Breaking Bad, Season 3
I caved and acquired the badge of fannishness, an icon specific to the show. Also, the dvds I'm watching this on played a cruel trick on me; in the middle of season 3, during a pretty pivotal scene involving Gus and the Cartel guys, there was some kind of layering mistake that shut down both dvd player and computer. I fast forwarded through it on the computer but lo and behold a few scenes later, with yet another crucial scene involving Skylar and her boss, same thing. Anyway. The rest of the episodes played just fine, which meant they left me gasping and heartbroken in turns. 'Twas awesome.
I always love it when a show expects you to pay attention and remember your continuity. When in s2 we see one of Jesse's pals/fellow drug peddlers shot by a child, I thought the point was another illustration of the full horror of the trade, but I didn't expect we'd see the child again. But lo and behold, not only did we but this contributed to some key plot developments.
In the season opener, literally dealing with the fallout of the s2 finale, we see Walt and Jesse deal (or not) with the culpability in very different ways. Walt feels guilt, sure, and is shattered by the (temporary) loss of his family, but he's also still in full denial, seeing himself as "not a criminal", still the hero of his own tale who does and did it all for his family. Jesse, who in s2 already showed signs of greater moral awareness (and again, who'd have thought in the pilot), comes out of rehab with the conclusion that "you can't run from what you are. (...) I'm the bad guy." Walter when talking about their activities (mostly in negotiations with Gus) uses business lingo and euphemisms throughout; whereas Jesse bluntly sums it up with "we're making poison for people who don't care". In the first half of the season, Walt in his campaign to get his family back tries to stay away from the business whereas Jesse, having decided he's a bad guy and not capable of being anything else and in full grieving nihilism, tries to do it alone. What brings them back together is a mixture, as Aristotle demanded for tragedies, of character traits and external circumstance. In season 2 we already got a taste of how Walt's ego and pride chaffed at the thought that since he couldn't tell Skyler & Co. where the money came from he wouldn't be appreciated as the provider; in s 3 it's by playing on his intellectual vanity and ego as well as to his greed that Gus gets him back to cooking meth again, but what brings him together with Jesse after their fallout is blatant emotional need as much as anything else. What started as a darkly humorous odd couple act has become such a fascinating and layered relationship and really the heart of the show. There's always, always the former teacher/student dimension; the comrades-in-arms aspect; and the way their emotional distance to their original families (their own fault, but still) goes hand in hand with having become each other's family. And of course the actors have fantastic chemistry, which the show uses well. Seems at least once a season we get the equivalent of a bottle show where Walt and Jesse are basically locked in a room together. In season 2, this was "Four Days"; in season 4, it's "The Fly", and this is the kind of show who can pull off such episodes without any exterior action at all. (We get that one in other eps, of course.) The incredible suspense comes all from the emotional situation; when a completely exhausted and nearly-slipping-into-sleep Walt says "I'm so, so sorry about Jane" you are biting your nails as to whether he'll confess the full truth about Jane's death to Jesse. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that you hope he won't, because of what this would do to the Walt and Jesse relationship, and the show managed this without ever excusing or prettifying what Walt and Jesse are. You know exactly what they are, and yet Walt's attempt to apologize for Jane and Jesse's later awkwardely tender taking care of him, removing his shoes and covering him with a blanket are incredibly touching.
The scene in question is amazing for other reasons, too; Walt's "I've lived too long" and deciding the perfect moment for him to have died would have been the night of Jane's death, before Skylar found out the truth about him (and, as we the audience know but Jesse does not, before he went back a second time to Jesse's house and let Jane die) is a moment of raw emotional truth - and yet it's also a lie, both because Jesse (without the information that Walt was in his house that night again) has to mistake the reason for the ambigously phrased "I'm sorry" and because the season finale shows Walt and the audience in an Orwellian way that he wants to live at the expense of everything and everyone else.
Jesse's at his most nihilistic and darkest early in the last third of the season when he's decided to start dealing meth to his rehab group, i.e. do deliberately what he did to Jane without meaning to, and that's when we get first The Fly (where Walt's not-quite-confession finally enables him to talk about Jane, which he wasn't able to all season) and then a push-to-shove situation where Jesse finds himself unable to go through with the dealing after seeing Andrea with her son, followed by the karmic slap from hell when seeing the Walt-and-Jesse-produced blue meth in the hands of Andrea's little brother Tomas. How he responds to this, and how Walt responds, is character drama at its finest.
Season 3 is also terrific for the supporting cast, both old and new. This is the season where Marie finally becomes as three dimensionally written and treated with the same depth as the rest of the ensemble, and her relationship with Hank makes for a fascinating parallel/contrast to the Walt and Skyler marriage. If "The Fly" is chamber play at its finest, the show also delivers the thriller/suspense element it spades, and the whole sequence of the Cousins tracking Hank down was breathtaking, especially since I really wasn't sure whether or not the show would kill Hank off. Best of all, though: said sequence came as the finale of a Hank character episode, where he faces the consequences of his brutal beating of Jesse. Hank's own capacity for violence (and Walt-similar inability to admit for the longest time just how traumatized he was by first the Salamanca shooting and then the turtle blow-up) brought out his own worst moment, but as opposed to Walt, Hank is able to say that yes, it was his fault; as opposed to Jesse at the start of the season, his acceptance of responsibility doesn't come with nihilistic "this is all I can be" despair but with "I should be better".
"Everything is contaminated" - Walt in "The Fly" could be the phrase of the season. Skyler at the start further illustrates she's as smart as her husband by making the right deduction about how he could have made that much money in that short a time, but is in the awful position of not being able to tell her son just why she wants Walt out of their lives and thus is cast as the villain in their marital breakup. How the show gets Skyler from being physically revolted by the drug trade at the start of the season to accepting the money to being ready to get into (money-laundering) business with Walt by the time the season finale rolls on without making her look weak or ooc is a further illustration of how good the writing is. Asking Walt for the money for Hank's post-shooting operations and physiotherapy is a turning point, but there was built up before this, and of course it doesn't end there. Significantly, by the time of the finale Skyler switches off the news about Tomas when it's broadcast; the process of not wanting to know anymore about the victims of the drug trade, of denying the reality of them which started for Walt in the pilot has now come upon her as well. Which drives the point home that Walt's idea that his actions would "save" his family, and his later attempt to keep his two realities separate were doomed from the start.
The show did the psycho drug lords in s1 and early s2, so no wonder they went with a different model this time. Gus the calm, soft spoken entrepeneur is simply being the ultimate rational capitalist, and thus far more dangerous, long term wise, than Tuco the psychotic. Both because he truly is able to facilitate mass production of drugs and because his reach is far wider and more encompassing. And it's this very effective rationality that makes him so chilling. Of course his enterprise uses children. ( Significantly, you get the impression that if Jesse wasn't so horrified and unwilling to let this pass and look away, Walt would have been able to rationalize it in a not too different manner as Gus does, or Mike, another rational, competent man. I.e. there is "my family", and there is everyone else, and humanity at large is of no interest other than its usefulness (or not). ) And of course he gets the better of the Cousins, who were going to be my seasonal complaint in that they're a bit too clichéd assassins, but then we got the flashback to their childhood and that made them human without making them less scary. And again: their showdown with Hank was breathtaking.
(Speaking of flashbacks: this show thankfully never does the clip show thing. If we get a flashback, i.e. a scene from a previous era of either our character's lives or the show, it's a new scene, not a repeated old one (the one of young Walt and Skyler buying their house in the finale or the one of Jane and Jesse visiting the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition earlier, which manages to capture just why that relationship was so appealing before it went horribly yet predictably wrong, come especially to mind).)
If Saul the one liner spouting lawyer is the most amusing recurring character, Wendy the meth-using prostitute, who shows up only once or twice a season, is the most haunting one. The montage showing us a typical day was visceral. And then there's Gale. And you know, I'm reasonably good at telling plot developments, but that one caught me by surprise; I truly didn't see where this was going until seconds before Walt spelled it out to Jesse. In retrospect, I should have. Walt and Jesse have their culpability in drug related deaths (plus more indirectly the air plane disaster caused by Jane's father), but when it comes to the physical act of personally, actively killing another human being, the show let them do this until late s3 only in defense-of-own-life situations. Given that the ongoing corruption is a big theme, there would, of course, come the point where this would change. So Walt goes from kiling-by-inaction (Jane) to killing-so-Jesse-doesn't (Gus' drug dealers) to deciding that in order to save his own life, Gale would have to die. But what makes the whole thing truly horrible isn't "just" the idea of sacrificing Gale (for, remember, the same man who earlier that season said "I've lived too long"). Gale may be an endearing geek, but let's not forget, he works voluntarily in the business of, as Jesse memorably put it, making poison. No, it's that Walt asks Jesse to do it, first as request and then, when his life really is under immediate and no longer theoretical threat, as a demand, thus shredding into tatters one of the few lines Jesse hadn't crossed yet and twisting the bond that ties them together that much further. Oh, show.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/756019.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
I always love it when a show expects you to pay attention and remember your continuity. When in s2 we see one of Jesse's pals/fellow drug peddlers shot by a child, I thought the point was another illustration of the full horror of the trade, but I didn't expect we'd see the child again. But lo and behold, not only did we but this contributed to some key plot developments.
In the season opener, literally dealing with the fallout of the s2 finale, we see Walt and Jesse deal (or not) with the culpability in very different ways. Walt feels guilt, sure, and is shattered by the (temporary) loss of his family, but he's also still in full denial, seeing himself as "not a criminal", still the hero of his own tale who does and did it all for his family. Jesse, who in s2 already showed signs of greater moral awareness (and again, who'd have thought in the pilot), comes out of rehab with the conclusion that "you can't run from what you are. (...) I'm the bad guy." Walter when talking about their activities (mostly in negotiations with Gus) uses business lingo and euphemisms throughout; whereas Jesse bluntly sums it up with "we're making poison for people who don't care". In the first half of the season, Walt in his campaign to get his family back tries to stay away from the business whereas Jesse, having decided he's a bad guy and not capable of being anything else and in full grieving nihilism, tries to do it alone. What brings them back together is a mixture, as Aristotle demanded for tragedies, of character traits and external circumstance. In season 2 we already got a taste of how Walt's ego and pride chaffed at the thought that since he couldn't tell Skyler & Co. where the money came from he wouldn't be appreciated as the provider; in s 3 it's by playing on his intellectual vanity and ego as well as to his greed that Gus gets him back to cooking meth again, but what brings him together with Jesse after their fallout is blatant emotional need as much as anything else. What started as a darkly humorous odd couple act has become such a fascinating and layered relationship and really the heart of the show. There's always, always the former teacher/student dimension; the comrades-in-arms aspect; and the way their emotional distance to their original families (their own fault, but still) goes hand in hand with having become each other's family. And of course the actors have fantastic chemistry, which the show uses well. Seems at least once a season we get the equivalent of a bottle show where Walt and Jesse are basically locked in a room together. In season 2, this was "Four Days"; in season 4, it's "The Fly", and this is the kind of show who can pull off such episodes without any exterior action at all. (We get that one in other eps, of course.) The incredible suspense comes all from the emotional situation; when a completely exhausted and nearly-slipping-into-sleep Walt says "I'm so, so sorry about Jane" you are biting your nails as to whether he'll confess the full truth about Jane's death to Jesse. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that you hope he won't, because of what this would do to the Walt and Jesse relationship, and the show managed this without ever excusing or prettifying what Walt and Jesse are. You know exactly what they are, and yet Walt's attempt to apologize for Jane and Jesse's later awkwardely tender taking care of him, removing his shoes and covering him with a blanket are incredibly touching.
The scene in question is amazing for other reasons, too; Walt's "I've lived too long" and deciding the perfect moment for him to have died would have been the night of Jane's death, before Skylar found out the truth about him (and, as we the audience know but Jesse does not, before he went back a second time to Jesse's house and let Jane die) is a moment of raw emotional truth - and yet it's also a lie, both because Jesse (without the information that Walt was in his house that night again) has to mistake the reason for the ambigously phrased "I'm sorry" and because the season finale shows Walt and the audience in an Orwellian way that he wants to live at the expense of everything and everyone else.
Jesse's at his most nihilistic and darkest early in the last third of the season when he's decided to start dealing meth to his rehab group, i.e. do deliberately what he did to Jane without meaning to, and that's when we get first The Fly (where Walt's not-quite-confession finally enables him to talk about Jane, which he wasn't able to all season) and then a push-to-shove situation where Jesse finds himself unable to go through with the dealing after seeing Andrea with her son, followed by the karmic slap from hell when seeing the Walt-and-Jesse-produced blue meth in the hands of Andrea's little brother Tomas. How he responds to this, and how Walt responds, is character drama at its finest.
Season 3 is also terrific for the supporting cast, both old and new. This is the season where Marie finally becomes as three dimensionally written and treated with the same depth as the rest of the ensemble, and her relationship with Hank makes for a fascinating parallel/contrast to the Walt and Skyler marriage. If "The Fly" is chamber play at its finest, the show also delivers the thriller/suspense element it spades, and the whole sequence of the Cousins tracking Hank down was breathtaking, especially since I really wasn't sure whether or not the show would kill Hank off. Best of all, though: said sequence came as the finale of a Hank character episode, where he faces the consequences of his brutal beating of Jesse. Hank's own capacity for violence (and Walt-similar inability to admit for the longest time just how traumatized he was by first the Salamanca shooting and then the turtle blow-up) brought out his own worst moment, but as opposed to Walt, Hank is able to say that yes, it was his fault; as opposed to Jesse at the start of the season, his acceptance of responsibility doesn't come with nihilistic "this is all I can be" despair but with "I should be better".
"Everything is contaminated" - Walt in "The Fly" could be the phrase of the season. Skyler at the start further illustrates she's as smart as her husband by making the right deduction about how he could have made that much money in that short a time, but is in the awful position of not being able to tell her son just why she wants Walt out of their lives and thus is cast as the villain in their marital breakup. How the show gets Skyler from being physically revolted by the drug trade at the start of the season to accepting the money to being ready to get into (money-laundering) business with Walt by the time the season finale rolls on without making her look weak or ooc is a further illustration of how good the writing is. Asking Walt for the money for Hank's post-shooting operations and physiotherapy is a turning point, but there was built up before this, and of course it doesn't end there. Significantly, by the time of the finale Skyler switches off the news about Tomas when it's broadcast; the process of not wanting to know anymore about the victims of the drug trade, of denying the reality of them which started for Walt in the pilot has now come upon her as well. Which drives the point home that Walt's idea that his actions would "save" his family, and his later attempt to keep his two realities separate were doomed from the start.
The show did the psycho drug lords in s1 and early s2, so no wonder they went with a different model this time. Gus the calm, soft spoken entrepeneur is simply being the ultimate rational capitalist, and thus far more dangerous, long term wise, than Tuco the psychotic. Both because he truly is able to facilitate mass production of drugs and because his reach is far wider and more encompassing. And it's this very effective rationality that makes him so chilling. Of course his enterprise uses children. ( Significantly, you get the impression that if Jesse wasn't so horrified and unwilling to let this pass and look away, Walt would have been able to rationalize it in a not too different manner as Gus does, or Mike, another rational, competent man. I.e. there is "my family", and there is everyone else, and humanity at large is of no interest other than its usefulness (or not). ) And of course he gets the better of the Cousins, who were going to be my seasonal complaint in that they're a bit too clichéd assassins, but then we got the flashback to their childhood and that made them human without making them less scary. And again: their showdown with Hank was breathtaking.
(Speaking of flashbacks: this show thankfully never does the clip show thing. If we get a flashback, i.e. a scene from a previous era of either our character's lives or the show, it's a new scene, not a repeated old one (the one of young Walt and Skyler buying their house in the finale or the one of Jane and Jesse visiting the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition earlier, which manages to capture just why that relationship was so appealing before it went horribly yet predictably wrong, come especially to mind).)
If Saul the one liner spouting lawyer is the most amusing recurring character, Wendy the meth-using prostitute, who shows up only once or twice a season, is the most haunting one. The montage showing us a typical day was visceral. And then there's Gale. And you know, I'm reasonably good at telling plot developments, but that one caught me by surprise; I truly didn't see where this was going until seconds before Walt spelled it out to Jesse. In retrospect, I should have. Walt and Jesse have their culpability in drug related deaths (plus more indirectly the air plane disaster caused by Jane's father), but when it comes to the physical act of personally, actively killing another human being, the show let them do this until late s3 only in defense-of-own-life situations. Given that the ongoing corruption is a big theme, there would, of course, come the point where this would change. So Walt goes from kiling-by-inaction (Jane) to killing-so-Jesse-doesn't (Gus' drug dealers) to deciding that in order to save his own life, Gale would have to die. But what makes the whole thing truly horrible isn't "just" the idea of sacrificing Gale (for, remember, the same man who earlier that season said "I've lived too long"). Gale may be an endearing geek, but let's not forget, he works voluntarily in the business of, as Jesse memorably put it, making poison. No, it's that Walt asks Jesse to do it, first as request and then, when his life really is under immediate and no longer theoretical threat, as a demand, thus shredding into tatters one of the few lines Jesse hadn't crossed yet and twisting the bond that ties them together that much further. Oh, show.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/756019.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.