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My wife and I have just watched all of this and we were left with one thing that puzzled us: Marie's reaction to Walt's activities. She seemed to take it so personally, more so than Hank, and was out for his blood immediately. Did we miss something?
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Nov 16, 2013 12:56
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Pissflaps posted:My wife and I have just watched all of this and we were left with one thing that puzzled us: Marie's reaction to Walt's activities. She seemed to take it so personally, more so than Hank, and was out for his blood immediately. Did we miss something?
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Nov 16, 2013 13:01
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And putting the kids in danger. And for somehow being responsible for Hank being attacked.
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Nov 16, 2013 13:09
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Lycus posted:And putting the kids in danger. And for somehow being responsible for Hank being attacked. Not to mention being responsible for Hank's disappearance/murder
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Nov 16, 2013 14:22
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And Walter intentionally wrecked his car while Hank was in it, to stop him from seeing the laundromat.
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Nov 16, 2013 14:32
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Yeah these are all fair but I dunno it seemed like an immediately switch it didn't take any time for it to 'sink in' so that she realised the implications she just suddenly hated his guts. Maybe if I watched it through again it might not seem that way, it's only a minor aspect.
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Nov 16, 2013 14:53
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Pissflaps posted:Yeah these are all fair but I dunno it seemed like an immediately switch it didn't take any time for it to 'sink in' so that she realised the implications she just suddenly hated his guts.
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Nov 16, 2013 15:27
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Here was my write-up of Marie after that episode:quote:Marie’s kleptomania subplot is an important and vital part of Breaking Bad.
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Nov 16, 2013 16:06
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Another thing about Marie's shoplifting: One thing this show likes to do, and does pretty well, is taking certain general types of situations and modeling them over and over not only with different characters, but with different characters at different points in their development. For example-- "how would Walt feel about killing somebody? He wouldn't kill somebody? Ok, well-- how about if it was a violent person chained up in his basement, who is literally about to stab him with a jagged piece of piece. Ok-- how about if he gets a bit more pro-active, and feels like somebody will try to kill him? Alright, now how about someone who he likes and bears no ill will, but who might indirectly put him in harm's way? Ok-- how about if Jesse is put in these positions?" and so on. It's why I never really felt as fatigued as I thought I would by the cyclical recurrence of certain plot elements, particularly the "Walt and Jesse fight, vow to never cook meth together again," thing. Each time is a bit modulated by new information and new complications, informed by what we know about their original relationship-- the student who doesn't give a poo poo and the teacher who sort of gets a kick out of seeing students disappoint him. Every clash they have-- and every nice moment they share too-- is in a dialectic with that initial relationship. Hopefully you get the picture. But anyway, Marie's shoplifting. Even though the show drops Skyler's active writing career/hobby pretty early on-- and sensibly, because, well, she doesn't really have time for a hobby past a certain point-- she's still pretty thoroughly set up as someone who has a knack for stories, and who, more importantly, fundamentally wants to believe in stories. At the beginning of the show, she and Walt both think they're living one kind of life, and then, very quickly, they aren't. How do they each deal with it? Walt deals with it like a chemist, not only because, you know, he gets out there and labs it up for five seasons, but because he tries to piece a solution together out of the skills he has, the resources he has, the stuff he knows how to do, without really being beholden to their context. He knows how to look at this pile of stuff and make meth. He has the talent and the training to do it better than anybody else. This same talent served him well as a research scientist or whatever, it served him all right as a teacher, but that's not really relevant. The situation that Heisenberg comes out of is a new situation, and it calls for new responses, and he'll figure it out. He'll create a new person to be if he has to. His lies throughout the first season are unconvincing because he doesn't know how to lie. A lot of the family scenes in Seasons 2 and 3 are honestly painful to watch, because he doesn't understand that he can't just take off his (literal) met-hat and come home and be Dad. Skyler, however, deals with it like a writer. This is maybe why she comes off as a bit abrasive to people in the first couple of seasons-- she can tell something is wrong, that Walt's stories don't add up, because she gets stories. She has no idea what's going on-- how could she?-- but she can tell that the story her life has become doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and that there's nothing she can do about it. It's an unbelievably frustrating and tragic situation, but plopped in the background of the rest of the show, it can get sort of buried the first couple of times you watch the show. Into this situation comes the Marie shoplifting plotline. Again, something in Skyler's life doesn't make sense and hurts her for no reason. She gets a nice but gaudy gift, tries to return it, and all of a sudden is being harassed and threatened by strangers. This is the first time that Skyler is put into a situation where: a) she becomes aware that someone she cares for deeply has caused her harm not out of malice but out of thoughtlessness, and b) she has to invent a fiction to fix it. Since this is early-show Skyler, she's pissed. She doesn't understand why anybody would steal-- and she can't understand why anybody would lie about doing something wrong. But since she and Marie are sisters and very close, and since shop-lifting is, in the scheme of the show, not a huge deal, it gets smoothed over. There's also a neat contrast with later developments in the plot-- Skyler freaks out about the shop-lifting, while Hank quietly tries to fix it without anybody knowing. Note how that dynamic is reversed-- not to mentioned magnified enormously-- in later seasons. What makes this situation so important, though, is that Skyler gets out of it by lying. It's a little fib-- she's pregnant, who knows, she actually probably shouldn't be put under that much duress-- but it shows us that she has this skill, she can think on her feet, and that people believe her. By this point in the show we know that Walt is a bad liar and that he leaves loose ends. I don't know if this is meant as an Achilles' heel on his part so much as it's just something the show needs-- if he covered all his tracks completely there wouldn't be much of a show. But the scene with Skyler in the jewelry store clues us in that even though she's in the dark right now, even though Walt's double life is causing strains in their marriage, she has precisely the set of skills that he lacks, and that he needs to carry on bridging the gap between his work-life and his home-life. This gets developed again with the Ted Beneke story, which I'm not a huge fan of, but ups the stakes by showing us a Skyler willing to invent stories not just to get out of a situation in which she actually is innocent, but in order to help someone, and, per Walt in the last episode, "because she likes it." And then of course, by the end, she's a total co-conspirator with Walt-- the gambling addiction, the car-wash, etc. He only lasts as long as he does because Skyler is there to help him, and because, crucially, she teaches him to be a better story teller. It's perhaps why he comes back in the last episode. Early series Walt doesn't really care about narrative symmetry, and he doesn't care about the beau geste. He's clumsy and gawky. We first see him standing there in his tighty-whities, panting and looking around in complete bewilderment. But if Gale made him aware of the poetics of his situation, that an arbitrary arrangement of stuff sold for an arbitrary amount of money to arbitrary people could be his transcendent "Baby Blue," then Skyler taught him how to be in a story. She taught him that the lover has to come back to El Paso even though he might as well just sit out his last couple weeks in a cabin. And this all starts with Skyler hauled off to a back-office and realizing that she doesn't know her sister as well as she thought she did after all. (It also bookends the last we hear from Marie as well. If we can imagine that Skyler comes out of the show damaged but afloat-- and I like to think that she does-- it's largely on the basis of her continued ability to tell a story, and because she taught Walt well enough that that harrowing, devastating phone-call in "Ozymandias" helps her in court. It's why, after everything, her sister bows out of the show offering a truce over the phone. She offers a truce in the shoplifting story-line as well-- but a kind of false truce where she thinks that if she just leaves enough upbeat messages, her sister will forget about it. Her peace-offering is turned down because she can't disclose her guilt, and because her rhetorical attempts to get out of it are pretty clumsy. Skyler's a master by the finale though-- she can tell a story so well that after everything, her sister is asking her for peace. Throughout the show we see how the ways in which Skyler is and remains a writer first alienate her from the people she loves-- then how they help her and Walt keep their heads above the water-- and finally how they might help her survive the world after Walt. Walt's genius is a little flashier than hers. Skyler doesn't have a Nobel Prize plaque on her wall. But Walt's genius kills him, and Skyler's, no matter how bleak and lonely her life looks in "Felina," keeps her alive.
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Nov 16, 2013 17:33
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Pissflaps posted:My wife and I have just watched all of this and we were left with one thing that puzzled us: Marie's reaction to Walt's activities. She seemed to take it so personally, more so than Hank, and was out for his blood immediately. Did we miss something? Marie's facial expression when Walt confirmed Hank is dead over the phone was pretty hilarious, especially after she was trying to act all boss to Skyler about telling Junior everything about Walt. Talk about ownage.
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Nov 16, 2013 20:11
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I'm still disappointed that Jesse didn't get a final gunfight with someone.
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Nov 16, 2013 20:32
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Mexcillent posted:I'm still disappointed that Jesse didn't get a final gunfight with someone.
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Nov 17, 2013 03:00
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Mexcillent posted:I'm still disappointed that Jesse didn't get a final gunfight with someone. It feels like it would be dramatically perfect if Jesse ended up shooting Walt (or vice versa), like the scene in GTA V where Trevor and Micheal pull guns on each other or if Hank, Walt, and Jesse ended up in a Mexican standoff. So of course Vince sorta gave us what we wanted, but also didn't give us that pure catharsis. Oddly enough, I got spoiled on finding out that Walt died in an AV Club article about the Dexter finale, where Dexter didn't die or get arrested, but became a lumberjack. And that spoiler made me want to see Breaking Bad more, since I knew it ended on a properly tragic note. I noticed a neat parallel between BB and Sons of Anarchy, in the episode where Clay hires Danny Trejo to kill his surrogate daughter instead of doing it himself. It sorta feels like BB takes place in a heightened GTA universe, where you deal drugs through chicken shops and erase hard drives through electromagnets. Then again, we live in a world where somebody died after drinking meth hidden in an energy drink: http://www.libertynews.com/2013/11/...n-energy-drink/ Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Nov 17, 2013 |
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Nov 17, 2013 03:15
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They actually officially filmed an alternate ending for the box set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kZivVxB3vU Love it. Ape Gone Insane fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Nov 17, 2013 |
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Nov 17, 2013 03:29
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Ape Gone Insane posted:They actually officially filmed an alternate ending for the box set: edit: and I'm really surprised they got together all the rights and whatnot to make that happen passionate dongs fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Nov 17, 2013 |
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Nov 17, 2013 03:36
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Ape Gone Insane posted:They actually officially filmed an alternate ending for the box set:  That was incredible!
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Nov 17, 2013 03:48
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Ape Gone Insane posted:They actually officially filmed an alternate ending for the box set: Holy poo poo.
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Nov 17, 2013 04:32
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Hal watches The Shield? This breaks my verisimilitude. Man I just realized I can't remember any of Malcolm in the Middle, despite watching every episode.
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Nov 17, 2013 04:41
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It's down now, is there a mirror?
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Nov 17, 2013 04:52
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Here you go. EDIT: We may need to change the thread title to "Yay science, b-word!" Timeless Appeal fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Nov 17, 2013 |
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Nov 17, 2013 04:56
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Why didn't Jesse ever point out that Walt wasn't the boss of him?
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Nov 17, 2013 05:03
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And that he wasn't very large in size.
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Nov 17, 2013 05:09
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Timeless Appeal posted:Here you go. Er, isn't that the one I posted anyway?
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Nov 17, 2013 05:16
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Seems it is, but if you click on the link in the quote from JOHN SKELETON--which is what I and I guess Stairmaster did--it says the video was removed by the user. Weird.
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Nov 17, 2013 05:22
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Guy also has the gag reel from the last season, fantastic stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F92ve2C8Tw
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Nov 17, 2013 06:12
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Count Chocula posted:Hal watches The Shield? This breaks my verisimilitude. Do you remember the episode where Francis is dared to eat 100 pink marshmallow unicorns? Or the one where Malcolm and Reece set up a huge slingshot on the roof and bombard the neighbourhood only for Malcolms nerdy gifted friends a block away to engineer a better catapult, destroying their catapult and trapping them on the roof? Or the one where Lois gets tremendously sick and Reese has received a letter from the school indicated he's about to expelled? It was a really funny show at its best. I'm amazed that the guy that played Reece never went on to do much, he was a really good comic actor.
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Nov 18, 2013 03:46
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hiddenmovement posted:It was a really funny show at its best. I'm amazed that the guy that played Reece never went on to do much, he was a really good comic actor. He got really into philanthropy and producing stuff if I remember right. Maybe he just wasn't into acting or being a child actor burnt him out on it.
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Nov 18, 2013 05:12
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Yeah, there is a lot of hype that Berfield is going to grow into a major mover in Hollywood. He's hasn't done much on paper, but he was an EP when he was 24 for Sons of Tuscon which is pretty amazing. Dude's 27 and clearly already has some clout, he just needs a successful project.
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Nov 18, 2013 05:16
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There's something I've never quite been able to put my finger on: why did Walter insist, with such momentous consequences, on Jesse being his partner in the superlab, rather than Gale? My guesses: 1) Walter sensed from the outset that Gale was his replacement, rather than his partner. Walt saw Jesse as somewhat talented, but ultimately under his thumb in a way that Gale would not be. (Of course, Jesse wound up as Walt's equal when it came to meth, but by then Gus had been blown to smithereens so no problem there). 2) Walt just didn't like Gale. Understandable. The guy's a dork. Not everyone's cup of tea. 3) Walt needed that twinge of illicit criminality. Gale was a mild-mannered chemist; Jesse had that outlaw, gangbanger, go-to-hell side to his personality. For all Walt's claims of professionalism, level-headedness, he liked going slumming. Jesse was his link to that world. Or maybe it's just loyalty. The show really rides on that weird chemistry (ha ha) between Jesse and Walt. Without Jesse, Walt don't cook. Simple as that.
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Nov 18, 2013 08:13
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It's #1 by a mile, the show practically hits you over the head with the obviousness of it. Jesse was a prop for Walt to get what he wanted in every episode of every season of this show, people who think he's a more special character than that because they related to him or something are way off base.
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Nov 18, 2013 08:39
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Pryor on Fire posted:It's #1 by a mile, the show practically hits you over the head with the obviousness of it. Jesse was a prop for Walt to get what he wanted in every episode of every season of this show, people who think he's a more special character than that because they related to him or something are way off base. Definitely agreeing with this. Walt didn't want a partner, he wanted someone he could keep under his control and at his command. Gale never would have been that. Due to the teacher/student relationship Walt had with Jesse, he already had an air of authority about him in Jesse's eyes. Jesse would follow orders he disagreed with and didn't understand at Walt's urging. One of the major aspects of the show was Jesse losing his grasp on his own morality because of Walt. Put simply: Gale would have never accepted "because I loving said so" as an answer. There's a certain irony in the guy who began the show as a criminal ending up being the one with a conscience.
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Nov 18, 2013 09:13
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Ape Gone Insane posted:They actually officially filmed an alternate ending for the box set: I...wow. EDIT: Seriously, this is now canon.
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Nov 18, 2013 09:44
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The Tao Jones posted:There's something I've never quite been able to put my finger on: why did Walter insist, with such momentous consequences, on Jesse being his partner in the superlab, rather than Gale? My guesses:
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Nov 18, 2013 09:47
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Pryor on Fire posted:It's #1 by a mile, the show practically hits you over the head with the obviousness of it. Jesse was a prop for Walt to get what he wanted in every episode of every season of this show, people who think he's a more special character than that because they related to him or something are way off base. What about when Walt called his son Jesse in a state of delirium? Or does Walt just use Flynn to get breakfast and that's why he got them mixed up?
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Nov 18, 2013 09:50
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The Tao Jones posted:There's something I've never quite been able to put my finger on: why did Walter insist, with such momentous consequences, on Jesse being his partner in the superlab, rather than Gale? My guesses:t. Jesse was going to continue cooking using an RV. Hank was on to Jesse, getting caught was close to a certainty. Jesse planned on turning Walt in to the DEA if he got caught. Walt's insistence that Jesse cook with him was a combination of self preservation and loyalty to Jesse, as he knew the most likely outcome was Jesse killed by Gus. Essentially Jesse forced Walt to either work with him or sign off on his death. I don't think that at this point Gale eventually replacing Walt was a major concern, because prior to his killing of the dealers he still had a good working relationship with Gus. I am of the opinion that Gus had every intention of letting Walt retire from cooking and die in peace until Walt forced his hand by killing the dealers and then continuing to be an antagonistic jackass. I think that before Walt killed the dealers he had every intention of quietly making his money and getting out clean. What makes it a tragedy is that things almost could have ended there, Walt had almost found his equilibrium but the ramifications of his actions were still out there and could not let him be. Lycus posted:The reason was part of that episode's plot. It was a bribe to get Jesse not to press charges against Hank for the beating. This too. There is never one reason for anything. Blind Melon fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 10:00
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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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freebooter posted: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. Walt was always 100% evil from the start, every action he took was an act of selfish malevolence because he literally feeds on the pain of others. Haven't you bee paying attention? Also something about misogyny.
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Nov 18, 2013 15:03
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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.
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Nov 18, 2013 15:12
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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. Wasn't Walt originally planning to kill Gale himself, but when he got captured by Gus and Mike he had to get Jesse to do it? I might be remembering wrong, but I thought he was intending to do it himself until he got caught at gunpoint. If so, would you really count that as 'manipulating' him into it?
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Nov 18, 2013 15:16
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PootieTang posted:Wasn't Walt originally planning to kill Gale himself, but when he got captured by Gus and Mike he had to get Jesse to do it? I might be remembering wrong, but I thought he was intending to do it himself until he got caught at gunpoint. If so, would you really count that as 'manipulating' him into it?
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Nov 18, 2013 15:42
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