It seems people just give out laud to something once it reaches a pique or a culmination of established storytelling. Revenge of the Sith was not a good film, it just had monumentally important scenes and was the culmination of the Vader story. This was a good episode of Breaking Bad, but I'm not sure I see anything fundamentally different about it than any other episode in which something decisively "final" happens, and it felt almost the same to me as the preceding episode. To me, the last episode with Sarah, and the subsequent episodes with her father (John De Lancie) were much more impactful, and rang more true. I also felt for everyone in those moments. But this episode? It just made me feel like a psychopath. Walt and Jessie were the only ones I even cared about in this episode.
The show has never wavered in its depiction of Hank as an A1 piece of establishment shit. He's a degenerate jackbooter with negative self awareness and the maturity of a six year old, and, though they never show it, his job is terrorizing people and enabling the existence of drug cartels. Did anyone else watching actually care that he was going to get it? To me Breaking Bad's writers have done a great job with making a boorish and non-sympathetic character just palatably sympathetic enough through five seasons to not be hard to watch his character. He was an integral part of the story and ensemble, but I never once cared about him.
That's where the disconnect came for me, right at the beginning of this episode (really, the end of the last). Walter was understandably impossibly conflicted with the situation he was in and not wanting to call down on his brother in law. But I didn't fucking care. I just wanted to see the shit hit the proverbial fan. Yet this episode stole that from us. It cuts straight to the aftermath and Walt being conflicted with the situation and fumbling with the results of his machinations after once again playing the devil but finding himself unprepared and caught unaware with the unexpected outcome. That was in character. It's something we've seen play out time and time again, as it seems to be one of the main ruminations of the plot: How desperation and necessity mold people into certain shapes, and how some people take to the shape more naturally, (Mike, Gustavo) whereas Walt throws himself and Jessie into a world where they're both massively out of their depth, and they're both like plastic figures that are partially but incompletely heated and bent, but snap back toward something resembling their natural shape (Walt), floundering in what they were trying, or, in Jessie's case, breaking in half under the stress.
After this, though? I have no idea what the showrunners' internal perspective or motivation was, but here's where it turned into the blackest of dark comedies to me. I was rolling with how aghast everyone was and how fucking stupid Walt's family became. She pulls a knife?! And then when Walt wrestles it away junior goes full retard and calls the cops saying the opposite of what just happened, like a small child calling for the teachers. I always liked junior, but here he had nothing but my contempt. I don't know it was forced and unrealistic, or just my disgust at how people can act like irrational, frightened animals, but I was laughing when Walt yelled at them, and pretty much the entire phone conversation. Yes, I get the extremely heavy drama with Walt playing the part of the evil, dominating drug kingpin spouse so he would take all of the blame and heat onto himself and off of Skyler, while falling apart from how everything turned out, but it was just so ridiculously tragic that the drama changed states from drama to comedy like a catalytic reaction.
I can't say whether or not that was intentional, but I still find it kind of silly that people call this one of the BeSt tHinGs eVaR FiLmeD when there are several better episodes of BB. Yeah, it's partially subjective. Yeah, you're also probably very easily manipulated and don't know the difference in a good script and a self-serious one. This episode could have used some heavy cinematic scoring for the climactic scenes. The dryness of the dramatic action is my only real criticism of this show overall.
Review by LNeroBlockedParent2021-08-29T03:12:00Z
It seems people just give out laud to something once it reaches a pique or a culmination of established storytelling. Revenge of the Sith was not a good film, it just had monumentally important scenes and was the culmination of the Vader story. This was a good episode of Breaking Bad, but I'm not sure I see anything fundamentally different about it than any other episode in which something decisively "final" happens, and it felt almost the same to me as the preceding episode. To me, the last episode with Sarah, and the subsequent episodes with her father (John De Lancie) were much more impactful, and rang more true. I also felt for everyone in those moments. But this episode? It just made me feel like a psychopath. Walt and Jessie were the only ones I even cared about in this episode.
The show has never wavered in its depiction of Hank as an A1 piece of establishment shit. He's a degenerate jackbooter with negative self awareness and the maturity of a six year old, and, though they never show it, his job is terrorizing people and enabling the existence of drug cartels. Did anyone else watching actually care that he was going to get it? To me Breaking Bad's writers have done a great job with making a boorish and non-sympathetic character just palatably sympathetic enough through five seasons to not be hard to watch his character. He was an integral part of the story and ensemble, but I never once cared about him.
That's where the disconnect came for me, right at the beginning of this episode (really, the end of the last). Walter was understandably impossibly conflicted with the situation he was in and not wanting to call down on his brother in law. But I didn't fucking care. I just wanted to see the shit hit the proverbial fan. Yet this episode stole that from us. It cuts straight to the aftermath and Walt being conflicted with the situation and fumbling with the results of his machinations after once again playing the devil but finding himself unprepared and caught unaware with the unexpected outcome. That was in character. It's something we've seen play out time and time again, as it seems to be one of the main ruminations of the plot: How desperation and necessity mold people into certain shapes, and how some people take to the shape more naturally, (Mike, Gustavo) whereas Walt throws himself and Jessie into a world where they're both massively out of their depth, and they're both like plastic figures that are partially but incompletely heated and bent, but snap back toward something resembling their natural shape (Walt), floundering in what they were trying, or, in Jessie's case, breaking in half under the stress.
After this, though? I have no idea what the showrunners' internal perspective or motivation was, but here's where it turned into the blackest of dark comedies to me. I was rolling with how aghast everyone was and how fucking stupid Walt's family became. She pulls a knife?! And then when Walt wrestles it away junior goes full retard and calls the cops saying the opposite of what just happened, like a small child calling for the teachers. I always liked junior, but here he had nothing but my contempt. I don't know it was forced and unrealistic, or just my disgust at how people can act like irrational, frightened animals, but I was laughing when Walt yelled at them, and pretty much the entire phone conversation. Yes, I get the extremely heavy drama with Walt playing the part of the evil, dominating drug kingpin spouse so he would take all of the blame and heat onto himself and off of Skyler, while falling apart from how everything turned out, but it was just so ridiculously tragic that the drama changed states from drama to comedy like a catalytic reaction.
I can't say whether or not that was intentional, but I still find it kind of silly that people call this one of the BeSt tHinGs eVaR FiLmeD when there are several better episodes of BB. Yeah, it's partially subjective. Yeah, you're also probably very easily manipulated and don't know the difference in a good script and a self-serious one. This episode could have used some heavy cinematic scoring for the climactic scenes. The dryness of the dramatic action is my only real criticism of this show overall.