I've seen every episode of Breaking Bad, or, to be more precise, I've seen a little under 3/4 of Breaking Bad. The missing little bit over a quarter comes from all the fast forwarding I have done watching seasons 3 and 4 on my computer. To me, in any given episode something like half of it is worth skipping (usually the home bits with the White family, Skylar in particular), but the episode on last night had almost nothing worth skipping, and Skylar herself has gotten more interesting as a character the badder she herself has broken. I still think the show isn't great, and the picture of the drug empire Gus has established is odd, for example, he is associated with some German based multinational, but has one, one, guy he really trusts to guard him. Unlike on the not as equally flawed Wire, whitepeople's favorite show ever, the writers of Breaking Bad don't seem to understand how massive drug cartels work, and aren't interested in creating the ensemble cast necessary to do so. This of course makes sense because it did not start out as a show about cartels and multinational drug conglomerates, but the flaws in the conception of the drug empire are always slightly glaring. On the Wire, for example, it took them almost an entire season to know even what Avon Barksdale looked like, and he never touched anything, not money, drugs, or guns.
As a necessary side note, I have to, as a whiteperson, tell some sort of Baltimore story, which thankfully I have because I grew up in the DC suburbs an hour away from charm/crack city. When I was in high school, Baltimore was where you went when you hit 18 for strip clubs, and where all the cheap punk shows were, always in slum neighborhoods that you did not want to be out in at night, or even during the day most of the time. This was in the post crack wars era when things were hardly safe, not that they are now. I have been offered enough drugs at Lexington Market, where the signs in the bathroom strictly prohibit showering in the sinks, to know that the city still has its problems. The oddest thing about the city is the extent to which the weeds have overgrown the city. I have a friend who grew up in a federal period three story beautiful town home, and two blocks from his house they have excellent crack you can buy. The 'safe' whiteperson neighborhoods abut the crack slums in a way I have seen in no other city. There must be some sort of iPhone app to exploit this, I'm thinking some sort of color map that gradates green to red (or, perish the thought, black) mapping out the streets. Whoever develops this, I just want the credit for the idea.
As a show, Breaking Bad suffered from the typical third season slump. I know from a screenwriting friend, that most shows have their first and second seasons planned out, and then have no idear what to do after they get picked up for a third. Clearly with Breaking Bad, they were ready to stop the show at the end of the second season and kill Walter off, leaving his family with however much money he had at that point. The third season of Mad Men (and the fourth) was terrible compared to the first and second, as was the third season of Deadwood. Both decided that the protagonists of their respective shows (Don Draper and Al Swearengen) were more interesting as some sort of crippled anti-hero, and were basically stripped of their verbal and physical power. Did Don say anything worthwhile in the whole of season 3? Anything as good as "I don't have a contract." Breaking Bad's main problem is, of course, that its protagonist is its antagonist, and it has taken the show basically two seasons to work towards creating someone we, as an audience, can get behind. Gus obviously isn't a real option, as excellent as he is, and finally, in the past couple episodes, Jesse has emerged as something worthy of audience backing. I give the writers of the show the limited credit they deserve for finally figuring out how to go about brining Jesse to the front. Because I don't care about it much, I won't talk about how coordinated the story lines were, or how excellent the final shot of the episode was, looking down on Walt in the womblike crawlspace under his house, crying in a fetal position, bald like a baby. I will only say that as an audience member, our desire for the good to end happily and the bad unhappily as Wilde so aptly defined fiction, seems to finally be being satisfied. The show has created such a terrible sob in Walt that watching him cry like a bald little baby after being tazed by a cattleprod was deeply satisfying.
