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Breaking Bad thoughts: Season Two finale

* Well well well, look what we have here: a show about my favorite and most dreaded subject in fiction, mistakes from which we can never ever recover or atone.

* I mean, Christ Jesus, talk about upping the ante this season, and in this episode alone. The relentless focus on Jesse’s grief and Jane’s father’s grief was almost unbearable at times. Major, major kudos are due to Aaron Paul for sobbing as well as I’ve ever seen it done, just for example. And cutting from that poor sweet man talking about what a lovely dress he picked out for his dead daughter’s funeral to the infant daughter of the man who murdered her? Sticking the knife in and twisting.

* But the plane crash itself — that’s the big one. I don’t just mean in terms of the planning involved, since I’m past the point where “Wow, they had this all planned out from the beginning!” is anything but a trivia item. I mean the reliance on the power of imagery to make thematic connections that aren’t strictly tethered to the demands of the plot. Could anything that directly happened to or because of Walt personally been a more powerful indictment of his moral rot? Could some personal plot twist he understood as a ramification of his actions said more about where he is as a person and what his actions have set in motion than his look of abject horror as two planes collided in the sky and rained debris and death around him? For all I know Jane’s dad becomes a regular cast member and half of season three is dedicated to Walt and Jesse dealing with the fallout of their involvement in her death and her death’s involvement in the death of everyone on those planes. But it doesn’t matter at all if he does or if they do, any more than it matters for us to ever see Saul’s Mister Fix-It again to understand what his appearance in this episode says about Saul, Walter, Jesse, their world, the world. The images and the ideas make the point on their own.

Tags: breaking bad, reviews, TV, TV reviews

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.