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

mind you i'm a total hypocrite on that rewatching tv dramas thing, the only tv dramas i've 'rescreened' in recent years has been rockford files (highly recommended) and twilight zone (not so highly recommended). i watched the first two seasons of deadwood again over a couple of different summers also a few years after but they're so short it wasn't much of an investment in terms of time.

agree slocki - but after hitchcock, lots of people made better thrillers than they would have

u kidding me about twilight zone? they're all not keepers but the best of them are brilliant and perfect

also highly recommend a sopranos rescreen. i think i just did #4. always gets better.

o the best of them are great, i just remember them all of them being the best of them and when i watched a full season i was kinda stunned at how many duds there were. also tv drama ages so weird, i don't know why (it's not like movie dramas age that badly).

like 'to serve man' is maybe not as good as you remember

and man hitchcock totally provided a template for directors to work w/ in creating smarter, better entertainment

you didn't get another Hitchcock after the original passed on ... but you did get a Brian De Palma.

make of that what you will.

tv drama from that era definitely has a very specific vibe. amateurist to thread.

yeah, ace. soooo... what did the watch symbolise?

I could be way off but I read Balls' earlier point as more being the lessons of Breaking Bad are more easily absorbed by future TV-makers than those of The Wire, etc - as a textbook on how to make long form narrative TV while maximizing the push and pull of subverting expectations and providing satisfying resolutions. It provides some models others can follow whereas The Wire etc didn't do as much that was as replicable. I think this is probably true - though I'm sure BB learned from the Wire etc..

I think it's bullshit when people try to separate out or downplay the entertainment aspect. I guess if you're being charitable you could call The Wire a slow burner but I think it would be pretty dumb for any future TV producers to try to copy the pacing of that show. The Wire might be "quality TV" or "great TV" but in some ways it failed at being good TV.

the fuck the wire was entertaining as fuck and for most of it's run was at least 75% procedural

why did walt leave his watch on top of the pay phone

― ภค๓ครՇє (lag∞n), Monday, September 30, 2013 12:43 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to me this was walt being melodramatic-now that he knows where gretchen and elliott live he's all ready to go on his suicide mission...no longer has any use for time

LOL

Gilligan explained that the reason Walt placed his watch (the one Jesse gave him for his 51st birthday) on top of the payphone after pretending to be the New York Times reporter was only retrofitted symbolism: The reason he had to do it was because they realized that in the flash-forward of him at Denny's that they'd shot for episode 501, Walt wasn't wearing a watch, so they had to explain where it went for continuity reasons. And so, out of necessity, they came up with what Gilligan called the "artsy fartsy" reason: It was a symbol of Walt, seeing the end is near, cutting ties with one of his "arch-nemeses," Jesse.

that is kinda silly

yeah ... wtf at The Wire not being great TV?!? i mean, did some of y'all forget OMAR LITTLE already or something?!?!?

really expected jesse to crash into something (another bunch of nazis, a tree, dunno) and explode when he was driving off whooping

lydia's humidifier btw

let's talk more about this episode than whether the wire was good

^ this

Gilligan should have just said "he felt like it," don't show all the strings man

All I could think of when Jesse was driving away was the end of Wages of Fear.

the post-credits sequence with huell was great

Would have been better or worse if they hadn't shown us the gun and ricin already in the flashbacks? I feel like we knew too much already but on the other hand cramming it all into one episode might have been a bit much.

love the little detail of lydia asking for more stevia, perfect.

ever so slightly disappointed that this wasn't just a casual detail. i mean lydia would so use sweetener and out of all the sweeteners she would so use stevia.

lolled at this:
the stevia industry must have really conflicted emotions about all this product placement
but i wonder what the deal was, did they actually pay to have it used in the show like that??

xp I say worse, mildly... all that setup really gave us stuff to chew on through the whole season, very fun

walt standing kind of christly in the light & sight of two windows, with cops-probably-watching, was so intense to me.

also disagree strongly with whoever upthread said it was cheap for walt to die by automated gunfire; I don't think this is true at all, & all the dimensions of it - that it's suicide, that it was probably a pretty likely outcome, that episode-through, in fact since he called Flynn, walt was a dead man walking, that scope for self-immolating redemption involved him dying either way, it's v fluent with the structure of the show I think

Well it's been fun

Slow, methodical resolution of the problem. Here is the money, give it to my son. Dakka-dakka-dakka now the Nazis are dead. Hello Lydia, I already killed you. Jesse, off you go, goodbye. The lab. The end.

I mean it's more than just pacing, it's a series of notes falling in exactly the right order at exactly the right time. Tonight and throughout the show.

it really was the 'happiest' of all options

Except for Jesse.

I liked the finale, but I felt like it needed one last jolt of chaos for that true BBad feel. Everything going so (relatively) smoothly was...odd.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/09/breaking-bad-recap-series-finale.html

^^ excellent point here about the ghost-like apparitions and disappearances of WW in the last few episodes. The climax of the show is when he puts his hands in the air and gives himself up to be cuffed, he's a dead man walking after that.

I liked that it didn't go for any dumb last minute tricks. Just a slow march toward the inevitable.

liked how walt was like a ghostly figure going round the houses

Kind of like Jesse drove through him at the end, too. He was lined up right in the center of the windshield.

also isnt it interesting you dont see any meth in the last episode, the famous blue meth. not even in the final scene where he wanders into the lab, where they so easily could have had him sorta say goodbye to it

when walt went to the lab i thought he was going to finish that cook jesse had abandoned. one last chemistry montage, let's remember the good times.

i was half-listening to talking bad and i think gilligan said a bit more about the watch thing, like it was also just walt knowing that he had no real use for it, knowing he'd be dead the next day, and deciding to part ways with that last remnant of normal life.

So much for my hopes of a Todd and Lydia romcom spinoff

Camomile with Meth

so for me it's interesting that Walt essentially dies of ricochet -- after all the talk over the years of us not seeing all the collateral damage of the meth he's cooked, essentially his life's work, Walt's last act ends with his own death as collateral damage of his vengeance. That's as appropriate as the ending could be, imo.

rmde at people suggesting that BB isn't about anything. Purely as a critique of the economy--a bunch of overeducated people out of work, the rise of the underground economy and how someone with an iq might navigate through its existing monsters, how business and management skills are developed, etc.--it has more to say than most other crime narratives.

At the beginning the car keys in the sunshield seems to be a conscious reminder that this is a TV show so suspend disbelief at some of the more outlandish leaps of logic.

And I would guess that the vast majority of the time that most people rewatch TV it's to return to a comfortable place they enjoyed, not to study subtleties they may have missed the first time around.

For most people the two halves of these sentences are synonymous.

I thought this was a really great finale and eerily beautiful in a lot of ways

walt looking through the glass at flynn was heartbreaking

that weary aside to Elliot 'if we're gonna have it this way, you're gonna need a bigger knife' was pure Ehrmentraut

Eerie: Walt died, just like the Nazis he killed did.

i most liked the part where "I saw you on Charlie Rose" was this chilling, ominous statement. should be on t-shirts like "I am the one who knocks."

Love that there was no histrionic standoff between Walt and Jesse. "Do it yourself" was the perfect resolution to Jesse's story.

what was up w jesse in the woodshop

― ภค๓ครՇє (lag∞n), Monday, September 30, 2013 3:20 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, Walt taught Jesse to be a craftsman. I took it as the closest the show could get to a flashforward, showing that despite all the fucking awful things that have happened to him he'll at least have an outlet for the perfectionism that has been instilled in him in the future.

when walt sat down between lydia & todd at the coffee shop i went 'aaah! holy shit' and then rewound and went 'aah!' again when i noticed he'd been sitting there the whole time. great composition by ViGi

jesse saying do it yourself was cool cuz it was walt trying to cajole him into doing his dirty work one last time, jesse saying no and walt accepting that instead of pushing it

anyhow show's kinda ridiculously overrated at the moment which is fine, it's had a really fun endrun, but i'm curious how it's regarded in a few years and whether ppl feel the need to revisit it the way they do the sopranos, the wire, deadwood. also wonder if what kind of limits it (for me at least) - that it was 'just' a piece of very very well executed entertainment - might be the thing that makes it a workable model for other shows in the future (certainly more than the wire or deadwood). boardwalk empire's not on this level but it's a similar thing - not much to say about anything but intelligent enough and loads of fun.

― balls, Sunday, September 29, 2013 10:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

it has about as much to say as The Godfather and people have no problem revisiting that. probably more people do that than they do, like, Andrei Rublev. of course it'll be rewarding to look at breaking bad again when you have the whole picture in mind! its not just well-constructed in a plotty thrillery way, its has a thematic construction too thats pretty well done and resonates in all kinds of surprising & cool ways. also entertaining things are the easiest things to revisit, which is why nobody can help themselves from watching The Departed or Empire Strikes Back for the 9000th time when they come on tv on a saturday afternoon. its why every dad has Band of brothers and the Outlaw Josey Wales on dvd

what was up w jesse in the woodshop

― ภค๓ครՇє (lag∞n), Sunday, September 29, 2013 11:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

in one of the eps where he's in narcanon he tells the crazy mustache guy who ran over his baby that when he was in HS he made a nice box in wood shop class, and then traded it to someone for weed

Another vote for "well-made pulp." Watched this in a crowded bar where the crowd gave touchdown cheers whenever Walter delivered vengence.

― LinkedIn Beef (Eazy), Sunday, September 29, 2013 11:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

ive been hearing about these bar screenings of BrBa and i cant think of an environment i'd like to watch the show in less than that... glad u liked it tho

rmde at the people who watched 6 seasons of this and are suddenly calling it "well made pulp." I guess all crime fiction can be considered "pulp" (in what world is that still an insult btw?) but this is some of the greatest crime fiction ever made imo.

― wk, Monday, September 30, 2013 12:12 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

even while you're praising a genre something, u gotta make sure ur 'putting it in its place'... its how st. pauline did it and by god thats how i'll do it until the lord takes me

i liked that walt changed out of his filthy clothes and into his old Walt Uniform (khakis, beige jacket) before visiting skyler, but they were super baggy and made him look like david byrne in stop making sense

See this is interesting - is it really in the crime fiction genre

I mean obviously it is, but I feel like the crime is just the form the big fuckup takes and it's actually in the big fuckup genre