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

Let's remember Eliot and his knife for a moment

Yeah I tried to catch up on everything on this thread but it was too daunting so I skipped to the bottom.

was waiting for Elliott to do something pretentious like take a defensive stance and shout "I KNOW TAE-BO AND I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU..HEISENBERG!"

I did some google, watch explained here:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/09/breaking-bad-finale-facts-learned-on-talking-bad.html

elliott snaps walt's neck, whispering "you're out of the company..." as he descends to the floor. 45 minutes "crimes of walt" montage set to a Phish jam follows.

I can totally buy that the Nazis were less careful than Gus and Walt. For all we know the DEA could have been on their ass.

yeah i guess that's true.

Also the Nazis are all known criminals so I'm sure they'd show up on the radar more readily than a humble chicken man or a science teacher.

anybody who thinks anything in this episode was "too tidy" needs to go watch Gustavo Fring, fatally wounded with his face half blown off, exit a hospital room, straighten his fucking tie, and collapse

Hahahaha....this morning, my wife said "So, Breaking Bad...should I watch it? Would I like it?" I had no idea how to answer her. She is kind of predisposed to dislike things that I like these days. I told her "I think it's really good, but you may not care for the bleakness and nihilism." Anyway, I just heard her fire up the pilot episode in the living room. Hope this goes well!

you should go tell her "you know, he dies at the end"

Best season of AMC's Breaking Bad

Yup, the last half of season 4 is another case of the show being too tidy (I hate Salud. The show spent 3½ seasons building the cartel up as some undefeatable force of nature, and then it was defeated by a bottle of booze. Boo.)

As I said upthread, the struggle between chaos and tidyness was constant throughout the show. But before, anytime something too tidy happened, we could rely on the show returning and showing some unremembered thread untying the whole thing all over again. It was dissapointing to me to see it double down on the tidyness at the finishline.

Shit, I just realised Jesse's pretty fucked. The police are totally going to find his confession tape in the Nazi compound.

(I hate Salud. The show spent 3½ seasons building the cartel up as some undefeatable force of nature, and then it was defeated by a bottle of booze. Boo.)

so you'd prefer them taking a protracted measure of fighting the cartel for like several seasons? I mean this is how TV works. Foe previously thought undefeatable KO'ed, often via unconventional means.

Jesse doesn't have any money either

I can totally buy that the Nazis were less careful than Gus and Walt.

For sure. Talkin' about train heists with methylamine in the parking lot and all that.

xxp: I would have preferred for the cartel to remain undefeatable, or, when they were defeated, for another cartel to take it's place. As it is in the real world. The show could have functioned in the shadow of retribution, would have been okay. The show was at it's best when the wider world was unknowable, as I've said before.

I'm ok with "Jesse is young, his family might be ready to take him back, he's clearly finished with doing/making drugs, and he seems to have never been implicated in the case against Walt" as his relatively optimistic forecast, although I hadn't considered the possibility of his confession tape still being out there.

I would have preferred for the cartel to remain undefeatable, or, when they were defeated, for another cartel to take it's place

Germany will go on

if you were looking for realism there wouldn't be any shadow of retribution. wicked genius vs. the cartel is a first-round KO by the cartel literally every time.

Jesse also hasn't appeared in public in months, so they might just assume that he's dead.

Could be argued that another cartel did fill the void: Walt's.

Also Walt was mostly selling in the Czech Republic so the turf wars weren't as much of a big deal.

if nussbaum is right - and i don't really think she is - it'd be a much better ending than the one readily accepted here. parallels with that epic deconstruction of the sopranos final scene that was floating around a few years back

nah screw it, i'm buying it. would like to hear giligan's response to it anyways

da croupier otm upthread

I don't think it would've been that difficult or finger-pointy to make the final episodes at bit more even-handed.

it would've required more time though, and it seems pretty clear from the pacing of this season that as it is they had to take a pretty streamlined approach to get in everything they did

I don't think anyone's saying it actually is a dream. If it really was, that'd be a terrible bait-and-switch. I took EN's idea more as a lens to view the episode's tone through.

while dealing with her immediate feelings of disappointment with the finale, she said she wished the ending was a dream, as it would have made its "everything's coming up walt" tone more explicable. It was actually her expressing that disappointment so well that made me realize the short-sightedness of it.

i think EN *is* saying that really. i know what you mean though, it's a bit reach-y but i can't help but feel the whole thing was so slick and rushed, i want it to have some extra dimension so it's more than just blam blam pulp schlock where everything goes walt's bad-ass way

i think that dimension is there, once you realize the limits of his "success" in the finale

i think it's also clearer once you take the episode as part of the whole. As a stand alone, yes, Walt did what he wanted to do. But in the context of the series, saying "Walt won" is totally blinkered.

the lack of supporting character moments actually adds to that - there are no whimsical subplots and small-scale foibles. Walt destroyed that. Allegedly, as it was at the end of previous seasons, the family has money coming. But Hank's dead. Everyone else is miserable and hates him. To provide for his family he destroyed their lives. That's all there in the finale, in between the moments where Walt pulls lucky switcheroo on someone he dislikes.

That he's not denied that switcheroo, that pulpy victory, is so much more acidic, unsettling than if he'd been left crucified to think about what a bad guy he is.

the big problem with season 5b is that it's just hard to see why he gives a shit about the nazis or Lydia. I get the idea that he wanted to stake a claim for his old empire that is running without him, but the stakes were so much higher for his Gus/Gale/Tuco machinations. They should have had a way for him to find out that they were threatening Skyler. Maybe they wrote that they killed her or Holly and then chickened out.

You're killin' it with otmness itt.
xp to da croup

people might right now be bummed walt didn't pay for his crimes more overtly (or that Team Walt didn't have them rubbed in their face), but if someone starting the show asks how things are going to turn out, you couldn't really say "he wins" or "he loses," and not because of a cheap ambiguity, but because it's too simplistic a binary.

xpost I'll totally admit that while i think the show did a great job with its overall arc, it definitely has the same problem as most shows around season 5, where they've already had and lost their coolest villains. That said, I'm not mad we met Todd or Lydia.

it's kinda challopy but I actually think I prefer 5a. Ozymandias is a top 5 episode tho.

for me it's not so much about walt winning or losing or paying for his crimes, more that up to now (in this season at least) the events mostly felt grimly believable - in terms of the bb world. but this episode didn't work like that, even in fictional terms so much depended on fluke and luck and coincidence and getting the angle of a transformerbot machinegun exactly right and a couple of billionaires having little-to-no home security. it worked entirely on walt's terms.

it was enjoyable and if i was sat in a bar watching i'd be wooping and cheering but in reality i didn't want this show to go out like that. fairly sure that gilligan & co didn't intend the sopranos-y dream explanation but hey.

some interesting stuff in here btw: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/sep/30/breaking-bad-series-finale-tv-review

...its clean, clinical neatness seemed off. There have been plenty of gut-punch moments throughout the series – the deaths of Jane, Gale and Hank, in particular, were astoundingly awful and grim. None of this finale felt unexpected in the same way.

..

In the end, he has given Jesse freedom, Skyler innocence, Flynn money. He collapses, and the Badfinger song Baby Blue strikes up. "Guess I got what I deserved," it opens, toeing the Gilligan party line, that this is a moral fable in which nobody gets to win. But look at Bryan Cranston's face. Walter dies happy. He doesn't only get what he deserved; he gets what he wanted.

In the end, he has given Jesse freedom, Skyler innocence, Flynn money.

this is exactly what i'm talking about. these are impressive accomplishments in the context of one episode, but to go from "freeing the meth slave you originally meant to kill for snitching, keeping your wife out of jail, and hopefully leaving a trust to the son that hates you for killing his uncle" to "he gets what he wanted" really requires blinders.

exactly

yeah he dies happy and he got what he thinks he wanted - like tons of other evil motherfuckers who leave their families destroyed - the damage is done and the audience knows it, did people want a tear to roll down his face?

he dies happy... alone on the floor of a Nazi meth lab, to a love song aimed here at fucking crystal meth - not sure what really needed to be underlined about him being a bad husband or father or human being in that ending

also grimly believable? like what, taking out the entire cartel at a pool party? gus frind walking around with half his head blown off? picky eastern european meth-heads actually giving a fuck whether meth is 72% or 92% pure?

I don't get people who think Jesse is headed towards some kind of bright future, or any future really. He's a goner.

anyone notice flynn dresses like a bad kid now

sorry didn't mean that last post to sound so harsh - just seems people arguing that Walt somehow won or got off too easy are actually wishing for a greater redemption for Walt than he deserved or was capable of. he went out doing what he had a genius for - destroying - and that possibly lightened a tiny bit of the mountain of shit he dropped on jesse and his family, but that's it.

way I read it, it's a flashforward a year, walt's spent some time hiding out in NH, now he's back in town and is planning to settle some score w/ a v big gun

breakfast + the callback to E1S1/happier times indicates his family is somehow involved, mainly due to their absence

― diamanda ram dass (Edward III), Sunday, July 15, 2012 9:39 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anyone notice flynn dresses like a bad kid now

noticed his ugly camo pants

I heart you Internet:

Walt just put regular unleaded into a diesel Volvo.

― pplains, Monday, September 30, 2013 10:54 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Watched this again. It's not a diesel Volvo. If it was, it would've said "diesel" on the trunk lid. Also, it appears to be an '88-'93 model, and Volvo didn't sell diesel 240s in the US those years.

GILLIGAN'S CONTINUITY RECORD REMAINS UNBLEMISHED.

Phew.

anyone notice flynn dresses like a bad kid now

― lag∞n, Monday, September 30, 2013 9:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't even know he was a Bills fan.

The episode was a little too aware of its finality, sometimes to the point of cuteness (totally called the Badger and Pete appearance while we were watching it), but it was OK. I think the ending of "The Shield" still looms as the one to beat.

http://i.imgur.com/UrovlOp.jpg

nailed it

we should have a thread for bad cartoons that aren't political probably