing, but I’d be willing to bet that BB averages fewer individual scenes or cuts per episode than about any show this side of In Treatment by a long shot.
But stuff is always happening on BB. The episodes themselves may unfold deliberately, but by the end there has almost always been a significant development of some sort, and really the show goes through a tremendous amount of plot in a season without losing the feeling that it is a thoughtful character-driven piece. What I love so much about the pace is that it is completely unpredictable; major storylines will suddenly lurch forward at times when the typical seasonal structure dictates they should be idling. The way it consistently employs those long, quiet scenes builds tension because you are never sure which one is going to suddenly explode into a complete disaster.
But yeah, things do happen on the show. The first season would’ve been about what I expected if Walt had gotten his diagnosis, decided to cook meth, hooked up with Jesse, cooked the first batch, met his first dealer, had them turn on him, and then he managed to turn things around and kill them. But all that happened in the first episode. Our protagonist even attempts suicide to boot (and as an aside, how many shows would have the confidence to not only do that in the pilot but to play it a a comic note?). Then Tuco gets introduced, and it seems like he will be the Big Bad for season 2. But then he’s abducting our heroes in the premiere and dead by episode 2. Walt and Jesse have the Heisenpire up and servicing most of the city by the halfway point, only to have it collapse by episode 10. Skyler deduces Walt’s secret with little prompting in the 3rd season premiere, rather than at the climax as we might expect. Gus shows up at the end of 2 and looks like he might be the new Bad Guy, but he’s actually pretty benevolent as far as drug lords go for a long time. The Cousins pop up and we think “ah, okay, these are the new bad guys, they’ll spend the season slowly circling in on Walt and get taken out in the finale.” Then they’re in his bedroom in episode 2 and out of the picture with 6 episodes remaining.
The unpredictability of the pace keeps you continually off guard. Such that in any other show (okay, except maybe The Sopranos), when the scene in “Fly” comes up where a drugged up Walter looks to be on the verge of helping Jesse take a fatal fall, I would be certain that he wouldn’t do it just because if you were going to go there, that’s a season finale-sized development. But with BB…man, in that moment, I was not sure at all. There are rumors swirling around that the 5th season premiere has some unspecified crazy plot twist, and I’m fairly convinced that either Hank or Marie (I’m hoping for the latter, just so we can have a few episodes of her trying to keep a secret) will find out the truth about Heisenberg right off the bat.
How about them Cousins, eh? I guess some people didn’t particularly like them because they are so arch they feel like they stepped out of a horror movie. I don’t agree, as I found them incredibly scary and a not completely outlandish ramping up of the show’s consistent noir-ish sensibilities. So….yeah, I guess that’s about it. Works for me.
Also ramped up this season are the show’s undertones of black humor. So much so that they aren’t even undertones anymore, but the basis for entire darkly comic setpieces like Walt’s confrontation and macing by the highway cop, or his hysterical, impotent attempt to confront Ted about the affair, or a sizeable portion of “Fly”, or the school assembly. That assembly is fantastic top to bottom, but my favorite bit is probably when the principal, right after telling the students they can say anything, no judgments, quietly admonishes a girl to “keep it secular, please” when she asks how God could let this happen. Hell, in his first scene back our “hero” accidentally sets himself on fire and tumbles into the pool along with a grill and several hundred thousand in cash. It seems like now that they know that we can accept Walt as a badass, the show has more confidence in making him a figure of fun for extended periods. This obviously plays to Cranston’s strengths as a comic actor (his Hal on Malcolm In The Middle is an all-time classic sitcom character, imo).
As far as clean up episodes go, “I See You” is not as good as “Bit By A Dead Bee”, as it tries to build tension out of whether Hank will live, when for all of its unconventional aspects, even this show is not going to have a major character scrape his way out of a climactic gunfight at the end of one episode just to have him die on the operating table in the next one. Also, as much as I love Jonathan Banks’ performance as Mike, it leans pretty heavily on transitioning him from a no-nonsense problem solver to some sort of utterly unflappable, paramilitary Bourne-type. I mean, cleaning up a house after an overdose? Sure, I can buy that a 60 year old ex-cop is suited to that task. But when he’s carrying out one-man raids on cartel strongholds and executing cloak and dagger assassinations under the nose of an entire office worth of federal agents without breaking a sweat? That strains credibility, imo. Still, the episode does allow Betsy Brandt to finally stretch Marie’s characterization, and she makes the most of it.
So, I was saying last time that Walt’s moral failing is how he eschews responsibility for the various atrocities that spiral out from his actions. Season 3 picks up on this, with both Jesse in the early going and Hank after he delivers his beatdown providing sharp contrasts to his prodigious excuse-making abilities. Jesse flat out tells him in the premiere that you have to face the things you’ve done, to which Walter replies that there are too many variables in the plane crash for him to feel responsible, and ultimately, “I blame the government.”
Hank’s crisis in “One Minute” doesn’t confront Walt so directly, but proves him to be a much bigger man than Heisenberg. Marie tries to convince him to lie to make things easier on himself, and it would be all too easy for him to go along with it. Hank, though, is having none of it even if he was initially the wronged party, insisting that however he was pushed, “I’m supposed to be better than that.” Hey, Walt, take note. It really is exactly that simple.
This has been one of the most fascinating angles of the show; watching Hank and Walt slide obliviously past each other on the traditional scale of masculinity. Walt began the show as an ineffectual omega-male, and as he has taken control of his life and pursued his interests more aggressively, he has turned into a massively destructive, increasingly malevolent force in the lives of all who know him. Whereas Hank started out as a caricature of swaggering machismo, but has become more and more sympathetic as his increasing vulnerability and emotional weaknesses were exposed. At his frailest moments, he demonstrates a strength of character that we never would’ve suspected from the blustery, tasteless fool of the pilot. In a weird way, he is the only character on the show who has “broken good”, as they literally had to break him to find out that he is deep down a good person with honest-to-God standards for himself.
Do I need to explain how great the final two episodes are, as things come to a head between Walt, Jesse and Gus? Probably not, as they are as thrilling and twisty and weighty as TV gets. So I will wrap up by pointing out two smaller things that stood out to me. One is how brilliant that final twist is, because having seen Walter’s moral decay in such intimate detail, watched him one-down himself time after time, I fully bought in the moment that he would actually sell out Jesse in a pathetic attempt to buy himself a little more time to live. The other is that they do a terrific job of showing Skyler break bad in a believable fashion on a much more compressed timeframe than we had for Walt. If there was any doubt that she was headed down the exact same path as her husband, it is dispelled in “Half Measure” when she insists on enacting her own money laundering plan rather than just playing dumb, saying that she’d rather everyone know she is a criminal than think that she was just that big an idiot. If Breaking Bad is consistent about anything, it’s that bad, bad things happen very, very quickly when you stop committing crimes out of pragmatism and start doing it out of pride.
Holy shit, did I not even mention how good Giancarlo Esposito is as Gus? Wow.
Estimated Profits: ~$290000 – $10000 (RV disposal) + ~1,000,000 (most of a Walt’s 3 month contract) – $20000 (est. for Hank’s physical therapy = ~$1.25 million
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale
Lesser Included Offenses – Driving with a broken windshield, resisting arrest. Other than the murder and conspiracy and drug trafficking, Walt actually behaves himself fairly well this year.
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy, giving him fairly severe PTSD. Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead. Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt). 3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields. Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates. Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process. Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up. Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Walt takes a shower in “Caballo Sin Nombre”, Hank tries to force his way into the RV in “Sunset” (the bullet holes casting beams of sunlight on Walt as Hank removes the tape is a particularly excellent touch), the titular sequence in “One Minute” (holy shit, that sequence!), Walt is marched to his execution in “Full Measure”
Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Run.”
Best Lie – Skyler’s story about Walt making his money gambling. Even Walt is practically slack-jawed watching her spin this tale, amazed at how much of his strange behavior it accounts for, at least to a credulous person like Marie.
It’s not a lie exactly, but Gus’s speech to Walter about how “a man provides, even when he is not appreciated” is a brilliantly-calculated bit of manipulation. Walt’s pride is extremely bruised at that point, but still a potent enough force to get him to do exactly what he’s insisted he wouldn’t for 4 episodes.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 11 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”)
Also five dinners (“Caballo Sin Nombre”, “I.F.T”, “Mas”, “Abiquiu”, and “Half Measure”), plus one mid-afternoon grilled cheese (“Caballo Sin Nombre”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Walt’s attempt to go clean at the start of the season marks the 4th professional estrangement between monseiurs Heisenberg and Diesel, who are fully at each others throats in episodes 5 and 6. They are back together by episode 7.
It’s The Little Things – Having everyone wearing the blue ribbons to commemorate the 50th (tied) worst air disaster in history for the first few episodes is a great macabre touch. Walt’s incredible pizza toss. The veggie trays Gus fastidiously lays out before each of his drug meetings. Saul’s big bin of neck-braces he keeps on hand for clients. The stupid little dance Jesse does at the end of this clip. The musical montage of a day in the life of Wendy the meth-ed out prostitute.
Monday, July 2, 2012
BREAKING BAD SEASON 2 REVIEW
(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)
The premiere is a bit of an odd duck, as it plays like a part two of the first season finale, but that one didn’t really end on a cliffhanger or demand that things pick up immediately. It’s neither the beginning nor end of the Tuco storyline. But it is funny and intense in all the right BB ways, and it leads us into the awesome climax of that story in “Grilled”, which is a highlight of the entire series. The broiling, claustrophobic tension in Tuco’s house is…well, that’s why I have the “Hitchcock” section at the bottom.
“Bit By A Dead Bee” marks the first of what I think of as “clean up” episodes, where the focus is almost entirely on dealing with the fallout from the climax of the preceding arc. These are not the most exciting episodes of the series, but serve necessary housekeeping functions and allow the show to indulge in one of its specialties: concocting solutions to problems that make things even worse.
The middle episodes are most remarkable for Aaron Paul and Dean Norris upping their game with the desperate and vulnerable sides of their characters. There’s a bit of downtime between the Tuco resolution and when Jesse gets their own distribution network going, but really it’s only an episode or two. I mentioned before that I don’t think BB is a particularly slow-paced show, although it has a reputation as such. I think that impression comes from how the show lingers on individual scenes, drawing tension out of the long, quiet stretches. That’s a luxury you can indulge when your show is built around one of the most powerful performances in television history (I might give that particular appellation to Ian McShane on Deadwood, but certainly wouldn’t quibble if someone named Cranston), and people like Paul or Esposito capable of matching him step for step. Those guys can hold the screen for minutes at a time with just their facial expressions and have it not get boring.
Apropos of nothing, I really wish Danny Trejo could’ve gotten more than a single scene before being killed off, but like most good supporting characters, his head ends up attached to an exploding turtle. But that’s your basic Dramaturgy 101 stuff, hardly worth mentioning.
So having spent a lot of the first half of the season ironing out the characterizations of the regular cast, the back half is where we see its first real expansion. We get to spend more time with Badger, Skinny Pete and Combo, which is always fun, and also meet Ted Beneke and Jane. Krysten Ritter really does an incredible job with a relatively small amount of screentime. She has to introduce us to this character, who is not exactly an open book, and be smart and sexy enough for us to get invested in the romance as something genuine and healthy, but also still damaged enough that her unraveling doesn’t seem arbitrary. It’s a very complex arc compressed to really only a few episodes, but she pulls it off with aplomb. Her end is one of the most gut-wrenching things I’ve seen on television, and it wouldn’t be if we didn’t buy both her basic sweetness and potential as well the conniving addict part of her personality when it rears its head.
Here’s some fun facts. Saul doesn’t show up until episode 8 of the season. Gus is introduced in episode 11, and has a grand total of 3 scenes in the season, counting the one where all he does is ask if the chicken is satisfactory. Mike the cleaner only appears in the finale. Given how much of the subsequent seasons is built around these guys, I was somewhat amazed that it takes the better part of two seasons to meet any of them. Even with them involved, Breaking Bad does not have what I would consider a sprawling cast, but the show just feels more complete once they’re all in the mix. I’ll probably have more to say later when they take on greater roles in the main plot, but for now I’ll just say that they all get fantastic introduction scenes. Gus is not a role that allows Giancarlo Esposito a huge variety of different shades to play, but just look at the turn he does from fast food manager to gangster in his conversation with Walt. ACTING!!!
God, the scene in the bar between Walter and Jane’s father is so damn good. Normally, I’m not a fan of scenes that hinge on us as the audience having a completely different perspective than the characters, particularly when one of them is so strongly our POV character, to work. But this one, with both of them talking about the same people but not understanding who they are, just works so well and I have no way of explaining why except that Bryan Cranston and John De Lancie are fucking champs. It would probably be my favorite scene of the season if it weren’t for Skyler unraveling all of Walt’s lies and leaving him in the finale. Anna Gunn may be stuck with one of the more thankless roles in recent memory, but she BRINGS IT in that scene.
I will say there is one bit of plot mechanics that just doesn’t work for me in the endgame here. In order to force Walter to choose between his daughter’s birth and the biggest drug deal of his career, Gus passes down an ultimatum that he will by 38 pounds of meth for $1.2 million, but only at a remote truck stop in exactly one hour. It gets the clock ticking on an intense sequence and sets up a nice moral conundrum, but completely goes against everything we know about Gus’s character. Our sole interaction with him so far has been his dressing down Walt for not being “cautious” and showing “poor judgment”.
We don’t just know that he is exceedingly careful about his drug dealings, it is literally the only thing we know about him. And yet the deal he offers demands exactly the kind of sloppiness that he was so disdainful of ten minutes earlier? The first time I watched this I was convinced that the truck stop deal was actually a second test to see if Walter would actually do something so stupidly reckless. And it’s not like getting to know Gus more over the course of the series has led me to see some new part of his character that would think that sending a guy barreling out of a smack den with a million bucks worth of meth flung into a garbage bag so he can tear ass to an abandoned building and hand it off to people he has never met before with no back-up is the right way to do this kind of deal. On a lesser show I probably wouldn’t think twice, but BB doesn’t usually let the tail wag the dog in this way so it stands out.
One thing I have no problems with is the plane crash. I can understand being a bit disappointed that, given how the entire season had teased it, it only affected Walt at a couple steps remove. But I think the first season was about Walt making a bad decision and being forced into situations where he had to do things he never thought he would to get out, and season 2 has to progress from that. And it does so by exploring the collateral damage from his decisions, how he responds when confronted with things like Hank’s PTSD or the deaths of Combo and Jane, who he didn’t kill with his own hands but nonetheless bears some real responsibility for. How responsible was Walt for Jane dying? Was it 80% of a murder? 50%? Whatever it is, his culpability for the disaster must be less, but is 10% responsibility for 167 deaths worse than full responsibility for one? There aren’t exactly “real” answers to such questions, but the important point is that Walt won’t ask them. He deflects and rationalizes and protests that he didn’t mean for any of this to happen. As Jane’s father looks through her closet and tries to convince himself that a blue dress will look better than a black one in her coffin, Walt tries to convince himself that the slight remove from actually killing her means his heart is not so much black as a sort of a navy blue.
Breaking Bad is a show that is very much concerned with concepts of masculinity (which is why Hank has continued to be such a great foil for Walt as the show digs deeper into the damage behind the masks they show the world). “What does it mean to be a Man in this day and age?” is a show the question that is constantly turning over and examining from different perspectives. I would answer that question in part by saying that a Man does not make excuses. A Man owns his mistakes. He takes responsibility for the things he’s done, rather than fleeing from it. A “Real Man” would not whine that he didn’t mean for this to happen, he would ask himself what he could have done to prevent it.
Whether or not what happened with Jane is technically murder* is irrelevant. A Man holds himself to a higher standard. Walt’s moral failing this season is that he keeps holding himself to lower and lower ones.
Estimated Profits: ~$65,000 – $600 (to Jesse) – $30000 (Jesse again) – $13000 (hospital stay following bogus fugue state) + $15000 + $4660 + $45000 – $80000 (Saul) + $480000 – 200000 (surgery) = ~ $290,000 ahead
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane
Lesser Included Offenses – possession of an unregistered firearm, indecent exposure in a supermarket, breaking and entering, assault and battery (Spooge/Skank), kidnapping, assault and battery (Saul)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy (even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die). Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Absolutely everything with Walt/Jesse/Tuco/Tio in “Grilled”, Hank brings Tio in to Jesse’s interrogation in “Bit By A Dead Bee”, Jane starts to overdose in “Phoenix”
Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Stay out of my territory.” TV On The Radio’s “DLZ” was already a favorite of mine, but now I can’t hear it without thinking of this scene. BB owns it like Goodfellas owns “Layla”.
Best Lie – The best scheme has to be using Walter Jr.’s donation website to launder meth money, which is doubly great because of the way it continuously rankles Walt’s pride, exposing what a joke the “all for my family” line has become. That constant frustration is a great example of Cranston’s gifts as a comic actor strengthening the dramatic material he’s wrestling with.
But in terms of spinning a tale on the spot, Walt claiming that Eliott and Gretchen are secretly broke not only prevents the whole house of cards from collapsing, but allows him to bridge a little of the distance that his lies have created between him and Skyler while smearing his hated “enemies” all at once. Cranston fighting to suppress a smile while she processes it sells it perfectly.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 9 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Jesse and Walt have their first fisticuffs in ep. 4, “Down”. They essentially break up again, promising they will never see each other again in episode 12, “Phoenix”. This one will not stick either.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt cooks ricin for poisoning Tuco, although he doesn’t pull it off. He concocts a battery for the RV from spare change and bits of metal, sponges, and graphite from scavenged brake pads
It’s The Little Things – Tio’s bell ringing over the credits of “Grilled” (everything with Tio’s bell, really), the what-the-fuck narcocorrido opening, Saul’s real name is McGill, but goes by Goodman because the “homeboys” want a Jew for a lawyer, everything about the set design of Saul’s office: inflatable Statue of Liberty on top, Constitution wallpaper, “America The Beautiful” piped in to the waiting room through tinny speakers, the scales of justice that Jesse uses as an ashtray
*It is, or at least manslaughter. Specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it’s an accepted tenet of nearly every legal system in the world that there is both criminal and civil liability for failure to aid someone when doing so would not endanger yourself or others. The liability is even more severe if you created the danger to them yourself, as Walt did by knocking Jane onto her back
The premiere is a bit of an odd duck, as it plays like a part two of the first season finale, but that one didn’t really end on a cliffhanger or demand that things pick up immediately. It’s neither the beginning nor end of the Tuco storyline. But it is funny and intense in all the right BB ways, and it leads us into the awesome climax of that story in “Grilled”, which is a highlight of the entire series. The broiling, claustrophobic tension in Tuco’s house is…well, that’s why I have the “Hitchcock” section at the bottom.
“Bit By A Dead Bee” marks the first of what I think of as “clean up” episodes, where the focus is almost entirely on dealing with the fallout from the climax of the preceding arc. These are not the most exciting episodes of the series, but serve necessary housekeeping functions and allow the show to indulge in one of its specialties: concocting solutions to problems that make things even worse.
The middle episodes are most remarkable for Aaron Paul and Dean Norris upping their game with the desperate and vulnerable sides of their characters. There’s a bit of downtime between the Tuco resolution and when Jesse gets their own distribution network going, but really it’s only an episode or two. I mentioned before that I don’t think BB is a particularly slow-paced show, although it has a reputation as such. I think that impression comes from how the show lingers on individual scenes, drawing tension out of the long, quiet stretches. That’s a luxury you can indulge when your show is built around one of the most powerful performances in television history (I might give that particular appellation to Ian McShane on Deadwood, but certainly wouldn’t quibble if someone named Cranston), and people like Paul or Esposito capable of matching him step for step. Those guys can hold the screen for minutes at a time with just their facial expressions and have it not get boring.
Apropos of nothing, I really wish Danny Trejo could’ve gotten more than a single scene before being killed off, but like most good supporting characters, his head ends up attached to an exploding turtle. But that’s your basic Dramaturgy 101 stuff, hardly worth mentioning.
So having spent a lot of the first half of the season ironing out the characterizations of the regular cast, the back half is where we see its first real expansion. We get to spend more time with Badger, Skinny Pete and Combo, which is always fun, and also meet Ted Beneke and Jane. Krysten Ritter really does an incredible job with a relatively small amount of screentime. She has to introduce us to this character, who is not exactly an open book, and be smart and sexy enough for us to get invested in the romance as something genuine and healthy, but also still damaged enough that her unraveling doesn’t seem arbitrary. It’s a very complex arc compressed to really only a few episodes, but she pulls it off with aplomb. Her end is one of the most gut-wrenching things I’ve seen on television, and it wouldn’t be if we didn’t buy both her basic sweetness and potential as well the conniving addict part of her personality when it rears its head.
Here’s some fun facts. Saul doesn’t show up until episode 8 of the season. Gus is introduced in episode 11, and has a grand total of 3 scenes in the season, counting the one where all he does is ask if the chicken is satisfactory. Mike the cleaner only appears in the finale. Given how much of the subsequent seasons is built around these guys, I was somewhat amazed that it takes the better part of two seasons to meet any of them. Even with them involved, Breaking Bad does not have what I would consider a sprawling cast, but the show just feels more complete once they’re all in the mix. I’ll probably have more to say later when they take on greater roles in the main plot, but for now I’ll just say that they all get fantastic introduction scenes. Gus is not a role that allows Giancarlo Esposito a huge variety of different shades to play, but just look at the turn he does from fast food manager to gangster in his conversation with Walt. ACTING!!!
God, the scene in the bar between Walter and Jane’s father is so damn good. Normally, I’m not a fan of scenes that hinge on us as the audience having a completely different perspective than the characters, particularly when one of them is so strongly our POV character, to work. But this one, with both of them talking about the same people but not understanding who they are, just works so well and I have no way of explaining why except that Bryan Cranston and John De Lancie are fucking champs. It would probably be my favorite scene of the season if it weren’t for Skyler unraveling all of Walt’s lies and leaving him in the finale. Anna Gunn may be stuck with one of the more thankless roles in recent memory, but she BRINGS IT in that scene.
I will say there is one bit of plot mechanics that just doesn’t work for me in the endgame here. In order to force Walter to choose between his daughter’s birth and the biggest drug deal of his career, Gus passes down an ultimatum that he will by 38 pounds of meth for $1.2 million, but only at a remote truck stop in exactly one hour. It gets the clock ticking on an intense sequence and sets up a nice moral conundrum, but completely goes against everything we know about Gus’s character. Our sole interaction with him so far has been his dressing down Walt for not being “cautious” and showing “poor judgment”.
We don’t just know that he is exceedingly careful about his drug dealings, it is literally the only thing we know about him. And yet the deal he offers demands exactly the kind of sloppiness that he was so disdainful of ten minutes earlier? The first time I watched this I was convinced that the truck stop deal was actually a second test to see if Walter would actually do something so stupidly reckless. And it’s not like getting to know Gus more over the course of the series has led me to see some new part of his character that would think that sending a guy barreling out of a smack den with a million bucks worth of meth flung into a garbage bag so he can tear ass to an abandoned building and hand it off to people he has never met before with no back-up is the right way to do this kind of deal. On a lesser show I probably wouldn’t think twice, but BB doesn’t usually let the tail wag the dog in this way so it stands out.
One thing I have no problems with is the plane crash. I can understand being a bit disappointed that, given how the entire season had teased it, it only affected Walt at a couple steps remove. But I think the first season was about Walt making a bad decision and being forced into situations where he had to do things he never thought he would to get out, and season 2 has to progress from that. And it does so by exploring the collateral damage from his decisions, how he responds when confronted with things like Hank’s PTSD or the deaths of Combo and Jane, who he didn’t kill with his own hands but nonetheless bears some real responsibility for. How responsible was Walt for Jane dying? Was it 80% of a murder? 50%? Whatever it is, his culpability for the disaster must be less, but is 10% responsibility for 167 deaths worse than full responsibility for one? There aren’t exactly “real” answers to such questions, but the important point is that Walt won’t ask them. He deflects and rationalizes and protests that he didn’t mean for any of this to happen. As Jane’s father looks through her closet and tries to convince himself that a blue dress will look better than a black one in her coffin, Walt tries to convince himself that the slight remove from actually killing her means his heart is not so much black as a sort of a navy blue.
Breaking Bad is a show that is very much concerned with concepts of masculinity (which is why Hank has continued to be such a great foil for Walt as the show digs deeper into the damage behind the masks they show the world). “What does it mean to be a Man in this day and age?” is a show the question that is constantly turning over and examining from different perspectives. I would answer that question in part by saying that a Man does not make excuses. A Man owns his mistakes. He takes responsibility for the things he’s done, rather than fleeing from it. A “Real Man” would not whine that he didn’t mean for this to happen, he would ask himself what he could have done to prevent it.
Whether or not what happened with Jane is technically murder* is irrelevant. A Man holds himself to a higher standard. Walt’s moral failing this season is that he keeps holding himself to lower and lower ones.
Estimated Profits: ~$65,000 – $600 (to Jesse) – $30000 (Jesse again) – $13000 (hospital stay following bogus fugue state) + $15000 + $4660 + $45000 – $80000 (Saul) + $480000 – 200000 (surgery) = ~ $290,000 ahead
Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane
Lesser Included Offenses – possession of an unregistered firearm, indecent exposure in a supermarket, breaking and entering, assault and battery (Spooge/Skank), kidnapping, assault and battery (Saul)
Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge. Hank had to kill a guy (even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die). Combo was killed dealing for Walt. Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined. 167 passengers on two planes are dead.
Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud: Absolutely everything with Walt/Jesse/Tuco/Tio in “Grilled”, Hank brings Tio in to Jesse’s interrogation in “Bit By A Dead Bee”, Jane starts to overdose in “Phoenix”
Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Stay out of my territory.” TV On The Radio’s “DLZ” was already a favorite of mine, but now I can’t hear it without thinking of this scene. BB owns it like Goodfellas owns “Layla”.
Best Lie – The best scheme has to be using Walter Jr.’s donation website to launder meth money, which is doubly great because of the way it continuously rankles Walt’s pride, exposing what a joke the “all for my family” line has become. That constant frustration is a great example of Cranston’s gifts as a comic actor strengthening the dramatic material he’s wrestling with.
But in terms of spinning a tale on the spot, Walt claiming that Eliott and Gretchen are secretly broke not only prevents the whole house of cards from collapsing, but allows him to bridge a little of the distance that his lies have created between him and Skyler while smearing his hated “enemies” all at once. Cranston fighting to suppress a smile while she processes it sells it perfectly.
Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 9 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2, “ABQ”)
We Are Done, Professionally – Jesse and Walt have their first fisticuffs in ep. 4, “Down”. They essentially break up again, promising they will never see each other again in episode 12, “Phoenix”. This one will not stick either.
The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt cooks ricin for poisoning Tuco, although he doesn’t pull it off. He concocts a battery for the RV from spare change and bits of metal, sponges, and graphite from scavenged brake pads
It’s The Little Things – Tio’s bell ringing over the credits of “Grilled” (everything with Tio’s bell, really), the what-the-fuck narcocorrido opening, Saul’s real name is McGill, but goes by Goodman because the “homeboys” want a Jew for a lawyer, everything about the set design of Saul’s office: inflatable Statue of Liberty on top, Constitution wallpaper, “America The Beautiful” piped in to the waiting room through tinny speakers, the scales of justice that Jesse uses as an ashtray
*It is, or at least manslaughter. Specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it’s an accepted tenet of nearly every legal system in the world that there is both criminal and civil liability for failure to aid someone when doing so would not endanger yourself or others. The liability is even more severe if you created the danger to them yourself, as Walt did by knocking Jane onto her back
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