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This is from a while ago, but if you haven't read it, a very thoughtful and interesting review of the series as a whole (well, halfway through s5) by James Meek in the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/james-meek/its-the-moral-thing-to-do
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 05:06 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 22:54 |
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cletepurcel posted:As far as legacy goes, I think you can make a solid case for Breaking Bad as the #2 drama of all time behind The Wire (I know at least one critic - Tim Goodman - already has, and I agree with him.) I think the general argument will go, The Wire is the best show ever because no other show was as ambitious, and successful in its ambition. However, as much as I love The Wire, BB beat it - and many other of the great dramas - cleanly on two important counts - consistency (it's difficult to name, off the top of my head, weak episodes of Breaking Bad, and there were no prolonged stretches of weakness) and cinematography. Probably acting too, come to think of it. There was a really great article a while ago - can't remember who wrote it or what it was from, it was Grantland or EW or Time or something - which made the case that of the accepted big four (The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad), BB was the best because it was fundamentally about choices. In The Wire everyone's a product of their environment, ditto The Sopranos, in Mad Men everyone's a product of their time. Breaking Bad is the only one that examines the concept of evil and wrongdoing as a matter of deliberate choice. I thought it fitted in neatly with the fact that the show doesn't ever particularly condemn Walt or Jesse for the production of meth (because imbibing meth is a user's own choice), only for the actual evil associated with the criminal trade and ruthless climb to the top. I'm currently approaching the end of the Wire season 2, and I think comparing them in terms of quality is apples and oranges. Breaking Bad is a stark, Shakespearean, moral-driven chess game with a very small cast; The Wire is more of a sprawling Dicknesian epic which doesn't, as far as I can tell, appear to have any particular moral - it's just about all kinds of different people struggling to survive against institutions, living in the cracks. The Wire also doesn't have many edge of your seat moments the way BB does. It's definitely a quality show that I'm enjoying, but I'll finish an episode and happily not watch another for several weeks - it's doesn't have that same now, now, now gimme quality that BB did. The exception is in season 1 with the episode culminating in Kima getting shot but that's all. And that's appropriate, for The Wire, because that's what real life is like.
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 05:55 |
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Oh, and I still haven't figured out how I feel about the finale, but I do think: the flashforwards in season five were a mistake. The first one was shocking and cool at the time, because it revealed that Walt's empire had fallen apart and he was on the run. In retrospect that wasn't a good move. Without showing that, the possibilities for the show's ending were limitless - but since they did show that, we knew that the show was ultimately going to end in a certain way. I would have preferred not to. It was still an absolutely amazing piece of television and I enjoyed season five a lot. I just think those two flashforwards were a bad move.
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 06:02 |
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Jack Skeleton posted:Breaking Bad's Southwestern setting strikes a perfect chord with me. I'm really glad they decided ABQ instead of Riverside, Ca. The city and setting of wide open skies works so loving well with the show. Seeing those montages with wide skies, sometimes with clouds, other times without for miles and miles around really helped the show and ABQ became a character in it. Yeah, I really can't imagine it taking place anywhere other than the American south-west. Something about just having a big city surrounded on all sides by trackless desert (not to mention the proximity of Mexico and the cartels). I'm Australian and often lamented during Breaking Bad's that Australian TV is formulaic drivel and why couldn't we come up with Breaking Bad etc. (The one thing Australia can, theoretically, do as well as the United States is a Western.) And the first problem that occurred to me was that Australia doesn't have any cities near the desert. I mean, why does Albuquerque even exist?
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 07:48 |
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IIRC Gus replaced the Cousins as the villains in s3 because they had to duck out early due to other contracts or something. It wasn't what Gilligan wanted at all, even though it turned out amazing. I loving hated the Cousins from day one, when they walked away from an explosion. They just never jibed with the show at all and I'd prefer to pretend they never existed (with the exception of Hank killing both of them which was loving amazing. Me and my housemate were sitting there watching it literally on the edge of our seats, grasping our hands together and shouting at the TV. Grasping hands in a cool semi-handshake kind of way, mind you, not a gay way.) Anyway, I think that's why s4 dragged in the middle? Because a lot of the end of s3 was actually meant to be in s4. I don't really understand someone who thinks s5 dragged while s4 was fine. The same housemate I was getting all gay and shouty with - somebody that invested in the show - stopped watching in the middle of s4 because he was bored with it.
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 09:00 |
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Why are they even remaking it? It shits me when America remakes foreign series because Americans can't bear (or networks think they can't bear) to watch something that's not 100% what they're comfortable and familiar with. It's just as bad the other way around.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 02:10 |
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cletepurcel posted:Gilligan talked about it on the last podcast. It would have come after Jesse's death at the hands of Tuco (or his story standin at that point) who originally was going to be a character closer to Gus on the badass scale. In response Walt was going to capture the dude, rig up a tripwire that would be attached to a gun that would shoot him, and continually torture him to try and get the guy to trip the wire and kill himself. Eventually, Walt Jr would stumble onto the guy and try to save him, but when the tortured guy figured out it was Walt's son he would activate the tripwire, killing both of them. Haha that's terrible. What's the deal with the blood suitcase and cowboy flashbacks? I never heard of those.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 03:44 |
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2house2fly posted:I thought the plane crash was a bit silly but I LOVED the black and white flashforwards. From reading along with a message board thread as I watched, I feel like a lot of people's problems were that the flashforwards gave the impression that some big cartel gunfight or meth lab explosion was going to go down at Walt's house, and the plane crash came really out of left field. This is precisely why I didn't like it. It's fine to pull a twist/mindfuck out of the left field on the viewers, as long as the actual thing is more interesting than what the perception was. "Plane crash that affects the entire city" was not as interesting as "Walt's deeds have caught up to him and something terrible has happened." The sensation it gave me was similar to that in the movie The Village, when it's revealed the monsters are just the village elders in costumes. That's not as interesting as what we thought was happening! They spent the whole season building up to it and then were like "psyche! It was an unrelated catastrophe." The idea of it being a consequence of Walt's actions was also dumb, because it was such a disconnected chain. It was Jane's dad's fault for returning to his high-stakes, high-pressure job before he'd dealt with his grief. Presumably the same thing would have happened if Jane had OD'd of her own accord, or died in a car crash, or been walking past a construction site when somebody accidentally dropped a hammer.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 13:22 |
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Regarding ranking the seasons, I don't know how 5 will stand the test of time (and the test of people watching it in one gluttonous gulp instead of measuring it out over years) but I do recall feeling relieved that the superlab was gone. Season 3 and 4 kind of blended into each other. They were amazing, yeah, but I was glad that Walt and Jesse were out of the superlab, out from under Gus' thumb, and the show was getting back to the freewheeling days of the first two seasons when all kinds of crazy hosed up things were possible - cleaning up a body that fell through the roof! Getting kidnapped by a drug dealer! Destroying evidence with magnets! Train robbery! That also reminds me of the moment very late in the show, when Walt is desperately trying to clean up the gasoline Jesse splashed everywhere. Skyler's now in on his life of crime, but it was a weirdly satisfying throwback to the days when he had to spin all kinds of lies to keep his faily out of the loop.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 14:54 |
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hiddenmovement posted:I really saw the crash as more of a comment on the broader, unseen effects of Walts behaviour. He is pouring out a huge quantity of an extremely addictive, destructive substance onto the streets of his hometown, and here we are with the indirect consequences of hard drug dealing, families torn apart and a society that stops working. I thought Breaking Bad actually actively avoided ever condemning Walt and Jesse for the creation and sale of drugs per se - instead they get condemned for all the criminal violence associated with it. The closest it ever comes is when Walt has to walk through a meth house looking for Jesse after Jane dies. This kind of links in with the theory that it's a show which is very much about personal choices and, thus, personal consequences. That's not necessarily my view, but I think that was the view the show took. There's a great moment, I can't remember when, when Hanks points out that meth used to be freely available in drug stores all over the country, and says something like "thank God we came to our senses on that." Walt agrees with him whole-heartedly, and not just to keep up his cover as a mild-mannered chemistry teacher - if meth were legal, he wouldn't be able to make nearly as much money off it as he does.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 14:58 |
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Was I the only person who thought he was talking to "Heisenberg" in that scene? However dumb that is? Praying to God literally did not occur to me until I read it on the internet.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2013 16:26 |
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Regarding what could happen to Jesse next - is out of the question that he'd be so eaten up with guilt that he'd turn himself over to the cops anyway? And if so, how much jail time would he be looking at? Gale's murder had extenuating circumstances, nobody needs to know about the guy he killed in Mexico, and there isn't a jury in the land that would convict him for killing Todd. He'd probably be in more trouble over two years of widescale meth production. But would he be looking at a life sentence? He's a young guy. And he shows/would show clear remorse. Although I suppose there is the problem that he'd be at risk from the Aryan Brotherhood in the prison population. I also think he's the kind of person who would want to track down Drew Sharp's parents and tell them what happened to their son, to give them closure, regardless of whether that happens via him turning himself in or not.
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# ¿ Oct 9, 2013 01:24 |
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Yeah I don't understand how anyone can think Walt's relationship with Jesse was 100% manipulation given his Freudian slip with Walt Jr tucking him into bed. That's not to say the relationship didn't totally degenerate and that by the time of Ozymandias Walt wasn't being completely evil and writing Jesse off entirely. But for a long time there, along the way, Walt at least in part had some affection for Jesse in a really messed up manipulative kind of way.
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2013 14:55 |
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Redundant posted:Jesse talking to Walt about the dealers manipulating the kid into killing Combo shortly before Walt manipulates Jesse into killing Gale was pretty neat and I missed it first time. This reminds me - you know how Jesse wants Walt to make ricin so he can kill them but Walt refuses? But then jesse has ricin in the burgers anyway? Where did he get that?
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2013 23:49 |
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 22:54 |
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Exploder posted:I'm re-watching this show, again, and every time I do, I find new things to be amused by. I've watched the first 3 seasons 6 or 7 times, but it's still as good as the first time, especially because I haven't seen it in over a year. I remember having the discussion after season 3 that there was no way they could top Half and Full Measures. Boy, in retrospect, I was so wrong. I can name five episodes off the top of my head better than Half Measures: Ozymandias, Crawl Space, Face Off, Confessions, and Dead Freight. And that is just off the top of my head. My favourite episode is still Grilled (when they're kidnapped out to Tuco's shack). The way they amped up the tension in that episode was loving amazing.
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2013 11:04 |