One of the things that’s struck me about the interviews Vince Gilligan’s done after this season’s finale of Breaking Bad is the extent to which they reveal not just that the show has all of these meticulously planned and executed episodes (it may be the most beautifully shot show on television right now), but that these meticulous episodes are coming together really fast. As he tells James Poniewozick:

Season four was pretty close to that in execution. In other words, we knew what had to happen at the end of the season. We knew that Walt would have to finally defeat his nemesis Gus and while we didn’t have every single detail nailed down, we talked about it. We would spend time every week in the writer’s room talking about where we were going. We would take breaks from where we were at that particular moment on any given episode and we would jump ahead to where we were going with the story. So, yes, we had the the plot of the last episode figured out probably three or four episodes in advance.

And in his conversation with Maureen Ryan, Gilligan reveals it wasn’t actually clear going into the fourth season who would live and who would die:

Back in the early days of plotting out Season 4, we did indeed realize that this was the season where it would all have to come to a head and there would have to be some resolution one way or the other. And we even briefly discussed, “What if it is Walt that gets killed”? We got to realize pretty quickly that we couldn’t actually go that way. But we try to make the writer’s room a safe place and let all ideas wind up on the table at some point or another, even if only for 10 or 20 seconds.

We discuss every possibility. We discussed, “What if Walt dies or is horribly wounded?” Or “what if” [scenarios involving Hank, Skyler or Jesse]. We do try to discuss every possible permutation that we can conceive of. But at a certain point we also have to choose between the least of all evils, I suppose. I’d hate to think of this show without Aaron Paul on it. Obviously, I don’t think we’d have a show without Bryan Cranston.

I’m intrigued by this, because it offers an intriguing insight into how fast the show has evolved from a significantly realistic show about health care, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the thin veneer that separates the middle class from the working poor in Albuquerque into a full-on horror show. Listening to this week’s TV On the Internet podcast, I both agree with Libby Hill that the show has evolved in concert with its main character, becoming more monstrous as Walt does, I also share some of Todd’s concerns about the show going slightly off the rails.

I guess I’d feel comforted if I knew which story the fifth and final season of the show was going to tell. It makes sense that we’re going to have to see what happens with the networks left behind by the cartel’s decimation and Gus’ sudden death, but I think somehow I’d be disappointed by a show that’s so intensely about morality giving Walt the chance to go out as a kingpin. Instead, wouldn’t it be more fitting the show’s worldview to have Walt stuck running the car wash, which, as some folks pointed out on Twitter, would be a fitting forced return to invisibility for a man who is desperate to be recognized for his greatness? But in either case, I’d really like to know that Vince Gilligan knows how this is all going to end even if he isn’t going to tell any of us yet.

Reflecting on it, I don’t think the manner of Gus’ death, which felt a bit like the show calling on the makeup crew for The Walking Dead just because they could, was an actual shark-jumping moment. The show’s always pitted the wildly grotesque against the realistic, particularly in the defeat of the Cousins by Hank, a crude human potato with remarkable, but not totally implausible, panic-fueled resilience. But I do think the end of this season, from the wild cackle that closed out “Crawl Space” to the literalness of “Face Off” raises questions about how Gilligan is going to deliver his moral coup de grace: through crushing banality, or through operatic shock?

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 4 episode of Breaking Bad, “Hermanos.”

I’ve written in the past that Breaking Bad‘s attitude towards the war on drugs, which runs from neutral to positive, makes the show somewhat conservative. So it was interesting to see the show back up and give us an origin story of Gus’ rise in the drug trade at the same time that it’s arguing that the Drug Enforcement Agency is bought off, unable to properly investigate the threat that he poses to them.

After he aces his interview with the DEA and the Albuquerque Police Department, organizations that are already inclined to believe him because of his record as a strong record as a supporter of law enforcement, not withstanding Hank’s trick question that “there’s no record of Gustavo Fring ever having existed in Chile, which I find strange,” Gus is essentially off the hook as a suspect. But Hank continues to track him even though as Mike explains, “from what I hear he’d be committing career suicide,” that without the backing of an agency, Hank’s little more than “Miss Daisy with binoculars” and Walt as his driver. Certainly the outward message is one of, if not the outright corruption of the DEA, its weakness and inability to think creatively and to see what’s in front of it. But is the deeper message that even though Hank is chasing the right man in Albuquerque, even he can’t see the larger picture?

It’s fascinating to see a young, vulnerable Gus pitching meth to Don Eladio, the man who apparently holds the end of the string that’s tied around Don Salamanca’s trigger finger. “This product is the drug of the future,” he rhapsodizes, explaining that’s why he’s been handing out samples to Eladio’s thugs in hopes of scoring a meeting. Instead, his entrepreneurialism gets his partner shot as the man desperately tries to defend Gus, his monologue a parallel of Walt’s constant entreaties on Jesse’s behalf. “The only reason you are alive and he is not is that I know who you are,” Eladio tells him, which raises an interesting question about what lessons Gus learned from that fatal meeting. Clearly, he didn’t stick to chicken, and the cartel followed his lead. But did Gus find out that cooks are dispensable? That protecting your partner can only get you killed? Or that if you’ve got two men making a business proposition, you do your research and then split the difference?

It’s still not a deeply-developed dynamic, but this is as close to an organizational critique of the drug trade and the people who chase it as Breaking Bad‘s come. It’s hard for men to escape the grip of organizations, to live as islands. Gus and Hank might have been able to play a cat and mouse game in another era, another moment in the West. But it’s not clear they’ll be able to do it now.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of Breaking Bad, “Problem Dog.”

One of the major themes of this season has been Walt, Jesse, and Hank’s struggles for, or with, visibility, even as they run from, or to, or hunt a man who balances a visible self and an invisible one with an ease none of them can muster.

Today, Walt makes another play for visibility with a child act of automotive destruction. After Skylar carefully negotiates the return of Walter Junior’s car for $800 in restocking fees, noting that “the law says they don’t have to take it back at all,” Walt throws a temper tantrum, does donuts with the car, and sets it on fire. When he calls a cab, he tells the dispatcher, “I’m sure he’ll see me.” At this point, Walt seems not to care what he’s seen for. It’s no longer a matter of establishing his genius, or his menace. He’d rather spend $52,000 on a bratty primal scream that gets him noticed than $800 on an act of prudence that lets him continue living as if he’s normal, invisible.

Skylar’s certainly had her realizations about her husband over the past few episodes, whether she’s finding out that he sees himself as a kingpin to figuring out tonight that his income is so large as to be unlaunderable. But I’m wondering if she understands that about Walt, that his need to be recognized is so strongly in conflict with her need to be normal that he will destroy her and himself to achieve it. It’s easy to understand that Walt might want to be recognized as a prodigy of some kind, whether good or evil, but that he just wants to be seen even if it’s to go out in a blaze, is wonderfully strange and particular. We’ve seen Skylar make all sorts of compromises, but I want to know what will spur her to decisive action. The tipping point is as interesting to me at this point as what she does once she reaches it.
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This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 14 episode of Breaking Bad.

For an episode without a lot of dialogue, a lot happened in the world of Breaking Bad this week. I don’t know that this was my favorite episode this season — I go back and forth between “38 Snub” and “Bullet Points” — but it’s part of a trend of the show picking up momentum and filling in continuity and plausibility holes in a way I find really gratifying.

This week started with Walt in one kind of panic and ended with him in another. With Jesse missing, he careened down the street, telling Saul breathlessly “Every dollar. If you don’t hear from me in 24 hours, I want you to give her every last dollar. I don’t care if you have to stuff it trash bags, just make sure she gets everything.” But once the danger’s gone, and he and Skylar have celebrated their purchase of the car wash by sleeping together, an event that’s prompted by Walt’s phone message telling Skylar he loves her, it’s as if another kind of noose is tightening on him. Skylar tells Walter Jr., though not Walt, that he’ll be moving back in on Tuesday. She’s designed the narrative that they’re using to explain their sudden riches to Hank, Marie, and the world. It’s as if Skylar’s embrace of their charade is a little too enthusiastic. Walt may tell himself and Skylar that by cooking meth, he’s providing for his family, but I’m not sure he’s comfortable with his family taking on its old shape and its old dynamics. It’s not just Skylar who’s changed, it’s Walter Jr., who comes down for breakfast and asks him for coffee instead of orange juice. “I didn’t know you started drinking coffee,” Walt tells his son, who he’s been distant from since he started cooking. “I also started tying my own shoelaces too, all by myself,” Walter Jr. tells his dad. When Walt left his family to go off into the unknown and start cooking, he assumed everything would be the same. But now that he’s back, Walt may be providing for his family but he’s not in control of it.
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I was so wrapped up in the emotional tension of Breaking Bad that it wasn’t until about a week after I finished watching the third season that I realized something that’s been itching at me: I’m not sure what the show’s politics are. Breaking Bad is meant to be a personal story rather than a systematic one, but that doesn’t mean it’s apolitical, especially when that personal story puts a drug dealer and a Drug Enforcement Administration in close proximity to each other. And especially when that personal story is essentially a long-term examination of masculine ideals. I’m not sure Breaking Bad is a profoundly conservative show, but it seems to me it’s not a liberal one, in that it buys fairly deeply into some existing assumptions and power structures.

First, the question of the DEA and the War on Drugs. Unlike The Wire, Breaking Bad isn’t really engaged in structural analysis (I’d be curious to see someone do that with meth, though). To the limited extent that it explores drug organizations, Breaking Bad tends to portray dealers as violent psychopaths like Tuco and the extended Salamanca family, or as shadowy amoral operators like Gus. It’s hard to see the kind of people who would cut Danny Trejo’s head off, put it on a turtle, and rig the turtle with bombs as anything other than desperately in need of prosecution. More importantly, the way Walt’s storyline is set up reinforces the idea that we shouldn’t have sympathy for people in the industry. He may start out manufacturing meth out of a sense of financial need, but he keeps cooking after he goes into remission out of sheer cussedness and pride—pretty much like everyone else we see in the industry. It’s harder to treat the War on Drugs as if it’s manifestly unjust if you reject or obscure the idea that the drug trade is the product of larger societal structures.
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“I’ve done a terrible thing. But I’ve done it for a good reason. I did it for us. That is college tuition for Walter Jr. And Holly, eighteen years down the road. And it’s health insurance for you and the kids. For Jr.’s physical therapy. His SAT tutor. It’s money for groceries, gas, for birthdays and graduation parties. Skyler, that money is for this roof over your head. The mortgage that you are not going to be able to afford on a part-time bookkeeper’s salary when I’m gone.” -Walter White

“New Zealand, that’s where they, uh, that’s where they made Lord of the Rings! I say we just move there, yo! I mean, you could do your art, right? Like, you could like paint the local castles and shit, and I can be a bush pilot!” -Jesse Pinkman

Pretty much as long as we’ve had television, we’ve used that medium to explore manichean struggles between good and evil. For much of television history, figuring out who’s on what side’s been relatively simple: cops and robbers, cops and rapists, cops and murderers. Perry Mason was a defense attorney, sure, but his clients almost always turned out not to have committed the crimes of which they were accused. If our moral art was about dividing the guilty from the innocent, that was a fairly easy project. The Wire basically preserved the distinction between criminals and the law, but suggested that there were people worth of sympathy on both sides of the divide. To a certain extent, Breaking Bad is the inverse of The Wire. Both criminals and the law are equally dislikable. And the key moral question of the show isn’t whether people commit crimes, or inflict vast damage on society. It’s about how clearly they see themselves, and what they’re doing.

I. Freaks

Where The Wire sketches a broad picture of the impact of the drug trade on society, the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with actual addicts. It’s a systematic show rather than an interior one. We see Bubbles on the nod, but not what it’s like to be on the nod. It’s characteristic of the interiority of Breaking Bad that we spend much more time with addicts, most important among them Jesse.
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