I’m three episodes into the third season. SPOILERS HO!
* Almost more than I like how the show is getting heavier as it goes on, I like how it’s getting weirder as it goes on. Weirdness, by which I mean pretty much anything that’s a little bit stranger and more sinister than is strictly called for by the demands of conveying a narrative and realistically depicting the world in which it operates, is very important to me. Even if you were to ignore the fifth season of The Wire which I absolutely hated, it’s why I feel less warmly disposed and super-excited when I think back on that show (with the possible exception of Omar) than I do about most any of the other shows I’ve gotten really into over the years. With Breaking Bad, we’re now at the point where the show can start a season with a bunch of people crawling on their bellies toward a death shrine with music that fairly explicitly references the industrial score of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or have an even more infernal scene involving two mute brother assassins communicating via Ouija board with a demonic old man and his accursed tell-tale bell, and yet it still feels like the show you were watching from the start. That’s a good place for a show to be, for me. I don’t want all the pieces of the puzzle to fit. I want some of the pieces to feel like they’re from some game that hasn’t been revealed yet, a game being played a few layers away from the one at hand.
* I was also really pleased to see that the emotional intensity of the Season Two climax was, perhaps even improbably given what happened during that climax, maintained in these first few episodes, particular the premiere. I felt close to tears the entire time. When you think back on the early episodes and how broad and loud it all was, the amount of silence in the S3 premiere, the amount of time spent with Walt, and also Jesse, just sitting or standing someplace and not speaking…well, it speaks volumes about the growing sophistication of the show and its willingness to leave you alone with your thoughts about it.
* On that note, and this is becoming a laundry list of things I really liked but what the hey: I really liked NuJesse. This has come up a few times both in these posts and in the comments, but both Jesse and actor Aaron Paul always seemed to come alive when something triggered him to momentarily drop the Slim Shady routine and interact with the world in a more direct and intense and less posed way. That appears to be his only interaction with the world anymore. He probably hasn’t said more than a dozen sentences yet, but what he has said have been among the best Jesse moments the show’s seen, from “I’m the bad guy” on down.
* Great eyes, he has, too. Never really saw it before, but now that he’s gone all crystalline and cauterized inside they’re quite piercing and haunting.
* I think a sign that a show is developing a real head of steam is when they inject Story Growth Hormone into the plot and get to something we didn’t think was coming for another half a season or so almost right away. In this case, we had Skyler confronting Walter about being a drug dealer, and Walter in turn revealing his drug of choice, within the first episode of the season. Given that this didn’t happen when she left him, I figured we’d spend most of this season watching her put it all together. Instead the moment we’d been waiting for since the very beginning was dropped on us in the middle of the first episode of a season. Obviously this will free up some real estate they can now spend on other things instead of building up once again to an inevitable moment of discovery, which they’ve already done several times now (the cancer, the money, etc.), but beyond that it shows that the filmmakers are confident enough in their abilities to toss a readymade multi-episode arc out the window.
* Glad to see the show take “contempt of cop” violations seriously rather than have Walt be humorously tasered or something like that. The whole sequence of events of him getting pissed off at the cop, the cop threatening to essentially assault Walt for being rude, and that final jump cut to Walt’s inflamed, tear- and snot-strewn face as he howls in misery when he’s thrown into the cop car was probably the show’s best evocation of police power, perhaps because that wasn’t really the point the way it was with, say, the kindly janitor whose life is destroyed when he takes the fall for Walt’s stolen chemistry equipment. It was less didactic and more effective.
* I was trying to put my finger on why Walt’s bullying of his way back into Skyler’s house and life felt so ugly, ugly, ugly. Some of it’s obvious: For the first time he couldn’t use “I’m doing this for Skyler’s own good” as a justification, since she’d made quite clear what her own good would be. Beyond that, though, this was the first time we saw his cutthroat, bullying nature used against Skyler the way he’d previously used it against, say, Tuco when he threatened to suicide-bomb his HQ, or the dudes at the Home Depot he confronts about infringing on his territory when he catches them ineptly buying cooking equipment, or god help us Jane when he leaves her to die. He has Skyler over a barrel and knows it, and exploits it shamelessly and ruthlessly despite all his aw-shucks posing. Every time he said “Now son, don’t make your mother the bad guy” was more unbearable than the last, since he’d quite deliberately made it impossible for Walt Jr. to see her as anything but. What a creep.
* But the final element of Walt’s ugliness in these episodes was that more so than ever before, he wasn’t our focal point. In several key instances, we are walked into a crucial Walt scene not by following Walt, but by following someone else watching Walt. Saul and Gus’s anonymous Mr. Fix-It watches him break into his own house — then watches the Salamanca Brothers show up to kill him. During the moments when Walt comes closer to death than ever before, he doesn’t even know it — only the Brothers, the characters whose POV we’ve been sharing as they make their way through his house, know what’s about to happen. Once Walt does finally ensconce himself in the house, we pull up with Skyler and share in her shock as she finds him there. When she tries to have him thrown out, we stay with her during her interview with the police, and like her we only overhear Walt’s interrogation. Later we come home from work with her to discover, and be disgusted by, his crass emotional manipulations as he fixes an elaborate dinner for Walt Jr. and one of his friends in order to prevent her from making any kind of scene. Walt has essentially been made a guest star, or better yet an antagonist, seen through the eyes of others, his own thoughts and emotions opaque. I think that’s a big part of why I found him so repulsive in these episodes: In a very real way he’s an alien presence.
* In addition to making my way through The Great Post-Millennial Television Dramas, I also watch the CBS soaps every day. Though the degree of subtlety and skill involved varies considerably, most soap storytelling involves one person or group of people with knowledge that another person or group of people (which may include the audience) wants or needs or ought to know but doesn’t. The moments of catharsis come when the people who’d been in the dark finally find out; depending on the nature of the storyline this could be because they’ve found it out themselves, or some pivotal go-between has revealed it, or, if it’s information that can be used to hurt the person who didn’t know it, because one of their enemies has finally thrown it in their face. So perhaps this explains why I fucking cheered when Skyler came home to Walt’s horrific family-man parody and said “I fucked Ted.” Eat it, you emotionally abusive creep! I’m very curious to see if Skyler continues to respond to the enormous shit sandwich Walt’s forcing her to eat by serving him some of her own, knowing he has as little choice to dig in as she does.
Tags: breaking bad, reviews, TV, TV reviews
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