El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

 "Dude, you're on fire!"

This film is, perhaps, a little slow at first. But it's slow for a reason and, as with anything written and shot by Vince Gilligan, it has real depths. For this is a characyer study of one Jesse Pjnkman, a man who has been enslaved and caged for months, and who is suffering intense PTSD at the start of the film. We have various flashbacks, all meaningful, all riffing on what's happening in the present day, one at the end featuring a welcome cameo for Bryan Cranston as Walter White.

But this is a film about how Jesse overcomes his PTSD to become a badass, and to have the chance to start a new life. We see the highly disturbing flashbacks of his life in captivity, and get to know at closequarters just how disturbing Todd is. It goes without saying that Jesse Plemons and, especially, Aaron Paul are magnificent.

It's a slow burn. This, crucially, is not an action film, and won't be enjoyed by those looking for one. But I'm watching it a mere couple of weeks after marathoning all of Breaking Bad. I know what it means to show such guts with those two fake cops; with that very particular vacuum cleaner salesman who can make one disappear; and that Wild West shootout.

Jesse grows so much as a character, if one sees this film as a continuation of Breaking Bad. Those two fake cops waste their money on girls and drugs in a way Jesse once did. But no more. He wants a new start, a new life in, er, Alaska. And he gets it.

This is a philosophical film, not an action thriller. Watch it with that in mind, and it's the perfect coda.

Breaking Bad: Felina

 "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And... I was really... I was alive."

We start with Walt, miserable and freezing in New Hampshire. Alone, isolated, off grid, trying to get a car to start and getting a police scare to remind him he's hunted. Oh, and he's dying. He's in a grim situation.

Yet, from this downbeat teaser, we get Walt visiting Albuquerque one late time like an avenging demon. The plan to eventually provide for his family is inspired, even if, like everything else, it's Heisenberg. It's Heisenberg who tells the truth to Skyler. It's even Heisenberg who touches his baby daughter for one last time, as even monsters love their children. But monsters can be terrible, and Heisenberg more than most.

I correctly predicted before the start exactly who would die in this finale. That doesn't matter. Poetically, Jack and his whole gang, Lydia and Walt all HAD to die. It was just a matter of how, and it was all realised with such brilliance, from the machine gun contraption in the boot to the dispatching of both Todd and Jack.

Best of all, of course, is Walt's phone chat with Lydia, casually and cruelly telling her that the reason she probably feels under the weather is the ricin (at last!) that he slipped her.

Walt and Jesse's final parting is meaningful, as is Jesse's joyful freedom. For Walt, though, there can be only one ending.

A perfect finale to a perfect television series. This is literally sublime.

Breaking Bad: Granite State

 "Just so you know, this isn't personal."

Oh my. Where to start? Suddenly everything is going horribly wrong. Walt is still dying of cancer; chemo takes place in less than ideal conditions; he's forced to live in a shack in deepest, darkest New Hampshire (still a better fate than Saul, seemingly, destined for Nebraska, which this foreigner assumes to be the most obscure state in the USA- it's always the pretty much square ones), off grid, starved of company, unable to use his money or even send it to his family. Yes, Flynn is a good lad.

Also, Skyler is doomed. As Saul points out, she knows not where she is, and so she has nothing to trade. It all promises to be, as Walt (not Heisenberg; he even grows his hair), all for nothing.

Except he plans to kill Jack and all of his Nazi mates. My God, I hope so, after the slave labour for poor, despairing Jesse; the swastika tattoos; the callous murder of Andrea in front of Jesse. I'll say this now: Jack and his gang- including dead-eyed, evil Todd- are all going to die, like Walt will. I hope that amoral, cynical bitch Lydia dies too, but I suspect she won't.

And then we get the final betrayal, just when Walt appears to be ready to give himself up, as Elliott and Gretchen insult him on telly. One episode to go. I can't believe it. It will be quite the ride. This is how you do telly as art.This is Dickens. This is Thackeray. This is genius.

Breaking Bad: Ozymandias

 "What the hell is wrong with you? We're family!"

Having started my blog on this brutal and almost perfect piece of television, about how a man once lord of all he surveys who finds it all crumble to dust among the sands, with the above quote, I'll also now do something unusual and quote in full the eponymous poem from Percy Bysshe "the missus wrote Frankenstein" Shelley:

"I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 

It's all so very apt, is it not?

It all falls apart. We begin with an opening scene from the old days, when Jesse and Walt were friends and Heisenberg was not a thing. But the ghosts of the past fade away to be replaced by the intensity of the present, as Walt- not Heisenberg, perhaps for the last time- pleads for Hank's life, yet Hank is the alpha male even in death, as Walt is humiliated by Jack and his gang of white supremacist scum. He is no longer the kingpin, forced to run away. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Things get even more intense as Marie goes on the warpath, thinking Hank has Walt just where he ewant him... and forces Marie to tell Flynn the truth, in deeply painful scenes. Flynn's reaction- like R.J. Mitte's acting- is very real. He's just a teenage boy, young and naive. His parents are not who he thought they were, and his world falls apart. The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And then we have the intensity of the final scenes, the altercation between Walt and Skyler with a knife as an appalled Flynn calls the police on his father. And Walt's phone call to Skyler- with police listening in- is classic abusive spouse. He's lost the plot- and helped Skyler inadvertently by making her collaboration seem like coercive control.

Then there's Jesse, having a very bad day. He dodges being killed only to be forced to work as a meth slave to stop his girlfriend and stepson being killed. Ouch.

Everything has changed. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred. Two episodes left. Walt has lost everything, and even been rejected by his baby daughter. Ouch. As a dad, this hits home.

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Breaking Bad: To'hajilee

 "Don't drink and drive. But, if you do, call me."

Wow. This is one of the most intricately plotted episodes of television I've ever seen, with all the interlocking pieces of the elegantly structured plot balanced out perfectly as we see the intertwining of two intertwining yet opposing plans- one from Walt, the other from Hank and Jesse- in a zero sum game in which they try and destroy each other...

Yet we end with a chaotic shootout which neither side wanted and neither side can control, ending in the ultimate cliffhanger. Will Hank survive? His emotional last phone call to Marie is ominous. There's no status quo now. No one is safe. Walt is dying, it's just a question of how soon, and desperate. And the acting is, of course, as superlative as the writing (and directing, much artier this week), with Cranston, Paul and Norris worthy of particularly high praise.

Yet there are also signs of things breaking down for poor Lydia without Walt, whose absence is crashing the quality of meth with uneducated criminals taking the place of a first class chemist. Things fall apart everywhere. No centre, it seems, can hold. The last fifteen minutes, certainly, show is that we are now approaching the end, and anything can happen.

Breaking Bad is better than ever. Also, it's very nearly over...

Breaking Bad: Confessions

 "Goodbye, Mr Jesse Pinkman. Hello, Mr Credit to Society."

You have to hand it to this episode. I mean, I might as well just stop describing individual episodes of Breaking Bad as superlative, as you can pretty much take that for granted. But this particular episode manages to be basically functional, putting pieces in place for the next act, and therefore traditionally requiring a slight dip in quality.

Hah! No such thing happens.

The episode centres around Walt's incredible confession, a devilishy clever work of cleverness that weaves together the facts that we've all seen over the last few seasons in a way that implicates Hank. It's a tour de force of both writing and acting. Walt- no, Heisenberg, is as vgood an actor as Bryan Cranston here. There is no higher praise.

Yet Aaron Paul is no less superlative in his performance. The scene in the desert where, yet again, Jesse shows that he may be undereducated but he's bloody clevee, something the snobbish Walt will never realise. It's unsurprising that he refuses to cooperate with a secretive Hank, himself at the start of another descent into obsessive self-destructiveness, but less surprising that, as soon as he puts two and five together with the ricin (he's wrong, but sort of right,,,), he turms against Walt, in a very fiery way. Will he now cooperate with Hank.

This very much fees like the beginning of the end.

And there are stiull subtleties to mention. Walt manipulating his own son, the poor boy. Marie's alienation from obsessive Hank. Skyler's dead eyes. Todd muscling in on the meth trade.

This is soooo good. That is all.

Breaking Bad: Buried

 "We are here to do a job, not channel Scrooge McDuck!"

This is it, then. The final stretch of the final act begins. Jesse's very depressed, dropping millions of dollars around while spinning around, on his back, on a roundabout. Symbolic much? Also, we see how bloody cold Lydia is as he has a load of meth underlings slaughtered purely because their substandard cooking is harming the bottom line... and then not wanting to see the bodies of the men she's just killed as the ever-gentlemanly sociopath Tom guides her gently through.

But this episode is mainly about the reverberations caused by the now-open war between Walt and Hank- although Walt doesn't wank to send Hank to "Belize". Yet. But it's 3-D chess, as Hank tries to turn Skyler without- yet- realising how exposed she s. Marie is not so naive, and the scene between the two sisters is extraordinary.

Everyone is exposed, though, and Walt's money isn't the only thing that gets buried in ths episode. Walt, his cancer returning, says in a moment of weakness that he'll take the fall if Skyler can use the money to support their kids... but that's not how it works. Meanwhile, for Hank, he needs evidence. He can'tjust tell the DEA- and he's right: the moment it's known that Heisenberg is his brother-in-law, he's an ex-cop. Yet saying nothing potentially exposes him to prosecution too...

The rest of the season looks to be absolutely gipping. This is first class, tension-filled, perfectly shot character drama.

Breaking Bad: Gliding Over All

 "Lydia, learn to take yes for an answer..."

SPOILERS. Be warned. Be very waerned.

Wow. This episode is extraordinarily played and shot, with a mood of foreboding and tension surrounding literally everything. This is, seemingly, the tale of Walt and Skyler rescuing their family, and retiring rich from criminality to a life of happiness ever after... something which we know damn well will never happen: Walt isn't in this episode at all. Only Heisenberg.

He has much blood on his hands, and not just Mike's. The nine potential informants- cleverly handled via the prisoner's dilemma by Hank- are all betrayed, stabbed multiple times in the chest, like Julius Caesar. Et tu, Heisenberg? This kind of darkness underlies the appatrent international success, shown by montages of success to ironic soundtracks, and literally more money than they could ever spend.

There is one notable loose end, of which we are purposefully reminded: the ricin, the Chekhov's Gun that seemingly never gets fired. But everything else is closed- even Jesse being paid off in an incredibly tense scene.

And then that ending, at the very last moment...

I'm glad I don't have to wait as long as the original viewers. Wow.

Breaking Bad: Buyout

 "I said I threw them. I would never come to the headquarters of our illegal meth operation, dragging a bunch of cops, would I?"

This is an extraordinary episode full of twists, turns, character moments and a very real sense that this final season is the last act of a very long theatrical tragedy, as Walt/Heisenberg spurns a golden chance to cash in, walk away from all this, and cash in as a rich man to try and rebuild relations with the family he's lost. But he won't. He's Heisenberg. And, in a pivotal two hander betweewn Walt (well, Heisenberg) and Jesse, he reminisces about the business (as we saw in Season One) that is worth billions today, yet he sold his stake for $5,000.

Walt is cursed by a tragic flaw which, I'm sure, will cause his downfall. He's addicted to the criminal life. He's Heisenberg.

Jesse and Mike are not like him. Admittedly, for Mike, it's the constant DEA harassment, but it's nonetheless clear that he's shaken by the murder of a child. As for Jesse, he's absolutely devastated. Aaron Paul, incidentally, is superlative here, not only in his very human reaction to the murder but in the awkwardness of the meal with Walt and a Skyler who is really downing the wine. This competent, intelligent if uneducated, morally complex man is suddenly reduced again to a child.

The cliffhanger is interesting, though. Both Jesse and Mike want to sell out for $5 million each, and leave the meth business forever. Yet there's a snag; the potential buyers need Walt out of the business, setting up a conflict of interest between Walt and his erstwhile comrades. But Walt, smug despite the gun to his face, has a plan.

I'm loving this.

Breaking Bad: Dead Freight

 "Everyone sounds like Meryl Street with a gun to their head..."

This is a heist episode, obviously. The heist is splendidly tense, magnificently helmed and hugely entertaining, as every heist should be, Yet that ending, with the hired help killing a kid who witnessed it, having been told earlier by Walt that there had to be no witnesses... ouch. Last season Walt was accusing Gus of killing children, which he would never do. He's really crossed a line here, one from which there can be no redemption.

So Skyler is right to stick to her guns in using what power she has to resist him, keeping the kids safe and away (at what cost?) as a quid pro quo for tolerating him- in a way that implied cold eyed, meaningless sex. And Hank, going all David Brent after his promotion, is naive to trust the man who bugged his office- just as Walt and Jesse are, perhaps, also wrong to trust the devious Lydia as Mike postpones her execution yet again. She's a fascinating character- scheming, moral, yet she'd do anything for her daughter. I love how eager Mike is to kill her.

It's a paranoid episode, full of bugs, mistrust and unexpected problems, much like organised crime itself. And it's an episode in which Heisenberg get what they want and solve their little problem. But in doing so they pass the point of no return into real darkness.

This is dark, dark, brilliant telly.