Breaking Bad: Live Free or Die

 "What about that stuff you young guys wear on the end of your pricks? Speak now or forever speak soprano."

This is an interesting opener. On the surface, it's a matter of tying up loose ends following the eventful finale. Yet there's a sombre mood throughout, while Walt is very, very Heisenberg indeed. Could this final season see Walt become a true kingpin... but not ultimalely survive?

Fundanenttally, the main thrust of this is a heist. As a heist, it's fun, with the use of the magnets reminding us of Walt's cleverness and big science brain. The urgent mutual need to destroy the recordings from Gus' six quadrillion cameras is a suble way of getting Mike (he's back!) together with Walt and Jesse. Will he stay with them?

It's interesting that Skyler starts out being distant with Walt. She's now seen he's capable of killing, and he scares her. Yet, when she hears that Ted has woken up, and she visits him, appalled at the sight before her, he's clearly scared of her, and as much as begs for his life. Skyler, too, has dipped her hands in the blood, and this is a dramatic reminder. Unsurprisingly, this brings her and Walt together.

As for the opening scene, with Walt turning fifty-two and engaging in spy type stuff... I have no idea. But this is enthralling stuff.

Breaking Bad: Crawl Space

 "This man needs help!"

"This man pays my salary..."

The walls are closing in. Walt has alienated both Gus and Jesse, he's in an awkward position with Hank, and Gus is now recovered from his poisoning, getting all avuncular with Jesse and in quietly vindictive mood as we see with his cruel goading of Tio Salamanca, whose children and grandchildren are now all dead. That's what happens when you mess with Gus. Jesse may be brave in insisting Walt not be killed, and he actually has some leverage, but it's all looking pretty ominous.

Skyler has her own problems, although of a much less immediate nature: Ted still won't pay off the IRS, he's in full denial mode, and Skyler is desperate in parallel with Walt, conspiring with Saul to get Ted roughed up. She's stepping, incrementally, further and further into criminality, just as her husband did. And this time, with grim comedy, she has blood on her hands as Ted is accidentally killed. Ouch.

Walt may manage to deter Hank through increasing desperation, and is lucky to arouse suspicion. But it's only a matter of time until Hank checks out the laundry. 

So finally we come to a denouement: a hooded Walt kidnapped and sent to face a visibly angry Gus in the desert. He's offered freedom and a clean break at the cost of giving up meth for good, and he could take it; with the car wash, his family is probably secure. Yet his defiant pride makes him refuse the offer, and so his family is doomed. The intricate plotting reaches a moment of true sublimity when a desperate Walt, hoping to give his family a new life, can't do so because Skyler used the money for Ted. Bryan Cranston gives a performance here which is absolutely top tier. The man is one of the greats.

The walls are closing in. Two episodes to go. This is televisual perfection.

Breaking Bad: Salud

 "I had to spank you..."

Wow. Yet again we see how this extraordinary season fits together like clockwork as we follow on from the Gus flashbacks from a few episodes ago and see that pool again, this tim ithout the yellow-tinted camerawork to tell us non-diegetically that we're looking at the past. Plot threads develop, and fascinatingly so, but for once the feud between Gus and Walt must yield to a much older feud of Gus'.

There's so much cleverness in how this is written, scripted, shown and played. A simple sub-plot about Walt missing Walt Jr's birthday becmes the catalyst for so much more, as Walt has to pretend it was a gambling relapse and experiences his son's tender concern... and accidentally calls him Jesse, something which is bound to be referred to again.

But the core of all this is Bryan Cranston's extraordinary monologue about his own childhood memories of his late father, who died of Huntingdon's Disease when he was six. It's an incredible bit of acting, followed in turn by Walt Jr's impression of how his own father has seemed over the last year.

There's also Skyler's plan to save Ted from the IRS- and herself and Walt from prison, of course- in a sharp example of how her plot threads have changed over the last season or so as she's fully embraced criminality, at least in its white collar form. The fictional "bequest" from an "aunt" in Luxembourg is to solve that debt problem... and he's spending it on other things! It's a fascinating sub-plot, especially as it shows how the power has shifted between them.

And power, of course, shifts south of the border too, as Gus serves cold his revenge on Don Eladio in an immaculately planned assassination in which an extraordinarily unflappable Gus takes a calculated yet dangerous risk. There is an air of menace. There is violence. There is Jesse proving himself in a shootout after Mike is wounded. And the sublime Giancarlo Esposito gives us what must surely be the most elegant vomiting scene in television history.

Breaking Bad: Bug

 "A guy this clean has got to be dirty..."

This entire season, as I've said more than once before, is something of a multi-dmensional chess game between Gus and Walt. There's a lot going on, you have to pay attention... yet the narrative is superbly done. And Gus is clearly winning.

All is not well with Gus as he is, seemingly, under siege by the rival gang. But literally everything with this is seen from Jesse's subjective point of view and we're left to question whether events are happening quite as he perceives them. This is a theme throughout the episode. Skyler, for example, sees the car wash becoming profitable and sees a possibility of Walt being able to give up his "other" job. She doesn't see the reality: Walt has two possible trajectories, taking over from Gus or death, and it's squeaky bum time.

Ted is back, and he's under investigation by the fraud people from the US equivalent of HMRC, who seem scarily powerful. Yet Skyler, cleverly, puts on a performance and makes the accounting dodginess look like incompetence rather than fraud, saving him from prison... and herself from dangerously prying eyes.

Then there's Hank's car tracker, which has its own point of view which is equally subject to manipulation, except at the end where Walt knows exactly where Jesse was the previous night and that he failed, yet again, to kill Gus, putting Walt in peril. Yet it's all so cleverly orchestrated by Gus- perhaps more of it than we realise- to divide and conquer yet again. And this time, it seems, for good.

I'm loving this season. Breaking Bad gets better and better.

Breaking Bad: Kafkaesque

 "One taste and you'll know!"

This is one of those episodes which, while easy to follow, have a lot of three dimensional chess going on beneath the surface, most obviously with the frank (and superbly acted) discussion between Walt (Heisenberg) and the ever-impassive Gus. Walt is always nervous before his boss, a proven princeling of crime, but his approach is all realpolitik and honesty. He shows he knows Gus' thinking, and would have done the same. He is at once demostrating to Gus that he's not a threat, an intellectual equal, able to cope with all this Kafkaesque complexity, and a supplicant. The alpha male competition may be latent, but it's there. Walt may be salaried middle management for now, with a pay rise to boot, but we (and Gus, who is no fool) know that he won't be satisfied being a middle manager for long.

Jesse, for once, in a role reversal, is the ambitious one. He now has drive, as we see from his desire to cream off a bit at the side and from a very revealing monologue at that ridiculous twelve step thing. He cares about his work and doesn't want to see success slip away- hence the very clever use of his underlings toexploit the group for advertising. Even if he's not willing (yet) to listen to Saul about money laundering. Which follows on from the very unusualopening advert for Los Pollos Hermanos, itself a front business.

Also, interestingly, we have signs of possible rapprochement between Skyler and Walt. She comes up with an inspired gambling cover story to explain Walt's wealth so she can excuse using the money to ensure Hank gets decent medical care in spite of the USA's third world lack of a health system. And yes, there's a deep irony if this comes to pass: Hank, of all people, benefiting hugely from blue meth money. And Skyler's reaction to Ted's awkward visit is hugely revrealing. Is her marriage to Walt perhaps showing signs of potentia llife after all?

I love these kinds of layered episodes. Top telly, as Breaking Bad always is.

Breaking Bad: Green Light

 "I caught my second wife screwing my stepdad, ok?"

This is another superb episode (aren't they all?) with particularly excellent acting on display all around. It's also an episode where Walt- or, as he for pretty much the whole episode, Heisenberg- pushes away literally everybody in his life.

We begin with Jesse being competent, assured and very much in the image of his mentor as he cooks meth, does it well, and holds his nerve as a cop approaches during a deal. We then hear, via the bug planted a couple of episodes ago, Walt's furious reaction to learning that Skyler is sleeping with Ted, and his not-exactly-dignified response.

But it gets worse. He suddenly loses his job, after we haven't seen him teaching for ages, in an act of blatant self-sabotage. He furiously washes his hands of Saul and Mike and then, in a rather interesting scene, with Jesse, whose impressive mastery of meth making makes him quite transparently jealous. 

He's at rock bottom. Yet the calm and clever, safety-first, Volvo driving Gus (you can keep the credit for that, Dave!) spots an opportunity with Jesse apparently cooking while Walt, at rock bottom, is refusing to have anything to do with meth. 

The only way for Walt, I suspect, is up. The same is not necessarily true for Hank, who is becoming increasingly and disturbingly obsessed in his search for Heisenberg as displacement activity for either going to El Paso or admitting that he's afraid to go. His detective work is impressive- Hank, for all his laddishness, is far from stupid- but he's slowly alienating everyone in a way that mirrors Walt. This is intense stuff, and I fear it may be leading somewhere very dark indeed.

Breaking Bad: I.F.T.

 "This spice feels like it's been through a couple of guys already..."

This episode, for the first time, feels a little transitional, not so much an event in its own right but setting up all the pieces for future moves to be played. It's all brilliantly shot, and remains quality drama, but for the first time in an episode of Breaking Bad you can perhaps see the artifice of the plotting a little more.

It's an episode where Walt and Skyler dance around each other in a battle of wills, as Walt/Heisenberg pushes again Skyler's edict that he's to leave the house and have no contact with the kids, both using the baby as weapon disgracefully but with Walt/Heisenberg essentially calling Skyler's bluff and gaining what seems to be the upper hand, for now. And poor, innocent, Walt Jr is an important catalyst here. These scenes are full of extraordinary subtlety from the script and, espdcially, both Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn.

Meanwhile a depressed Jesse, living in his unfurnished house, rings Jane's phone again and agaknjust to hear her voice on the answerphone... until he no longer can. This a rather nice little microcosm for going through the stages of grief so, with Saul acting as the devil on his shoulder, it's back to cooking for him.

We also have Hank being sent back to El Paso which, much as he tries to pretend otherwise, terrifies him utterly. The events of the episode have me fearing for him; it's a brutal world out there, as we see in the opening film, shot like a Western and tinted in yellow to appear like a different world as Danny Trejo's Tortuga meets his comeuppance in scenes full of tension and reminiscent of something by Tarantino and Rodriguez. It's in this context that the plot to kill Walt is paused for a while as Gus vetoes any revenge while he and Heisenberg have "business"... but this pause has its limits, and is dependent on more cooking...

You can see the joins a bit here. But there's also real excellence here, as always in Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad: Mandala

 “This game we're playing? You don't got the street cred to survive it."

This ewpisode really raises the stakes and moves things to a higher level. The pressure is on, not only for Walt in keeping both his lives together (Or is it Heisenberg? It's increasingly ambiguous which is the alter ego, with a lot of credit due to Bryan Cranston's facial acting, as ever) but for Jesse and Walt in maintaining the meth dealing in the face of increasingly hostuile competition.

The first scene- with one of Jesse's underlings being killed- is extraordinary in how bloody tense it is, and the horror of the eventual killing (by a kid on a bike with a gun!) really hits home. It hits home for Jesse too, who falls completely to pieces, his rewaction being a total contrast to the now clearly sociopathic Walt. It's clear that Jesse is far from cut out for the role he's occupying- and, implicity, the role that may partly have made Jane fall for him- and he's only there because, as Walt later says out loud, he does what he's told.

Except, of course, having fallen to pieces, he doesn'r- with consequences not only for Walt but for Jane, the poor girl, who has fallen for him hard. After so much effort to give up, she gets back on the heroin wagon for him, and we get a deeply disturbing scene straight out of Trainspotting.

Meanwhile, Walt's life continues to be complex. His improved condition means that further surgery looms- and, this being America, this means forking out a six figure sum, which is a lot of meth. I can't help feeling that the NHS must be keeping this country's drug problem from reaching quite the same level. His relationship with Skyler continues to be deceptively smooth; there's no conflic, but they're increasingly distant, and both have secrets.  Noonly is Skyler clearly close to affair territory with her boss, but a bit of forensic bookkeeping seems set to lead her to dabble in criminality, rather neatly paralleling her husband.

Oh, and the baby is due. Speaking as a father, I can say that this is the biggest thing that can ever happen to a bloke.. yet Walt, with more superbly subtle acting from Cranston, clearly cares about this much less than the meth.

More the focus of the plot, though, is our introduction (via Saul, becoming more and more Hyman Roth) to Gus, a distributor who is professional, risk-averse and, I'm sure, important. I know this more, perhaps, than would have been obvious in 2009 as Giancatlo Esposito has since become a well-known actor, courtesy of The Boys and The Mandalorian.

The end shows how clever the plotting is: with Jesse out of it, Walt is under pressure, taking huge risks to get the meth to Gus' underlings. And that's when Skyler's waters break....

An extraordinary, and pivotal, episode.

Breaking Bad: Over

 "You cannot beat the thermal efficiency of the C3!"

This episode may not have the high concepts or dramatic incidends of recent instalments, being very much a character piece. But it's an utterly superb, and very subtle, bit of drama, getting to do subtle little things with all these characters that are made possible by the previous gradual development of all the characters.There's some interesting stuff with Jesse and Jane, with her reluctance to introduce him to her dad seeming to indicate that she likes this stoner with criminal connections, wants to sleep with him and spend time with him, but doesn't see a long term future in the way he does. Ouch.

But essentially the episode is all about being an alpha male, Walt's need for it, and the places he can find it.

He can't find it at home. There's Hank, competing with him as father figure to Walt Jr as well as at being a man generally. His fight with Hank about how much tequila the sixteen year old Walt Jr should drink may be petty, but it's about status, not how much a teenager should drink. And it's revealing that, in the heat of the row, Walt should look at Hank with Heisenberg's eyes- which shows where this is headed.

He's not a man at home, where his over-the-top DIY hardly impresses Skyler. He's at the back of his own party, delivering an embarrassing speech. He's very much the beta male- and, if he only knew, Skyler's boss is being the kind of sensitive, attentive, caring man to Skyler that he isn't. And Skyler is very much noticing.

And yet he's top dog with Walt, who is totally dependent on "Mr White". And he seems to effortlessly switch to being Heisenberg at the end as he warns competitors off his territory. This shows that, much as Walt may imagine he can leave his new life as a budding meth godfather, he can't. It was never really just about paying for the cancer. It was always about being a man, an alpha male.

He needs that. And always will. This, I suspect, is the seed of his destruction.

Superlative telly, as though that needed saying.