Top 10 TV Shows of 2014

Here's some caveats before I get into my top 10, because I certainly haven't seen everything that has aired this year:

- I live in Canada. There are some shows, like Transparent and Review that simply have not become available in Canada through any (legal) form yet, so they have gone unwatched.
- I do not have any pay cable channels. As a result, there is no Game of Thrones or Girls or Boardwalk Empire on this list. There is one exception to this, which we will get to, because it was available on DVD before the end of the year.
- I give up on shows fairly quickly, so if a show got considerably better over the course of the year past the initial reviews and my initial impressions, I don't typically try to catch up. For that reason I don't watch shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I also only got into serious TV watching around 2011, so shows that started earlier than that (such as The Good Wife) may be unwatched as well.

So, this is by no means an exhaustive list. But without further ado, here is my top 10 shows that aired in 2014. I watched enough of about 25 shows to be considered for this list.

First, honourable mentions this year go to The Killing and House of Cards.

10. Survivor
Yes, really. I'm just as surprised as you are. I'm not sure what bug infected me that I started watching Survivor again this year, but I quickly became obsessed with it. No other show this year did I spend more time obsessing over the ins and outs of what was really going on. The combination of trying to figure out the best strategic moves as well as how to deal with people in the game has not yet really gotten old for me. Plus, this year's two seasons both gave plenty of food for thought, as they were two of the least straight forward and most unpredictable seasons ever. It's completely unlike anything else on this list, but I don't look forward to any other show more, nor did I discuss any other show as much. Seriously, look at my Disqus comments since I joined. They are literally 95% Survivor comments. So I had to put it on the list, and this was the place for it.

9. The Walking Dead
This is an odd one for me. All at once, somewhere halfway through the previous current crop of episodes, a bunch of critics including Andy Greenwald of Grantland and Todd Van Der Werff of Vox posted columns about how The Walking Dead had finally gotten good after years of being mediocre. Meanwhile, I've thought Season 5 has been business as usual for the show, which for the longest time I've been more positive about than the general community, particularly through Season 2. Comes onto the list this year after not even getting an honourable mention last year for two reasons:
1. Three stellar episodes this year. When The Walking Dead  is at its best, it is one of the top shows on TV, no exaggeration. It hit those highs this year with "After", "The Grove" and "Self Help".
2. The baseline for the show has improved. In previous years, when The Walking Dead was bad, it was quite awful. This year, the Walking Dead had no episodes that I would give any worse adjective to than tepid. I still would like to see better consistency from the show, but having no episodes reach the lows of some of the later Season 3 episodes or the Season 4 midseason finale is a nice step.

8. Fargo
Considering how many great shows I haven't seen, putting Fargo this low on the list is practically trashing it compared to the general critical community. Voted the number 1 show of the year by the critics polled for hitfix.com, it is beloved. And the show is pretty great at multiple things. It has possibly the best command of tone of any show on this list, effortlessly switching between dark comedy and heroic drama. It's that tone that is the biggest tie between it and the movie, and being able to pull that off makes the project a worthy sequel to the movie. It also has one of the top 3 characters on TV, Molly Solverson, played wonderfully by previously unknown Chicago theatre actress Alison Tolman. Martin Freeman also gives a great performance that is nothing like either Bilbo Baggins or John Watson. And while I have fairly major problems with the character concept, Billy Bob Thornton is having a lot of fun and chewing a lot of scenery as Lorne Malvo.

However, the problem is that the degree of heightened reality that the show employs doesn't work very well for me. I find that it removes the character just enough from my world that they become tougher to dig into and really explore in proper context. For instance, there is no exploring to do with Lorne Malvo. He's a cartoon character who is evil incarnate and nearly unstoppable for most of the run of the series, and he sucks everything around him into his vortex of ridiculousness. I find it hard to scrounge for something worthwhile among the carnage he creates. Still a pretty good show, and I'll be looking forward to next year, especially with no Malvo to be seen.

7. Happy Valley
Even as I'm writing this post, I'm still playing around with my rankings. I originally had Happy Valley in the 5 hole, but I moved it down as I was writing the blurbs for the next two shows. Happy Valley  is pretty flawless, and does a good job not being exploitative or misogynistic with a kidnapping case, something almost every other show falls into. It does a great job sketching out its main character in Catherine, who feels so much like a real person, and can hit the emotional moments and absolutely wreck the viewer when it is aiming for them. I highly recommend it. It doesn't have uniqueness of many of the other shows on this list, which is why it dropped as there's not as much about it that sticks with me, but it is extremely well executed, compelling, and does some great character work.

6. True Detective
It was a great battle between anthology series this spring, as everyone was picking a side between Fargo  and True Detective, and it had to be one or the other. At the time of airing, True Detective had all the accolades and buzz surrounding it, and Fargo was the much smaller show airing later that so many assumed was much better. This was not the side I thought I'd be taking, especially after about 6 episodes and this show seemed to be running out of steam. But the much maligned finale brought it all together for me, that this show was never about the Yellow King or murder mysteries involving antlers. This was a show about a broken man, Rust Cohle, who was so damaged by the loss of his daughter that he just couldn't be a person any more, and instead decided to be this philosophy touting piece of cardboard that didn't really resemble a human being. To watch the little pieces of the real Rust come out among the acting, in his dedication to a case he pretended wasn't important in the grand scheme of things, before finally emerging in that wonderful speech in the finale was compelling and some of the best character work of the year. The show is flawed, the case wasn't that exciting and it took the flashback and interrogation room form as well as some spectacular directing to tie us over while the show built its foundation, but there was some really fascinating work under the surface. It's a show that missed the boat on the cable antihero era and therefore seems a little tired, but there's something new and different about it nonetheless.

5. The Americans
This is, bar none, the most morally complex show on television right now. There is no other show that is so dedicated to making us care, and care deeply, about people who routinely kill and ruin the lives of innocent people as part of their daily life. It is committed to showing the toll it takes on them, and the acting of those characters is fantastic. And this season, by centring the season so much around Phillip and Elizabeth's children, it turns that around. It puts a new set of innocents in the path of the wreckage of their jobs, but this time it's innocents that they love more than anyone else in the world. Choosing their undercover life fighting for a theoretical sense of patriotism and right and pitting that up against the things that affect them on a more real and emotional level was a brilliant play for this show and paid major dividends.

I just wish I could feel the show like some of its biggest proponents can. It's just that Phillip and Elizabeth are just so far misguided and so inhuman at times that I just can't drum up the empathy for them that I need for this show to fully succeed and take me through the slower stretches. The good episodes of the show are fantastic, but there are enough dragging ones that I simply can't justify putting it higher, especially since I'm so much more invested in the main characters of these four shows above it.

4. Hannibal
At this point, there's not much left to say about Hannibal that hasn't already been said. The number 1 show at the AV Club, with a finale that I would consider probably the best episode of television this year, the psychological dance between Hannibal and Will Graham this year was nothing short of a masterpiece. The way Will embraced his darker side to lure Hannibal in to ultimately trap and catch him was both brilliant and tragic to watch, as Will struggled with the difficulties of empathizing with serial killers like never before. And that finale left everyone, including the viewer, as an absolute wreck. A fantastic season of a fantastic show, one I'm not sure of how it continues to exist, but we get a Season 3 and I couldn't be happier.  And I almost forgot to mention the best cinematography on TV.

3. Rectify
As far as concepts for a television show go, there are few that have as much depth and complexity as a man getting off of death row 19 years after being convicted as a 16 year old, and having to find his place back in the world again. There's something so bittersweet about the show, a sense of joy and loss mingled with one another, forcing you to put yourself in Daniel's shoes and feel along with him. And the show lives up to that concept, as Daniel's character is even more than you expect. This season, he's shown to be just weird enough and off-kilter enough that you wonder whether his time in prison completely distorted a normal human, or whether he was already a weird dude and death row just exacerbated the problem. And if it's the latter, was he strange enough that he did commit the crime he was convicted of?

I've heard many say that it's not important whether Daniel committed the crime or not, but I disagree. Learning whether Daniel is capable of murdering his girlfriend is essential to learning who Daniel is, and what kind of person he is. And that is ultimately what the show is about. And it's so intellectually and emotionally stimulating to try and parse that out.

The show does very well with its supporting characters such as Ted and Amantha as well. It manages to make them both off-putting and downright unlikable at times while still maintaining their basic humanity. This is something many shows struggle to do with their main characters, much less their supporting ones.

Ultimately, this could have been my number one show this year if it had been a little tighter. The expanded 10 episode order this year meant it spent a little too much time with "Lezlie with a z" for my liking. But the highs were so high, and the finale was so good, that even disregarding the premise that is tailor-made for my TV sensibilities, this show fully earns this spot on the list.

2. Mad Men
I'll talk more about what makes Mad Men so great near the premiere of the final stretch of episodes, but suffice to say that it's a show that manages to cover the broadest range of topics with the most depth. After spending the last two years very invested in the societal changes of the 60s, this half season it dug deep into the technological changes that were on the horizon. It made the visionary of the show, Jim Cutler, into the primary antagonist and ended up with the two obsolete members of the agency dominated the final episode. And the fact that it had the men of past winning a victory over the ways of the future in the end showed how subversive and unique Mad Men can be. Plus, thematic material aside, those last two episodes were great and fully showed off possibly the best cast of characters on television. I thought this was a down year for the show. Yet it's still the show, and wasn't going to drop any lower than this.

1. Orange is the New Black
This has everything you could possibly want in a television show. It has the highest quantity of great characters anywhere, and makes you care about every single one of them (that aren't complete sociopaths). It tells diverse types of stories with a diverse cast, incorporating the experiences of people from all classes, races and religions. It can be hilarious, enough that many consider it to be a comedy. It highlights flaws in society, particularly the prison system. It's centred around women, something traditionally under-represented on TV. It points the finger at privilege, and makes the least likable and most out of touch character the one that is most similar to the majority of the audience (that would be our good friend Jason Biggs). It does standalone episode arcs, and they are brilliant. It does season long episode arcs, and they are brilliant. It incorporates flashbacks in ways that add to the characters without protruding too much into the main story.

In my mind, this year of Orange is the New Black was pretty much perfect in every way and I couldn't be happier to have it as my number 1 show of 2014. I'm honestly surprised that it is not the consensus choice for best current television show (or whatever) of people everywhere, that is how good I think this show is. If you haven't seen it, do whatever you need to watch it. It is amazing.

The Personality of a Killer - On Serial and The Killing Season 4

*The following has minor spoilers for Serial and major spoilers for Season 4 of The Killing. It does not assume you’ve seen/heard either of these, so if you don’t plan on watching The Killing, or don’t particularly care about spoilers, you should be fine.

Over the past couple of months, Serial has quickly become the most famous podcast ever to pod. It’s the relaying of the results of a real investigation by reporter Sarah Koenig into the murder of a girl named Hae Min Lee, and specifically whether the convicted ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed actually committed the murder. The first half of the episodes of the podcast were focussed almost entirely on the evidence Koenig had collected about the case, and parcelling it out in a natural form that arrested the reader and made them care about the results.

The podcast took a turn near the end of episode 6, “The Case against Adnan Syed.” Sarah had just finished laying out all the evidence that had accumulated against Adnan, and then her thoughts turned a different way. She wonders aloud how someone who acted like Adnan, and spoke to her like Adnan could be capable of this murder. But she also wondered if she was just being manipulated. The story has progressed in a similar vein ever since then, focussing on people and behaviours rather than hard evidence, because it seems the hard evidence for the case has pretty well dried up. It has become no less fascinating through this stretch, though.

Through this whole process, the listener had the opportunity to hear many parts of Koenig’s taped interviews with Adnan. And he literally says all the right things. With everything he says, my immediate reaction is “How can someone who had committed apparent cold-blooded murder speak like this?” But it’s not just how he speaks; it’s listening to how those who were in contact with him, both before and after the murder. He’s always presented by everyone as kind and caring and gentle, even by those who think he committed the murder. Anyone in contact with him says he was not overly upset about the breakup with Hae Min Lee, at least externally. This breakup was said by the prosecution to be the driving motive for him to commit murder.

Yet the hard evidence points to him, and it pointed to him enough that he was able to get convicted. And while I don’t believe that he should have been convicted, that there are more than enough problems with the prosecution’s case that there is reasonable doubt, if you asked me at gunpoint, I would say that Adnan Syed killed Hae Min Lee.

This seems so simple. You can’t trust personality evaluations when looking at murders. People who seem like outstanding citizens have committed them to the shock of everyone around. I know of these stories, you know of these stories. However, to this point, I’ve never had such an in depth look at a real person accused of murder that really doesn’t seem like the type. And it messes with your head badly. Adnan Syed is not a trained actor; he should not be able to pull off the role of the innocent victim of circumstance as well as he’s pulled it off. And that’s not only 32 year old Adnan who is speaking to Koenig and to the audience from his jail cell, but 17 year old Adnan was doing the same charming innocent victim bit back them. The judge at sentencing accused him of manipulating through his charm. It just doesn’t seem likely that the things Adnan says, and the way he acts both then and now are the actions of a perfectly rehearsed psychopath, or even the actions of someone who let their emotions run away with them to such a degree that they committed murder. This person committing murder seems like something off a TV show.

The Killing is an interesting place to turn when looking at Serial. It was one of the first television shows to try to pull off the “one case over a season of episodes”, a format Serial is sort of piggybacking off of. I watched Season 4 recently. The conclusion of the matter is the detectives find out that a son was moved into a trancelike state by his peers at his military school and convinced to kill his parents. He kills them and the rest of his family, including his young sister. Afterwards, he attempts to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, but fails, and the impact of the bullet wound causes him to experience amnesia and forget the whole event.

It’s not a great season of television, and the case isn’t particularly groundbreaking, though it does have a nice hook to it. It has a cool roundabout narrative, where suspicion is initially on the son (Kyle), moved off of him for a while, before finally landing back at the place where they started, that the initial suspicion was correct. But the writers are very careful to make it seem that Kyle was not capable of murder, and they get to work on that almost from the moment he wakes up out of his coma.

There’s one scene in particular where the lead detective takes Kyle back to the house where the murders were committed. It’s a very emotionally charged moment, as Kyle immediately throws up upon seeing the blood stains and being walked through exactly what happened. He’s not in the role of the charming sociopath, he’s in the role of the normal person who doesn’t understand how he could have done something like this. There’s one point where the detective asks him point blank whether he could have killed his younger sister, even if it were possible with his parents, and Kyle says no, and there’s no doubt at all that he means it. There is no acting about it.

The writers of The Killing are positing that people who seem normal and grounded are capable of terrible things if they snap the wrong way, things they themselves wouldn’t have been capable of, and there have been real cases that have indicated that to be true. There’s no such thing as the personality of a killer, they can manifest many different faces to the public eye.

This is what is messing with my head so badly about Serial. Emotionally removed, and ignoring everything said by or about Adnan, he seems like the killer. And there’s ample reason to ignore all that stuff. There’s many times where you simply cannot tell someone is a killer by the way they act before or after an incident. But I’m wondering if TV is influencing me the wrong way in this regard. How many people are really like Hannibal Lecter, the charming sociopath? Or like Kyle, the normal kid who snapped? Maybe TV is making me think these types of things are way more common than they actually are. Maybe I should be paying more attention to the character references, both from my instincts from listening to him talk and the way the people around him refer to him. Maybe people just aren’t as good as acting as TV, which is built for dramatic purposes, makes you believe.

I’m stuck. I’m reluctant to see Adnan as a manipulative psychopath, because that seems such a rare and extraordinary thing to me that he would distribute absolutely no other signs of that to anyone. Is he a version of Kyle, someone normal who suddenly snapped on the person who broke up with him, and is just fighting hard to maintain his innocence because he can’t bear to see people think of him that way? Maybe, but how was he able to maintain so calm and collected between the breakup and the murder if it made him angry to that degree? Is he innocent? The facts just don’t seem to back that up.

How much can you know about a person, or believe about a person based on what they present to the public? TV and other fictional literature tell me you can believe very little, but they have an agenda of trying to be dramatically satisfying. There’s special real life cases that tell me you can believe very little, but they are special cases for a reason. Ultimately, I just don’t know, and that’s going to bother me. By far the most interesting thing about Serial is that it is real life, and real life is confusing and messy. 

Breaking Bad 2.02 - Grilled

Pre-Credits Sequence

Chaos. That's what Walt brings to the table throughout the series. When it comes down to it, Walt's position as an agent of chaos is probably his most surprising trait given what we know about him early on in the series. He seems to be the type who prefers things neat and orderly, yet he's constantly the one throwing things into complete disarray.

Now, most of the disarray in the pre-credit sequence isn't caused by Walt. Apparently Tuco is a hoarder of some really weird stuff. But there's the bouncing car with the bullet holes, and that's the true symbol of what happened here. Interestingly, even though we don't see any people in this scene, Hank, Walt, Jesse and dead Tuco are still around, as the end of the episode shows the car stops bouncing before anyone leaves.

Review

Breaking Bad is the best show I have ever seen at creating tension, and making that tension stick. A lot of the time, shows can have very tense moments while you are watching, but afterwards, when the more rational part of your brain kicks in and the more emotional part of your brain kicks out, the tension you felt fades away. "Grilled" shows the template Breaking Bad uses throughout the series to create that tension. They use memorable images and sounds, so you always have that reminder of the tension you felt. But most importantly, Breaking Bad understands that tension comes from unpredictability.

Most shows simply don't give themselves much room for possible resolutions to the conflicts created. The stakes are often life or death for the main characters, and since the show has to continue, there's no doubt which way things are going to go. The brilliant thing about this episode is that there is a possibility of a third option, an option which would allow the show to keep its actors employed, but is still enough of a deterrent to the characters that the viewers don't want to see it happen. The threat from Tuco is not to kill Walt and Jesse, or at least that's not the direct threat, the threat is to ship them off to Mexico so they can cook in a lab they have built there. What makes it terrifying for the viewer is that there is no reason that the show can't go there, as it is always a possibility that the show can do two or three episodes with Walt and Jesse kidnapped, working for a mad man who could kill them at any time, and looking for a way to escape. The threat is real, which is more than can be said for what passes as tension on most TV shows these days.

Further, the show has gotten to the point where it can endanger some of its cast members. It's become well known now that if the writer's strike that shortened season 1 did not occur, Vince Gilligan and company had planned to kill off Jesse. The viewer may not have known it at the time, but the threat to Jesse's life in this episode was real, and it was always a potential scenario for the show. There's another instance where Tuco is going through Walt's wallet and pulls out a picture of his family. No real threat is made, but the tone of Tuco's voice and the menace he has makes it clear that Walt's family is not safe either. These are real potential results, and though the show doesn't follow through with any of them here, it will eventually make it clear that it's not fooling around, no one is safe. And establishing that in the back half of season 5 is what makes the home stretch of the show so fascinating.

The scene that makes this episode in particular, though, is Uncle Tio's bell. It seems like it's something played as a joke first. Tuco has his decrepit uncle hanging out at his hideout who communicates with a bell. But does the show ever use that. It soon becomes clear that Tio has more control of his faculties than previously realized, and the only thing that stands between Walt and Jesse and a swift death is Tuco's ability to translate the ding of the bell. The most terrifying scene in the episode is right when the viewer realizes that Tuco and Tio have a system for communicating, and the effort to slip Tuco the ricin cannot stay a secret for long. Further, you don't only have the bell, you have Tio's face. I could really mention almost every actor who plays a minor character in this series, but holy crap does Mark Margolis ever make a meal out of a role with strict limitations. He has no way of speaking, he only has a narrow range of expressions he can use due to Tio's inability to really move his face, but he makes the most out of those expressions. His death stare to Walt and Jesse here is something to behold. It conveys pure hatred, yet he still leaves something in reserve to top that expression when Gus declares that he has killed his last remaining male heir in "Crawl Space." It's masterful work from one of the most memorable characters in the series.

As far as convoluted Walt and Jesse escapes go, this is one of the more straight forward ones in the series. Like always, they manage to dig their own hole by screwing up royally. Jesse can be such an idiot at times, and this episode he may be at his most idiotic. He tries way too hard to get Tuco to try the poisoned meth, mentioning chili powder as a secret ingredient. The whole reason Tuco liked their meth in the first place was the purity of the high, did he really think putting chili powder in it would make him more likely to try it right there? It put Walt and Jesse into scramble mode immediately. Poisoning the burrito was a good plan, but of course Tio was there to screw that up. After all that it is kind of amazing that they were eventually able to scramble their way into getting the upper hand, mostly through the pure craziness of just trying to attack him.

But in getting that upper hand, Walt and Jesse show us something else, something that shows it's still early days in the series for Walt, but establishes a continuing pattern for Jesse. They have Tuco writhing on the ground, bleeding out, and neither of them is able to shoot him. Walt has killed previously, but it's clear that this isn't something that comes easy to him. However, forcing himself to watch Jane die in "Phoenix" and killing Gus's henchmen in "Half Measures" shows that circumstances can force him to get over that bridge. And while he very seldom pulls the trigger himself, Walt  has no qualms about someone dying if they need to die. Jesse has those qualms. He can't shoot Tuco either, and when he does have to finally shoot Gale in "Full Measures" it sends him into a complete tailspin. Jesse is just not the person who is cut out for the stuff that being in business with Walt forces him to do.

The structure of this episode is something to behold. After the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode, where Jesse and Walt are kidnapped by Tuco, we don't see either of them for 10 minutes. We spend the early portion of the episode with Skylar and her attempts to find Walt. Then, we finally see Tuco, but he's by himself. He's smoking a cigarette and overlooking the scenery. Then finally, he moves over to the trunk, opens it, and we finally see Walt and Jesse shoved in there before cutting to a commercial break. From that point on, the only time we spend away from the action at Tuco's hangout is to lead us to the finale, all the other scenes are about how Hank comes to find Jesse's car and end up in the shootout with Tuco.

There's something to be said for an episode that's perfectly structured but doesn't call attention to itself. There's nothing special or extraordinary about the structure of this episode; this isn't a very special episode of Breaking Bad. Instead it just does a fair job of building tension, starting the episode off with Skylar's search, a place with no danger or real stakes, and slowly building towards the confrontation at the end.

Skylar herself has possibly her best episode of the series to this point. We desperately needed to see Skylar competent at something, to give her character more depth than being the nagging wife who tries to override her husband's wishes. And this episode gives us that. Skylar does a really good job searching for Walt. She checks the credit cards, she gets the posters ready. She covers pretty much all the bases, and throughout it all she's able to maintain a calm demeanor and keep her mind on the task at hand. Skylar is a competent person, and her business acumen and attention to detail makes her valuable to Walt's organization throughout seasons 3 through 5.  It would have been nice if we could have seen this side of her sooner, but better late than never.

Hank and Marie keep trending in the same direction they were previous to this episode. Hank gets to be non-confrontational again, trying to ease Skylar into the idea of the Walt's second cellphone in a way that won't make Skylar blow up in his face. But for all his bluster, he actually proves to be good at his job, tracking down Jesse's car, and then not being too surprised to stumble onto Tuco to compromise his ability to deal with him. Marie is obnoxious this episode, just blurting out the grenade about the second cellphone, and using "at least Walt hasn't turned up dead" as her form of consolation to Skylar. Marie has a long way to go in the series, and she takes her time getting there. It basically takes Hank's injury in season 3 to put Marie in a sympathetic enough role that the viewer can finally start to tolerate her. Fortunately, she grows as a character from that point forward.

"Grilled" shows Breaking Bad to be a masterclass at tension. It has real stakes and unpredictability, and it creates images to make the tension stick. It is structured perfectly to build the tension over the episode, but it doesn't skimp on giving any of the characters development, whether it be Jesse, Walt or Skylar. This episode is really the start of Breaking Bad as we know it, and all the foundations of greatness are clearly visible.

Other Notes:

-Tuco's reference to the Mexican cartel and specifically "his cousins" is a nice setup for the start of Season 3
- I'm not a big fan of Walt having to lay out to Jesse exactly why they are in trouble if Tuco finds out that Gonzo is dead. The viewers are smart enough to figure that out on their own.
- The music over the closing credits is fantastic. You have a Mexican style version of the Breaking Bad theme, with Tio's bell intermixing in. It leaves the viewer with that sense of terror that Tio's bell had begun to conjure up by the end of the episode.

I'm Still Here, I Promise

Hi everyone,

It's been a while, and I have no real new posts ready to go, so I wanted to let you know I'm still here, and there's new stuff on the horizon. Coming in the next month or so:

"Grilled" review: This one is about half written, and it's pretty much certain to be my longest review yet. I've had to back off of it in the last week because I became crazy busy.

Review of The Sopranos Season 5: ie - the season that is both by far the best season of The Sopranos as well as the one that has given me no real enthusiasm for continuing. I'll explain.

Year End Top 10 list: At my current TV watching rate, this may be the last year I watch enough shows to create a real top 10 list, so it may be a monumental event.

Walking Dead Midseason Review: I still have 4 episodes to watch, so I have no idea what form this review is going to take. Suffice to say, a lot of high profile critics have suddenly jumped on the bandwagon for this show. I sort of get why, but I still think they were missing a lot of what the show had done best that's kind of disappeared under Gimple's reign.

Update: If you have any other suggestions for posts, feel free to suggest in the comments. I should have made it so that everyone can comment with no need for an account of some type.

The Highs and Lows of The Walking Dead

The following article contains spoilers for the first 4 seasons of The Walking Dead.

The journey of The Walking Dead has been a curious one. It is the most popular scripted show on television, and has been for many years now. It could easily sit back and focus solely on giving the audience the zombie action they clearly want and keep the plots and themes simple and the characters as ciphers. But it hasn’t done that. I would argue that no other show on TV is more committed to fixing its problems than The Walking Dead. Yet, for all its constant tinkering, and changing showrunners over “creative differences,” it hasn’t actually gotten any better over the years. So as we stand on the precipice of a new season, once again thinking that the show is on the cusp of becoming the show it has always had potential to be, let’s reflect on the journey of the show.

Season 1 arrived with a bang. I still consider the pilot of the show to be one of the great pilots, if not the greatest pilot, of the last 5 years. It was perfectly paced, focusing on Rick’s slow realization that something very wrong was going on. Its character interactions between Rick and Morgan are to this day some of the best dialogue the show has produced. It has an extremely touching moment after Rick leaves towards Atlanta, where Morgan takes one of Rick’s guns and just mows down the zombies, trying to bring himself to finally shoot his wife’s living corpse and let go of the fact that she’s not coming back. It hit on the main theme of zombies; the dead are right there in front of you, walking, symbolizing the idea of loss, and how when you lose someone they never actually leave. They continue to stand outside your door, haunting you. It made full use of the symbol of change, and the need to let go the life you had that may seem better, the days gone bye, and instead focus on the life that is in front of you. It looked like the start of a classic show, possibly the start of the defining genre show of the era of television.

That show never materialized. The rest of the first season was concerned with the idea of lost hope and crushing any inkling that there is still a chance things could be like they were, but never really fleshed out the point. The characters introduced after the pilot were either bland, cartoonish, or annoying, and not once was the show able to develop that same depth it found with Morgan with any of the rest of the cast. The show stayed popular because it was able to satisfy on a visceral level, there were people covering themselves with zombie guts and shootouts between warring groups. There was an attack on the survivor camp that led to deaths that should have had emotional resonance but fell flat. There was a trip to the CDC and a scientist who lost his wife searching for a cure. There was a theoretically interesting moral conundrum of whether to keep living in a world that will never be the world that was or to just let go, and let things end. And while the thematic material was interesting on the surface, the show just never was able to generate the character depth to bring emotional stakes to what was happening. And though the show remained interesting and satisfying on a visceral zombie attack level, though the direction and music choices were often great and though the show was able to find its own voice and style, it was failing at the most important of all aspects of a TV show: make interesting characters. Because for a TV show to sustain itself, it needs to be able to slow down from time to time and focus on the people in it. If there are no people that anyone cares about, it simply isn’t going to fly.

The slowdown came in Season 2. Season 2 is the most reviled of the seasons of The Walking Dead, and I think that is an unfair evaluation. In fact, I would probably argue that on the whole, Season 2 is the best season of the show. The problem is, that unlike other seasons, the bad episodes are all centred in one spot, namely episodes 4, 5 and 6. And even then, episode 4, “Cherokee Rose,” is the only one that’s a complete disaster. The problem is that these episodes all had the same major weakness: nothing was happening, and the characters weren’t developed enough to make up for it. And three straight episodes of nothing happening on a show that the pilot had primed people to expect to be great are enough to turn people against the show.

This is where the showrunner switches start to come into play. There is no evidence in the 1.5 seasons of The Walking Dead that Frank Darabont had any idea how to properly structure a TV show. We know Darabont can create great movies. The Shawshank Redemption is considered one of the great movies of all time and The Green Mile is no slouch either. And the pilot of The Walking Dead basically acted as a movie with an hour and a half running length. And it was great. The problem is that there are only two episodes that Darabont was involved with afterwards that are top tier episodes of the show, and they were both written by far and away the show’s best writer (and soon to be showrunner), Scott M. Gimple. “Save the Last One” is the best episode about Shane, portraying him as either the only character who realized the type of things you need to do to survive, or a maniac obsessed with Rick’s wife. The show would start to lean towards the latter with him in particular, but since his attitude and actions started to become commonplace among more sympathetic characters over the course of the series, the episode stands as a landmark for the show. “Pretty Much Dead Already,” the last episode Darabont was associated with the show for is great for one set piece. Shane and company release the zombies Herschel kept in his barn while Rick’s group fires away at them, killing the zombie who was Herschel’s wife and family in the process, when out walks Sophia, the girl they had been searching for to that point. Watching Herschel and then Carol’s grief was entrancing, and to this day is probably the best setpiece the show has ever done.

The rest of Season 2 is decent, a fact which is often forgotten when the season is evaluated in hindsight. It stays on the farm, yes, but is centred around a growing resentment between the mercenary attitude of Shane and the desire for civilization of Dale. In the end, both extremes are eliminated, leaving the group at a crossroads. There’s no room in the world that they live in for Dale’s, people who are wholly selfless and empathetic. But do they need to become copies of Shane to survive? It’s a point that Darabont’s successor, Glen Mazzara, is very concerned with in his term on the show.

In fact, Mazzara is so concerned with this and Rick’s moral state that he adapts the Governor as a mirror of Rick rather than outright making him the lunatic he is in the comics. He wants to make the Governor the funhouse mirror version of Rick, someone who is initially so concerned with protecting his people that he’s willing to destroy anyone else’s people that get in the way. In fact, the point made in the 3^rd season, and why I was one of the few who found the finale effective, is it presented the solution of the matter as Rick discovering that there is no dividing line between “our people” and “your people”. There are just people. The Governor wasn’t the real villain of Season 3, and that was why he wasn’t killed in the finale but instead revealed to be the insane person he was. The possibility of Rick becoming the governor was the real threat, and that threat was overcome.

It’s exciting thematic stuff, and that’s why ultimately I point to the Mazzara era as my favourite section of the show. However, the show clearly still had problems, and big ones at that. The characters still weren’t there as people, they were there as ciphers of whatever thematic material the show wanted to present at the time. Andrea was especially bad, because any development she got in the first two seasons was basically thrown out the window and she became a completely different person in Season 3. Similarly, I could not tell you one notable thing about Glenn except that he liked Maggie, because he tended to adapt to whatever character traits the show needed him to have at the time. The plot remained exciting most of the time, though as the Governor really started to wear thin at the end of Season 3 due to a lack of complexity, the Rick-Governor plotline began to wear thin as well.

After Season 3, Mazzara quit the show because of creative differences, and Scott M. Gimple took over. As previously mentioned, he was the show’s best writer to this point, writing 3 of its top 5 episodes in the aforementioned “Save the Last One” and “Pretty Much Dead Already,” as well as the Season 3 standout, “Clear.” Gimple had two missions: Undo everything Mazzara had done at the end of the third season, and actually get the characters some development. The start of Season 4 was primarily concerned with the former mission, and suffered as a result. At the end of Season 3, a busload of people from the town that the Governor ruled over filed into the prison where Rick and his group were staying. It was the proclamation that all humans are equally important and care must be taken for all of them, even if they’ve fallen into the thrall of an evil dictator. Well, at the beginning of Season 4 those humans were promptly all killed off. There was no one from Woodbury left by the midpoint of the fourth season. Also, the Governor running away was an indication that while the Governor may be gone, the ideals he represents could always be lurking behind any corner. Well, the Governor was brought back for three terrible episodes (though “Live Bait” and “Dead Weight” were only terrible in hindsight, “Too Far Gone” is by far the worst episode the show has ever done) and killed off real good this time. Then, after Rick had received this epiphany that he can’t be the Governor, his season 4 arc is about spinning him back towards the person who realizes he needs to kill and be animalistic at times to survive in this world, basically rendering his season 3 arc worthless. It was an unfortunate schizophrenic turn thematically for a show that had been excellent on that front to that point.

But in character work, Gimple and crew did much better in Season 4. Carol had an excellent arc in season 4, culminating in the divisive, but for me, classic Gimple penned episode “The Grove.” Carl had a very nice character episode in “After,” taking him from a character I was pretty lukewarm on and making him to one of the ones I care most about. We got to actually learn something about people like Beth, and Bob and Sasha. Tyreese had a very nice season. Herschel probably had the best individual character episode in “Internment,” a nice wrap up to his arc on the show before getting beheaded in the midseason finale. The plot definitely suffered to try to get these characters depth and to make them into real people, but it was a necessary suffering. And unlike the plot-light arc at the beginning of Season 2, the time spent with them separated and developing their own stories looks like it will be very beneficial to the show long term.

So Season 5 in a way may be the last chance for The Walking Dead to actually become a quality show. For the first time in the show’s history, we have a foundation for all the characters. We have a showrunner already signed on to another season after this, which means there is a clear vision of how the show is going to proceed, and it is the vision of the show’s best writer. The leftovers from the Mazzara era are cleared out, so there will be no more sudden turnarounds to get rid of things that Gimple was unhappy with from Season 3. I do worry that the show will suffer thematically, as Gimple doesn’t seem to have as good a grasp of that aspect of this show, but better and more rounded characters more than makes up for that. As soon as Gimple gets his plot train rolling, it’s perfectly possible he can take this show to new heights.

Or maybe he won’t. This is The Walking Dead after all, a show that makes its living on squashing the hopes and dreams of its characters over and over and over again. It only makes sense that it keeps doing the same to the viewer as well.

Breaking Bad 2.01 - Seven Thirty-Seven

Pre-Credit Sequence

Breaking Bad decides to give us an eyeball floating in a pool to open the season. In hindsight, we can tell the eyeball stands in judgment of Walt for his actions. It's not a coincidence that the plane crash in "ABQ" is caused as a direct consequence of Walt's worst moment in the season, and for quite a while his worst moment in the series. If Season 1 was all about Walt's decision, then Season 2 is all about Walt facing the consequences caused by that decision. I'm not just talking about the plane crash at the end of the season, though that is what forces Walt to momentarily quit in "No Mas", but consequences are strewn throughout the season. The teddy bear introduces that theme by showing the final result.

Review

The first episode of Season 2 presents us with a curious conundrum: How do you start up a new season without having really finished the last one? While I argued in my review of "A No Rough Stuff Type Deal" that Season 1 works as a particular character arc for Walt, from a plot perspective it left us completely hanging.  So, how do you form an arc for a season when you are forced to open mid-thought?

"Seven Thirty-Seven" bypasses the idea of forming an arc for the season in this episode. Instead, it focuses on forming the main underlying arc for the rest of the series: the DEA's hunt for Heisenberg.  Hank's dramatically ironic search for his own brother-in-law forms the backbone of the entire series. Even though the final showdown and payoff doesn't actually happen until the last half of the final season, even though there is always much more pressing matters for Walt to deal with, Hank looking for Walt dwells in the background of the series like that pit dwelling in your stomach. And even though there is no doubt from the onset that this plotline is of utmost importance to the series as a whole, it is introduced in a completely unassuming way, played more for humour than anything else.

This is only fitting, because a humorous side point was how Hank himself was introduced to us, and it is only in this episode we begin to get a real grasp of who he is. For me, the most notable scene in this episode is the scene where he's talking to Skylar about Marie's problems. For Skylar, it is another negative scene piled up on top of all the others she has received to this point. It is hard for the viewers to sympathize with Skylar's issue, when Walt is dealing with a life threatening mad man at the same time. It is hard for the viewer to accept Skylar's complaints about Marie's kleptomania when Hank is taking it all in stride. On the other hand, the writers do a very good job with Hank in this scene. He clearly is the type of guy who has trouble just going out and stating something confrontational, and instead relies on crude jokes and metaphors to get his point across. We saw that in that terrible plotline in "And the Bag's In the River", where instead of just confronting Walt Jr. about the weed he and Marie thought Jr. was smoking, instead went on a roundabout mission to show him the dangers of drugs. We saw it again in "Grey Matter", where in the intervention for Walt he framed his whole argument in a baseball metaphor. In this scene, he starts talking in roundabout, crude language until eventually we see him snap out of that and start being very straight with Skylar.

This is how things work for people who like to avoid confrontational conversations. It's not that they never say anything of importance, it's that they need to get to the point where they're comfortable saying what's on their mind. That is exactly what happens with Hank in this scene and what we will see from him in the rest of the series.

Turning to humour is clearly how he deals with his job, as well. The scene at the scrap yard is grisly, as there are two dead bodies: one has been mangled by Tuco, and the other done in by a scrap pile moving at the wrong time. Yet instead of cringing, Hank finds reason to laugh at it. Hank's dark sense of humour permeates through the entire episode. There's a playfulness at work in the irony at the end of the episode, when Jesse and Walt are put in fear of their lives by a complete coincidence. The show finds a sort of a sadistic streak when it has Walt too busy fearing for his life to take a phone call from Hank; a phone call that would assuage his worries considerably. The episode is laughing at the horror occurring, just as Hank laughs at the bumbling criminals who are going to introduce literal tons of meth into the community and as he laughs at the misfortune of Tuco's dead lackeys.

The main story has less of note to discuss, as this episode basically acts as a middle episode in a three part story. We had the build-up in "A No Rough Stuff Type Deal," where Walt's addictive tendencies put him and Jesse in a precarious position with a madman boss, and next week we have the conclusion in "Grilled", where they finally deal with said boss. This episode acts as the moving pieces episode, where we have to take Walt and Jesse from the point where they realize the danger to the point where they deal with the danger. As such, it's a little bit of a lighter episode in terms of material for our protagonists.

There are still a few interesting scenes to explore, though. The first is Walt's near rape of Skylar. This is taking his newfound knowledge that he can break any boundaries he desires to its tipping point. Walt had become addicted to danger, yes, but more than that he became addicted to doing those things he previously believed he couldn't. Once he came to the realization that there was nothing preventing him from cooking meth, he realized there was nothing preventing him from breaking into a chemical facility, he realized there was nothing preventing him from having sex with his wife in the back of her car, and eventually he realized there was nothing preventing him from having sex with her wherever and whenever he wanted. This moment acts as kind of the peak of that attitude, and works as kind of slap in the face to Walt to show him that there are still boundaries. Those boundaries are just wider than he previously thought. After this, he becomes less impulsive and more calculated in the risks he takes for the most part, though this caution does continue to have a tendency to break down under great stress, such as when he goes after Gus with a gun in "Thirty-Eight Snub."

Meanwhile, we see our most clear picture that Jesse is not cut out for the criminal lifestyle. When trying to indicate how to take out Tuco, he shows that he isn't able to fully visualize killing a person. His plan is brought forward in broad strokes, taken more from someone who has watched movies than someone who can immerse himself fully in the mind of a murderer. His inability to operate the gun only adds the naivety he shows. He understands on a rational level that Tuco needs to be killed, but the thought of actually killing him repulses him enough that he's not willing to put the required thought into it.

"Seven Thirty-Seven" doesn't stand on its own as an episode nearly as well as the great episodes of Breaking Bad, but serves two important functions. It starts the DEA arc of the show, and properly balances the tone of the humour centred Hank with the terror that is occurring in the other sections of the show. It also reinforces some deep seated character traits that are beginning to become manifest: Hank using metaphor and humour to cover up a desire to avoid darker conversations, Walt reaching a breaking point with his addiction to rule breaking, and the innocence and emotion of Jesse contrasted with the ruthlessness he requires in his situation.

Other Thoughts

- It is an interesting decision to begin this episode before the last one ended, and repeat that final scene. It must have been really tough on the director to get the lighting for this scene the same as it had been at the end of the last season

- Speaking of the director, it's the first episode directed by Bryan Cranston himself, which probably explains why the episode is a little lighter on Walt

-A lot of those weird camera angles are used in the initial scene after the beat down of Tuco's lackey, looking at both Tuco and Heisenberg from the perspective of the ground. In this case, I found those angles distracting

-The kid with the remote control car Marie drives over has a little bit of a Drew Sharp feel to him, no?

-First mention of the ricin, which though is only ever used once, and in a slightly anticlimatic fashion, becomes important multiple times

- Foreshadowing for the plotline where Skylar finds out about Walt's second cellphone, as we're given clear indication that Walt has two of them when he tries to figure out which one to answer when called by Hank

- This episode has (arguably) our first major cliffhanger of the series. It will not be the last.

Round-up: Gotham and Sleepy Hollow

Gotham

Gotham premiered last night, and it was generally well received by critics, particularly in comparison to every other new drama. This makes me think it’s not a great year for dramas, because Gotham suffered from some really sloppy writing overall. First, the introductions of the villains were heavy handed in every case, from the Penguin who did not yet even remotely resemble a penguin, to the Riddler who Harvey responded to with the grating, “If I wanted riddles, I would read the funny pages.” Further, insisting on calling Mario Pepper an innocent who Harvey and Jim would be in trouble for killing was ridiculous, considering the whole “attempt to murder a police officer” basically renders your innocent status kaput.

That said, there’s something unique about a setting where everyone on the police force is crooked except Jim, and the idea of Detective Gordon as a lone crusader for justice. Also, the ending worked for me. The show has a good base, but the writing and in particular the dialogue has to improve for this show to go anywhere.

Sleepy Hollow

At the end of last year, I compared the first season of Sleepy Hollow with the first season of Buffy, where the show can be ridiculous but has a good central grasp of characters. In Season 2, Buffy came back with a character heavy slow moving episode that really detailed what the focus of the show was going to be moving forward. Sleepy Hollow came back with a fast-moving plot heavy premiere that gave almost no one any opportunity to breathe. That was a disappointment, as I don’t watch this show to see the various plot mechanisms.

The early hallucination was clever, as it kind of forced the viewer through the motions of “hallucination…no, time jump…wait, hallucination…HALLUCINATION!” but after that the episode basically became a plot machine. We’ll see whether the show is willing to slow down a little and let the characters bounce off each other and really do their thing.

I’ll check up on these shows occasionally on big episodes, and maybe do a midseason recap for each.

Intro to Breaking Bad Season 1 Reviews

Scott, why are you reviewing Breaking Bad? Hasn't enough been said on it already?

The answer is sort of. One thing that's easy to forget is that Breaking Bad was such a small show in its early going that not a whole lot has been said on the early episodes. In Seasons 1-3, there was nowhere near the amount of analysis on every little scene that there was in the last season. Further, I haven't seen many places really go back and look at what was going on early on in light of what we learned later.

As a result, these reviews are filled with spoilers. I never discourage people from reading along as they watch the show for the first time, because some people (like myself) just don't care that much about getting spoiled, but spoilers are here.

I'm also taking a different angle at the show than most places take. My biggest interest in these reviews is looking at how the show manipulated viewers into being as pro-Walt as they became in the first couple seasons, despite Walt deciding that cooking meth was a good idea, and despite how generally terrible he was to Jesse throughout the series. It was probably the most impressive thing the show did in its run, and while the spectacular acting of Bryan Cranston contributed a lot, the show also made Walt's surroundings such that rooting for Walt was always the best alternative.

So sit back and enjoy, and hopefully I'm able to provide a new perspective on one of the greatest shows of all time.

Breaking Bad 1.01 - Pilot

First impressions are so important. This applies to life, but  I think it applies even more so to our relationships with literary characters. A big goal of literature is to get us to form emotional bonds with the people contained inside, and needs to get that bond formed immediately or risk losing the consumer's interest. Breaking Bad needs you to be sympathetic to Walter White. It needs you to feel that for this pilot to work, and it needs you to feel that for the show to work as a whole. Because once the show gets that sympathy built up, it then conducts an experiment with the viewer. It does whatever it can to try to tear that sympathy down.

We'll monitor closely Walt's behaviour and the intended reactions of the viewer over the course of the season, or entire show if we get there, but in the pilot we are concerned with one thing: how well does it create that sympathy for Walt?

A possible complaint one can have with the set-up of the show is that it is too manipulative. It is not subtle in the slightest to try to portray Walt as a beaten down figure. The benefit of doing this review retrospectively is that I can see how important it is to get this relationship between Walt and the audience formed. The very first we see of him he's pleading with his family as he believes he has seen them for the last time. He's shown as pathetic, possibly in debt, without good health insurance, a pushover. Jesse guesses Walt's age as 10 years older than he actually is, and with that awful caterpillar mustache he looks it. And then comes the kicker. Walt has inoperable lung cancer. That fact forms an instant connection that takes a lot to be broken. When we are introduced to anyone as having cancer, I'm willing to bet we barely ever stop to consider what kind of person they are. They are dying, and that's all there is to it. That person garner's immeasurable sympathy from everyone, no matter what. And it makes it so easy to forgive Walt for his terrible decision to join Jesse and start cooking meth.

That ability to forgive Walt for his original decision is of ultimate importance, here, and the show excels in getting us to do it. We need to have an emotional inlet to this show. If we ditch Walt, if we stop feeling bad for him as he starts to cook, the show is going to fall flat. An external emotionless approach to this show is a much inferior way to watch it. For me, it hooked me like a charm. The show did such a good job making me feel for Walt that even after all he's done I still wanted him to "win" in "Felina <5x16>." I still wanted to him to get the money to his family. I still wanted him to reconcile with Skyler. This all stems from the bond formed in this episode.

The singular focus of this episode works incredibly well for the show as a series, but it also prevents the pilot from being a great episode. The secondary characters are brutally pigeonholed into caricatures. Skyler is the nagging wife, Jesse is the dumb sidekick, Hank is the buffoon brother-in-law, Marie is the awful and blunt sister-in-law. I think there's a bit of intentionality to this, as the show needs to elevate Walt, and an effective way to do that is to deflate everyone around him, but it does make parts of this episode tough. It also hurts any interactions Walt has. The show is great when he's by himself, or even when he's with Jesse, but as soon as Hank or Skyler get prominently involved, it's hard not to cringe. This will get more than rectified over time, but it's a tough bit of characterization to swallow here.

The speech Walt gives about chemistry, and how it's the study of change and transformation is an obvious, but good kickoff to the story Breaking Bad is trying to tell. There's a clever bit of misdirection here that becomes apparent in retrospect though. The change Walt is talking about is not a change within himself, which seems like the obvious foreshadowing, but rather the external changes around him. I firmly believe Walt is the same person when the show begins as when the show ends. But the circumstances he's in, and the people around him, and his external actions as a result of that changes rapidly through the course of the show.

There may not be a better example of that than the scene in the clothing store with Walt Jr. This is such a good scene, as it shows exactly the kind of bravery and even to some degree, ruthlessness Walt is capable of, but keeps him firmly in a sympathetic light. These attempts to run over and demean those he perceives as disempowering him is not a trait that ever goes away. It just rears its head it much uglier forms over the course of the series, such as his disgusting treatment of Gretchen as early as "Peekaboo."

There's other examples of Walt's insecurity, and his spitefulness towards all things that portray him as weak. He rips the Handicap Parking sign off his car mirror because he doesn't want to be seen as handicapped. He downplays his coughing as much as possible, and tries everything he can to prevent himself from going to the hospital. He doesn't tell his family he has terminal lung cancer, just so he doesn't garner that sympathy. Walt wants to be admired, and though he doesn't know it yet, he wants to be feared. This is an interesting contrast to the way the show portrays him and the way it wants viewers to see him. Walt would hate the "Awww...isn't that pathetic middle age man cute?" reaction that he inspires. This aspect of him, the blinding pride he suffers from, is there from the very first episode. It becomes abundantly more clear in "Gray Matter" He is that same man throughout the show. It's his circumstances and relationships that change.

There are two relationships that change significantly over the course of the show, and in both cases, the change is for the worse. The starting point for the relationships is seen in this episode, as well as foreshadowing for how they are going to change. First, there's the obnoxious kid who Walt calls out in the classroom. This boy is supposed to be a proxy for Jesse, and Walt's reaction to him is a mix of superiority and disdain. This is how Walt feels about Jesse throughout the series. There's some foreshadowing in this episode about how the relationship switches, though. Later, when that same kid sees him at the car wash, Walt's the one who is on the ground. This is a preview of the relationship Walt and Jesse have near the end of season 4, when Jesse becomes an essential part of the Fring organization and Walt is on the outs, showing that in all ways that mattered, the student surpassed the master.

The other relationship that changes throughout the series is the relationship between Walt and Skylar. We see that Walt's decision first helps their marriage, a preview that Walt's life of crime is going to introduce more passion into his marriage, as shown by the comparison of the passionate sex scene at the end of the episode compared to the lame birthday handjob scene earlier on. But ultimately, Walt's decision to cook meth will destroy the family. The marriage of Walt and Skylar isn't passionate and isn't inspiring at this stage, but it does appear to be stable and functioning. It's a good environment for their kids to grow up. This quickly switches to passionate and instable very early on, which is not a good tradeoff with kids involved. This will lead to the "divorce" in Season 3, and though Walt moves back in after that, the relationship never recovers.

There are constant directing tricks used to emphasize what the show is trying to do. Breaking Bad routinely has some of the most creative camera angles used in TV. This episode, for instance, has a camera inside a washing machine as Walt tries to dry out money. It has a camera inside and MRI machine looking down at Walt directly followed by a camera looking at the reflection of Walt in a desk. Later in the series, we get a camera imitating the viewpoint of a shovel in one scene, and a Roomba in another. And more subtly, there are constant camera angles looking at Walt (and other characters) from slightly above, or slightly below. The message is clear: we're going to examine Walt from every angle in this series. We're going to look at him as the family man with cancer, as well as the criminal meth cook.

The show also takes pains to be one of the most beautiful shows on TV. The cinematography of the scenery is almost second to none. The show's first scenes are looking at aspects of that quiet and peaceful scenery before we see the RV tearing through. Once again it's Walt that brings the disturbance.

As that disturbance occurs, the lighting and the scenery reflect that. Breaking Bad Season 1 looks nothing like Breaking Bad season 5. The surface lightness of the first two seasons contrast the heaviness of the final season. In terms of aesthetic, I prefer the early seasons. My long-lasting image of Breaking Bad is seeing that RV in the New Mexican desert. But the darkness the direction, lighting and acting switch to completely matches the change in story being told. The externals around Walt do a complete 180, but inside he is exactly the same.

The show presents Walt in the most positive way possible, then asks the viewer to come to terms with who he really is. It is a show of changes, and takes one man and puts him in a sympathetic light, than completely changes his circumstances so the light shining on him becomes unsympathetic. Breaking Bad wants to know how long and how many horrible things it takes to lose sympathy for someone you once had a close connection with. For me, it was a long, long time.

Notes

• Didn't get to talk much about Jesse in the main review, but he has some funny scenes. My favourite: Coming into Crazy8's house wearing the same colours as the dummy the dog is chewing up.
• Walter Jr. is introduced to the show by sitting down for breakfast. There may be a theme establishing.
• Bogdan. Just all things Bogdan.
• Walt's reaction both at the hospital and at the car wash feel like how someone really would react to being diagnosed with cancer
• The Hank/Gomez bet that Gomez actually won, unbeknownst to the two of them
• Walt literally laundering money
• What part of the school year are we in? On the board, there's atomic orbitals (pretty advanced stuff), the speech he gives to the class is like their first day of chemistry, and then Walt gets them to turn to chapter 6 of the textbook.
• Walt's attempted suicide. It didn't really add anything substantial to Walt's character, and it was super contrived that the bullet jammed.

Breaking Bad 1.02 - The Cat's In the Bag

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Breaking Bad 1.03 - ...And the Bag's In the River

This is an episode where taking a retrospective look at the series really comes in handy. We now know with certainty that the murder of Krazy 8 is now the crossing of a moral event horizon for Walt. Before this, Walt is very much restricted by the ideas of right and wrong he had grown up with in his more sheltered lifestyle, but after this he becomes much more pragmatic about his actions. Instead of valuing all human life as equal, he values only the life of the humans he cares about; those within his sphere of influence. That really only includes his extended familly and Jesse. Outside of those people, human life means nothing.

How does a switch like that flip so quickly? Is this common to all humans, that once they break a certain barrier human life no longer has the same meaning to them? Breaking Bad itself says no. Jesse goes into a downward spiral because of the death of strangers twice. Once, when he had to murder Gale, and once after Todd murders Drew Sharp by following the instructions of Walt and Jesse. There's something special about Walt, something that allows him to take that sociopathic attitude required to be the monster he becomes.

The conversations between Walt and Krazy 8 offer some of the best dialogue Breaking Bad has to offer. The acting is top notch, and it makes me sad we don't get to see more of Krazy 8 after this, as the way Max  Arceniega was able to sell the story of him working in his Dad's shop is extremely compelling stuff. That scene doesn't work unless the audience is being sucked into the story as Walt is, and it adds so much more power to the scene where Walt has to kill Krazy 8.

It is tempting to take that conversation, and the desperation of Walt to trust Krazy 8, as evidence that it was circumstance that drove Walt into the man he became. I don't believe that is the  case, because I believe the reaction after the event is more important than the hesistance to perform. I think many of us would have made the same decision Walt did here. I don't think many of us are capable of what Walt does over the next couple of seasons. Walt wrote on his pros/cons list that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he killed Krazy 8, but that was a lie he told himself. Walt has no trouble living with himself after this event. Normal people would struggle greatly with killing a man after the fact, breaking hard and fast rules they live their life by. Walt barely struggles at all.

It comes down to this: Walt is a great rationalizer. That's all it takes. It seems crazy that you can be driven from fairly decent family man to mass murderer simply by being able to rationalize, but that is completely true in this case. Walt goes up to reflect on his action, and ultimately decides that mankind is made up of nothing more than matter. He decides there's no intrinsic value to human life, it's just another lifeform on the planet. As he states to Gretchen in the flashback, "There's just chemistry here." Walt is not able to accept that he has done something awful, he is not able to accept anything other than the absolute highest opinion of himself. This is his ultimate downfall in every way. He simply refuses to accept that it was his decision to cook crystal meth that got two men killed, he instead resorts to the nihilistic view of  life and death being meaningless.

And so, a monster is born. Or rather, a monster is revealed. As I've said before, the traits that made Walt into Heisenberg always existed within him, the series simply reveals them in an ugly way. Over-rationalization can be a terrible thing, arrogance can be a terrible thing, and stubbornness can be a terrible thing if they are given the proper channels to reveal themselves. Krazy 8 says twice that his line of work does not suit Walt. He has no idea how wrong about that he is.

From the perspective of the viewer, we are still given every reason to be on Walt's side. The show has done a bit of a clever job to this point glossing over what a terrible decision it is to cook meth as a solution for dealing with your own mortality. From our perspective, Walt has had very few choices to this point. He had to kill Krazy 8 because Krazy 8 was ready to attack him with the plate shard. He's had to lie to Skylar because Skylar just wouldn't understand the burden he is putting on the family with his cancer and he needs to take advantage of his considerable chemistry skills to offset that. He needs to yell at Jesse and demean him because Jesse is a drug addict and an idiot who tells a murderous drug dealer both Walt's name and details about his life.

Related to this, if there's one part of the show I'm not on board with, it's the sabotaging of its secondary characters to make Walt look good. The B-plot in this episode, the misinterpretation of the Schraeder family that Walter Jr. is smoking pot is cringeworthy on quite a few levels. First of all, from a personal standpoint I can't stand to watch plotlines like this. To me scenes like the one in the seedy motel parking lot where Hank is trying to curb Walter Jr. off weed is unbearable. The only way that scene works if it is funny. Maybe my sense of humour is a little out of calibration, but that just wasn't funny. Secondly, this plotline makes both Marie and Skylar look terrible. Marie is nosy, loudmouthed, and a kleptomaniac, where Skylar is controlling. Skylar doesn't even let Walter Jr say "Yo!" Maybe it's trying to connect to Skylar's disdain for  Jesse Pinkman types, but come on! Further, Skylar is easily perceived by the viewer as inconsiderate to Walt. At this point, very early in its run, the show is purposely tearing down it's support characters in the eyes of the viewer to build Walt up. It needs the viewer to stay sympathetic to Walt's plight as long as possible or it loses the viewer's interest. I understand this, I just wish it could have done so in a way that doesn't cause us to dislike all its support characters in the early going.

In my mind, if a show is to be a success it needs solid male and female characters. At this point of the show, it seems incapable of making a good female character. Fortunately, the show goes on to prove that it's problematic treatment of its females was mostly a mirage, and Skylar and Marie get to become way more sympathetic by the end.

This episode presents both the best and worst of season 1. The scenes between Walt and Krazy 8 as well as its aftermath shows some of the best stuff Breaking Bad has to offer. The B plot with Skylar and Marie shows that Breaking Bad still has some distance to go before it can really break barriers and be one of the best shows to ever air on television.

Notes

• Camera work in the opening scene where Walt and Jesse are cleaning the remains of the dissolved body is really cool
• Walt handing the second beer to Krazy 8 rather than rolling it to him is a nice indication that Walt is intentionally deluding himself
• The plate puzzle with the missing piece is one of Breaking Bad's most memorable images
• Why does Krazy 8 reach for his plate shard before he's untied? If you want to make Walt suspicious, that seems like an excellent way to do it.
• No Walt Jr. eating breakfast this time. What a disappointment

Breaking Bad 1.04 - Cancer Man

One of the remarkable things about Breaking Bad is its consistency. "Cancer Man" is probably one of the worst five episodes in the show's run. A lot of the relationships just aren't calibrated quite right yet, and the episode doesn't have enough compelling stuff to really make up for it in the same way that "..And the Bag's In the River" did, or the amount of Walt and Jesse humour that was in "Cat's In the Bag." Yet it isn't remotely a terrible episode of television. There's a lot of things here that lay groundwork for what makes these characters who they are, and some individualized stories that are both tragic and yet fitting at the same time, which echoes throughout the series. "Cancer Man" doesn't rise above its inconsistencies in the way most of the Season 1 episodes do, but it doesn't completely get derailed by them either.

The main thrust for the episode is Walt telling the rest of his extended family that he has cancer. It was an episode that had to happen, and the reactions we got were sort of stock TV character reactions, because the supporting characters haven't really rose above stock TV characters at this point. But the fascinating thing about the episode is not Skylar's or Walter Jr's reaction to the cancer, it is the way Walt treats them given those reactions.

Skylar is made to be quite unappealing to audiences at this point. Her emotion and desperation to try to get Walt the absolute best treatment runs counter to the cold, calculating acceptance that audiences have adjusted to with Walt. And I think that contrast wears on the audience, like hot water shattering cold glass. Walt is clearly annoyed at Skylar's enthusiasm for finding the solution, which makes the audience slightly annoyed. Even I, who you could probably tell at this point has no love for Walt as a person,  was feeling a little put off. Anna Gunn's performance seems like it is on a different show from the performance Walt is giving at this point, and the easily readable and sometimes wearing emotions Skylar carries are just too much of a contrast and too opposed to the character that we are beginning to fall in love with. It's a hurdle the show just never clears with some people when they switch poles and make Skylar the sympathetic one, because too much damage was done to her character in the early going. It's interestesting watching this unfold, but I think that Gilligan and company probably wish they had treated Skylar more delicately in the early going to have the viewer more ready to accept the long game with her character.

The show has sucked the viewer into Walt's stratosphere so much by this point that they can't help but feel what Walt feels about the situation. That's kind of amazing considering the man made a conscious decision to become a criminal just because he was diagnosed with cancer. Ultimately, the show coerces the viewer to take the insane side of the argument and get peeved off by the rational side. Part of this may have been cheating a bit, because Skylar did say some pretty awful things in the last couple of episodes to turn the viewers against her. But still, look at the Skylar-Walt exchange I've put down in the quotes section. In what universe is Walt in the right there? He is willing to basically give up and abandon his family because he doesn't want to be seen as the husband who left his family in debt. Why? Because Walt considers leaving his family in debt as a failure, and if there's one thing that Walt can't abide, it's being a failure.

The pride of Walt is strewn throughout this episode. Walt shows such contempt for getting the best help for his problems. He shows such contempt for Skylar and Marie trying to find the solution that has the best shot at keeping him alive. He doesn't want to only be alive because Marie found him a physician, then he's accepted help from Marie he can never repay. He doesn't want to be fawned over and shown sympathy because that implies his cancer makes him weak in some way. He doesn't want help because that means he has to accept help. It's all so ludicrously macho from such a pathetic man that I'm certain if it wasn't so well hidden in subtext at this point viewers would be fleeing from Walt in droves.

That's one of the brilliant things about Breaking Bad here. All of Walt's considerable faults are in the subtext, not to hide what the show is doing from the viewer, but to disconnect the faults from the viewers emotions. You have to think rationally about Walt to see what a screwed up person he is at this point, and as soon as you  do that, you've disconnected yourself emotionally from things. This weakens a little bit in the next episode, [1x05], where Walt's decision not to accept the money from Grey Matter is much more in your face, but there's enough sympathy garnered for Walt by this point that it's simply a blip on the radar. Breaking Bad entwines you so much with its main character it takes a pry bar to pull you away. They will bring out that pry bar eventually, but it amazes me how much evidence that Walt is a monster has to accumulate before viewers turn against him.

The show could have gone a different way with this and made Walt a much more outright villain from the start, just by putting him in less favourable situations. If we had seen Walt surrounded by drug users in the early going when he was making that decision to cook meth, it would have repulsed viewers on a visual and therefore, emotional level, which is something Breaking Bad wouldn't have been able to get away with. The decision to make Walt sympathetic for as long as possible leads to the show being forced to tread lightly around the inner workings of drug culture. When they do feel they have to touch base with the idea, it leads to something half-hearted like what we got with the B-story of this episode.

Jesse's story in this episode is less well done than Walt's, and contains most of the problems that force this episode down near the bottom in the show's history. It's sort of odd that this show really has nothing to say about drug use and addiction. The episode pays lip service to the idea that drugs can screw you up, but doesn't add anything beyond the basics. We see issues with addiction on a surface level where Jesse suddenly becomes very paranoid as a side effect of his crystal meth use. In retrospect, I'm a actually a little disappointed with the camera work on this scene. For a show that gets so creative later on with camera angles and looking at things from all angles, the Jesse drug use scene is pretty standard fare. This becomes more obvious when compared to the camera work in "Phoenix" when Jesse first tries heroin.

We also see issues with addiction on a deeper level where Jesse has lost all trust of his parents because of the times he's failed them before. To be honest, the story doesn't really accomplish much other than cast Jesse's parents in a bad light, which is either not the intention or not a meaningful development. I suppose an argument could be made that Jesse became the way he became because of his parents suffocating influence, but there's just not enough evidence for it.

The other thing the show tried to do to portray drug culture in this episode was the early scene with Jesse, Krazy 8 and Combo, but the dialogue was off enough that the exchange came off as more hokey than it should have. If a show about drug use can't even sound sincere in its dialogue between drug users, than it's got problems. It's probably to Breaking Bad's credit that it realized what it was good at and what it was poor at, ditched the "drugs are bad" angle and focussed on the moral deterioration angle instead. Other than the divisive episode "Peekaboo," the show pretty well stayed away from showing much of Walt's worse off customers, even once it was no longer a goal to keep Walt's sympathy with the viewer.

I still sort of liked the Jesse story as kind of a tragic standalone arc. It does hurt that he has no more chances left, his family is so convinced that he's a failure they simply don't believe in his efforts to make things right again. This also does connect a bit to the overall arc of the show, as that Jesse becomes desperate for Walt's approval to replace the approval he never got from his parents. I'm not 100% sure I buy the development with the joint, as judging by the actor Ben Petrie's age the kid at this point is 12. I know there are kids who smoke pot when they're 12, I'm just not sure they are running in circles anywhere close to the circles Jake Pinkman would be running in. Even if you give the show the benefit of the doubt and say there's some older brother envy going on there, it's awfully coincidental the joint is found in the day or so after Jesse moves back in.

I'm contractually obligated to mention the Bluetooth guy. It's certainly a memorable scene when Walt blows his car up, but I don't have much to say about it. We all know how much Walt likes to feel powerful, and this episode really makes him feel impotent for large stretches of it. The explosion also puts the viewer even more on Walt's side because of how much of a jerk that guy is, so that's a bonus.

This isn't a great episode of Breaking Bad, but as you can see by the fact this is my longest review so far, there's still a lot going on here. It is the rare show that still reveals so much about its characters even at its low points, and Breaking Bad is particularly special in this regard.

Notes

·         Operation Icebreaker for a crystal meth operation. Clever, in an obvious way.

·         Walt and Skylar's story of how they met is so good. It also fits particularly well with Walt's general passive aggressiveness.

·         I really hope that picture in Jesse's room was a young Aaron Paul and not a lookalike.

·         "I believe things have a way of working out in the end." Oh, Walt, you're such a liar. I can't think of anyone who lies to their son as much as Walt does over the course of this series in such awful ways.

·         Krazy 8 revealed to be a mole. Got to think that if Walt lets him go, Krazy 8 turns him over and this series goes into brother-in-law vs. brother-in-law hyperdrive quickly.

·         Walt has a living mother? I think it's a major missed opportunity that we never got to see her.

·         The initial scene with the Pinkman family is a wee bit overcooked. Jake's not allowed to play both the piccolo and the oboe? He's wearing an awesomely preppy sweater vest that is only possibly a school uniform?

• Walt: I just think we need to discuss it a little further, that's all.
  Skylar: What is there to discuss? You're going to get the best treatment, and he's the best.
  Walt: Well, there's the money discussion, I think. No, $90,000 out of pocket. Maybe more.
  Skylar: There's a way, Walt. There's financing, there's installment plans. I could always go back to work. Walt, there's always a way.
  Walt: All right, Skylar, say, there is a way. And we spend that money and... Am I supposed to leave you with all that debt? No. Honey...I just don't want emotions ruling us. Maybe treatment isn't the way to go.