I finished the third episode of Season Two today. SPOILER WARNING

* Three episodes into Breaking Bad Season Two and it already feels almost like a different show. A better show, for sure. Tighter, quieter, more serious.

* A whole lotta factors go into that. For starters, this story arc — call it “Travels with Tuco” — isn’t just technically the payoff for the work done in the seven-episode season one, it’s literally the intended culmination of that work. As I found out from my illustrious commenters after I wrote my post, Season One wasn’t that short by design, but due to the writers’ strike. So if I got to the end feeling a bit uncertain about what the show had said, there was a good reason for it: It hadn’t gotten the chance to finish talking. Here, it did.

* The funny thing about that metaphor, though, is that what it said, it said pretty quietly. Each episode began with a wordless interlude of pure sound and vision: a charred pink stuffed animal and its severed eyeball floating in the Whites’ black-and-white pool as approaching sirens wail; Jesse’s bullet-ridden lowrider mindlessly hopping up and down in the middle of nowhere; a worm’s eye view of Jesse and Walter burying a gun, then trudging through the sun-soaked wilderness. The first two openings warn of impending doom (we still haven’t seen how that first glimpse of the future comes to be); the second is two guys stranded with their thoughts and their consciences, just putting one foot in front of the other in hopes that they’ll get somewhere eventually. It all seems pretty apt.

* Each episode also had a goal-oriented plotline. Walter and Jesse needed to survive their meet-up with Tuco now that they’d seen him kill a man. Walter and Jesse needed to escape Tuco’s clutches now that he’d kidnapped them. Walter and Jesse needed to get home and get clear of the law now that they’d been traced to Tuco and potentially involved in the events leading to his death. This didn’t just keep me focused from moment to moment — it kept them focused, which in turn kept Walter from getting too absent-minded professor and Jesse from getting too juggalo. It was a leavening influence on their behavior that I appreciated, besides being a heck of an incentive for me to keep watching.

* There are many examples of this: The tense moments as they stand around with Tuco while his minion takes care of the body; Jesse and his prostitute friend’s interrogations by Hank and Gomez; Walt’s dealings with his doctors; Jesse’s attempt to get Tuco to snort the poisoned meth. But the best example of this? Tio Salamanca and his tell-tale bell. I’m always happy to see that cadaverous-looking assassin guy from Scarface, and this was a wonderfully awful use for him — a way to coax mounting dread out of Walter and Jesse, and mounting anger and frustration out of their captors, be it Tuco at first or Hank and Gomie later on. And again, it shows how good Breaking Bad is at using film’s aural dimension. (I forgot to mention this during my Boardwalk Empire piece yesterday, but I think a big reason why I was so fond of last week’s episode was that it did things with sound that favorably reminded me of BB.) Edge of your seat stuff, often triggered by just the slightest cues: a look in the old man’s eyes as Tuco wheels him to the dinnertable, a disembodied “ding!” and a knock on the interrogation room door from Hank.

* And hey, let’s talk about Hank, too. When he’s broad, he’s very very broad, even now — the jocular racism, the macabre trophy from his big kill. But in these episodes we saw dimensions of him that may not quite compensate for these lapses in character, but at the very least flesh him out so he’s not just some grinning macho buffoon. As we’d previously seen in the intervention scene last season, it’s clear that Hank really does love and care about Walt, and that’s really endearing. He’s not just trying to find him to placate Marie and Skyler, he obviously really likes the guy and wants him to be okay. Just the force of effort it must have taken him to gain Jesse’s mom’s trust rather than bluster her defenses down is proof of that.

* Moreover, this is a guy who’s actually pretty good at his job, and that brings out some of his best and most interesting qualities. He’s dogged, focused, and intuitive in tracking down Walt — he’s able to turn off his bluster in order to win Jesse’s mom’s trust, which surely took some effort, and he’s able to jerry-rig a way to track Jesse down simply from hearing what kind of car he has. When we see him reviewing the break-in at the chemical plant or attempting to piece together the connection between the burglary, the new pure varieties of meth going around, and the deaths of Crazy Eight and Tuco, you can see he’s thoughtful, curious, attentive to detail, able to see the forest for the trees. Whatever his other shortcomings, and whatever the wisdom or morality of the drug war generally, it’s appealing to see him behave in this intelligent, competent, likeable manner. (He’s friendliest with Gomie during these interludes, too. And hey, you figure Gomie puts up with him for some reason despite all his piggishness, which also helps humanize the guy.)

* Ultimately, my main takeaway from this opening arc is that I might have had the wrong idea of what the show is even about. Going in, I really knew only the bare bones, a la “mob boss goes to therapy” or “plane crashes on a mysterious island”: “dying science teacher sells crystal meth to make money.” I assumed that meant that after seeing his initial decision to do this, we’d spend some time with the “new normal”: He’d make meth and sell it and keep it all a secret from his family and friends, and this would be the status quo until the end of the season or so, when something would happen. That’s how these things typically work: the cops and dealers on The Wire, Tony and friends on The Sopranos, the men and women of Sterling Cooper on Mad Men — not to mention the mobsters in GoodFellas and Casino, from whence all these shows can be traced via Scorses’s influence on David Chase — did basically their normal thing for a while, until something sends them off the tracks. But Walter never got on them! From the moment he decides to cook meth, he’s simply careened from one catastrophe to the next. He kills a guy in the first episode! And it’s been a series of cascading disasters ever since. That’s a very, very different way to approach this subject than what I expected — and I feel like in these last few episodes, the enormity of Walter’s situation is stripping down the show’s occasional goofiness quite a bit. When stripping naked in a grocery store and being taken to the hospital for neurological and psychiatric evaluations is your protagonist’s best-case scenario, you really don’t have time to monkey around. The seriousness of purpose really suits the show. I hope it keeps it up.

Tags: breaking bad, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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