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.
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.