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Oct. 25th, 2022
Seasons Three and Four of Breaking Bad
Oct. 25th, 2022 08:29 pmI made another super simple icon which will impress nobody (and a third for my ao3 account) so there's that.
Breaking Bad continues to gel with me, becoming easier to handle as it goes, seeming to buck the usual trend of television getting darker and darker as the writers compete to outdo early successes. Here, the introductory villains were off the wall psychos like Tuco, killed and replaced by far more subtle and nuanced enemies like Gus and Mike - a much better trajectory. The show also expanded into more of an ensemble piece, and less Walter White is more, I say. At the start of the story, almost every single scene was about him in some way and since so much of that material was a tissue of grotesque lies, it was much harder to endure. Seasons three and four were comparative cakewalk.
Another upside is in how they laid off a lot of the gross imagery (other than a scene throwing the Association under the bus, which I did not appreciate), allowing me to finally notice how damn gorgeous the camerawork is on this show (though occasionally on the nose, what with the color coordinated clothing and the way Walt is so endlessly separated from family via columns and other things). They also started leaning into some very western iconography, giving the visuals a sense of sweep and scale I found missing from the first two seasons. Bonus points for an amazing use of Fever Ray's If I Had a Heart.
I will say I preferred the finale of season three over that of four. Season three was quite genuinely stunning, and centered wholly on two incompatible concepts being seamlessly entwined: A killing done in self-defense and a cold-blooded murder of a non-combatant were made one and the same event. Season four went for something more literally explosive, but to get there jumped through some convoluted hoops involving the poisoning of a very minor character, and in hindsight it didn't hang together that well - kind of like the only Agatha Christie books I've ever read.
I find it fascinating how every single season (usually several times over) there's an opportunity presented for Walt, Jesse and now Skyler to get out of the game relatively clear, and they choose not to. Skyler has a lot more in common with her husband than appeared at first, and her desperate attempts to wrest control of the situation from Walt were terribly frustrating to witness, as she'd had my full sympathy from the start and lost it by deciding that perception was more important than reality. Skyler wants her son's image of Walt to remain pristine, unclouded by anything so terrible as the truth, while Walt continues to be outclassed in everything but chemistry and still insists that he is the smartest man in the room. This is going to end by blowing up massively, and if Breaking Bad is to be classified as a tragedy at all, I maintain it is the tragedy of Hank and Marie Schrader and the two White children - darlings all, who deserved much better.
I still have hope for Jesse.
Breaking Bad continues to gel with me, becoming easier to handle as it goes, seeming to buck the usual trend of television getting darker and darker as the writers compete to outdo early successes. Here, the introductory villains were off the wall psychos like Tuco, killed and replaced by far more subtle and nuanced enemies like Gus and Mike - a much better trajectory. The show also expanded into more of an ensemble piece, and less Walter White is more, I say. At the start of the story, almost every single scene was about him in some way and since so much of that material was a tissue of grotesque lies, it was much harder to endure. Seasons three and four were comparative cakewalk.
Another upside is in how they laid off a lot of the gross imagery (other than a scene throwing the Association under the bus, which I did not appreciate), allowing me to finally notice how damn gorgeous the camerawork is on this show (though occasionally on the nose, what with the color coordinated clothing and the way Walt is so endlessly separated from family via columns and other things). They also started leaning into some very western iconography, giving the visuals a sense of sweep and scale I found missing from the first two seasons. Bonus points for an amazing use of Fever Ray's If I Had a Heart.
I will say I preferred the finale of season three over that of four. Season three was quite genuinely stunning, and centered wholly on two incompatible concepts being seamlessly entwined: A killing done in self-defense and a cold-blooded murder of a non-combatant were made one and the same event. Season four went for something more literally explosive, but to get there jumped through some convoluted hoops involving the poisoning of a very minor character, and in hindsight it didn't hang together that well - kind of like the only Agatha Christie books I've ever read.
I find it fascinating how every single season (usually several times over) there's an opportunity presented for Walt, Jesse and now Skyler to get out of the game relatively clear, and they choose not to. Skyler has a lot more in common with her husband than appeared at first, and her desperate attempts to wrest control of the situation from Walt were terribly frustrating to witness, as she'd had my full sympathy from the start and lost it by deciding that perception was more important than reality. Skyler wants her son's image of Walt to remain pristine, unclouded by anything so terrible as the truth, while Walt continues to be outclassed in everything but chemistry and still insists that he is the smartest man in the room. This is going to end by blowing up massively, and if Breaking Bad is to be classified as a tragedy at all, I maintain it is the tragedy of Hank and Marie Schrader and the two White children - darlings all, who deserved much better.
I still have hope for Jesse.