Breaking Bad withdrawal support society

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

we are fallen etc

There's probably a really great book to be written about our engagement with fictional characters of ill repute

i haven't read this so I don't know if it's "really great" though I do remember reading something by kotsko that i liked (only a blog post but it was good) -- anyway i think it covers the topic generally and perhaps specifically (breaking bad keeps being mentioned in the blurb but i'm not sure whether or not he discusses it in detail)

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41GEkk%2BGfcL.jpg

here's a quick interview to give you an idea of his angle (spoiler: he thinks there's more going on than "back to milton"):
http://scottberkun.com/2013/why-we-love-sociopaths-interview/

i like that.

this kind of goes back to something i think about a lot, that drama routinely requires its protagonists to be above or outside the law (or at least to hold special privileges in relation to the rest of us) so that they can exercise every option in attaining whatever their goals are - i.e. all the police and hospital dramas, secret agents, detectives, the nobility in shakespeare etc. - the logic running that if heroes ("heroes"?) are constrained by the same dull rules we all are then it's more difficult to generate a satisfying drama. breaking bad is no exception - it's literally about a man deciding to live outside those rules - but it's interesting to me that, partic in season 2, the stakes feel impossibly, butt-clenchingly high, but not because of walter's involvement in any public drama but because of his private relationship with his wife. we're anxious not because he might go to jail but because of how much we care about the consequences of that on his relationships. and speaking for myself because i want him to somehow be able to square his bad-breakingness with being a good guy, good father, good husband, which cannot happen, will never happen. but that's what generates the tension (for me). so i've always been baffled by the anti-skyler crew, the ones who sociopathically cheer on walt's "bad-assness" - what are they getting out of this show if they don't feel that tension?

i guess the tension is "WILL HE BECOME EL CHAPO phD?"

el quacko if you will

or the anti-skylers are all like, he broke bad! why does he still care what she thinks?? his rule-breaking runs aground in the private sphere where it's actually exactly those "rules" - honesty, integrity, respect - that he's purportedly risking it all for

This is why I was kinda captivated (surprisingly, given its star) by Men of a Certain Age. The protagonists could/would have been a trio of middle-aged antiheroes with loose morals on any other cable drama, but the central conflict was just...dealing with getting older, mostly. There was a certain 'oh, at least one of these dudes is going to go all the way off the rails any minute now, just you wait' tension that was almost stubbornly unfulfilled. Romano's character had a gambling problem and even his bookie was unbearably reasonable about not getting paid.

Naturally, it didn't last very long.

a subterranean issue is the extent to which the having-already-broken-bad *also* treat family (= their own family) as basically sacred and entirely a good reason to override badworld business sense (as per michael corleone fingerwagging at fredo): the salamancas obviously, also gus re his long-lost lover (the chilean chemist headshot by hector by the pool in past-times yellow-lens)

jesse's throughline is his alienation from his family, as jimmy's will be i guess

Thanks for the link, mark, still waking up and didn't notice it til now.

Fwiw my anti-Skylerness was entirely down to her being a poorly written and poorly acted character. Maybe thats not what ppl are referring to here idk

it's not

i thought her acting was great btw fwiw