Breaking Bad 2.03 - Bit By a Dead Bee

Pre-Credit Sequence: This is the first time where a pre-credits scene basically just kicks off the episode, and doesn't do anything special such as the constant in media res of season 1, or show some spectacular scene. That said, the pre-credits is achieving something; it's showing the origin of the plan that would dominate the episode. Jesse and Walt are still in a pickle, as they have to explain their absence as well as the fact Jesse's car is at the crime scene. They had a lot of time to make this plan, and for one of the few times in the series, it works almost without a hitch. I'd also like to note that the opening camera angle, showing the camera being in the hole uncovered by the dirt that Walt and Jesse are digging, is nonsensical and I don't like it.

Review: We are getting into a stretch of episodes I generally consider to be the worst of the show. We are done laying the foundation for Walt, we know what makes him tick and the writers have put us fully on his side. We have finished dealing with his first threat in Tuco, his life is not in immediate danger, and while there's some minor danger about him being found out, we don't really have any reason to believe that is going to happen. We haven't entered the part of the show where Jesse and Walt have really kicked off dealing meth on their own, and don't really enter the issues that come with that until "Peekaboo." And even when the good part of Season 2 kicks off, that's really not driven so much by overarching plot as much as making each episode deal with something special and interesting. There is an overall theme to Season 2, and I'll get to that in one of these next two reviews, (because I'm not sure how much else I'll have to talk about), but it's much more of a conclusion driven theme and not a theme you can clearly see as the season is going on.

This episode for instance, from a plot perspective, is basically only about Jesse and Walt explaining what happened to them while being kidnapped by Tuco. Walt showing up naked in the supermarket is such a memorable image, that I remembered this episode as much better than it actually is. It has its moments from both Walt and Jesse, and we'll get to those shortly, but overall there's not as much of either depth or tension that Breaking Bad has at its best, and the show needs one or the other to be successful.

All that said, there are two fantastic scenes in this episode that is Breaking Bad  in top form. The first one is the kickoff to Jesse's section of the plan, where he's waiting in Wendy's motel room. The way the scene is staged makes it look like Jesse is on some sort of drug. The camera focuses on the sun through the blinds and is alternating between focused and unfocused. This continues until the police team breaks into the motel room and starts yelling and taken Jesse in. It becomes pretty clear afterwards that the fading camera was not a symptom of Jesse on drugs, but more displaying the tension Jesse felt because he knew what was about to happen. It's a great piece of camera work, a great piece of misdirection, and it still manages to put the viewers in Jesse's mindset. He's going to get hassled, it's not going to be easy, and he'd rather not do it, but he has no choice in the matter and his freedom depends on how he acts.

The other scene is Walt talking to the psychiatrist. The type of scene where someone lies by revealing a lot of the truth isn't unique to Breaking Bad by any means, but almost any time a show is clever enough to use this technique it works. Here it works particularly well, as this discussion with the psychiatrist also informs Walt's decision in the rest of the episode. The reasons that Walt gives for running away for a couple days are pretty much the exact reason he starts cooking meth in the first place. It's so cathartic to hear him finally give his real reasons for doing the things he is doing, even if it's just as part of another lie he's telling.

At the end of the episode, Jesse believes that this is the end of the road and that their cooking adventure is over. It's a reasonable thing to assume, given that they nearly were sent to Mexico and/or killed by a crazed lunatic. But Walt's reasons for cooking, the same reasons he gave to the psychiatrist, are as strong as they've ever been. As much as he repeats the 737,000 dollar number to himself, the real reason is that for the first time, he feels powerful. He feel like he's in control. He feels like his chemistry expertise is finally not being wasted teaching high school students. And he's still got that addiction to danger that drove so much of his actions in "A No Rough Stuff Type Deal." At the moment, Walt is in this for the long haul. Is there something that will change his mind, at least for a while? Absolutely, but it's not the threat of death from Tuco. It's actually a pink teddy bear.

Also driving Walt to continue in spite of the danger? That view of just his wife and son, on their own, while he thinks he's in hospital. It allows him to keep up his lie that all he is doing is for them, and to keep them well enough off without him there. The interesting thing about this scene is that there isn't actually anything special about how Skylar and Walter Jr. were interacting when he saw them. There's nothing he sees here that would be different than what he knew, or would have seen before to change his perspective on things. I really believe Walt is looking for excuses to continue, and a glimpse of his family that shouldn't be meaningful, he elevates it to very meaningful levels in his mind.

One thing that's surprised me writing these reviews is how prominent Hank has been this early in the season. He gets two episodes focussed on him later in the season in "Breakage" and "Negro Y Azul", and in the episodes leading up to that, he's definitely been the third most important character on the show. It is sort of impressive that the show commits this much this early to developing someone they had originally outlined as a joke caricature. In this episode, we really start to see the fringes of how the Tuco shootout affected Hank. It's pretty easy to tell in hindsight that he's really not comfortable with what went down. He is initially taken aback by Junior asking him about the shootout, though just for a moment before he recovers. This same sort of hesitation happens when he gets awarded Tuco's grills, though once again he recovers quickly and acts as he thinks would be appropriate for someone who should be proud of his "catch." It's subtle writing, and only really can be seen after watching "Breakage" and knowing the truth about Hank's  PTSD.

The other small sign of the effect of the Tuco shootout on Hank is how ineffective he is in his interrogations. Jesse was clearly not comfortable, but he's unable to really push the issue with him. He has Wendy where he wants her, and then blows in on his cheap "Windy" joke that he had previously used when seeing Wendy with Walter Jr. in "...And the Bag's in the River." He's been shown to be a pretty good cop, both before and after this point, and is really not good at all in this episode.

This episode is about 25% really good deep stuff and about 75% fluff. That's not a good ratio for Breaking Bad and a sign that the show really isn't quite ready to take the next step it wants to take. This season was built backwards, where they knew the ending and had to build to it, so it is possible that they didn't have enough story to fill the 13 episodes they were given. The show really shouldn't be spending a whole episode on the execution of a rather straight forward plan by Jesse and Walter. The show still has its flashes of brilliance, and the execution is still at a really high level, but for a show that needs the plot engine to be churning to be successful, "Bit By a Dead Bee" is not the episode the show needed to follow up its Tuco arc.

Other Points
- The writers still aren't being very careful with Skylar. In this episode, she's made to look dumb by supporting Walt's lie by complaining about cancer drug side effects, like this is something new to a doctor

-  Badger is on a roll this episode, especially clearing out the basement. "You are Willy Wonka and I have the golden ticket!"

- Speaking of Badger, if Badger was vouching for someone to you, does that really impact anything at all? I'd be less likely to trust that person.

-My favourite part of Walt's naked gag with Skylar is that he wears the porkpie hat

- And we have the continuation of the all time great second cellphone storyline! I really thought I liked Season 2 better than this going in to these reviews

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.