Breaking Bad withdrawal support society

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

it was

Skyler is a well written and acted character

ps since my comment on gus's smile started an interesting wider discussion i'm a bit leery of saying "actually i meant" buuuuuut

what i guess i meant -- but didn't say very precisely -- is that it's the precision of the smile that giancarlo esposito chooses (as an actor) that i love, not the character: gus is a character that terrifies me! and GE makes this teror land very precisely, bcz he can put such a charming kind face on someone as they're casually doing something deeply cruel, so that you absorb both at once

(hector is horrible obviously so the cruelty is probably merited but what gus is doing at that point -- taunting him in his ruin -- is nevertheless cruel)

Her situation and how she attempts to deal with it are the dramatic crux of the last few seasons imo, it’s def true to say she’s “underused” but that’s kinda the point, the show is from Walt’s POV it’s his wacky adventures in breaking bad

btw I have no idea how strong the #teamwalt contingent actually were during the show’s run, I just know that they’re an obligatory reference point - maybe tho we’ve got to a point where we don’t have to make such a big thing of saying that the guy we saw on two occasions enacting a marital rape scene is Actually Bad Actually

xp I guess!

breaking actually bad actually

lol chekhov's trippy-uppy carpet

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

we can solve this by requiring that all horrible characters be played by shitty actors

I'm hoping she gets a scene in the forthcoming Deadwood movie where she finally just tears out her hair after years of thankless-wife roles on prestige dramas

the Gus thing doesn't seem terribly complex to me; it's a fascinating character played by a great actor. there's also the fact that he's written to appear mostly by proxy, and never really says much when he's on screen, so you kinda have to figure out his motivations on your own. the ruthless professionalism is fun to watch.

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

in the first season maybe...I think from S2 on Hank is a much more well-rounded and sympathetic character, but you don't really root for him because if he "wins" then the show is effectively over. as for Walt...its sorta like watching "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"...you may not like the character, but he's the crux of the show and there's still a part of you rooting for the guy to just walk away while he's ahead rather than continue to risk it all, over and over again

I just mean...even recently itt people have been keen on picking apart Hank's character flaws. I think it's interesting that people were/are often quicker to nitpick Hank's dude-brah-isms or call Skyler a nag than to, say, be creeped the eff out by Gus's ice-cold sociopathy.

I'm enbarrased to admit I dont think I ever twigged that the murdered Pollos Brother was his love interest partner. Does this suggest he also had a thing for Gale?

Him = Gus there, obv

Me either

Oh here we go, in an interview with Vince Gilligan:

Gus is a man who had one Achilles Heel, as far as we know: His burning desire for vengeance against the people who killed Max, who was very important to him. We don’t tend to nail things down on Breaking Bad. It’s fun to be a little mysterious, and it’s nice to have the audience come up with backstories on their own. Having said that, I personally think Max was more than just a friend to Gus. I think they probably were lovers. And therefore it was understandably a very crushing, terrible loss for Gus, one that he would never forget. That one bit of emotion that he allowed himself ultimately proved to be his undoing.

never picked up on that either tbh!