BB marathon - season 1
I'm having a Breaking Bad marathon before the show comes back on Sunday (hopefully I'll find the first episode of season 4 online on Monday!).
There was so much in the pilot.
"Chemistry is the study of change" was a key line (Walt's lectures in episode 1 and episode 2 are very meaningful, working as meta moments), but you can see that everything is already there in Walt, the cancer just provides the right catalyst so the inner darkness (the anger, the greediness, the need to control and succeed at last)would show up. The dangerous man, Heisenberg, is awaking.
Still, Walt isn't a very good liar yet and he's still someone we can relate to at the beginning (and being a teacher I so much understood his frustration with those little brats who couldn't appreciate what he was teaching, and the scene in the car wash when the boy mocks him and takes his picture was perfect) because of his situation.
Jesse was so funny ("cow house" cracks me up every time!) but he was already a mixed bag of foolishness, blunder, good heart and sensibility, and the two of them, they just clicked from the first scene. The show wouldn't have worked without that incredible chemistry in such an odd couple. Either they are arguing, high-fiving or physically fighting the pairing works.
Rewatching those first episodes I realise how metaphorically castrated Skylar had Walter (hence Hank being the macho man of the family), and how the partnership with Jesse, and the crime life cooking meth got him into, put Walt in charge and allowed him to retrieve a lost potency, against Bogdan or the brats who mocked his son first, and later in the matrimonial bed...
Skylar must have felt it somehow and the scene with Jesse with her ending every sentence with his trademark "yo" was perfect. She was defending her territory!
So many great twists in those first three episodes. The Krazy-8/Emilio storyline is so awful and hilarious at the same time! Walt/Jesse is an union forged in crazy situations, they have been through a lot together and it's something they can't talk to anyone else.
Humour lies in the over-the-top situations but also in the little details. The scene of Jesse and Walt standing in children's pools and cleaning each other, in"...and The Bag"s In the River" is priceless but my farourites remain in "Cat's In The Bag" with Jesse trying out the basins in the store or thinking of using the padlock to tie Kary-8 or Walt giving his captive, water, bucket and above all, roll of toilet paper and hand sanitizer!
Because Walter, who wants to make the purest product, is anal about stains (the mustard on the doctor's overall) and any kind of contamination (we'll see it again in season 2 and season 3), always focusing on the mess that must be cleaned, perhaps because he thinks he can control that contamination while he has no control over his "failed life" (he contributed to a Nobel Prize work after all) or the cancerous cells spreading in his body.
Walter's heart-to-heart scene with Krazy-8 and his pondering whether to kill him or not (loved his list!) made the fact that he does kill him eventually even more significant. Walter will do anything it takes which seems to foreshadow both the Jane thing and the Gale thing in season 2 and 3. While it is obvious that Walt becomes darker and darker over the course of the show he is consistent and still in character.
Also, I wasn't a big fan of the flashback scenes (mostly because of the lame "soul solution"), but now I think that the ending of the Krazy-8 sequence redeems it, as Walt puts the bits of the broken plate together, echoing his putting all the chemical elements that makes a human body together, and realises that there's a missing piece that Krazy-8 must have kept to strike. Walt is no longer his hopeful, soul-believing younger and hunkier self, and even though he finally tells his wife about the cancer, he's a desperate man willing to go on a journey alone in the dark.
One last thing, it's strange to see Hank and Marie in those first episodes. Hank looks like a bragging asshole in the pilot - as I used to call him the Vic Mackey (from The Shield) of the poor with a bit of Herc from The Wire - and the Hank/Marie couple seemed weird, yet Hank has become one of the most endearing characters over the three seasons and that married couple is one of the strongest I have seen on tv.
There was so much in the pilot.
"Chemistry is the study of change" was a key line (Walt's lectures in episode 1 and episode 2 are very meaningful, working as meta moments), but you can see that everything is already there in Walt, the cancer just provides the right catalyst so the inner darkness (the anger, the greediness, the need to control and succeed at last)would show up. The dangerous man, Heisenberg, is awaking.
Still, Walt isn't a very good liar yet and he's still someone we can relate to at the beginning (and being a teacher I so much understood his frustration with those little brats who couldn't appreciate what he was teaching, and the scene in the car wash when the boy mocks him and takes his picture was perfect) because of his situation.
Jesse was so funny ("cow house" cracks me up every time!) but he was already a mixed bag of foolishness, blunder, good heart and sensibility, and the two of them, they just clicked from the first scene. The show wouldn't have worked without that incredible chemistry in such an odd couple. Either they are arguing, high-fiving or physically fighting the pairing works.
Rewatching those first episodes I realise how metaphorically castrated Skylar had Walter (hence Hank being the macho man of the family), and how the partnership with Jesse, and the crime life cooking meth got him into, put Walt in charge and allowed him to retrieve a lost potency, against Bogdan or the brats who mocked his son first, and later in the matrimonial bed...
Skylar must have felt it somehow and the scene with Jesse with her ending every sentence with his trademark "yo" was perfect. She was defending her territory!
So many great twists in those first three episodes. The Krazy-8/Emilio storyline is so awful and hilarious at the same time! Walt/Jesse is an union forged in crazy situations, they have been through a lot together and it's something they can't talk to anyone else.
Humour lies in the over-the-top situations but also in the little details. The scene of Jesse and Walt standing in children's pools and cleaning each other, in"...and The Bag"s In the River" is priceless but my farourites remain in "Cat's In The Bag" with Jesse trying out the basins in the store or thinking of using the padlock to tie Kary-8 or Walt giving his captive, water, bucket and above all, roll of toilet paper and hand sanitizer!
Because Walter, who wants to make the purest product, is anal about stains (the mustard on the doctor's overall) and any kind of contamination (we'll see it again in season 2 and season 3), always focusing on the mess that must be cleaned, perhaps because he thinks he can control that contamination while he has no control over his "failed life" (he contributed to a Nobel Prize work after all) or the cancerous cells spreading in his body.
Walter's heart-to-heart scene with Krazy-8 and his pondering whether to kill him or not (loved his list!) made the fact that he does kill him eventually even more significant. Walter will do anything it takes which seems to foreshadow both the Jane thing and the Gale thing in season 2 and 3. While it is obvious that Walt becomes darker and darker over the course of the show he is consistent and still in character.
Also, I wasn't a big fan of the flashback scenes (mostly because of the lame "soul solution"), but now I think that the ending of the Krazy-8 sequence redeems it, as Walt puts the bits of the broken plate together, echoing his putting all the chemical elements that makes a human body together, and realises that there's a missing piece that Krazy-8 must have kept to strike. Walt is no longer his hopeful, soul-believing younger and hunkier self, and even though he finally tells his wife about the cancer, he's a desperate man willing to go on a journey alone in the dark.
One last thing, it's strange to see Hank and Marie in those first episodes. Hank looks like a bragging asshole in the pilot - as I used to call him the Vic Mackey (from The Shield) of the poor with a bit of Herc from The Wire - and the Hank/Marie couple seemed weird, yet Hank has become one of the most endearing characters over the three seasons and that married couple is one of the strongest I have seen on tv.