Ian On The Red Dot

Trying to catchup on some quality television before the new seasons begin again. AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad’ is the story of a chemist teacher who discovers he has cancer and his metamorphosis from a zombie waiting to return to the grave to (maybe) Scarface. Like Dexter, Walter White isn’t an easy person to be rooting for.

While as a male who is (hopefully) coming of age and beginning a phase in my life where new responsibilities must be shouldered, with the big 30 coming up when one starts questioning where his life has been and will be going, and recognizing I’m hitting a horizon where potential is becoming failed potential, this show hits me in a existentialistic gut-wrenching way.

On another note, totally enjoy reading the reviews of Alan and comments over at his blog (which is a great compendium to quite a couple of television shows). Undercover Asian Man is probably one of the most insightful commentators (among many) over at Alan’s blog.

Alan:

Now we have a much stronger idea of how Walt went from Nobel Prize-winning team member to bitter high school teacher: his girlfriend (or, at least, the woman he loved) married his partner, and Walt (impulsive, resentful and grudge-holding as we know he can be) no doubt quit the company rather than have to suffer through this perceived humiliation every day.

and Walt and Hank’s conversation about where to draw the line on drug laws. Hank’s been a good comic relief character, but this is the first time he felt like more than a clown.

Although what’s interesting about season one was the way it set you up to sympathize with Walt, and then slowly but surely told you the reasons why maybe you shouldn’t. You find out that he was the one who sabotaged his own career, for instance. You see Walt turn down his ex-partner’s guilt-driven offer to pay for Walt’s medical treatments, take care of his family, etc., all because his stubborn pride won’t allow him to take it.

Walt doesn’t need to be in business with someone like Tuco. He chose to do it. He’s had chances to walk away and he hasn’t taken them. And that’s what’s so fascinating about “Breaking Bad” — that it keeps subverting my expectations for and opinions about the main character.

Undercover Asian Man:

It is the failing love story between Walter and Skyler that makes me ache the most. The first season established that Skyler, throughout the crushing money problems, never stopped loving Walter and supporting him, never blamed him for anything missing in their lives, and was willing to sacrifice even more just on the wishful chance of having the best oncology doctor caring for her husband. Money truly does not mean anything to Skyler compared to her family, something said in real life more often than actually meant, but so strongly portrayed in the first season as to be totally believed in the White family. Now money – Walter’s relentless and reckless pursuit of it – has made Skylar feel as abandoned and lonely as possible, and the real tragedy is that she doesn’t even know that the money she never prized in her life is now ruining her last remaining days with her husband and is driving them apart. Her psychotic sister and her well-meaning but emotionally narrow brother-in-law show convincingly this episode what Skylar has in her future for family and support without Walt in her life. That she must live that loneliness now, even while Walt is still present and sharing her bed, is such a powerful display of the cost of “easy money” and the unilateral choices Walt makes, and shows how Walt might be assaulting Skyler psychologically as cruelly and as selfishly as he did to her body in the kitchen.

Yet through it all, we clearly see the humanity in Walt, and reasons why is doing this. It is not at all lost on him what his current acts are costing him, what it has already extracted from his soul with each new death that occurs around him and even by his own hand. While there are some beneficial side effects like an increased libido and an occasional surge of macho energy, Walt’s path into drug dealing is clearly motivated only by love for his family and the finality of a legacy as being the sole provider for the White clan, to be remembered as the one who guaranteed the Whites’ futures.

Other comments:

I don’t think Pinkman’s sudden perfectionism has as much to do with Walt as much as it is about himself. Between last week with his family and this week with the realty office, he has come to realize that the rest of the world sees him as worthless. He is a screw up that can have no greater function than to be a signpost in a dollar bill costume. So he goes back to meth (a trade he didn’t want to continue in) because it is the only thing he has ever been at all good at. And, for the first time, he realizes that “almost” isn’t good enough. It isn’t about the meth or the customers. It is about what HE can do.

Walt didn’t turn the money down the first time out of spite or pride. I think he genuinely didn’t want to go through all of that for a few extra months, or even a year or two. He wanted to enjoy the little pleausres in his life, even if that meant shortening it.

But then he realized that all of those little pleasures, the glass of wine, the good meal, having his hair, were nothing in comparison to the pleasure of his wife’s smell. And that is why he changed his mind.

When he turned the money down the second time, it wasn’t the same situation as the first. This time he was tunring down his ex, the girl who broke his heart and left him for his best friend. And with his new found backbone, he isn’t about to take charity from her. He’d rather go back to meth than owe her for his extra time.

As for Jesse learning about the beakers, was I the only one who saw the pilot? Pretty sure those were the exact same beakers that Walt named for him. In fact, at one point Weasel (or whatever his name was) screws something up and Jesse has to grab a stopper to put in one of the beakers; that is exactly the same thing that happened in the first episode. He learned about meth fast because it was something he gave a damn about learning.

As to the perfectionism, it wasn’t about the meth. It was about himself. If his drugs aren’t good enough, neither is he.

Sure you might say that pride led Walt to leave his partner and head off in his own direction. You might also say that going into work every day and working with the man who stole the love of his life is but a small price to pay in the pursuit of scientific glory. But when you think of that scene where he was adding up the chemical sum and total of all that is human, and if you felt that deep, almost visceral connection between Walt and Gretchen, you just might have the merest inkling of the profound sense of personal betrayal he must have felt.

Accepting his old partners offer would have not only meant placing himself directly into the maelstrom of conflicting emontions of a past life best long forgotten. It also would have meant surrendering the control he had finally learned to exert over his own life. He probably knew that he could do some great work by rejoining his own company, before he died. But he probably also knew that he last days of life would be his only by the grace of Judas.

Vince Gilligan:

We’ve all seen so many TV shows and movies over our lifetimes where the murder is kind of a given, and the aftermath is kind of clean and pain-free and kind of skipped over, and it’s on to the next plot point. There’s plenty of movies that follow that pattern that I love, but I, as a viewer have found my mind wandering and find myself thinking as I’m watching a crime movie, ‘How would you go about killing someone?’ The mechanics of it, or the minutiae of it, is oddly interesting to a lay-person, to a non-criminal, as is the minutiae of just about any interesting job. What’s it like to be a space shuttle pilot, a brain surgeon, a criminal? These are all interesting fields. Hopefully none of us aspire to be criminals, we instead aspire to be space shuttle astronauts. But the minutiae is interesting nonetheless.

Those kind of scenes are fun to write, because I think we idly wonder, from time to time, ‘If I had to commit the perfect crime, how would I pull it off?” Talking through it, A to B to C, step-by-step, is interesting to me personally, and I figured it might be interesting to an audience.