Breaking Bad: Season 5

No the ricin is still in his house, Jesse knows now that Walt poisoned the kid and planted fake ricin in his house when they were cleaning it.

Best show on TV, no doubt about it.

 

Bingo. Huell lifted Jessie's weed when they went to the Vacuum guy, and when he couldn't find it he realized what happened. Absolutely the best show on tv.

 

Here is a great explanation on the ricin cigarette. Click here This show is more addictive than I would imagine meth to be.

 

Here's what I would like to see:

A. Walt Jr. walks in on Jesse. Jesse tells him everything and leaves without burning down the house. (The 52nd birthday house doesn't look like it was burned down.) Walt Jr.'s disgust about Walt's actions leads to him refusing the money (the whole point of cooking meth was to provide for the family) and/or teaming up with Hank or at least giving Hank a new psychological weapon against Walt. (RJ Mitte has been grossly underused on this show.)

B. Skyler walks in with Holly startling Jesse and he accidently shoots them both. This would be apropos considering that one of Jesse's big motivations has been not hurting children. Related to the wardrobe color thing, Holly wears pink which has been associated with death on the show. (The teddy bear and Walt's sweater during the plane crash.) Also it would explain the mournful way Walt was arranging the bacon on his 52nd birthday. And we would get to see Walt have to explain this to Walt Jr. with either more lies or finally coming clean.

 

I feel terrible posting this, but it made me laugh.

 

Yeah I was thinking something similar to Old Hairy Porno. Think it's pretty clear Jesse doesn't light the gas. I wouldn't put shooting Skylar/Holly past this show, but I think he hears a cry or sees a toy and changes his mind, then spray paints Heisenberg on the wall, and goes on to do something us feeble mortals couldn't come up with. I definitely think Holly, and probably Jr will die at some point though. And Vince Gilligan said before the first half of this season aired that Jr will play a bigger and bigger role as the series ends, so you might be closer with theory A.

So. Fucking. Epic.

 

Shit just got real on the meta level. Anna Gunn on the hatred of Skylar White "I Have a Character Issue". I think she's right about all of this. Vince Gilligan has admitted that he is disgusted with the hatred of Skylar because Walter White is a bad fucking person and she stood up to him the most before she eventually was broken.

 

I've never understood the hatred for Skylar, and think almost all who hate on her are morons. I mean, was she supposed to just be ok with him cooking meth? For one, that wouldn't have been realistic in the least, and it would have made for a pretty boring dynamic from the get go. We would have missed some of the show's most powerful early scenes. At this point, now that she's on board with Walt and fighting to KEEP the kids in the house, it's like we get a side of Mrs. Chips-to-Scarface to go along with Walt's transition. So cool.

Also really think Jr will either see and talk to Jesse (Walt let Jesse's name slip to Jr near end of first half), or at least see Heisenberg on the wall.

 

I warmed up a lot to Skyler once she actually started to matter to the plot by opposing Walt. What I hated were the first few seasons where she was just kind of a inconsequential cunty background character whose problems were insignificant compared to murderous cartel thugs. A lot of her earlier scenes consisted of me wanting her to shut the fuck up so we could get back to Walt and Jesse being awesome. It got better when she found out and started doing interesting things like scamming car wash owners and maiming Ted.

 

That, plus I think Anna Gunn is a contributing factor herself. I fucking hated her character on Deadwood because she was a fun sponge preventing Seth Bullock from doing cool cowboy shit (like beating people up with little to no provocation and/or fucking Molly Parker's character).

My other big point of contention with Skyler is that she is a cheating whore. If you go back and watch Season 2, she begins cheating on Walt emotionally long before she finds out about any of his illicit activities. I'm a big believer in "people do what they truly want to do and simply find justification for it after the fact." Skyler wanted to fuck Ted, so she did mental gymnastics until Walt gave her an excuse to act.

In conclusion, I hope Skyler catches a bullet with her face before the end of the show.

 

I agree. I think she's been typecasted as an unlikable twat. And anything she does is tainted by that persona. Let's also not pretend the show doesn't have you rooting for Walt even though he is Satan incarnate. It might be a rough analogy but I attribute him to being like magneto. If we were to only meet Walt as Heisenberg, and have no back story, you probably wouldn't like him either. But magneto, we learn, is a Holocaust survivor with a lust for revenge. So you kinda understand at where he's coming from.

Although Walt's initial motive is somewhat noble, it quickly derails. But by that point, you are under the show's spell and firmly on his side. Thus, anyone in his way now is a shithead and Skylar is nothing but a cunt.

 

Oh well I would never argue that outside of the actual drug dealers he crossed, Skylar was Walt's only antagonist in the early going. If I recall, Gunn says exactly that in the article she wrote. That's what hooked me to the show so fast: he'd be out in the desert/junkyards with a 50-50 chance of getting murdered, then come home to an ever more suspicious wife, and often times the latter was somehow MORE tense and dramatic. That's brilliance, right there.

My problem with the Skylar haters is basically: what did you want? Did you want her to have no problem with her husband who, COMPLETELY out of nowhere, suddenly started acting sketchy? As the woman who loved and understood him like no one else, she was supposed to just be cool with him CLEARLY hiding something, lying, and having a second cell phone? This, to you guys, would have made for a better, more realistic drama?

Actually her scenes consisted of some pretty high level acting, portraying a woman whose husband is suddenly behaving deceptively, and the only thing she's sure about, is that it isn't an affair (which in a way would be worse, I would imagine). I'm almost certain that your reaction, or whatever awesome stuff you wanted, never came up in the writer's room. A good decision, in my opinion.

How about you go back to when he first got diagnosed and kept it from her? Then, after confessing only to cover up his illicit activities, he takes advantage of her new well of sympathy to do more illicit activities. Unless you're saying she cheated emotionally before the series even started?

It's funny, there is near across the board sympathy for almost every character that was/is a victim of Walt's mastermind manipulations, yet when it comes to his wife, the mother of his children who didn't even turn him in when she found out, she's just a cunt.

I hate to pull a Bunny and claim sexism where there is none, but given she's the female lead character...

 

My problem was that she was a a one-note character early on, and that one note (white middle-class nonviolent relationship problems) was boring compared to what was going on with every other character on the show. I understand that they were setting up things that came later, but at the time I did not care about anything Skyler was doing.

And since they didn't do much to flesh her character out, people filled in the blanks with the cunty aging suburban soccer mom stereotype. No one likes anything about cunty aging suburban soccer moms. All of the other characters were given qualities that made us like them Walt was basically a good guy until the confrontation with Tuco, Jesse had friends and a soft spot for kids like his little brother, Hank has a mentally unstable wife (she got better, I guess) and had the whole sad clown thing going on, Saul is Saul. Are there early scenes humanizing Skyler that I'm just forgetting? I guess we were supposed to feel bad for her because her husband was being sketchy, but there just isn't a lot of sympathy out there for people in shitty relationships, especially when she does some equally shitty things in response.

The New York Times website seems to be down right now, but I seem to remember Gunn comparing Skyler to Betty Draper. That's stupid because Betty Draper was written as a self-centered bitch. We weren't supposed to like her. I also remember it claiming that people just dislike complicated female characters. Skyler didn't really start being a complicated character until the first time she walked into Saul's office. Before that she was just a generic middle-class white woman in a custody battle. It was well acted, but if you can sum up an entire character in one clause they aren't complicated. Hell, she isn't even really a strong woman unless you define strong woman as any that aren't complete doormats. Most of the things she does to defy Walt make no sense if she actually thinks he might hurt her or the kids. Skyler as a strong woman pales in comparison to Rita from the early seasons of Dexter. Kicking a cancer-ridden, 50-year-old schoolteacher out of the house for keeping secrets doesn't make you a strong woman any more than sleeping with strangers makes you empowered.

As for people on the internet being mean? Congratulations, you've discovered the internet. It's a showcase of the worst aspects of humanity and it's on 24/7/365. I guarantee that someone has applied rule 34 to Skyler by now. It's what these savages do.

 

I just really hated her when she gave Ted the money. And her face.

 

You have to keep in mind the time frame. It's only been a few months since that happened. I think you're supposed to infer that Jessie has been thinking about Walt constantly when you look at his behavior of late essentially starting with the conversation he had with Walt about Mike. Once you realize you're being worked, you start thinking about every time you could have been worked.

 

It also helps if you think of it in the context of the scene in the desert where Jessie tells Walt to "Stop working me for one minute and just tell me the truth." He knows Walt is full of shit and always has been but he can never prove it. It's been a recurring theme that Jessie never really believes Walt has his best interests at heart but is not bright enough to figure out just how Walt is playing him. I think it is completely plausible he would have finally put two and two together in that situation. It would be fitting if Jessie had a hand in taking him down.

 

Totally made sense. It clicked for me during the commercials, and I'm not a character that's been having a month-long psychotic break; thinking I was responsible for a child's poisoning. Think about how many times he played through those events in his head, all while trying to grasp the extent of Walt's evil. Fucking great scene.

I was hoping this season would turn into Jesse vs. Walt... but not I'm hoping that Hank hasn't been completely neutralized. Three way grudge match to Armageddon (or an M60 in the trunk).

 

Same thing with Jesse thinking Walt killed Mike, simply because Walt wasn't running around scared for his life.

Jesse's revelations seem to be the toughest bit to swallow on this show.