Review: Better Call Saul – Mijo

The second episode of the Breaking Bad spinoff shows us just how wide the range is with Jimmy’s bargaining skills. One on hand, he successfully convinces a full-blown psychopath from handing down a death sentence, all the way to badgering a prosecutor down to a more palatable charge for a kid who just stole a slice of pizza (which, in Jimmy terms, probably means he knocked over a Domino’s).

REVIEW: Breaking Bad – Rabid Dog

Breaking Bad has always excelled at ending an episode (seriously, like, all of them) with the series shifted into a radically different direction than when that episode began. And Rabid Dog, clearly, was no different.

This episode of Breaking Bad switched a couple of things up on us, though not technically anything the show hasn’t done before (just not quite to this scale). And yet while switching up some of its practices, it remained steadfast in what it does best, namely giving us exactly what we weren’t expecting.

Dexter: Season 8 – The Ride So Far

tl;dr

Hope I didn’t bury the lede too much there.

We’re more than halfway through the final season of Dexter, and what seems to be missing from the show this year is any sense of urgency whatsoever.

Breaking Bad Season 4: My Requests

Now that Season 3 of Breaking Bad is over, we’ve got a long wait ahead of us.  It’s probably going to be March until a new episode of my favorite show is back.  While we won’t see a new episode for a while, that doesn’t stop us from wanting more or thinking about what we would like to see in a new season.

Breaking Bad Review: Abiquiu

-AMC

After last week’s episode “Fly,” where Walt basically cracked under the knowledge and acceptance that he was under contract with Gus and the meth production and distribution business for basically the rest of his life.  For this week’s episode, “Abiquiu,” he has figuratively woken up the next morning and is deciding to do something about it.  He’s managing his now-accepted lifestyle with the business finesse of a man with the Constitution of the United States as his office wallpaper.  However, Walt also has a new accomplice, namely his wife.  Oh, you thought he was divorced?  So did he.  Apparently, Skyler is fond of the law that says spouses can’t be compelled to testify against one another.

REVIEW: Breaking Bad – “One Minute”

-AMC

It would honestly be a crime to begin talking about this episode and not just start out with the shootout scene first. WOW.  Just wow.  In a series that continues to raise the bar for quality TV storytelling and dramatic performances, Breaking Bad just showed the rest of the industry how to masterfully craft an intense, and tightly filmed shooting.  Starting with an anonymous and voice-masked call to Hank (my money’s on Mike the Cleaner, since Gus is too obvious, but who the hell knows), warning him about the approaching Cousins, Dean Norris showed us how an actor can properly portray both a PTSD attack and manning the hell up all at once.  You can actually watch Hank physically force himself to calm down and get a grip on what he fears is about to happen.

And shit, does it happen.

Predictions

I have seen the preview that airs at the end of Sunset, but nothing on AMC’s website. I haven’t read any of the episode summaries that appear on Wikipedia; I honestly don’t even know that there are episode summaries, as I saw text, looked away, and closed the window.

I make this disclaimer because I don’t know if there’s information in those sources that would make these predictions obvious (or obviously wrong).

I make two independent predictions, each with a corollary prediction (“given X happens, I predict Y will follow”). I have placed them below the fold so you can avoid them if you want.

REVIEW: Breaking Bad “Sunset”

For last week’s episode, “Mas,” I said that, “I think it’s safe to say this was the episode we’ve been waiting for since the premiere, No Mas.”

Well, that’s only because I hadn’t been privy to the wonders that were this episode, “Sunset.” This episode was near, if not completely, perfect from start to end. We got to see Walt advance professionally, Hank get pwned, and then Walt and Jesse back together, which, let’s face it, is where they belong, dammit.

Walt scoping out his model apartment was an interesting fusion of characters. That man had the confidence of Heisenberg, but the affability of Walt. HeisenWalt. Waltsenberg. I don’t know. The name still needs work, but the fact is, watching him simply state that he was going to take the model home, furnishings and all, because, “What in this world isn’t negotiable?” is a damn good point to a man who has the money and drive that Walt has right now. Watching him get ready for his first day of “work” made perfect sense. This is Walt’s job now. He’s a professional. And professionals dress the part and bring their own sack lunch with their name on it to work.

After he got to the lab, and we heard, “Mr. White?” I’ll be honest. I didn’t recognize the voice, and internally, I groaned, because a new character is not what I want on this show right now. But, c’mon, how can you NOT love Gale? Sure, he’s probably just there to learn Walt’s formula for after the cancer returns to do in Walt, but he’s a nerdy libertarian who makes the best damn coffee on the face of the Earth. I, for one, welcome our new character to the show. May he be around for a while. Watching Gale and Walt work together is simply amazing. Gale is the anti-Jesse. He’s smart, properly qualified and most importantly, not a fuck up. This is important. Gale gives Walt the ego boost he wants, which is someone to admire and appreciate the chemistry that Walt does. And while Gale fully admits why he’s making the meth, the coffee gives us a slip into Walt’s mind. He says it’s all about the chemistry and not the drugs, but that World’s Best Coffee is all about chemistry, but they made only a passing reference to actually going legit (more like a passing reference to why weren’t they going legit).

After a successful first day, Walt goes home to kick back and read some poetry. Everything’s going well until he gets a call from his DEA brother-in-law, the awesome Hank. He’s seen two of Jesse’s cohorts leave his newly-purchased lavish abode (I have a joke prediction about Badger that I’ll just keep to myself for right now, just in case it comes true). Watching Hank just matter-of-factly ask Walt about Jesse’s RV, and watching the cool, calm and collected shit-eating-grin-wearing Heisenberg instantly revert back to the scared and impulsive Walt was marvelous. Truly, Bryan Cranston earns every penny he gets on this show.

After Walt runs to the RV to destroy it, and after the inevitable chain of events brings Jesse (and Hank) right to the domicile, this is where the show picks up and shines. As much as I loved the lab scene, the RV sequence just knocked it the ever living hell right out of the park. Someone much smarter could probably write down how much I loved this entire bit, but since I’m obviously not them, I’m just going to go with, “This was completely, unadulterated awesomeness.” And my spell check tells me “awesomeness” is actually a word, so don’t bother bringing that up, tool.

Hank crept up on the RV like a lion in the wild. He was a predator. He found his prey. It was immobile and wounded. It was not going anywhere. He tested the windows. Then the door. Walt and Jesse are collectively shitting bricks inside. At this point, I’m tense. I’m on the edge of my seat. It’s then that I’m suddenly angry at the rest of TV currently being broadcast for not having the talent to make me feel like this every single week, episode by episode. Even though it’s not set to air it’s 5th season until September, I’m going to break the ice by saying that other than Breaking Bad and LOST, Dexter is my other favorite show. I love the shit out of that program. And I haven’t been tense like “Sunset” made me since watching Dexter Season 2, where he was attempting to thwart the FBI week in and week out.

Walt trying to keep the RV’s door closed when Hank was going at it with the tire iron was maddening. As much as I like to try and keep a cool head during the shows I watch, I was, for all intents and purposes, biting my nails saying, “Omigod Omigod Omigod Omigod Omigod.” And then the impound lot owner came out, and by then I’d managed to completely ignore that Larry Hankin played Kramer on the show-in-a-show of Seinfeld. He comes out and starts spouting off “4th Amendment this” and “domicile that.” I was quickly concerned that he was going to turn out to be some sort of legal prodigy. The sort of thing that, had his life gone differently he’d be a Supreme Court justice. But, thankfully, no, he’s just a really shady junkyard owner that knows the law, as it applies to him, inside and out, because he’s needed it before. He stymies Hank. And then Walt tells Jesse various other legalese-related things to shout off again.

So Hank goes to call in the warrant, which had me curious, because I knew he wasn’t going to leave. I was interested to see just what Walt was hoping this would do, because he’s just now guaranteed that backup is coming. So we have Walt left stranded in the RV. Jesse is looking at him for a solution once again, but this time, science won’t save them. This time it’s going to take ingenuity, brains and a set of wrecking-ball-sized brass balls. He picked up that phone, and at first, I thought he was going to call Hank. Tell him something, anything, to get him to get the hell away. He got locked out at his apartment. He needed help with something that couldn’t wait. Then he dialed, and it wasn’t Hank. I thought it was Saul, but then figured that was too obvious. I was worried he was calling Gus, because that would be just too damn humiliating.

“Better call Saul!”

What follows is an absolute arrow to the heart of a man. Not some metrosexualized, modern man. A loud, obnoxious, DE-freaking-A agent. His wife has been hurt. Even with his white whale right in front of him, Hank bolts to the hospital without thinking twice. This is a cold, cold thing to do to a man. And Dean Norris played this perfectly. As I don’t know much about acting, I’m just assuming this: I think anger is probably a very, very hard emotion to portray. A lot of people have two modes, which are “fine” and “murder-ragingly furious.” Norris did a damn fine job of getting this across. He wasn’t out of control once he figured out he’d been had. But on the inside, that is a dark, dark place right now. Obviously, the show is called “Breaking Bad.” We saw Walt do it in the pilot, Skyler did it in “I.F.T.” and I figure Hank’s just about there.

For me, the RV scene was a true mystery. I had no, repeat, NO idea where they were going with this. For me, literally, anything could’ve happened. My expectations and emotions were like putty in the show’s hands, which is exactly where I know they want me to be. And when I’m watching TV, serious TV, this is exactly where I want to be.

As I stated above, it really, really ticks me off that TV as a whole doesn’t do this to me every time I turn on a fictional show. These people are supposed to be the most talented, inventive and creative in the industry. Yet the highest quality shows aren’t on the broadcast channels. They’re on cable or premium cable. As long as they keep coming, I don’t care where they are, just as long as I have them. That is the reason you will never, ever, and I mean fucking EVER, see a post titled thusly: REVIEW: CSI: Miami.

REVIEW: Breaking Bad 3×05 – Mas

For those who haven’t Googled it yet, mas translates to “more,” so it’s been a good guess since we first saw the episode title a while back that this would be the week when Walter returns to producing methamphetamine. What provided the episode’s payoff, though, at least for me, was seeing how he went about that return.

Walter got into cooking to thwart all the people and institutions who have always dictated his identity to him. Repairing decades of abuse to his ego with meth money was a habit with steady, reliable returns. He cooked meth to avoid having to be grateful to a man whose life should have been his: successful chemical firm, a life with Gretchen. Then he cooked meth to attain that level of financial security for his own family.

As his medical outlook slowly improved, and consequences slowly rolled back into his life, Walter’s motivation shifted from pure pride to duty to his family. Figuring out which of these motivations was primary and which was secondary has been the source of a lot of my enjoyment of the show. Was the duty to the family real, or only rationalization? What made last night’s episode so powerful, for me, was seeing Walter answer that question unequivocally: Family. Gus saw Walter’s need for validation and viciously went for the kill. The money, the insinuation that his unique skill wasn’t necessary as long as the formula was used, the offer of giving him the world-class lab and competent assistants and thereby stripping him of all the petty limitations that have kept his talent in check (the whimsical music-box soundtrack hit the perfect tone: this was Walt as a 10-year-old kid playing with his first chemistry set writ large, and illegal) – these are knock-out punches if Walter’s ego is still weak, yet none of them break Walter’s refusal.

Seeing Walt decline Gus’s offer, even after he saw the lab, brought back a lot of affection for the character that had been slipping away. We’ve seen a lot of weakness in Walt these last few weeks, but seeing his wife carry on an affair with her boss while demanding a divorce and losing his job, everyone in the business is courting and flattering him, giving him everything he wanted when he got into the business in the first place, and still turning it down to try to win back a fractured family: It wasn’t weak. Here he was, containing the pride that he’d been unable to control since his diagnosis and accepting his responsibility for the state of his family. After that, Gus knew how to use Walter’s paternal instincts against him: Declining is making your family sacrifice to pay for your mistakes.

So: Mas.

Mirroring Walt’s journey from longtime humility to newfound sense of self is Hank’s arc this season in the opposite direction, from a historically strong identity to feeling overwhelming self-doubt. (His fractured self-image was alluded to in a visual metaphor in “I.F.T.” just before the bar fight, when the bathroom mirror had a crack across it.) Hank’s pursuit of the blue meth is based in his hope that this will be an alternate career progression path, one where he can make a major play without passing through the El Paso war zone. He does so in spite of convincing evidence against his theory; it simply must be true. He marches from one pathetic lead to the next, turning each into something concrete through dogged policing and will.

Knowing he was going to have to go home, pack, and fly to Texas later, Gomez still stayed out all night in an R.V. park, patronizing Hank’s obsession, which implies some level of pity. There was a shot of Hank in the shower, when Marie is asking him questions, when he’s got his head up against the shower wall and he’s thinking: I want to not be living this moment right now. “I want to be included,” she says; she tells Skyler that Gomez is going to El Paso and says, “I don’t know how I feel about that.” There is a part of her that has lost some respect for him.

(A brief aside: when the four Splenda packets were lined up on the counter, you knew it was Marie right away, from everything about it: not real sugar, excessively sweetening, lining them up before using them. Brilliant.)

In the lawyer’s office, Skyler was coming around to the idea of taking Walt back. We needed to see this because it makes Walt’s decision to cook again more tragic. His resolution to get his family back was working. The tide was turning, finally. Skyler’s desire to have her family back was going to make her reconcile with Walt; Walt’s desire to have his family back was going to prevent him from cooking again. This is how close we came to having a happy ending.

REVIEW: Breaking Bad 3×05 “Mas”

I think it’s safe to say this was the episode we’ve been waiting for since the premiere, No Mas. This episode bookends that one nicely, I think, and almost acts as a sister episode. There, we saw Walt adamantly refuse to get back into the cooking game to save his family. Here, we see him get back into the game FOR his family, almost even to spite them, thanks to Gus’ very, very convincing mini-speech on what it means to be a man.

The show opened by answering the burning question that had plagued fans since literally the beginning of the series: Just how the hell did Jesse get a freaking RV? Well. . . maybe it wasn’t really a question we needed answered, but we still got it. I loved seeing Aaron Paul play old Jesse again. He just slipped that character on like a glove. The arrogant cockiness, the “yo”s after every sentence and the red clothing color scheme. The scene served to nicely explain why Hank wouldn’t and also would be able to find the RV later on in the episode.

It was pretty funny to see Hank and Steve Gomez stake out the RV in the RV park. Hank has been able to just cover up how obsessed he is with the Heisenberg case, and make no mistake: it is obsession. He needs to solve it. I think that he feels if he can solve this, then it will prove to his peers he still has it after his embarrassing turn in El Paso, and at the same time fill the hole that El Paso put in him. Just an aside, I was wondering how the people in the RV didn’t feel the entire vehicle shift over as Hank climbed it, but I let that slide. Seeing Hank have to use his DEA credentials to get out of a peeping tom charge also seemed like a story that would be classic Hank Schrader. However, at the end of the stake out, Gomez tells him he’s going to El Paso. That hurts. It’s a stab in the back, I think, but for Gomez, he also needs to think about his career. I also doubt we’ll be seeing poor Steve Gomez come back from El Paso. That’s just me, though.

I absolutely loved Walt’s meeting with Gus at the restaurant. He just threw Jesse under the bus by saying that Jesse wasn’t capable of running his own operation. When Gus threw Walt’s words back at him, that Walt himself vouched for Jesse, Walt’s assertion that he worked well under “his supervision” was the ultimate put down, I think, but not an untrue one. About halfway through this scene, I noticed that Bryan Cranston was again wearing a green shirt, the color scheme he seemed to wear at the beginning of the series when he was first cooking. I thought that was a nice touch.

Also, when Gus Frings tells you to take a ride with him, you obviously do it, but if it were me, I’m thinking that’s going to be the last car ride I ever take. Thankfully for Walt, it wasn’t, which led us to what was probably one of my favorite scenes of the series. Gus taking Walt on a tour of his meth-making laundromat operation. A secret hideout? A button to a secret hideout? Holy crap, how could that possibly get better? If Gus had called Walt “old chum,” that would probably be overdoing it, but definitely still in the right direction. And how about that weird music playing in the scene. I got a Tim Burton vibe from it, and not a bad one. I got a kick out of Gus explaining that the only exhaust from the meth lab was an odorless smoke, exactly like the kind that would come from a laundromat. Gus is getting pretty close to mad scientist level, or whatever the hell a meth equivalent of that would be.

During this entire part, Walt was getting exactly what Walt wants to get: the feeling of being needed. He wants to be appreciated for his talent, for what he can do. He wants to be wanted. The sad thing is that Gus doesn’t give a shit about Walt the person. He only cares about Walt the meth producer. Walt is an investment to Gus. He’s not a person. If someone came around that could make better meth than Walt, he’d get dumped just as fast as Saul dumps Jesse at the end of this episode. Gus is just feeding Walt everything he needs to hear to get back into the game. For all of his quiet and unassuming demeanor, Gus is coming at Walt with the same methods of a child predator. It’s so disturbing to watch Walt just fall for everything, but he’s at his best when he cooks, so we desperately want him back in that role.

And while we’re still on the topic, I just can’t believe that Walt still initially turned down the offer. Everything was in line for him, and he still said, “No.” I was just floored. This is Walt acknowledging that even some of what he’s done has been a detriment to his family. Before it was just under the auspices of being misunderstood. But here, he finally took responsibility for it. That’s a big step. Too bad he shat all over that by grabbing the metaphorical apron again.

Cue to Skyler, who, at this point, really likes sleeping with Ted, as she tells her attorney, but she also hates it. She knows it’s not going anywhere. She’s leading poor Ted on, who thinks he can actually make a relationship out of this arrangement. This is more in line with how I thought this romance would be back at the end of I.F.T. At some point, Ted is going to realize he was just a revenge fuck, and that probably won’t do wonders for Skyler’s upcoming job performance review.

Hank missing out on Gomez’s party, I thought, was kind of a douche move. We all get that Hank needs to be wrapped up in the Heisenberg case, and even when he went out and said his good-byes, I thought they were rather pathetic. Gomez used to look up to Hank as a respected supervisor and friend. Then in the last few weeks, that’s all gone right out the window. I think the look he gives Hank is one of pity, and that’s definitely the worst look someone can get. On a lighter note, how about that cake? That was a “lol” moment for me, if there ever was one.

Skyler getting back from her lawyer/therapist, finally deciding to try and salvage her marriage, only to see a cleared out room and signed divorce papers probably cut her pretty deep. She even looked to see if some of that money in that massive duffel bag was still there. Of course, it wasn’t. As an aside, when she was looking at it, the thought occurred to me that none of us will ever, EVER see or hold that much money in our entire lives. Just imagine that for a second. You have that duffel bag in front of you. That was a TON of money. That was enough money for everything Walt told her it would cover. That was just crazy.

The confrontation at Saul’s office was tremendous. Such a great scene. Each week, I ponder how the writers can make Saul more of a sleazebag without being an open parody, and each week they surprise me. Saul talking fondly of his massages with happy endings was both eloquent and just disgusting. After Walt showed up, (“Escalating!”) I actually felt for Jesse after he realized he was just a pawn of Gus’ to get Walt back into the game. Finally, he had a sense of accomplishment in his life, something he was good at, and suddenly he was openly shamed and mocked. That passes embarrassment and goes straight into humiliation territory. If you think about it all, him just smashing Walt’s windshield is almost that car getting off light.

The episode ended with Hank at Combo’s house going through his room. And suddenly, the episode comes full circle, and we’re left with Hank looking at a picture of Combo and Jesse, and now Jesse’s back on the radar of an obsessed Hank Schrader.

“Escalating!”