I’ve now seen Season Four episodes 7-10. Close to the end now. SPOILER WARNING
* Ha, remember back in Season Three when I said how much less intimate the show was, and how big the players had gotten? Little did I know! Straight-up Godfather/Scarface-level shit now, from “and Stephen Bauer” in the opening credits on down.
* Which is a development worthy of some study, I think, beyond just “wow, big things popping for the former Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” But to get there requires some preamble…
* Okay, so during these episodes — even in the first couple of them, when Gus was still largely at the margins, still the invisible man behind the cameras, and when Jesse’s position as Mike’s shadow still seemed much more like a combined act of charity and insurance policy — I realized that all of the major protagonists and antagonists on the show, i.e. the people whose actions truly drive the plot, were quite simply a lot of fun to watch at this point. I found myself really hating that these guys were at odds, that for any one of them to come out on top, one or more of the others would have to go down.
* Let’s start with, for lack of a better term, the good guys. Walt may have been largely coasting on sympathies earned over the past three and a half seasons, but I still didn’t want to see him get busted or killed. (I mean, even putting those sympathies aside, there’s a pleasure to “how’s he gonna get out of this one?”, you know? The Houdini act is fun to watch. Jesse only gets more sympathetic and more charismatic as the show progresses. And Hank is a cross between Sherlock Holmes and (to quote another actor on the show in another movie he was in) that guy from The Incredible Hulk — his detective work gets sharper and sharper, and his panache in presenting it to Gomie and Merket was an absolute joy, plus he’s very kind to both Marie and Walt now.
* Meanwhile, on the cold-blooded killer side of the ledger, Mike remains one of the most enjoyable characters on TV in terms of just watching the guy scowl and listening to him talk. And as I said, he’s deadly competent, and competence is compelling. This also applies to Gus, which the show makes crystal clear when they have him walk head-on into a hail of sniper bullets, and which reaches its apotheosis during that fateful pool party at Don Eladio’s. I mean, the second the Don took a drink and toasted all his men too, I started laughing out loud. “Hahahaha, he just poisoned all these assholes!”
* But in addition to making these guys scary badasses, the show’s also taking this time to humanize them, believe it or not. It’s become apparent by now that Mike’s growing trust in, even respect for, Jesse isn’t just an act. For one thing he saved his life at a time when it would have been quite easy to let him die without Walter really being able to blame him or Gus. But more than that, he seems happy for Jesse when Jesse proves his mettle. His smile down in that Mexican factory when Jesse told off the imperious chemist genuinely made me happy, goddammit!
* Even Gus gets his shades of grey now. We see signs of fear several times: He’s obviously rattled by his conference with Hank and friends; he’s flustered by the cartel’s refusal to actually negotiate; and most importantly, he was terrified during his initial meeting with Don Eladio in that majestically awful flashback sequence, and completely devastated — this was quite apparent even in a brief flashback dedicated to the death of a character we’d never met — by the murder of his friend and partner, the other Chicken Brother. I felt terrible for Gus. For Gus! Suddenly I felt like, okay, now I understand.
* And he too saves Jesse’s life when letting him die would have come at no cost, by sparing him from the poisoned liquor at Don Eladio’s house. His trust and respect for Jesse appears genuine as well. And I’d have to imagine that for both him and Mike, Jesse saving their lives (I think — haven’t seen the next episode yet) in Don Eladio’s driveway will only deepen their connection with him, and ours with them.
* But.
* Over in Walt-land, after Jesse beats him up, Walt Jr. comes over and finds his father wounded and doped up on painkillers. What followed would be under normal circumstances the kind of thing that would have me crying, sobs and tears and everything, on the train. A grown man weeping over his failures to his son, saying “I made a mistake, I had it coming, it’s all my fault, I’m sorry”? That stuff usually just murders me, murders me, man. But here? I spent the whole time thinking Walt was faking it.
* In short, I think it’s no coincidence that the show chose to beef up and round out the roles for its murderous antagonist characters at the exact same time that it reduced our sympathy for Walt to an all-time low ebb by making him almost completely unlikeable. Normally, to paraphrase Walt himself, in a contest between Walt and Gus, Walt would win every time. Now? With Skyler and the kids financially secure, with a legally lucrative future ahead of them, with Jesse in tight with the bigwigs and able to cook brilliantly on his own, with Walt bringing nothing but misery to everyone he touches and really not caring or even noticing that this is the case, we’re left to wonder if we’d honestly find it so terrible if he ended up in one of those barrels. He didn’t just damage or destroy his relationships with his family, Jesse, and his employers. He damaged his relationship with me.
* And as I said earlier, this bears some study. Competence is compelling, and with their daring in-the-lion’s-den decapitation of the cartel, Gus and Mike (and Jesse) have become, as best we can tell, arguably the most competent criminals in western North America. By contrast, Walt is a wash. Previously the show had offered us no alternative to his and Jesse’s gut-churning series of failures and disasters, narrowly averted or not. Now we have Michael Corleone or Tony Montana if we want them. And on the level of entertainment, we do want them, of course. I don’t want to see Gus and Mike get busted or killed now, not at all. And I want Jesse to keep his cool and stick with them. And after the finales of Season Two and Season Three, after we witnessed the moral consequences of behavior made possible by Gus and Mike, I’m not sure how I feel about how I feel. No, I’m not sure at all.
* Anyway. How good does Jere Burns look with a mustache, huh?
* Speaking of, Jesse’s brutally confrontational monologue in the support group was Aaron Paul’s finest hour. It mirrored Jesse’s primal scream at Walt for ruining his life while in the hospital after Hank beat him, but this time he was screaming at himself. The filmmakers hit us hard by conjuring imagery of crimes we find the hardest to forgive in fiction — killing children, killing animals. That’s how Jesse thinks of himself. No wonder I want Gus and Mike to grant him a new lease on life, poor kid.
* I was happy to see Steve Gomez return. Underutilized character, underutilized actor, I think.
* Man this is a clever, cheeky show. They cold-open an episode with blood in an unidentified manmade body of water, then make sure we hear, and hear about, but never actually see, Andrea’s “nice birdbath” at the new place Jesse’s helping to pay for for her and her son Brock. It’s the Season Two burnmarks-and-bodies swimming-pool fakeout in miniature, but no less effective for that.
* Saul’s good with kids. I like that.
* I’m sure I’ve said this before, but just like The Sopranos, this show gets funnier as it gets darker. Hank and Walt’s whole conversation in the Los Pollos Hermanos parking lot, as Walt is forced to feign surprise when Hank reveals his suspicion that Gus Fring is a drug dealer, and is then cajoled into bugging Gus’s car, while he and we alike watch Mike pull up a few spots away and watch them, was just about the funniest thing the show’s ever done. It was like Curb Your Enthusiasm: Crystal Edition.
* I liked the handsome young cartel representative. Thoughtful, unpredictable casting there. Too bad we won’t be seeing more of him!
* Let’s throw in a whole bunch of gorgeous time-lapse sunset/sunrise shots, because why not.
* As much as I enjoyed the Skyler/Ted Beneke side storyline and her cleavage-based attempt to resolve it, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe there are a few too many improvisatory geniuses in the White/Schrader family? Marie, Skyler, and Walt have all now proven to be able to spin bullshit into gold at the drop of a hat, and Hank’s no slouch in the storytelling department either, though he hasn’t deployed those talents in quite that way. For once I’d like to see one of these folks just blow it.
* I don’t see good things in Ted Beneke’s future, by the way. I suspect Skyler’s headed for her Walt/Jane, Jesse/Gale moment.
* I’ll leave you with a conspiracy theory. Now that we know Gus’s backstory, specifically the roles of the cartel and its representatives Juan and Old Man Salamanca in that backstory, doesn’t it seem possible that pretty much everything Gus has done — setting up the lab, hiring Walt, saving him from Juan and the angry Salamancas, siccing the brothers on Hank and then tipping Hank off about it, having Mike kill the surviving brother in the hospital, having the federales kill Juan, cutting off the cartel’s access to the States, using Walt to fill the vacuum with his own meth supply, drawing the cartel into a cold war with occasional flare-ups, backing off the plan to kill Walt and Jesse, keeping them both alive and cooking, building up Jesse’s confidence, presenting Jesse to the cartel as a peace offering, and then of course what we saw during the visit to Mexico — was all a plan for revenge? I mean, even agreeing to work with the man who caused the death of Tuco Salamanca to begin with, you know? Did the legendary businessman structure his entire business plan around something very, very personal? “This is where blood for blood gets us,” he tells Hector Salamanca in his nursing home, and at first you think it’s a reprimand. But what if it’s a master plan, hiding in plain sight?
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