Breaking Bad withdrawal support society

Post BB focus on skyler seems way more interesting than Jesse - broke, pissed off, surly kid who may or may not have $9 million dollars, competent money launderer, feds probably monitoring her to some degree, awkward relationship with your sister whose husband died because of your husband who is also dead, etc.

skyler was a great character

her relationship with Walter was the crux of the show for so long and was usually more interesting to me as a dynamic than Walter/Jesse

Strange - it's the 40th anniversary of Jonestown, and reading about it I saw that Gilligan and MacLaren were down to make a six-episode miniseries for HBO about it. But this was back in 2016 and I can't find anything more recent about it on the innuhnet.

is it just me or do some of the plot points in the latter part of S3 seem a little...too convenient

like, Jesse hooking up with the girl from his support group, only to find out that her little brother just so happened to be the one who shot Combo? and then Jesse being able to come up with the perfect murder plot because he happens to know the junkie who delivers the burgers? and Walt figuring things out and running into the dudes (lol) literally a second before a shootout is about to erupt? I haven't watched the season finale so maybe it explains that a little better but for now it's kinda feeling a bit soap opera-ish.

idk I feel dumb even complaining about it because this show is so good but I felt they were a bit more careful about that in the first 2 seasons. a lot of the show's most dramatic elements were a direct cause-and-effect; for example the fact that Hank is unknowingly investigating Walt's crime ring is a result of the fact that he's kind of a braggart, talking about all the money meth dealers make and offering to take Walt along on a bust, leading him right to Jesse. here it's just a lot of "wow, small town"

this show is 100% ridiculous plot contrivances, how is that a question

I mean, that doesn't make it a bad show, it was fun to watch and a great series of cliffhangers but c'mon

It's all one giant Rube Heisenberg machine.

exactly - that's what makes the show so awesome. Walt cutting Jesse out of the operation -> Jesse ghosting Walt -> Walt being unable to contact him to tell him that Hank is looking for the RV -> Walt taking matters into his own hands to destroy it -> Jesse inadvertently leading Hank directly to the RV with Walt inside -> Walt having to plant a "fake" injury story about Marie -> Hank beating Jesse's ass for messing with his family -> Walt having to take Jesse back as partners so he won't roll on him...that stuff's brilliant. maybe that's why "let me tell you about my little brother who killed a guy down on Guerrero street" felt so out of place?

anyway just watched the S3 finale, I guess we aren't getting a Gale spinoff show after all. probably unintentional but I loved how Gale looked and acted like the archetypical chemistry teacher, right down to the succulents and the odd obsession with old French music. I'd kind of assumed Gale was a plant, but nah...poor guy

skyler is the only one saul can't snow (and he comes across as a fool when he tries, in a way that seems quite unlike the jimmy of BCS)

odd obsession with old French music

Italian -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5vd70oytDo

the ep that's mainly just make driving round and jesse being "are we there yet" is excellent

oh my god the scene where Hank says "I think someone doesn't like how I've been spending my free time" and Walt Jr. responds "uh....the minerals?"

having to process walt's total inability to get his head round the practicalities of money-laundering as a manifestation of his self-loathing self-destructiveness i think -- mirror to jesse's but located as an unexploded bomb off in a hyper-cerebral realm

altho i guess it's also a manifestation of his extreme resistance to what he sees as skyler's controllingness?

anyway it kinda sorta doesn't fit his (post-remission) character

just noticed another cool parallel - Hank throwing Tuco's grill into the river vs. Todd keeping the big spider and Walt keeping Gale's book.

it's not explicitly mentioned but it's kind of implied that Tuco is the first person Hank's ever actually killed, right?

the scene where hank pulls gail and gustavo together -- hank is SUUUUCH as dislikeable jock asshole… but also a good and not at all dumb detective (it turns out) and the assholeness is (partly) a mask for that

yea I kinda love how Hank was full of character flaws... he's the "good guy" and has arguably the best moral compass of any of the main characters but he also has the tendency to be an abusive jerk. not to mention the way he treats criminals like animals, posing next to their corpses like a hunter would a deer. he projects that badass hero cop image but the violence legitimately affects him. he's my favorite character on the show.

anyway just thought y'all should know we just finished "Ozymandias" which was, man...not a great thing to watch right before going to bed. but what an awesome episode it was. one of my favorite things about this show is how it doesn't hold anything out - the moments you think are going to be drawn out over many episodes (or left as cliffhangers) just sorta happen. no clue what's gonna happen in the final two.

*spoilers*
everybody lives happily ever after

like my guess is he's gonna come back to waste the Nazis/try to get his money back/protect his 'recipe'/maybe save Jesse in the process, but I'm batting a solid .000 in these predictions so far

The last episode is a musical, if that helps with your predictions.

♬ they got the meth lab out 🎶

hey I was pretty close

lmao @ Walt's "say hello to my little friend" moment, that was pretty awesome

You were pretty close! but I didn't want to spoil it for u.

I've never felt more smarter than when I kept accurately predicting future plot points in the old BB threads. It's really just all been downhill from there.

tbh I still wish "Ozymandias" (with some slight augmentations) was the finale. most of the last two episodes was pish

last two episodes definitely felt like an epilogue, since the central tension in the last season wasn't so much "how will Walt die" but rather "how will the White family be irreversibly torn apart".

totally called the "hitmen" being Badger and Skinny Pete. felt like pure fanservice but I'm glad they did it

one thing I really dug about this show is how every major event is thoroughly dealt with in the plot, no death really gets shrugged off or glossed over. in a lot of lesser dramas you see characters get killed in the closing scenes and they're barely mentioned in the next episode. but here...like, nothing in S4 or S5 could happen without the murder of Gale, who you figure at first to be just a goofy minor character. for a show that was supposedly made up on the spot it really is incredibly tightly scripted...I've never really seen anything like it. though I do wish they revealed what happened between Walt & Gretchen way back when.

also thought it was cool how that "there must be some combination of words that would make her understand" quote during the fly episode basically revealed Walt's entire worldview

tbh I still wish "Ozymandias" (with some slight augmentations) was the finale. most of the last two episodes was pish

this is nuts to me

xpost Yes, everything is a formula that can be tweaked and refined if you're smart enough, and goddamn it I'm the smartest one there is.

beyond the final Walt/Skyler scene and Jesse's resolution it was mostly pretty useless to me idk xp

ok then pretend they don't exist

though I do wish they revealed what happened between Walt & Gretchen way back when.

didn't they tho? I recently rewatched a random episode and thought they did that. She took him to a party her high society parents threw and he felt inadequate and basically abandoned her.

they do but it feels kinda glossed over. the assumption is that Walt let his ego sabotage him again but the specifics are never quite mentioned. the only reason why it feels significant is because it is in effect his entire origin story - the one decision that derailed his entire life, basically

I think there was a lot of build up and speculation about what happened, and when we saw what did happen it seemed kind of underwhelming

they didn't need to get into detailed spin-off territory (Better Call Gretchen): we were shown enough to see that the relationship was tanked by Walt's massive shoulder chip, and he had stoked his own resentment over the intervening decades. it was well-timed, as we'd been able to assume that he wasn't totally unreasonable to assign some blame to others for his situation previously, but now his ego was shown to be a consistent damaging trait.

oh man I just remembered Walt sarcastically telling Lydia "what am I going to do, murder you in the restaurant, right here in this public place??"

She took him to a party her high society parents threw and he felt inadequate and basically abandoned her.

I've literally just finished watching the whole show and I dont recall this. You mean as a flashback? Which episode was that in?

I mean there was the party Walt and Skyler went to in S1 but that wasnt a past thing.

He and Gretchen talk about it when they meet up later

It's mentioned that he leaves her, but they don't really go into it. I think the implication is that Gretchen's family was high society and Walt felt uncomfortable or intimidated. The bigger question is how a dude who is obviously a world-class genius wound up teaching high school chemistry.

love the way gus smiles when he visits hector, so bland, so ruthlessly victorious

also lol old giancarlo made up and wigged up to play a much younger giancarlo (a trope we will come to recognise)

I find the way gus is presented as the character you Simply Have Got to Love troubling though it's not a new development -- Sidney Greenstreet worked this same angle time & time again -- but I get all fretful about how nakedly horrible a person as Fring is also the person we're happiest to see every time he appears

No idea what anyone would find lovable about him tbh, he’s quite openly portrayed as a monster

or “what do you mean ‘we’”, i guess

yeah but solve for monster there

Idk least monstrous is probably Mike tbh

...who is also a profoundly shitty person. idk this show -- which I consider a masterpiece, don't get me wrong -- has this dicey moral grammar that I suspect collapses if you focus on it too long

There's probably a really great book to be written about our engagement with fictional characters of ill repute. Wrt this show in particular, I think Gilligan & co. intentionally steered the audience to pooh-pooh a flawed but ultimately upright character like Hank while they whooped and hollered for Walt and Gus, if only to push us to the point where we find ourselves questioning why we would ever have taken the sides that we did.

(Also I have a nascent theory that fiction generally tends to steer into the car crash of conflict rather than boringly maintaining the speed limit of accord. Which is to say: audiences are more primed to respond to bad guys/bad behavior as plot engines.)

(Work has exhausted me so I hope I'm not just barfing out incoherence rn.)

if only to push us to the point where we find ourselves questioning why we would ever have taken the sides that we did.

not incoherent, very well put. the death of hank is moment at which I think the viewer is supposed to realize absolutely all these people are wretched. except maybe hank & except maybe skyler, who attracted such a cult of hate but knew the least about the operation, etc

also think yr nascent theory of fiction is correct

Also Gus is a great boss if you work for his legit business

I find the way gus is presented as the character you Simply Have Got to Love troubling though it's not a new development -- Sidney Greenstreet worked this same angle time & time again -- but I get all fretful about how nakedly horrible a person as Fring is also the person we're happiest to see every time he appears

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Friday, December 14, 2018 6:09 PM (five hours ago)

been this way since milton's satan iirc