Ceremony
blahem
- Jun 8, 2012
- 113,232
- 15,473
I recently finished watching Breaking Bad
Last Thursday, to be precise. Upon doing so I obviously went looking for a thread on my chief means of entertainment discussion, HFBoards, to read up on the opinions of names I recognise and leave my own. Sadly, unlike The Wire's thread which devolved into debate on the show and on various topics relating to the show, all the threads were relative GDTs of when it first aired. And they're all closed. And all hideously congratulatory.
So, if you will now indulge me, I will at great length attempt to explain why Breaking Bad is such a truly horrific television creation, and how the praise lavished on it by so many is so mis-placed and unjustified.
As far as my frame of reference regarding TV shows goes, it's quite limited. Off the top of my head the only things qualifying as "drama" I've ever watched that contained any continuous storylines there's this, The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad and (as of Friday,) The Sopranos. As such my ability to objectively view and judge what I see is hindered in that I compare what I see to what little I've seen, and what I've enjoyed. I will come to the rating comparisons to such shows later, but I want to try and view Breaking Bad on its own terms as much as possible. Then I can add in the killer blow of outlining how it is so brutally inferior to The Wire by every measure possible.
Going into Breaking Bad I had a very vague idea of what it was about. Man is diagnosed with cancer, man cooks meth to pay for cancer treatment. That summed up pretty much all I knew about it. Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up all that happens in it. Something that occurred to me as I was about halfway through it, very little actually happens in episodes. From what I read on here some people found problems with the pacing of the show, I never did, in the immediacy of watching it. Thinking about it afterwards is what created my problem, as the realisation that I was seeing something easily surmised in a few sentences dawned on me.
Really, the shallowness of the whole thing is my first problem. There's what, ten characters in this that have any serious effect on anything? Walter, Skyler, Walter Jr., Gus, Mike, Jesse, Saul, Hank, Marie. Even then they can all broadly be grouped together as serving the same purpose. The Whites, the Schraders, then all the drug people. There's so few characters and such overlap between them and their social circles that they all sort of meld into one, becoming extremely uninteresting. Now, a small cast is fine, that isn't a problem in itself. You could call it a focus of... well, focus. The viewer's focus. This show is about 'these' people so we will see all of 'these' people. The problem comes when the people you are depicting are little more than extreme parodies, caricatures, of the emotions that they feel. Like a sitcom that's been on too long from the very start of this show any pretence of subtlety is abandoned to make the characters fit into very rigidly defined roles. This is fine if any of them were to show any sort of meaningful development as the show goes on but, they don't.
Before you say Walter does, no, he doesn't. The only development he experiences is getting worse, becoming more of a self-absorbed ********. In the beginning there is some justification for his actions. He wants to cook meth to get money for his treatment, to keep his family cared for when he inevitably dies, great. About the most honourable variety of drug dealing there is. Except we quickly learn that the true motivation goes beyond the cancer, that for years a festering resentment at everything in the world built up to lead him to where he was. An undoubtedly brilliant chemistry mind, his chance at fame and riches was squandered by his family. His son being born meant he had to abandon his plans for his company to provide for his family. Now admittedly here there is an irony in that he does eventually get to put his ability and his intelligence to work to provide for his family, only on a brutally illegal and immoral way, and after he's guaranteed to die. With this in mind, he's still a clown. When he teams up with Jesse there's a very strict duality put in place marking the two of them as opposites - Walter as the reasoned, logical thinking operator and Jesse as the immature, emotional moron. Except, Walter's rage completely belies all of this. When he blows up Tuco's joint, when he punched that tissue dispenser, when he's faced with some problem he can't immediately formulate a solution to and goes into a mad rage, when he eventually goes on the run and then phones Skyler and calls her all the names under the sun, his adorable I AM THE DANGER speech which seems to have struck the hearts of so many, it never ends. Then there's the other side where he just goes full sociopath. Watching Jane die. Poisoning the kid Brock. Telling Jesse about both of these. Forcing his son to get drunk and vomit everywhere. Making Jesse kill Gale to save his own ass. I understand that the escalation of Walter's antics show how far he gets sucked into the world he's in, but there comes a point where you just watch the culmination of this man's actions existing in him and find yourself failing to justify anything he does. There are ways to achieve his goals in the meth business without the pettiness, the spite, the brutality of what he does. Any belief I had in his motivation being good for what he did vanished when he watched Jane die. Not that I thought her especially important or special, that was the first time I did remember him doing something deliberately to **** over and manipulate someone he needed. Without Jesse, he has no in to the meth business, no channel of making money. And here he is, repaying Jesse by making him even more subservient to him. The legitimacy of Walter's character, literally the character that he assumes, is particularly unbelievable. As mentioned, his "I AM THE DANGER" moment and any others where he's bragging to Skyler about how big and dangerous he is are quickly undermined by someone much more dangerous than he is making him **** himself. Again, this is probably deliberate to undermine him and show how truly out of control of his surroundings he is, but it's never done effectively enough to make me feel any sympathy or empathy for what he goes through, and just makes him look like a dick.
What truly encapsulates how bad Walter is as a character however comes when he kills Mike. Admittedly, him crying on the phone to Skyler while acting the hard man is a close second but in killing Mike, all of Walter's extremely wooden character traits are exposed. Mike tells him pretty much every accurate complaint I have about Walter and his actions. Mike, in the midst of being about to leave with all his ends tied up, a free out of this world, a secure future for his granddaughter, officially better than Walter since he is both achieving what Walter wants (and can't get) and is able to beat Walter in a fight, tells Walter what he doesn't want to admit. Walter's rage then immediately rears its head as he kills Mike in the same cowardly way he did everything else described. He literally flounces off like a petulant child, his "I'll show you I will!!!" actions being compounded as he kills his superior with no thought. His façade of being the calm, the logical = shattered.
Handily, this sort of contradiction is where we can also see where Breaking Bad fails in its ability to depict believable or engaging characters or events. Aside from the contradictions between the character's detailed tropes and their executed tropes, in the very last episode, it still tries to reinforce these. As Jesse leaves the Nazi compound (and by the way, who the **** where these lunatics? Christ. But more on the complete waste of time that was S5 later) he starts screaming as his car speeds up, wildly celebrating as he's free. Cue immediate cut to Walter close up, silent, and still. Yes, Jesse was the wild one and Walter the calm. That's why Jesse, when they split the first time, managed to get his life into some sort of deranged order, and put his accumulated knowledge to use, while Walter went the path of Wile E. Coyote and came up with increasingly mad schemes to solve his problems, ending with blowing up Gus and Senor Ding Dong. The point here is, it's ********. The depictions the show gives us, forces upon us, of these characters, are false. They're wrong. Everything they do, everything that happens as a result of what they do, contradicts what they're supposed to be. This is the mark of something which is bad.
Now, regarding character development, for such a centralised show, there really isn't much. Consider Marie. We see early on that she's a kleptomaniac, she has a past of stealing things and is apparently incapable of handling it. Yet, as soon as it appears, it's gone. Fine, she's not the focus of the show, but why have this character who's going to play an important role in the whole thing with this massively defining trait and offer no justification for it? Same goes with Hank. When he gets shot and becomes bedridden and cranky I think "ah, we'll see what really makes him tick here." He shouts at his wife (their relationship was much more interesting than Walter/Skyler) and buyssome loads of rocks. Then from one episode to the next he goes from needing help and rails to walk five feet to being able to go places on his own. Nothing else offered. Great. What's the deal with the rocks? Even as he buys them we don't see him doing anything in detail with them, he just has loads of them. Then when he can walk again, there's no mention of them anymore. Then consider Jesse, post-rehab. He shaves his head and starts living in something resembling a scene from Caligula. He starts throwing money around - literally. Then it all goes away. No explanation, no justification shown for it. It doesn't affect him as a character, it doesn't develop him in any way. Why is it there? Why should I care? The only good recurring thing with Jesse is his strange allure to vulnerable children, which in his own child-like way seems to be an attempt at redeeming himself for the failures in his own life. But then, these never take any sort of precedence, and playing video games with a kid once isn't really a positive development for anyone involved. In terms of effective character development there's what I mentioned with Walter and his scientific background, Gus is quite good as we see why he got into the meth business but them aside, all the main characters as we see their growth, it's a pisspoor explanation of how these pisspoor characters got to where they are. Fitting, I suppose.
When Breaking Bad was originally shown and was at the height of its fame I tried to ignore it as much as possible. I didn't care, I wasn't watching it, and was annoyed at people talking about it. What did manage to permeate my defense however was a name. Skyler. And a common sentiment, that she was some sort of female dog. This was something that stuck with me as I watched, waiting for it to manifest itself. Except... it never did. At all. Skyler White is the only redeeming quality about Breaking Bad, the only thing to exist with a shred of realism, to act with any reason, to emerge with any dignity. While to begin with she seems... busy-bodied, it's not surprising. Walter is an atrocious liar, whenever he gave it "I do not have a second cellphone!" or similar I imagined Joey Tribbiani talking about raccoons. I can't blame her, for her reactions to him then. Then when she finds out her husband is cooking and distributing meth? With her sister married to a DEA agent? What exactly is she supposed to do in this situation, with one vulnerable child existing and another along shortly? Some sort of morality has to exist in this world to offset the complete dearth of it elsewhere, yet Skyler gets castigated by the entire internet because she doesn't go along with her husband? I don't blame her at all. Even as she gets sucked in and starts to go along with Walter and the stuff he does (oh hey who remembers the bit when Walter practically sexually assaults his heavily pregnant wife after cooking some drugs that was cool) she remains trying to encase it in some sort of legitimacy. The irony is that for all his protestations that he did it for his family (and remember, the show ends with definitive proof that he didn't, he did it for himself), Walter isn't the family member who acts in the best interests of his family. Skyler is. She attempts to protect her children, always. She attempts to protect herself, both of these from her husband and from the people he so insists he is bigger than, but isn't. I think as far as sympathetic characters in Breaking Bad go there's a hierarchy of Skyler, Mike, Saul (oh and speaking of Saul, why on earth does he have a spinoff? yawn) and that she should be the only one who could be considered as acting regularly with any sort of clear or justifiable reason.
Incidentally, I did enjoy how Walter's cancer and his means of dealing with it drove Skyler to take up smoking again - his means of dealing with his disease made his wife more vulnerable to it. A nice metaphor for a horrible event.
And to add to that, just briefly, in terms of cinematography, woof. Yawn. I know it essentially takes place in the desert and there's not much to include in shots there unless you're filming a Western, but there's just nothing. And when there is, such as Walter and Skyler's last conversation where we see Skyler's new life (the big wood-effect pillar in her ****** apartment) first shield Walter as Marie's on the phone, then exist as a barrier between them (as she sits chain smoking), it could count as subtle if it didn't take up half the ****ing screen. I would love to be able to dissect the visuals of the show to a greater extent but I can't do that on one watch, and I don't plan another. All I'll add is that the flashbacks scenes being filtered in what could best be described as ****-yellow was bizarre.
I know I said I didn't want to compare Breaking Bad to shows I've seen but if in its praise and its ratings it's being compared to The Wire, I have to step in. I am by no means an expert on The Wire, but I believe that everything bad I'm describing about Breaking Bad, The Wire does well. But what The Wire has to go along with its drugs and the people involved in drugs is consequence. We see social commentary stemming from the drugs, which ups the emotional involvement of the show and shows a much deeper level of relatable consequence of what happens. This in turn highlights another aspect in which Breaking Bad is severely lacking. From what I can best recall, Walter makes an accumulated amount in excess of $83,000,000 from cooking meth. Now, consider the assorted costs that go along taking out the amount of money he can make and truly realise how much money is in the meth business. Consider then how far reaching into society the meth he cooks is - hell by the end it spans three separate continents. When is this ever seen on screen? I can think of three notable things showing the drugs involved - the scene early on when Jesse gets robbed by the couple on crack that ends with the guy having a cash machine dropped on his head, we see real squalor there. We see lots of what the people who peddle the drugs do and how dangerous that side is, but for all of Walter's millions and the hardship it causes him and those close to him, what about the hundreds of thousands he exploits for his own gain? The show and the characters in it live in a self-contained, myopic world that only serves to expose the afore-mentioned shallowness. They carry out actions which have severe consequences for themselves, but we only ever see exactly that. This just makes the whole thing and all the people in it seem even more distant, and unbelievable. Admittedly however this allows the story to exist and progress quite comfortably. Despite Walter's tens of millions of drug money it seems the only drug police in the entire state is Walter's brother in law, who can only investigate things when Walter is there (Walter crashing his car on the way to the laundry is second only to Mike's death in my rage moments list). There is no way someone as emotional and as uncontrolled as Walter could have existed in the meth business for as long as he did without police interference. All of this is irrelevant anyway was if this were real, Gus would have had him killed about halfway through S3. The main focus of the show, the central element which motivates all the characters and allows them to exist happens completely devoid of any link to any tangible reality that the viewer will try and reconcile it with. The only effect I can recall Walter's empire having on the community at large is him being responsible for the plane crash. He lets Jane die, her dad lets the plane crash happen - disaster. Even then, the crash exists in small glimpses at the beginnings of episodes. The blue ribbons that people wear, none of the Whites wear them. The only person I can recall wearing one for any length of time is Saul, and even then once it's gone, it's... gone. Such of the show exists in the immediacy of what is going on it becomes hard to see the whole thing as something worthwhile and dampens the perception of any tangible development of anyone or anything that may exist within it - although there is very little of it to speak of anyway.
While I don't know Breaking Bad well enough to go into as much detail as I'd like (more detail than it deserves or that it contains itself), I'd like to think I've done my feelings some justice. I'm not sure the rage is properly communicated, although I'm also not sure that the rage has been fully cultivated. Like I said, I'm not planning a second viewing any time soon to consolidate that. When I've hit submit I'll no doubt remember something else I wanted to say but by then it'll be too late. It also has to be said that I don't believe my analytical powers or my oratory powers are what they once were. What I can sum up with is simple - Breaking Bad is not worthy of the praise it deserves. Its attempt at drama, at a need to compel the viewer to watch from episode to episode fails with its ludicrous plots, its paper thin characters, it's tedious. Tedious is about as kind a word as I can think for it. Contrived perhaps another. In fact, contrived is a nice thing to leave you with - at the end of S4, Walter is free. He literally sums it up, telling Skyler "I won." He's out. He has a good amount of money, he's free, he's safe, his family's safe... and he jumps back in. There is no need for the events of S5 to exist. Contrived, absurd, ********.
If that wasn't enough to truly sum up the show, consider this. Hank discovers that Walter is behind everything while he is s()itting on the toilet. Leaves of Grass my ass, indeed.
Last Thursday, to be precise. Upon doing so I obviously went looking for a thread on my chief means of entertainment discussion, HFBoards, to read up on the opinions of names I recognise and leave my own. Sadly, unlike The Wire's thread which devolved into debate on the show and on various topics relating to the show, all the threads were relative GDTs of when it first aired. And they're all closed. And all hideously congratulatory.
So, if you will now indulge me, I will at great length attempt to explain why Breaking Bad is such a truly horrific television creation, and how the praise lavished on it by so many is so mis-placed and unjustified.
As far as my frame of reference regarding TV shows goes, it's quite limited. Off the top of my head the only things qualifying as "drama" I've ever watched that contained any continuous storylines there's this, The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad and (as of Friday,) The Sopranos. As such my ability to objectively view and judge what I see is hindered in that I compare what I see to what little I've seen, and what I've enjoyed. I will come to the rating comparisons to such shows later, but I want to try and view Breaking Bad on its own terms as much as possible. Then I can add in the killer blow of outlining how it is so brutally inferior to The Wire by every measure possible.
Going into Breaking Bad I had a very vague idea of what it was about. Man is diagnosed with cancer, man cooks meth to pay for cancer treatment. That summed up pretty much all I knew about it. Come to think of it, that pretty much sums up all that happens in it. Something that occurred to me as I was about halfway through it, very little actually happens in episodes. From what I read on here some people found problems with the pacing of the show, I never did, in the immediacy of watching it. Thinking about it afterwards is what created my problem, as the realisation that I was seeing something easily surmised in a few sentences dawned on me.
Really, the shallowness of the whole thing is my first problem. There's what, ten characters in this that have any serious effect on anything? Walter, Skyler, Walter Jr., Gus, Mike, Jesse, Saul, Hank, Marie. Even then they can all broadly be grouped together as serving the same purpose. The Whites, the Schraders, then all the drug people. There's so few characters and such overlap between them and their social circles that they all sort of meld into one, becoming extremely uninteresting. Now, a small cast is fine, that isn't a problem in itself. You could call it a focus of... well, focus. The viewer's focus. This show is about 'these' people so we will see all of 'these' people. The problem comes when the people you are depicting are little more than extreme parodies, caricatures, of the emotions that they feel. Like a sitcom that's been on too long from the very start of this show any pretence of subtlety is abandoned to make the characters fit into very rigidly defined roles. This is fine if any of them were to show any sort of meaningful development as the show goes on but, they don't.
Before you say Walter does, no, he doesn't. The only development he experiences is getting worse, becoming more of a self-absorbed ********. In the beginning there is some justification for his actions. He wants to cook meth to get money for his treatment, to keep his family cared for when he inevitably dies, great. About the most honourable variety of drug dealing there is. Except we quickly learn that the true motivation goes beyond the cancer, that for years a festering resentment at everything in the world built up to lead him to where he was. An undoubtedly brilliant chemistry mind, his chance at fame and riches was squandered by his family. His son being born meant he had to abandon his plans for his company to provide for his family. Now admittedly here there is an irony in that he does eventually get to put his ability and his intelligence to work to provide for his family, only on a brutally illegal and immoral way, and after he's guaranteed to die. With this in mind, he's still a clown. When he teams up with Jesse there's a very strict duality put in place marking the two of them as opposites - Walter as the reasoned, logical thinking operator and Jesse as the immature, emotional moron. Except, Walter's rage completely belies all of this. When he blows up Tuco's joint, when he punched that tissue dispenser, when he's faced with some problem he can't immediately formulate a solution to and goes into a mad rage, when he eventually goes on the run and then phones Skyler and calls her all the names under the sun, his adorable I AM THE DANGER speech which seems to have struck the hearts of so many, it never ends. Then there's the other side where he just goes full sociopath. Watching Jane die. Poisoning the kid Brock. Telling Jesse about both of these. Forcing his son to get drunk and vomit everywhere. Making Jesse kill Gale to save his own ass. I understand that the escalation of Walter's antics show how far he gets sucked into the world he's in, but there comes a point where you just watch the culmination of this man's actions existing in him and find yourself failing to justify anything he does. There are ways to achieve his goals in the meth business without the pettiness, the spite, the brutality of what he does. Any belief I had in his motivation being good for what he did vanished when he watched Jane die. Not that I thought her especially important or special, that was the first time I did remember him doing something deliberately to **** over and manipulate someone he needed. Without Jesse, he has no in to the meth business, no channel of making money. And here he is, repaying Jesse by making him even more subservient to him. The legitimacy of Walter's character, literally the character that he assumes, is particularly unbelievable. As mentioned, his "I AM THE DANGER" moment and any others where he's bragging to Skyler about how big and dangerous he is are quickly undermined by someone much more dangerous than he is making him **** himself. Again, this is probably deliberate to undermine him and show how truly out of control of his surroundings he is, but it's never done effectively enough to make me feel any sympathy or empathy for what he goes through, and just makes him look like a dick.
What truly encapsulates how bad Walter is as a character however comes when he kills Mike. Admittedly, him crying on the phone to Skyler while acting the hard man is a close second but in killing Mike, all of Walter's extremely wooden character traits are exposed. Mike tells him pretty much every accurate complaint I have about Walter and his actions. Mike, in the midst of being about to leave with all his ends tied up, a free out of this world, a secure future for his granddaughter, officially better than Walter since he is both achieving what Walter wants (and can't get) and is able to beat Walter in a fight, tells Walter what he doesn't want to admit. Walter's rage then immediately rears its head as he kills Mike in the same cowardly way he did everything else described. He literally flounces off like a petulant child, his "I'll show you I will!!!" actions being compounded as he kills his superior with no thought. His façade of being the calm, the logical = shattered.
Handily, this sort of contradiction is where we can also see where Breaking Bad fails in its ability to depict believable or engaging characters or events. Aside from the contradictions between the character's detailed tropes and their executed tropes, in the very last episode, it still tries to reinforce these. As Jesse leaves the Nazi compound (and by the way, who the **** where these lunatics? Christ. But more on the complete waste of time that was S5 later) he starts screaming as his car speeds up, wildly celebrating as he's free. Cue immediate cut to Walter close up, silent, and still. Yes, Jesse was the wild one and Walter the calm. That's why Jesse, when they split the first time, managed to get his life into some sort of deranged order, and put his accumulated knowledge to use, while Walter went the path of Wile E. Coyote and came up with increasingly mad schemes to solve his problems, ending with blowing up Gus and Senor Ding Dong. The point here is, it's ********. The depictions the show gives us, forces upon us, of these characters, are false. They're wrong. Everything they do, everything that happens as a result of what they do, contradicts what they're supposed to be. This is the mark of something which is bad.
Now, regarding character development, for such a centralised show, there really isn't much. Consider Marie. We see early on that she's a kleptomaniac, she has a past of stealing things and is apparently incapable of handling it. Yet, as soon as it appears, it's gone. Fine, she's not the focus of the show, but why have this character who's going to play an important role in the whole thing with this massively defining trait and offer no justification for it? Same goes with Hank. When he gets shot and becomes bedridden and cranky I think "ah, we'll see what really makes him tick here." He shouts at his wife (their relationship was much more interesting than Walter/Skyler) and buys
When Breaking Bad was originally shown and was at the height of its fame I tried to ignore it as much as possible. I didn't care, I wasn't watching it, and was annoyed at people talking about it. What did manage to permeate my defense however was a name. Skyler. And a common sentiment, that she was some sort of female dog. This was something that stuck with me as I watched, waiting for it to manifest itself. Except... it never did. At all. Skyler White is the only redeeming quality about Breaking Bad, the only thing to exist with a shred of realism, to act with any reason, to emerge with any dignity. While to begin with she seems... busy-bodied, it's not surprising. Walter is an atrocious liar, whenever he gave it "I do not have a second cellphone!" or similar I imagined Joey Tribbiani talking about raccoons. I can't blame her, for her reactions to him then. Then when she finds out her husband is cooking and distributing meth? With her sister married to a DEA agent? What exactly is she supposed to do in this situation, with one vulnerable child existing and another along shortly? Some sort of morality has to exist in this world to offset the complete dearth of it elsewhere, yet Skyler gets castigated by the entire internet because she doesn't go along with her husband? I don't blame her at all. Even as she gets sucked in and starts to go along with Walter and the stuff he does (oh hey who remembers the bit when Walter practically sexually assaults his heavily pregnant wife after cooking some drugs that was cool) she remains trying to encase it in some sort of legitimacy. The irony is that for all his protestations that he did it for his family (and remember, the show ends with definitive proof that he didn't, he did it for himself), Walter isn't the family member who acts in the best interests of his family. Skyler is. She attempts to protect her children, always. She attempts to protect herself, both of these from her husband and from the people he so insists he is bigger than, but isn't. I think as far as sympathetic characters in Breaking Bad go there's a hierarchy of Skyler, Mike, Saul (oh and speaking of Saul, why on earth does he have a spinoff? yawn) and that she should be the only one who could be considered as acting regularly with any sort of clear or justifiable reason.
Incidentally, I did enjoy how Walter's cancer and his means of dealing with it drove Skyler to take up smoking again - his means of dealing with his disease made his wife more vulnerable to it. A nice metaphor for a horrible event.
And to add to that, just briefly, in terms of cinematography, woof. Yawn. I know it essentially takes place in the desert and there's not much to include in shots there unless you're filming a Western, but there's just nothing. And when there is, such as Walter and Skyler's last conversation where we see Skyler's new life (the big wood-effect pillar in her ****** apartment) first shield Walter as Marie's on the phone, then exist as a barrier between them (as she sits chain smoking), it could count as subtle if it didn't take up half the ****ing screen. I would love to be able to dissect the visuals of the show to a greater extent but I can't do that on one watch, and I don't plan another. All I'll add is that the flashbacks scenes being filtered in what could best be described as ****-yellow was bizarre.
I know I said I didn't want to compare Breaking Bad to shows I've seen but if in its praise and its ratings it's being compared to The Wire, I have to step in. I am by no means an expert on The Wire, but I believe that everything bad I'm describing about Breaking Bad, The Wire does well. But what The Wire has to go along with its drugs and the people involved in drugs is consequence. We see social commentary stemming from the drugs, which ups the emotional involvement of the show and shows a much deeper level of relatable consequence of what happens. This in turn highlights another aspect in which Breaking Bad is severely lacking. From what I can best recall, Walter makes an accumulated amount in excess of $83,000,000 from cooking meth. Now, consider the assorted costs that go along taking out the amount of money he can make and truly realise how much money is in the meth business. Consider then how far reaching into society the meth he cooks is - hell by the end it spans three separate continents. When is this ever seen on screen? I can think of three notable things showing the drugs involved - the scene early on when Jesse gets robbed by the couple on crack that ends with the guy having a cash machine dropped on his head, we see real squalor there. We see lots of what the people who peddle the drugs do and how dangerous that side is, but for all of Walter's millions and the hardship it causes him and those close to him, what about the hundreds of thousands he exploits for his own gain? The show and the characters in it live in a self-contained, myopic world that only serves to expose the afore-mentioned shallowness. They carry out actions which have severe consequences for themselves, but we only ever see exactly that. This just makes the whole thing and all the people in it seem even more distant, and unbelievable. Admittedly however this allows the story to exist and progress quite comfortably. Despite Walter's tens of millions of drug money it seems the only drug police in the entire state is Walter's brother in law, who can only investigate things when Walter is there (Walter crashing his car on the way to the laundry is second only to Mike's death in my rage moments list). There is no way someone as emotional and as uncontrolled as Walter could have existed in the meth business for as long as he did without police interference. All of this is irrelevant anyway was if this were real, Gus would have had him killed about halfway through S3. The main focus of the show, the central element which motivates all the characters and allows them to exist happens completely devoid of any link to any tangible reality that the viewer will try and reconcile it with. The only effect I can recall Walter's empire having on the community at large is him being responsible for the plane crash. He lets Jane die, her dad lets the plane crash happen - disaster. Even then, the crash exists in small glimpses at the beginnings of episodes. The blue ribbons that people wear, none of the Whites wear them. The only person I can recall wearing one for any length of time is Saul, and even then once it's gone, it's... gone. Such of the show exists in the immediacy of what is going on it becomes hard to see the whole thing as something worthwhile and dampens the perception of any tangible development of anyone or anything that may exist within it - although there is very little of it to speak of anyway.
While I don't know Breaking Bad well enough to go into as much detail as I'd like (more detail than it deserves or that it contains itself), I'd like to think I've done my feelings some justice. I'm not sure the rage is properly communicated, although I'm also not sure that the rage has been fully cultivated. Like I said, I'm not planning a second viewing any time soon to consolidate that. When I've hit submit I'll no doubt remember something else I wanted to say but by then it'll be too late. It also has to be said that I don't believe my analytical powers or my oratory powers are what they once were. What I can sum up with is simple - Breaking Bad is not worthy of the praise it deserves. Its attempt at drama, at a need to compel the viewer to watch from episode to episode fails with its ludicrous plots, its paper thin characters, it's tedious. Tedious is about as kind a word as I can think for it. Contrived perhaps another. In fact, contrived is a nice thing to leave you with - at the end of S4, Walter is free. He literally sums it up, telling Skyler "I won." He's out. He has a good amount of money, he's free, he's safe, his family's safe... and he jumps back in. There is no need for the events of S5 to exist. Contrived, absurd, ********.
If that wasn't enough to truly sum up the show, consider this. Hank discovers that Walter is behind everything while he is s()itting on the toilet. Leaves of Grass my ass, indeed.
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. I find BB wayyyy overrated, just like TWD
