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Tag Archives: Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad’s 10 Most Brilliant Schemes
Andrew joins Michael Roffman and Alex Huntsberger to celebrate the ingenuity of Vince Gilligan’s series by revisiting its greatest schemes.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman, Vince Gilligan, Walter White
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The Forgotten Arc of Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman
The mild-mannered, middle-aged dad becomes a cold, remorseless killer. The put-upon chemistry teacher evolves into a vicious drug lord. As series creator Vince Gilligan famously put it, Mr. Chips turns into Scarface.
That transformation is the backbone of Breaking Bad and one of the most convincing and compelling character shifts in television history. With that, Walter White understandably takes up a lot of oxygen in discussions of the show. And yet, focusing on the slow, disquieting arrival of Heisenberg within the broader trajectory of the show ignores how it’s only one half of the grand irony and reversal at the core of the series.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad, Essays, Jesse Pinkman, Vince Gilligan, Walter White
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Better Call Saul Veers Ever Closer to Breaking Bad in “Quite a Ride”
Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because this episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of our hero during the Walter White era. It’s not just because Gus Fring seems to nail down his plans for the facility that will one day become Heisenberg’s lab. And it’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and seedy hangout where Jesse Pinkman once sold his drug of choice.
It’s because “Quite a Ride” is about people who are almost peerless at what they do, unable to walk away from it, and the different directions those superlative skills take them. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a show devoted to a man who had an undeniable talent, but who could not let it go in the face of the money and long-awaited recognition he thought he was due, even when it came with a side of peril and human misery. Breaking Bad lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone as talented as Walter White operate at the top of his game in a terrible industry, and earned its emotional resonance from the uncertain but foreboding sense of where those talents would lead him.
Better Call Saul and the Last Line of Defense Between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman
Breaking Bad posited that who a person is, what kind of choices they make, is situational. Walter White always had Heisenberg within him: the arrogance, anger, and self-satisfaction. But that side of him, and the evil he would inflict, couldn’t emerge until his circumstances changed. When fenced in by a middle-class life with domestic responsibilities, Walt was a meek science teacher who wouldn’t, and maybe couldn’t, hurt a fly. It took a cancer diagnosis and a series of increasingly wild events to turn him into the vicious kingpin he eventually became and yet somehow always was. Breaking Bad suggested that this type of change in circumstances could reveal the real you and that your true nature is just one big bang away.
And yet Better Call Saul, through its own protagonist, presents a very different idea of who a person is and who they might become and what can restrain or expose that. There is a sense that Jimmy McGill’s true nature is irrepressible no matter his circumstances. Jimmy was born to con and manipulate and use his silver tongue to open doors, regardless of whether he’s a humble (if colorful) elder law attorney or the local TV huckster who becomes Walt’s conscience-free fixer in Breaking Bad. That part of him was always going to be there, rich or poor, success or failure, good or bad.
Posted in Better Call Saul, Television
Tagged Better Call Saul Season 3, Breaking Bad, Chuck McGill, Kim Wexler, Op-eds, Saul Goodman
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Breaking Bad’s Pilot Has It All, And Yet Has Nothing
It’s all there. And none of it’s there.
As I talked about on the Pilot Study Podcast, the Breaking Bad pilot tells you everything you need to know to watch and understand the series. It gives you Walter White, the down-on-his-luck, spineless high school chemistry teacher who’s sleepwalking his way through life. It gives you the hint of an interest and a talent within him that goes unnoticed and unregarded by everyone around him. It gives you Skyler and Walt Jr., Hank and Marie, Jesse Pinkman and so many other figures who make up his world, with just enough color to get a sense for who they are. It gives you the cancer diagnosis that ignites something in Walt, that causes him to take control of his life. And it gives you the sense of the consequences of that change and that choice, the subtle transformation that sets him on a different trajectory.
But what isn’t present, what’s barely even hinted at in this first installment, is where that slow-burning transformation will take him. That’s the beauty of Breaking Bad, and its devotion to the idea of change embodied in Walt’s speech about chemistry. We see the first chemical reaction here, the catalyst that sends a lowly science teacher down a new path. We see brief sketches of his wife, his brother-in-law, and his new, less-than-reputable business partner. But we can’t see how much these individuals, and our view of them, will shift and flip over the ensuing five seasons of one of television’s all-time great dramas.
This pilot gives you everything you need to dip your toe into the world of Breaking Bad, but only gives the slightest hints as to how deep and how dark the water goes.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, Episode Reviews, Vince Gilligan, Walter White
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Better Call Saul: “Gloves Off” — Tension, Motivation, Moral Codes, and Batman
It’s difficult to build tension and create real stakes in a prequel, and that problem is magnified the closer a film or television show gets to the familiar part of the timeline. If the audience already knows who lives and who dies, and who has to reach a certain point of the story unscathed for that matter, it can mute some of the excitement and intrigue of a particular plotline.
On the other hand, it can also heighten the tension in an episode by spotlighting the mystery between the known beginning and the known ending. As Better Call Saul shows Nacho planning a hit on Tuco, we know that Tuco lives; we know that Mike lives, and thanks to the opening scene in “Gloves Off”, we know that the crafty Mr. Ehrmantraut ends up bruised and battered, presumably in the attempt. All of this raises the question of how we get from Point A to Point B.
Does the hit go wrong? Does Mike beg off from Nacho and catch a beating for his troubles? In true Breaking Bad fashion does some unexpected intervening factor come into play and throw the whole situation out of whack? We don’t know, but we want to know, and that’s just part of the masterful job that BCS does in using its prequel status as a boon and not an obstacle when it comes to holding the audience’s attention.
Mad Men and The Greatest Trick Don Draper Ever Pulled
Salon’s Matthew Brandon Wolfson recently criticized Mad Men for its commercial appeal. He accused the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, of “selling…an image of a glowing past — a prettier, simpler time when people knew their social roles and played them perfectly.” And he insinuated both that the show’s commercial-friendly nature sits uneasily with its art and that Weiner wants the viewer to “find [the show] twisted and layered and dark, but [he] also wants you to buy it.” But in describing Mad Men as an “exquisite empty shell,” Wolfson mistakes the packaging for the package, and misses the subtly brilliant way the series has its cake and eats it too.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Breaking Bad, don draper, mad men
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