Breaking Bad: Breakage
By fred | April 6, 2009
(S02E05) Before we go on and talk about the episode itself, let have a brief mention of a good news first: as you probably heard already, AMC already renewed Breaking Bad for a third season. It wasn’t a hard guess given Bryan Cranston’s well deserved Emmy win, the ratings always strong (and stronger) and the great press the show is getting, and it might be yet another proof that television is evolving. Once upon a time, NBC was home of the greatest show on TV (see E.R. or The West Wing), now it’s the home of Knight Rider and Kath & Kim.
Now, the really good television is found on smaller network, where the audience might not reach the dozens of millions of viewers, but the shows are just as great if not better, since they can dare more than ever. E.R. was one of those shows where we obviously loved the main characters, they were good people, heroes, but humans and, as such, flawed.
Here we’re also dealing with people who are human and flawed, but they’re certainly not heroes. It’s interesting to see how, last season, it was easy to root for Walter. Sure, he was cooking meth, but he was doing so for his family, he was getting the thrill of a brand new life out of it, letting himself be freed from all fears and social oppressions he felt his whole life, as an under-appreciated high-school teacher.
But these days, it’s not so easy to root for Walt anymore. Last week I was wondering about his health condition, as he wasn’t seen sick or coughing anymore, and this week was almost answering those concerns directly, as he was seen again during his treatment, sick and puking up as well as coughing on occasion. And yet, even as the bills add up and he can barely cover for it with the money he made out of the Tuco’s experience, it’s hard to sympathize for him now.
He is more and more selfish, he’s putting his wife through Hell, so much that she feels so isolated and lost she even smoke three and a half cigarettes while pregnant. There’s no communication between them, and Skyler can’t even get an apology, comfort and a confident in her sister. She’s all alone, because of Walt. And to some extent, if Hank if now having panic attacks and looking like he’s way more affected by his shooting of Tuco than he lets show, it’s all because of Walt as well.
He was out there looking for him because he was missing, and the only reason Hank came where he did and found Tuco there, is no other than Walt as well. If that wasn’t enough, Walt is now pushing Jesse into what will surely inevitably cause their next downfall. Because Jesse was getting things back together, he started to get a life back together for himself, getting himself a new car, even a new house (and a cute landlady he surely would love to impress) and a new deal.
It’s as he told it: “We do things my way this time. Or I walk. You need me more than I need you… Walt.” Back to basis, Walt cooks and Jesse sells, and he will do it his way. And it’s not necessarily that Walt was wrong, it can’t be a good thing that Jesse let people just steal shit from him, and he should probably have asked his buddy that, as he told them first: they do their shit the way they want, doesn’t matter, Jesse always gets his money, no matter what.
Jesse might have been a little too easy on his boys (who, by the way, looks very much like the kind who, once busted by the cops, would come clean in no time…) but the pressure Walt is putting on him, and the addition of gun power into the mix, that just can’t be a good idea. There’s probably no better way to get things messed up, and grab the DEA attention.
Couple of scenes could be taken quite literally on the show. There was Walt throwing up hope to the garbage. He doesn’t have any hopes, and he doesn’t even want any. Walt is just accepting his death, and trying to get things done his way, without consulting anyone else. He wants to do this for his family, but whether he’ll succeed or not, looks like before that he’ll have broken his family apart, maybe up to the point where, in the end, they wouldn’t even accept his money anyways – especially if they found out how he got it.
Then there’s Hank’s beer bottle. Everyone on the show seems to be like that, keeping their feelings trapped inside, refusing to let anything out, and it’s all piling up to the point where, inevitably, it will explode. The question is, who will explode first, when and how. So far things have never been really good for Walt & Jesse, every time it looked like it was going better, things blew up in their faces, having them at gun point, taken hostages or having to kill people. And now, it seems like whatever they have now will soon explode again, and Walt made sure guns would be involved…
It just doesn’t look good, but then again when does it ever in this show? It continues to be an incredibly exciting journey, and I can’t wait to find out what will happen next, and eventually leading us to that teddy bear drowning in the pool.
What did everybody else think?
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Breaking Bad
