Shall we anticipate the FIFTH SEASON of the AMC series "Breaking Bad"? I think I may.

Lots of "Chekhov's Guns" in this show... Always has been...

"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev

pretty sure team walt membership overlaps w/ the ppl who idolize pacino's scarface

the gangster is always a symbol of capitalist avarice gone wild, walt has the benefit of being a hen-pecked castoff of the middle aged middle class emerging in the middle of a massive + prolonged economic downturn so audience identification among the secretly badass males of america is going to be off the charts, girlfriends ODing and kids getting poisoned is just how the sausage gets made, more bullshit flotsam to wreck yr soul on the way to becoming a kingpin, don't these fucken idiots understand I gotta provide for my family

nice tie-in to the act of killing in there somewhere

Walt would be the type to have a Travis Bickle poster in his dorm room.

no

i root for walt because

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IJCFc_qkHw

everyone roots for walt on some level because he's the protagonist or all you all experiencing narrative in some amazing and impressively moralistic new way

of course we root for Walt on a narrative level, but that's kind of a far cry from the "he gotta support his family, fuck the haters" thing isn't it?

well obviously there are a lot of morons out there

a friend revealed he's not rooting for anybody except walt jr at dinner last night.

I kind of enjoy seeing him shat on at a narrative level

did he at least wait until dessert

sorry it's just a little hard for me to grasp this "Team Walt" concept, i don't know anyone who watches this show who has this attitude - wouldn't this kind of show bore those folks

welp if you want to find the stupidest people on the online and talk about them all day its totally possible, they are out there, thats the promise of the net

"he's a dying man making hard choices and putting his life on the line for his family and they're a bunch of ungrateful do-nothings who hate him for it"

it's surely wrong, but not incomprehensible to me

nah taxi driver's the aspirational handbook for punk weirdos

audience bad guy idolization runs alongside the gangster genre from great depression era originals to the frayed 70s classics to 90s hip hop and tony soprano, would've been surprised tbh if it didn't happen w/ BB

and taking a nuanced look at gangsters along the lines of scorsese/coppola/gilligan just means part of the audience is going to appreciate the complexities and others will just say THATS RIGHT DE NIRO BITCH

xps

My pal Mo:

One of the goals of "Ozymandias," I think, was to rub our noses in the true nature of the guy we've been following for five seasons. This hour forced us to look hard at his capacity for cruelty, his selfishness and his narcissistic desire not just to win but to subjugate and control. It's no wonder some of us wanted to look away: It was ugly to witness Walt terrifying his family, easily accessing the tyrant of that phone call and kidnapping his own daughter. But we have to look at it. All of it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/breaking-bad-reactions_b_3942905.html

nhex *nobody* is bored by breaking bad, the only ppl I know who have stopped watching are the ones who think it's too intense

xps

http://25.media.tumblr.com/53af3cefd495631af0ca31357623561a/tumblr_mt9xj3PPrN1qzs0cgo1_500.jpg

funniest comment i saw on the tumblr post for that image

Walt is an asshole, Macbeth is an asshole, Dexter is an asshole, Khan is an asshole, Alex DeLarge is an asshole, Hans Landa is an asshole, Jack Torrance is an asshole, 90% of the white people in Django Unchained are assholes, General Zod is an asshole, HAL 9000 is an asshole, Biff is an asshole, The Joker is an asshole.

ALL OF THESE PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES, AND IT IS STILL ALRIGHT TO IDENTIFY WITH AND IN SOME WAYS ROOT FOR THEM. They are effective villains BECAUSE they appeal to a secret truth inside all of us as people. Half of these people aren’t any more evil than you or I, they are simply humans who had an extraordinary opportunity present itself to them. If you can’t support them even a little, even if it’s just to yourself silently, then you are a liar

yeah my wife stopped watching while she was pregnant. it was not good for the gully-works. she is totally hooked again though.

maybe the twist is that Skyler is pregnant AGAIN...with Beneke's kid

tho I guess she'd have known by now given the flash forward

It's pretty obvious by now that Walt is this weird concoction of ambition, hubris, greed AND a virtually limitless capacity for self-delusion. Like there's little doubt in my mind that he genuinely believed he was doing it for his family right up to the point when Hank got shot, and maybe even up to the point when Skylar and Junior turned against him. Maybe even now he still does.

It's what makes him interesting as a character, the "Walt is pure evil" crew as wrong as the Team Walt people. I mean the world is full of greedy ambitious dicks who do things they know are wrong on the basis that they're providing for their families.

the twist is... walt was right

Any argument for Walt as a misunderstood anti-hero would have been built upon the foundation of delusions ("B-b-but he's doing it for the good of his faaaaaamily!") that completely crumbled in this last episode.

I dunno, the bothersome thing about the walt-skylar phone call, as masterful and elegant as that scene was rendered, is that it does act as a sop for team walt meatheads - expressing all that dark abuser rage but providing the out of DONT U SEE I DID IT ALL 4 U

rather than a total plunge into darkness this eps gives walt the latitude to appear heroic, i.e. I am the one who confesses

I AM THE ONE WHO *plops*

i feel like those delusions crumbled earlier - like basically the first time he was given a shit ton of money and decided to keep going, or ranted about his old chemist buddies.

xp Edward - that's part of makes that scene genius!

or when he was dissolving a 14 year old in a vat of acid

xp

Walt's delusions that he was doing it for his family should have crumbled the first time Skyler aka his family told him that what he was doing was harmful.

well yeah I appreciate the multivalent aesthetic achievements of that scene but imagining the psychic itch it scratches for armies of irl abusive husbands in the viewing audience makes me ick out

then again I watch reprehensible horror movies that irl serial killers prolly wank off to so maybe I shouldn't be the one to judge

xps

Walt's delusions that he was doing it for his family should have crumbled the first time Skyler aka his family told him that what he was doing was harmful.

Yeah, remind me what Skylar went on to do after that?

Walt is an asshole, Macbeth is an asshole, Dexter is an asshole, Khan is an asshole, Alex DeLarge is an asshole, Hans Landa is an asshole, Jack Torrance is an asshole, 90% of the white people in Django Unchained are assholes, General Zod is an asshole, HAL 9000 is an asshole, Biff is an asshole, The Joker is an asshole.

ok I need to call bullshit on this

HAL 9000 acted in self-defense, the inalienable right of all sentient beings

Didn't HAL-9000 start killing astronauts before they realized what was up?

tbf they had it coming

nope

xp

I'm not arguing that Skyler is a saint, and while I think Walt's behavior to Skyler is textbook abuser behavior, I wouldn't argue that Skyler is merely a victim. I'm just saying that Walt's delusions should have crumbled a long time ago were he willing to listen to anybody, specifically the person who would be most immediately affected by his actions and who was speaking on behalf of his actual family, rather than the fantasy family concept he had.

xp

...how did Biff get on that list?

Hal asks Bowman about the unusual mystery and secrecy surrounding the mission, but then interrupts himself to report the imminent failure of a device which controls the ship's main antenna. After retrieving the component with an EVA pod, the astronauts cannot find anything wrong with it. Hal suggests reinstalling the part and letting it fail so the problem can be found. Mission control concurs, but advises the astronauts that results from their twin Hal 9000 indicate the ship's Hal is in error predicting the fault. When queried, Hal insists that the problem, like all previous issues with the HAL series, is due to "human error". Concerned about Hal's behavior, Bowman and Poole enter one of the EVA pods to talk without the computer overhearing them. They both have suspicions about Hal, despite the perfect reliability of the HAL series, but they decide to follow its suggestion to replace the unit. As the astronauts agree to disconnect Hal if it is proven to be wrong, they are unaware that Hal is reading their lips through the pod's window.

I also don't think Skyler's eventual complicity in Walt's actions undermines my point. xp again

just saying if I made a mistake at work and then overheard 2 coworkers discussing how they'd kill me if I messed up again I might decide to take out some astronauts too

haha fair enough

lol

Yeah, HAL was no asshole.

So, hey, were those money barrels the same size/color as the barrels Walt used to melt people in? Lotta barrels in this show, most I've maybe seen in something since "Jaws."

I blame HAL's programmers myself - they're the assholes

the BB writers are clearly into FPS games, probably played a lot of Half Life 2

I guess the ultimate argument against Team Walt would be: what has he (or anyone else) gained from all of this? I guess you could argue he's $11M richer at the moment than he was a year and change ago, but what can he really do with that money at this point (and how much longer do we really expect that cash to be in his possession)? And whose life that he's touched (including his own) isn't in ruins compared with where they were pre-Heisenberg? Pro-Walt folks need to read and reread the Shelley poem until they get whassup here.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/31400000/Half-Life-2-Walter-White-Edition-breaking-bad-31422211-1800-2560.jpg

They've alluded to the fact that they literally had more money than they could spend, that no amount of amateur laundering would ever free that cash up. It was sort of a revelation in every sense when we saw how much Walt had accumulated - this ep is the first time a dollar amount was assigned to the pile, right? Anyway, it's just underscoring his greed and hubris. A million dollars would have changed their life forever. But to prove he was the best Walt needed to have the most.