context; personal nonsense
The first time I tried watching Breaking Bad was when the series had ended but was relatively fresh. At that time I guess my comprehension was not good. Because I stopped at the episode when there is a single fly in the lab. My interpretation at that time was that the episode was a comedy filler but upon rewatching that arc I couldn’t be further off the mark. So it’s fair to say I did not understand what was going on.
series spoilers
I don’t really know what to say. The whole point of this season seems to be watching W.W. be a monumental piece of shit. In the previous seasons you had at least a modicum of a reason to root for him because apart from his origin story he was in a tussle against powers greater than himself. Now he is just being a garbage human being for no reason.
I think it is just a logical culmination of how badly W.W. is characterised in the series. He goes from someone who is “cut off” from a multi-billion dollar endeavour for $5000 bucks of rent money to someone who wants to be the king of meth slingers at any cost. The transition is not subtle because it turns out he was a sleeper hardcore badass all along and he just needed the consciousness of mortality that a cancer diagnosis brings about to be doing his thing.
So far I have been viewing the series as somewhat of a fantasy setting which has made the whole thing acceptable premise-wise and very enjoyable. But towards the end as they are wrapping it up I don’t feel compelled to see it through for a reason other than the sunk cost.
I feel like Jesse has been much more sympathise-able throughout. It is not a surprise he did not “apply himself” with a teacher like W.W.
Can’t believe I’m engaging in an actual serious discussion after years on r/okbuddychicanery so here we go.
I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it’s definitely ridiculous at some points, everything Walter did up to season 5, made perfect sense, starts off as living shit life working multiple jobs, gets cancer, starts cooking with Jesse etc, then he wanted to exit in season 3 because shit happened before he actually strikes a good deal with Gus, was actually more than happy at the time with money they had, before that goes to shit because of Jesse and both of them spend entire season and half trying to stay alive.
And now in season 5 they’re broke along with Mike and have to continue, which they do, but then Walter goes off the rails and continues piling up the sum while being an ass before he eventually stops and then everything ends when Hank finds out.
The point is, so much stuff is out of character not only for Walter, but for Jesse also, he was cooking way before the series started, not to mention using and with all the problems that created, didn’t have any issue working with Gus, going to cartel etc, but now he kind of just wants to stop? Keep in mind that this all happens in a span of few years.
So yeah, I never really thought about it that way, but now looking back, a lot of stuff seem off. And fly episode is important because it shows and deepens Walt and Jesse’s characters, Walter is dozed and they’re both sincere with each other for once and shows that Walter has regrets.
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/rc Fly was Lalo reincarnated as a shapeshifting vampire, Howard was also reincarnated as one and escaped.
I don’t find Jesse stopping to be out of character. The murders they rack up in the course of their misadventures seem to visibly take a toll on him. When they murder a child in cold blood with Walter rationalising it and talking about it as if it’s a non-event, I think it is logical that Jesse wants to dissociate from the party.
Did I miss the scene? They never killed any children, Todd did, and it was Mike’s idea to keep him around since he had connections to gang and if they wasted him on spot, there would be consequences and the’d be in danger. All the killing up to that point was in self defense but at least that’s understandable , the weird part is Jesse not being ok with cooking suddenly.
I don’t know if you are trying to be cute/funny but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
They never killed any children,
Yes, they did not directly kill any children technically or literally. But if your associate, however temporary the relationship might be, shoots a child in front of your eyes, you are gonna feel bad about it. That is what I was talking about in regard to the guilt weighing on Jesse’s shoulders.
I thought it was less engaging than the previous season because suddenly all he moving parts that made Walter’s story so interesting just…vanished. Like a group of armed neo-nazis essentially take over a town in New Mexico and no one talks about it. The DEA doesn’t seem to exist outside of Hank, and all of Walter’s contacts and rivals disappear.
Good point.
To be fair, the neo nazis didn’t actually take over the town in New Mexico. That might have lead to some interesting storytelling opportunities.
No, the Nazis existed the entire time, were comfortable never leaving their compound, and would eventually get $80 million which they promptly decided to do more of the same with.
They hide out in the desert and cook meth they don’t need to cook with a slave they don’t need to have so a man who doesn’t need to kill them can come and resolve the story.
Vince always said the story was planned up to season 4. They should have left it there.
Yeah lol, it’s noticeable. Everything after Gus feels half assed.
I’d have to disagree. The whole show is about how Walter allows his pride devour his life. He’s too prideful to accept the handout from his former business partners. He gets a taste of being powerful and good at something, something he felt was stolen from him by said former business partners, and his pride feeds on it.
The show only wants you to root for him in the first season. By the second season Walter is the antagonist and Jessie is the protagonist.
As Walter’s ambitions become more grand and his pride grows and grows he eventually gets got, all his mistakes and failures finally ruin him.
::: Ending Spoiler The last episode puts this plainly. Walter rescues Jessie not to help Jessie, but to try and clear his own conscience. He only does it so that someone, anyone, looks at him fondly. Since he destroyed his family that just leaves his protégé.
Then he shows his true colors by crawling into the lab, his place of contemplation and pride and destruction, and finally dies. :::
Walter White is a man only to be pitied and reviled. Chuds look up to him because of course they do, they can’t understand that the show is mocking them and showing them that their own arrogance and pride destroys everything around them. Almost every time Walter is “badass” is when he’s abusing others or he’s lying. He’s the definition of a coward and paper tiger.
You’re supposed to hate him, not love him.
I get what you are saying and agree with it. But my point is that the last season is not entertaining at all, something which I felt the previous seasons were.
Agree with all of this, I also have to add that the only reason Elliott and Gretchen were his “former” business partners was because Walt chose to leave the company, purely because he chose to break up with Gretchen over feeling inferior because of her family’s wealth. He made some of the worst decisions of his life because he couldn’t take the hit to his own pride (which, given how he would later go on to treat Skyler, was clearly backed by misogyny), and would blame everyone but himself from that point onward
Honestly, I think that stuff makes it clear that the underlying factors that led him to becoming “Heisenberg” were there loooong before the series started, and it’s not hard to see how the pieces fit together with the early seasons, and with that in mind I find the last season to be a pretty logical conclusion for where the story was headed
His actual behavior didn’t change, he just stopped hiding it and started being honest with himself, and it was very clear that things were heading this way in the previous seasons
cw: sexual assault
…And to be honest? If someone could watch Walt attempt to rape Skyler literally at the start of season 2 and still see him as a sympathetic character to root for all the way up to season 5, then alarm bells just start ringing in my head 😅 Not accusing OP of anything, for some reason it seems to be an often forgotten about scene, but he was never anything more than a pathetic, despicable man
Not to mention Walt trying to force himself on the school principal near the start of season 3
still see him as a sympathetic
It is not sympathetic but as I watching him duke it out with a man who is a major distributor of a highly addictive and dangerous drug (fried chicken) it made sense for me to want Gus to lose.
That isn’t to say that the show has any kind of extra-personal analysis, it doesn’t. The show is rooted in and based on liberal vibes based non-analysis. It understands that there is something wrong in the American culture that produces people like Walter White, filled with cowardice, impotent rage, greed, and pride, but never thinks about analyzing how, why, or what is wrong with American culture. So the show falls back on intra and inter-personal analysis. How Americans abuse each other because they can’t address their actual issues because of pride and cowardice.
The Wire does a much better job of analyzing the larger picture, even if it is also a fundamentally liberal analysis. But as much as I love The Wire it doesn’t foment the white-knuckle tension and rage as well as Breaking Bad does. But that mostly comes down to storytelling style I think. The Wire plays out very realistic while Breaking Bad uses Tarantino-esque hyper-reality as dramatic flair to heighten the narrative.
Anyways this is just rambling now. I like the show a lot, for a lot of reasons but mostly for the drama and cinematic flair of it all, not because of its biting criticism.
That all said I did have issues watching it the first time. I had to stop in the middle of season two because I hated Walter White so much. But when I went back into it with the understanding that Walter was the antagonist and Jessie was the protagonist I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I only got around to watching it in the last couple years. I watched the whole thing but it wasn’t good. The first few seasons were barely passable and yeah the last season was bad. Better call saul was better but only a bit and only because Odenkirk is a good actor.
I didn’t like BCS much but Odenkirk plays the role really well. IMO his portrayal of the character improved in BCS but he was also getting a lot more screentime so it may have been because of that.
Breaking bad is inherently conservative media, in the same way the wire is. Its a conservatives vision of the drug war and what would happen if the middle class white suburban dad decided to become a meth kingpin based soley on what the news has told him about what drug kingpins are like.
Racism doesnt even enter the conversation, which is kinda insane considering its 5 seasons focused on the police and a drug kingpin no? The drug war was made as a class and race war, yet the entire 2 show universe focuses on suburban white guys who have everything they could ever want before they decided to do adventurism into the underclass.
Its a conservatives vision of the drug war
Excellently put. I just wanted to hijack the post to highlight how easily this is seen by looking at the ‘junkie’ characters.
All of the ‘good’ drug using characters are from well-off homes where the character in question ‘fell off’ the path and took drugs on their own accord. See: Jesse living in a literal mansion because his family is so well off that he was expected to inherit it.
All of the ‘bad’ drug using characters? They’re literally useless junkies, incapable of higher thought and consistent only in their deranged behaviors. See: the meth family with the ATM episode.
It paints a picture that was already sort of clear from the premise: this is a story written from a fairly privileged perspective not influenced by the reality it’s referencing.
I wouldn’t say The Wire is conservative. It does a very decent job of showing how racism, poverty and an absolute neglect by the government creates a black hole of crime that sucks everything in and from which there’s no escape. It also does a very good job of showing how cops are mostly pieces of shit either by upbringing or by the system grinding them down.
I wouldn’t say The Wire is conservative
I would argue it is, its based on the memoirs of a guy who shadowed the police for a year and it tends to view the police as ‘good guys and bad guys’ rather than structurally bad.
The way it potrays gangsters as well, while the reality of the gang soldier is accurately potrayed the gang leaders enter mythical figure territory pretty quickly lol.
Thats not to mention the subtle anti-union messaging of season 2; the show is certainly critical of the police, but its solutions dont consider legislation (look at the hamsterdam episode, its making fun of liberals).
I can understand the reasoning why it seems conservative, but there’s a clear intent that each season is critical of one facet of society that eventually ends up leading to oppression, poverty and misery. The 1st season is about the failure of the justice system and the police as an institution. The 2nd season is about the failure of the education system under capitalism. The 3rd season is about the failure of politics even at a local level. The 4th season is about the failure of journalism to inform people on why the other failures exist.
Overall it shows how indifference and corruption leads to a total failure of society. Also, it shows how individuals trying to lash out and forge their own solutions is ultimately going to fail, because nobody addresses the core issues.
On the Hamsterdam episode, I’d say it makes fun of conservatives actually. The captain wasn’t trying to solve crime in Hamsterdam. He was trying to “exile” all crime in a particular area, so the rest of the city can be alleviated of crime. This is the conservative dream. Get all criminals in the wilderness and let them kill each other. And his motive was partly to say fuck you to his bosses who cared about crime numbers. And eventually it all failed because it didn’t address the actual issue that causes crime to be the only option left to the, largely coloured, poor population.
I don’t think any of the cops are viewed as heroes by the show. Even the main character’s starting motivation is self-interest and career advancement.
I think the creator is a “progressive” liberal, so his views are flawed ofcourse. But I still find it hard to consider the show as conservative.
I don’t think any of the cops are viewed as heroes by the show. Even the main character’s starting motivation is self-interest and career advancement.
I would say McNulty and his motely crew of gestapo officers are potrayed sympathetically, the show keeps banging on about ‘real police work’ and suggests some work (mainly that of terrorizing the underclass) is considered ‘good police work’
The 2nd season is about the failure of the education system under capitalism
Partially, its also about how unions are full of fuckin failures and undermine their own workplaces through greed yadayada fuck the dock workers for asking for more money; the anti-union messaging in 2 is strong.
My ideas are also considering the authors later works, he made ‘we own this city’, which again focuses on Baltimore police and attempts hyper-realism - the issue is that again while hes able to potray these things realistically, the solutions they come to and try to push are for reforming the bad guys out of the police rather than addressing the root issues.
Most of your analysis makes sense to me. But this part:
suburban white guys who have everything they could ever want before they decided to do adventurism into the underclass.
I don’t quite follow on. Looking at the two main characters:
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Jesse is a drug addict from the start, no? (Using his own supply?) And not exactly doing well for himself. Sure, he’s white and his parents are doing well enough, which makes him better off than the most exploited in society, but he’s not exactly a Bruce Wayne becoming a vigilante (which would seem like a more apt place to use phrasing like “everything they could ever want before they decided to do adventurism into the underclass”).
Walter this maybe more closely applies to, given his flirting with big business success in the past, but he’s actually kind of miserable because of not getting the part in it that he wanted, getting stuck working as a high school teacher in spite of how well he knows chemistry. And then he’s dealing with a cancer diagnosis and medical bills. The first part is more his own ego as the problem than anything else, but the second is a very real existential threat on multiple levels. His response to it is bonkers, but I’d hardly call it adventurism. It’s fueled by a combination of desperation and ego, and I’d argue starts out primarily as desperation with it becoming ego more so later.
Oh I meant more Saul and Walter respectively, should have clarified.
Jesse is like the vessell that the bored middle class guy gets to live his fantasy through, the stoner underachiever underclass that is Jesse; we find Jesse as a drug dealer on the run from the DEA and estranged from his parents.
Ah gotcha.
Racism doesnt even enter the conversation,
I am not saying this to dispute your point because I agree. But it did make me think of something. There is a very explicit point in the series where Hank making racist jokes ends. Up until that point he cracks racist jokes at Steve Gomez but at one point that just stops happening. Hank also has an arc in Texas where he takes a stab at a racist joke but his colleagues don’t like it. It was right before the tortuga episode.
It’s always interesting to me to hear people’s reactions on the show, it can vary. I watched the whole series once and thought it was really well made, but I was also pretty lib back then and have not watched it since. Could be I’d have a very different take on it now. But I know some people fall off of it even earlier than s5 as far as thinking it’s just (possible significant spoilers below)
spoiler
devolved into Walter being a POS. What I find fascinating about the writing though (which I think is mostly Vince Gilligan’s influence) is how procedural I remember it being. Possible I’m exaggerating how well written some of it is from memory, but based on what I can remember, the style of it feels borderline dialectical in the sense that there are all these moving parts and although people are making their own decisions as humans do, there’s also this sense that they’re being pushed along by the momentum of their circumstances to a degree and that their actions are a culmination of the mounting contradictions of a situation, not just because “they feel like it.” It may be this is how I appreciate the show, is that I’m doing a bit of detaching and looking at it less so as “Walter is justified” or “Walter is a POS” and more as “Walter both has agency and is also pushed around by circumstance and it’s interesting to watch him navigate this.” Later on, he is getting to where he has the power to act out his fantasies of ego dominance, but he has also become tied up in the role of being the exploiter and all the baggage that comes with it, and so to some extent, the baggage is controlling him. Kind of like how we say that the problems of capitalism are beyond any single billionaire and their actions.
We can still enjoy things for what they are while acknowledging their ideological framing. Otherwise Marxists in the West wouldn’t be able to engage with most anything that gets made here.
For example, Die Hard is the most conservative, patriarchal, cis-male power fantasy of a movie out there. Still fun to watch for the explosions.
I wouldn’t say it is dialectical but it is well thought out. Before this last season I think the way is plot is laid out to you, it does a really good job of conveying how the interconnected components affect each other and the cascading effects of small actions. I really enjoyed it, It’s just that culmination of it does not feel satisfying.
Fair enough.
Also i dislike the racist premise that this random white dude does things better than the mexicans.
Tbf he wouldn’t stand a chance against Lalo and Gus was with the cartel the entire time, Walter and Jesse just survived because of him.
I think I made it to like season 4 before the crushing New Mexico depression that every shot is laden with really got to me.
Walt is only sympathetic at all for the few episodes before we know he could’ve been A-OK when his former business partner offered to pay for everything. Jesse is sympathetic throughout to me IMO, he’s a smart kid who got into trouble and manipulated by some old man.
apparently Gilligan wanted him to go on being sympathetic but ended up being convinced by other people working on the show to go the other direction
Walt is only sympathetic at all for the few episodes before we know he could’ve been A-OK when his former business partner offered to pay for everything.
AFAI understand they only agreed to pay for the treatment. But there is whole lot of other costs that come after the treatment’s success or failure. For example, the living expenses of Flynn, Holly, their education et cetera.
But the wealthy couple are never asked to pay for those so I don’t know what to make of that.I think leaving that in the dark just adds to the incoherence and noise.
I mean they offer to give him a job making waaaay more than he makes now plus there company’s very good healthcare. Either way Walt is already paying for junior and holly was a decision they decided to keep despite being old and broke. Not saying I know what acess to abortion was like in New Mexico in the 2000’s.
I feel like I disagree. But I can’t explain why. I am going to rewatch breaking bad and edit my comment when I’ve done that so I can explain my disagreement. Or maybe I’ll end up agreeing with you
See you in a few months
Are you gonna watch the whole series because of this? I was just shooting shit. Don’t feel compelled to.
I’m already rewatching bcs. So I’ll do breaking bad next.
I just want to see if re-watching it will make me feel any different about it. My friend said they didn’t like it on a re-watch as much
I had a similar reaction. I thought it started out decent, but the writing just got incredibly sloppy as the seasons went on. I actually quit halfway through Season 5. I only came back and finished it after the first season of Better Call Saul (which I really liked, but could have used a whole lot less Breaking Bad references).
