With Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman standing aside, Bryan Cranston as Mr White advising Aaron Paul as Jesse to find a new identity — near closure
Dear friends and readers,
When I began watching and then writing about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad I did not intend to write seriously about it, but gradually I came to see the it comprises an unusual set of quality TV films worth study and evaluative commentary. They mirror central deeply disquieting and central aspects of US life, the whole plot-design actuated by the cancer epidemic (from our ubiquitous “chemistry, yo Mr White!”) and the horrendous price of a pretense at effective chemical medicine:
Anna Gunn as Skyer desperate and believing Walt could be saved, pressuring him into going for the out-of-range expensive chemotherapy and operation.
At film’s end: she sits, chain-smokes, drinks coffee, listens to others in a corner of a trailer-home
As film art they are brilliant. The genre finally American gothic: the mini-series has the recipe except for the supernatural: the double self, death, labyrinthine haunted places, the past never goes away, even sexuality in the form of homo-eroticism unacknowledged, and at the end a house in ruin. Less known but common characteristics: exploration of science, doctors (as in Frankenstein). Kafkaesque, majorly says Jesse of his experiences.
So now, as I’ve done for the Palliser, Poldark and Downton Abbey mini-series, as well as many Jane Austen and Andrew Davies’ films, I offer a handy list in one place for people who are interested easily to reach my summaries and commentary. I’ll keep it to this blog (and not attempt to put it on a new website when I finally make it) as after all I discover I did not write as many here as for these previous series:
1) Cancer and Anatomies of Violence: Season 1:1-3
2) Cancer and Money: Season 1:4-6
3) Parallels distract common sense from seeing who is the villain here: Season 1:17
4) It’s the reverse of what’s claimed: Season 2:1-4
5) A Crime Adventure Story: Season 2:5-7 to Finale
6) A Crime Adventure Story (Cont’d): Season 2:8-10
7) American Gothic: Season 2:11-13
Their first lab
8) Sensational Screenplay into a film: Season 3:1-4
9) Rather poorer stuff: Season 3:5-7
10) Stasis (includes Fly and Kafkaesque): Season 3:8-10
11) A Killing Way of Life: Season 3:11-13; 4:1-4
12) I change my mind about Skyler: Season 4:5-13 & Reprise 1:1-7
13) Walt and the Emmys: Season 5:1-8 & Reprise Season 2:5-13
14) The Dark Tragic End: Season 6:1-8
From The Fly
I’ve two books to recommend, and transcripts of what was said in each episode. As I discover new essays or materials (reviews welcome) on-line that are good, I’ll add them here:
David R. Koepsell and Robert Arp’s collection of essays by themselves and others, Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living Through Chemistry
Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad by Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz
The Breaking Bad episodes scripts — simply the dialogue taken down (not the screenplay, not shooting scipts as they have no stage directions, no description of production design, no designation for shots)
One of the many landscapes and bags of chemicals from the series
Ellen
Thanks for this Ellen.
And thank you for all your appreciation and patience.
Susan Hoyle: “Tonight we will be watching the last episode of Breaking Bad (more my kind of thing than Poldark, but then I’ve never been one for the romantic), and I am hoping that Netflix will give us access to some of the background material that you get when you buy the boxed sets. My son gave us a set of Series One, but I’d like more of an overview — which I know I’ll eventually find — but I’d rather it be right to hand before I have moved on to the next thing. BB is such a complex story: we were saying that Walt Jnr may be the (morally) best person in the whole thing, while we also watched Walt Snr steal their daughter and shout at his wife, in order to try to exonerate her, and we watched her understand that that was what he was doing. Well tonight it will be over and I expect, like Walt the dad said to Walt the son a couple of series ago when they were watching a film on television, “This is a movie where everyone winds up dead”.
My reply: Well the costume drama book I was published in (! — my essay on Davie’s Trollope films is there: Upstairs and Downstairs, JTaddeo and JLeggott) argues what I believe to be so and sort of demonstrates that 1970s BBC films were genuinely far more liberal and left than the dramas since the mid-1980s; if you were to try a couple of Winston Graham’s books and then watch the series you’d see it. I hope the new series stays closer to the books.
On the features on the big box set of Breaking Bad: terrific, and they got better and more of them as the years passed. I did describe a parody ending of the whole series on the last disk in my last blog: Walt Sr wakes up from this bad dream where he’s been killing people and he has as a partner a man-boy who walks around in clothes way too big for him … One book I can recommend (I hope it’s available in the UK: Wanna Cook: complete, unofficial companion to Breaking Bad, Ensley Guffey and K Dale Koontz. It is remarkable how good this mini-series is — given it is by genre action-adventure, thriller, high violence. No one wants or is allowed to tell a real cancer story; Jenny Diski is trying in the LRB (she has inoperable lymph node cancer) but it’s very hard (as she says).
E.M.