Skylar (Anna Gunn) to Walt (Bryan Cranston): get the fuck out
Dear friends and readers,
I know I said I was done with Breaking Bad, but when 3 episodes of season 2 unexpected arrived (I had called for something else which was “delayed” and had forgotten to erase these), and watched, I found myself right back again. My fascination is the same I have for Downton Abbey: both melodramas capture the issues of the day, one reflecting the lies the British establishment concocts to erase these, deny they are there; the other, the American insistence on callousness as the way for individuals to continue to survive and as admirable and moral too.
So in 2:8-10, the series returned to the central cancer story and focused on the characters’ evolving, and these three final episodes show us what now happens to Jesse (Aaron Paul) with his new lover, Jane (Krysten Ritter), and to Walt, told he had one more dangerous bizarre operation to endure and must come up with $170,000 with the doctors talking as if they were helpless against lowering such a sum (instead of being as they are, its central source). While Downton Abbey is traditional sentimental and psychological familial-romance multi-thread soap opera, this mini-series is informed by its central paired horror of continual deaths in order to procure huge sums of money to stave off death: it is a form of seeming realistic American gothic. Gothics are after all action-adventure stories, both the male kind (origin: Lewis’s Monk) and female (Radcliffe’s Udolpho). The pile-up of bodies and the grief over these, whether mourning for the person destroyed or guilt by the destructive person (even Dean Norris as Hank suffers a version of post-traumatic disorder) are part of the morbidity of the series. We have even one of the features of traditional gothic modernized in a number of settings & objects: the labyrinthine and/or frightening hellhole.
To the story-line: 2:11-13 are stark moving episodes: Jane dies of a heroine seizure, and Jesse goes to pieces at the loss of this deeply congenial young woman. She was his “apology girl” in a touching cartoon of herself matching his book of himself as a cartoon good guy Star-trek hero.
Jesse trying to resussitate a corpse
Walt finally admits to himself how much Jesse means to him, a son in effect, and is glad to rescue Jesse (as Walt sees it); in the triangular rivalry of Walt and Jane for Jesse’s soul and body, Walt won because he is not so sickened by the culture he’s lived in. This sub-story with Jane’s father’s grief and sense of deep loss at her death, was the central empathetic moment for me.
Walt attempting to comfort Jesse
Jane’s father (John de Lancie) desolated
Another of Jesse’s friends is murdered as part of the turf battle; and Saul Goodman, the shyster lawyer (Bob Odenkirk), introduces Walt to a man who distributes meths over several state borders (an utter hypocrite who we see in charity organizations).
Themes: the series continues to mirror the worst aspects of US life (frivolous materialism, militarism as a norm for men and the police, racism, sexism), while the film-makers offer as moral lessons the opposite of what is ethical. In this close of the second season the behavior of the film-makers towards Jane (Kirsten Ritter), the apparently hard-faced but within pitiful girl seeking comfort from Jesse when she recognizes him as a male version of herself and the wife’s behavior in abruptly turning on a husband of many years disclosed the hard selfishness at the center of this US society. They talk of Jane’s father, John Margolis (John de Lancie) as someone who endured a troubling nuisance (how dare she is the feeling); Skylar (Anna Gunn) never once thinks that she might have an obligation to see to her husband’s need and not violate his individual character after all the work and effort he has made for her over the years. I write to voice a deep alienation from this respectable female icon presented as long-suffering and exemplary.
What really prompted me to write a blog is I was electrified with dislike by Sklary’s sudden abrupt throwing of Walt out of the house, or (to put it in value words), her lack of loyalty or any love for Walt. Like her, I loathe lying, and give her credit for being the only character in the whole show for 2 seasons who never lies (Jesse does not lie either, but it’s by avoiding explanations), and Walt is continually presenting her with webs of lies, but this is due to his knowledge she will not empathize with his case at all, but immediately judge and distance herself from him, offering no help at all. He would tell her if he thought she was with him.
She listens to Ted, the boss (Christopher Cousins), plays up to him with imitations of Marilyn Monroe
By contrast, when she discovers her handsome ex-boss has been embezzling and doctoring his financial record, while at first she threatens to quit, soon she is promising “not to turn him in,” and coming to work daily to help him out. In the last five minutes of the season, she comes home to tell Walt suddenly and with no warning, and at first no explanation, get the fuck out by the end of the weekend, which she’ll spend with her sister, Marie (Betsy Brandt), and brother-in-law, Hank. She phones the wealthy Gertrude whose husband originally offered to pay for Walt’s treatments (his company exists and he is rich out of Walt’s know-how) and accuses Gertrude of being her husband’s mistress. This intrusive going-behind his back to ferret out information (improbable) to hold against him as “cheating” her is utterly in character. She learns he came up with all the money by himself, but when he offers to tell the truth if she’ll stay, she refuses to listen. She says she does not want to know; what she is afraid of is reality.
Enjoying imitating Marilyn Monroe (who died at age 37 of an overdose — shades of this series’ Jane) as she enacted sexual aggression in front of John Kennedy for the delectation of public cameras
The actress playing her, Anna Gunn, the screenplay writer, Vince Gilligan, and producer thought her behavior just fine. We catch her answering someone that “it was about time.” She obeys a code, legal & normative authority figures. The actress previously described the wife as having strong boundaries; in this episode she seems to have nothing else and does not recognize a clown show when she’s participating in it: she is proud of her biological son for building an on-line site begging for money, and when Walt manages to marginalize this project by his lawyer’s suggestion to send them part of his gains through the intermediary of a paid information technologist (on the other side of the globe), and the fools see this money dribbling in, they celebrate. I expected them to run marathons for supposed corporate money next.
She is the central on-going female presence in the series. All the actors just about said “good riddance” to Jane, “bad for Jesse,” “will bring him down.” Down is shameful in the US. True, Jane seemed unable to kick her addiction to a destructive drug, especially once she fell in with Jesse. But I don’t know that she needed to be killed off. Lots of jokes as usual, visual and verbal. I’m with Marie when she says “Please don’t tell me to relax, you know I hate that”:
All but Bryan Cranston agreed the evil person (described by Gilligan as enacting “depraved indifference” when he does not try to save Jane) is Walt. Cranston talked of the character’s coming (“more”) agonies. By the film-makers, the character’s given no slack or sympathy — he’s simply a “criminal” — what he is, is a victim and either it’s not seen or not cared about, or close-up (by Skylar) prompts hostility.
Walt looking down at the dying Jane
The person who has driven Walt to this is the wife: the cancer came from the society, but not the demand he accede to super-expensive treatments which led to his relationship with Jesse whom he forms bonds of trust, kindness and identification he never does with his wife. I suggest she is acceptable because she enacts competitive demands ruthlessly and amuses those around her by gaming her sexuality and then spouts pious (allowed) speeches about gratitude.
This quality TV series (brilliant acting, sets, props) functions as a bleak bizarre fun-house mirror for American culture (explicating by inference how people think nothing of dropping drones on others thousands of miles away).
A debased version of a Sesame Street puppet with which Season 2 opens & closes
The puppet has lost one of his eyes, is half-blind. They have concocted a misleading acquiescent protest.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Jane did not die from a heroin overdose.
The first time she and Jesse did heroin together, as an experienced user, she taught him what to expect, and precautions to take to keep him safe. She said that they must always use something to prop themselves on their sides because users often would asphyxiate on their own vomit (vomiting is often a consequence of being high on heroin) unless they had a pillow at their back. When Walt broke into Jesse’s apartment and tried to shake him awake, he dislodged Jane’s pillow and she rolled onto her back. She began to vomit, as he watched. She choked to death on her own vomit, as he watched. He knew she had been behind the attempted blackmail. This was his chance to rid Jesse of her influence, and himself of an aggravation. He actually was responsible for Jane’s death, and he knew it. He could have turned her back on her side when he saw her begin to vomit. He also was emotionally prepared to be compassionate for Jesse; his usual response to urgent pleas for help was to brusquely tell Jesse not to bother him (as when he was kicked out of his parents’ home and made homeless due to Walt’s extreme self-involvement). Seeing Jesse’s despair after Jane’s death finally awoke Walt to Jesse as a real, feeling, human, and for the first time he began to act in a way for Jesse’s benefit, getting him into a good drug rehab program, and getting him the job as his assistant. Jesse, with good reason, was skeptical of Walt’s change of heart.
Jill
Well I guess I have no such knowledge. If someone began to vomit in front of me, they’d be in trouble. You assume Walt knows of this. I suppose he does – since he is presented as very knowing in science.
Walt is as good or bad as any of them — better than the cop, his wife or Skylar. My Jim could not have lived five minutes with her. I think of E.M. Forster’s essay on how he hopes he will betray his “country” when he’s asked to betray a friend.
What gets me is how the film-makers and actress think she’s quite all right and I’m supposed to identify apparently.
I had no such knowledge when I was twelve. I guess such things are instinctive in some people.
I can’t regard one character in the series as sympathetic, but I can relate to all, see aspects of their personalities in myself.
Skylar was especially unsympathetic. She struck me as smugly self-righteous, even after she became active in Walt’s “business” later on. But I did like the fact that she did not want the children to see Walt in a bad light, even to the point where Walt, Jr. blamed her for all their problems, and continued to regard Walt as some kind of paragon.
Jill
I can identify with Jesse. It’s apparent you went on to the end; I may after all. Self-righteous is right.