Miserable People On The Edge: Breaking Bad Season One!

The Good: (Mostly) Wonderful acting, Decent plot progression
The Bad: Some of the supporting actors are not great, Unlikable characters
The Basics: In its first season, Breaking Bad did what wonderful television does best in taking the time to establish characters, however unlikable, who start to develop.


There is an almost cult-like quality surrounding the fandom of Breaking Bad. While I do enjoy the show, I have found that the series lacks some of the core elements to an enduringly great television show: most notably, likable characters and bigger themes that make the show worth returning to multiple times. The seven episode first season of Breaking Bad is good, but it is not great in a way those who are part of the cult of Breaking Bad would insist that it is.

Breaking Bad Season 1 is very much the start of a journey and the key to any enduring television show is characters who evolve. Obviously, at the beginning of the journey, the first season is intent on establishing, rather than developing, characters. But despite having a somewhat empathetic protagonist, almost all of the regular characters in the first season of Breaking Bad are unlikable. Add to that that over the course of the first seven episodes, the show already begins to illustrate some narrative conceits that imply exactly what will happen over the course of Breaking Bad; the plots will be repetitive and somewhat formulaic.

Walter White is a milquetoast high school Chemistry teacher who works afterschool at a car wash where his boss takes advantage of him. He collapses one day at the car wash, shortly after his fiftieth birthday. His braggart brother in law, Hank, takes him on a ridealong and he sees his former student, Jesse, climbing out a neighbor’s window. After extorting Jesse and using his life savings to buy an RV, Walter steals equipment from the high school to go out into the desert to cook meth. Jesse’s past quickly comes back to haunt the pair, though, when the first people he tries to sell their near-pure methamphetamines to decides to get revenge upon him for fleeing during the ridealong. Walter and Jesse are put into mortal peril by Jesse’s former associates who want Walter to cook for them.

Their first cook goes disastrously, with Walter and Jesse left with two drug dealers who have seen them and their operation, one who is already dead. As Walter and Jesse deal with wrestling with killing one of the dealers and disposing of the bodies, Skyler calls Walter out on knowing Jesse. Claiming Jesse sells him pot, Walter defers the threat and she finally gets it up to kill Crazy Eight when it becomes clear that Crazy Eight can identify him. Soon, Walter’s lies begin to unravel and Skyler pushes him away. To keep her with him, he tells her about his cancer while lying about his burgeoning crystal meth business. As he gets treatment for his cancer, Walter takes on the alias Heisenberg and pairs with Jesse to make meth for a violent, crazy, wholesaler named Tuco.

The plots in the first season of Breaking Bad become somewhat predictable, trading on raising tension instead of following sensibility and reason. While the initial premise is genius, Walter White’s medical condition leaves him with only minimal consequences in the day to day. After causing a massive explosion, for example, Walter has no problems with breathing, despite the fact that he should be exhausted from his chemotherapy. The episodes frequently hinge on viewers forgetting what they saw in the episode’s teaser – like the way the pilot starts with details like bodies rolling around the R.V. and him standing out in the road in his underwear, gun drawn, waiting for vehicles with their sirens blaring to expose him.

Breaking Bad has distinctive characters, though none of them are particularly likable. In the first season, the principles are:

Walter White – After his fiftieth birthday, he collapses at his second job and he learns that he has inoperable lung cancer. While on a ridealong with his DEA brother in law, he sees his former student fleeing a meth lab and decides that making methamphetamines is his best chance to provide for his family. The first clue his family has that anything is wrong with him comes when he attacks a twenty-something who is mocking his son. Fed up with jerks around him, he blows up a man’s car, lies to his wife and willingly leaps into bed with a villainous drug distributor . . . instead of returning to work for his affluent ex-partner and ex-girlfriend doing Nobel-prize winning work and having his medical bills paid,

Skyler White – A former writer, who never quite hit it big, she is unhappily married to Walter. She sells things around the house on eBay and tries to protect her son. She is instantly suspicious of Walter’s increased libido and nervousness when he gets a call at home from Jesse (who is posing as an AT&T caller). When she talks to Walter’s former business partners, she becomes convinced Walter should fight for his life and stages an intervention to voice her feelings about the situation. As her pregnancy progresses, she seems to willingly believe Walter when he says his old friends are paying their medical bills,

Jesse Pinkman – A former student of Walter’s, he’s been cooking and selling meth with chili powder in it. He is extorted by Walter to sell the meth they cook together. Stressed out over having to dispose of bodies and having Crazy Eight chained up in his basement, he begins to get high on the meth he and Walter made. To keep his friends around and interested, he starts sharing the meth with his addict friends. After visiting his family and finding how little they trust him and failing to get a real job, he eagerly goes back to the lifestyle of making and selling meth. Eager to overcome his own limitations, inspired by an old paper from Walter, he strikes out on his own trying to cook a good batch of meth. When Walter finds him after his medical bills begin to mount, he eagerly pairs back up with Walter,

Hank Schrader – A DEA agent who is a braggart and heavyhanded. He is married to Marie, Skyler’s sister. After trying to scare Walter White Jr. straight, he helps rescue the boy from police when Junior tries to get an adult to buy him and his friends beer. Otherwise, he seems to luck into finding clues related to drug busts, as opposed to any innate talent on his part,

Marie – Cleptomaniac, who believes that Walter White Jr. is smoking weed. She is the only one to side with Walter during the intervention Skyler stages. She steals a tiara for Skyler and Walter’s unborn daughter,

And Walter White Jr. – Skyler and Walter’s teenage son, he suffers from Cerebral Palsy and Walter’s new view on life makes him violent to those who mock Junior. He wants Walter to fight his cancer, arguably because he sees cancer as less of a struggle than he has to deal with day to day from his CP.

The first season of Breaking Bad slowly develops to the iconic look of Walter White as the meth cook Heisenberg. The arc is an engaging one, even if Walter is only somewhat sympathetic. Walter is smart and fast-thinking, but he is an almost-constant liar. That makes him harder to empathize with than one might expect. Still, the first season has some real fun moments, like the gross and wonderfully ironic moment when the acid eats through the bathtub at Jesse Pinkman’s house and Walter has the chance to give him a cold lecture.

The performers in the first season of Breaking Bad are also decidedly split. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are amazing in their roles of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. They have amazing on-screen chemistry and both are thoroughly credible in their roles. Unfortunately, the women and young man of Breaking Bad are not nearly as good. Anna Gunn is stiff as Skyler and Betsy Brandt (who was pretty wonderful on The Michael J. Fox Show) is entirely unlikable in the role of Marie. R.J. Mitte might be just saddled with a horrible role, but the scenes he is in as Walter White Jr. are almost unwatchable. Mitte plays Junior as bratty and snotty as opposed to tortured by his body or overcoming his adversity with dignity.

Ultimately, the first season of Breaking Bad is watchable, but it mortgages its social significance by starting with characters who are unlikable and some performances that are mediocre.

For other shows from the 2007 – 2008 television season, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Family Guy - Season 7
How I Met Your Mother - Season 3
The Big Bang Theory - Season 1
Heroes - Season 2
House, M.D. - Season 4
Boston Legal - Season 4
Pushing Daisies - Season 1
30 Rock - Season 2
Dexter - Season 2
Weeds - Season 3
Lost - Season 3
Psych - Season 2

6.5/10

For other Television reviews, please check out my Television And Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

A Study In Self-Preservation: Why Breaking Bad Is A Tough Series To Want To Own!

The Good: Dynamic plot, Wonderful acting, Moments of character.
The Bad: All of the characters end up unlikable, Troublesome moments of suspension of disbelief
The Basics: Breaking Bad is a novelty show that smartly ended before it became too tiresome . . . but not before its characters became thoroughly unwatchable.


I was never a convert to Breaking Bad. There seems to be a cult of personality that surrounds the AMC television series Breaking Bad, which works out well for the fans who wanted the series to continue and now have a full season of a spin-off on the way with Better Call Saul. The reason I refer to the fandom for Breaking Bad as having a cultish bent to It is pretty simple: I’ve yet to meet anyone who identifies as a fan of the series who does not declare it one of the very best television series’ of all time. There is something of a “love it absolutely” or “hate it entirely” mentality around those who have watched the show. Having run for five seasons, with sixty-two episodes, Breaking Bad is a series with a clever concept that quickly wears thin. The result is a show that has pretty wonderful initial watchability, but pretty low replayability.

Like AMC’s other major produced television series, The Walking Dead (season 1 is reviewed here!), Breaking Bad may suffer in an objective evaluation simply because of how it is billed. The Walking Dead is not actually intended to be a zombie show; it is a tale of survival horror, so the writers strive to explore the horrors of the world falling apart entirely and surviving in it (and, if the graphic novels are any indication, how the world might slowly be rebuilt through forming communities). In a similar way, Breaking Bad tries to explore with realistic depth what happens when a good man gets into a business that is illegal and dangerous. In other words, Breaking Bad is not about cooking methamphetamines, it is about the destruction of a family when one man becomes obsessed after embarking on a dangerous business venture. Breaking Bad is how desperation motivates a man to find his spine and sell out all of his principles and while the initial set-up is bold and entertaining, it soon degenerates into a consistently-tense, but repetitive, story about evading law enforcement and eliminating adversaries who are involved in the organized drug trade.

The complete series Breaking Bad boxed set includes the content of:
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
and Season 5 with all of the previously DVD/Blu-Ray bonus features and discs. The new boxed set is more compact than the prior bundle packs of the seasons.

Walter White is a nervous, quiet, high school chemistry teacher whose family is so barely squeaking by financially that his wife’s average day of good news is selling an ugly lamp on eBay for a few dollars more than the couple originally spent on it years ago. Walter tries to take care of his wife and son, who has cerebral palsy, but when he is diagnosed with lung cancer, he is astounded and has no idea how he will afford treatment. Walter accompanies his brother-in-law, Hank, on a DEA raid of a small-time meth lab and is astounded at how much cash is laying about. Witnessing one of his former students fleeing the area, Walter realizes that Jesse Pinkman is working with the meth cook Hank busted. Walter extorts Jesse to work with him making methamphetamines and selling them in the American Southwest.

Walter’s quest to make enough money to alternately afford cancer treatment or leave behind a nest egg for his wife and family quickly draws the attention of the local drug cartels. Walter’s meth is one of the purest ever seen and both the cartel and the DEA want to put him out of business. Working with Jesse, Walter makes the transition from working in a run-down RV in the middle of nowhere to producing for the drug kingpin who has managed to elude the authorities for years. Over the course of two years, Walter White has to remain ahead of Hank’s investigations of the local meth business, keep Jesse off drugs long enough to be useful to him, and keep his marriage to his wife intact while battling cancer. That consistently puts Walter and his family in the crosshairs of drug pushers, thugs, and law enforcement.

Almost all of Breaking Bad occurs over a single year (the second year of the series is the last half of the fifth season) and it details a very dark turn in the life of Walter White. Watched in quick succession, Breaking Bad ages poorly in that the speed at which events happen to Walter White. Continuity problems seem vastly more significant when one watches Breaking Bad in rapid succession. For example, one of the earliest conflicts in Breaking Bad comes when Walter draws some suspicion when Hank finds that some of the equipment used to make meth in Arizona matches missing science equipment at Hank’s school. Watched quickly in order, the way that entire plotline is dropped and Hank seems to forget the suspicion that was drawn toward his brother-in-law seems much less believable. Equally unbelievable is how quickly Jesse bonds with Jane Margolis so that Walter is able to manipulate him using her. In context, in less than a year Jesse goes through two incredibly serious relationships and in and out of rehab so frequently that it becomes impossible to believe that someone as cautious as Gus (who has survived so long in plain sight in the drug business) would ever have accepted him into his organization. Similarly, the ups and downs of Walter’s relationship with his wife becomes utterly unrealistic when one watches the series over the course of, say, a weekend.

Why is Breaking Bad so popular, then? AMC found a way to successfully market it as hip and cool and, frankly, there is nothing quite like it on television. The concept was a strong one, even if the execution is deeply flawed. Perhaps as important, Breaking Bad mastered the serialized cliffhanger concept in a way not seen in television since Alias (reviewed here!) went off the air. In other words, the characters almost always end the episode in complete peril, which makes viewers desperate to see the resolution before they get into their next stupid dangerous set of circumstance. Breaking Bad also does some season-long arcs, like one involving flashes forward in the teaser to a plane crash and how Walter White and Jesse inadvertently are involved in that event.

As well, Breaking Bad has a protagonist who is more memorable than he is likable. Walter White is perhaps the ultimate survivor on television and he leads some pretty interesting characters. The principle characters in Breaking Bad are:

Walter White – A high school teacher who also work at a car wash, he is incredibly stressed out about how much cancer treatment would cost and how it would completely destroy his family’s finances. After a ride-along with his brother-in-law, Hank, he becomes convinced that the way to save his family is by cooking methamphetamines. Because of his brilliant aptitude for chemistry, he is able to manufacture near-pure methamphetamine. He quickly becomes consumed with the business end of the arrangement when his work with Jesse necessitates a more active stance. Keeping the secrets from his wife, his son, and his newborn daughter and his wife’s family leads him to lie almost constantly while he negotiates his way from meth cook to drug kingpin,

Skyler White – Trapped in a marriage that is stagnant, she is shocked when she learns she is pregnant at virtually the same time that she learns her husband has lung cancer. She tries to be supportive of him and easily buys his lies about where the money to pay for his treatment is coming from (one of his old business partners). As her pregnancy progresses, she tries to go back to work for a boss who once was romantically interested in her. She also becomes deeply depressed and when she discovers that Walter has a second cell phone, she gets suspicious and when he tells her the truth, she has to accept how his actions will change her entire life,

Jesse Pinkman – A drug-addled former high school student of Walt’s, he was working with a meth cook who got busted when Walt discovered the financial benefits of being in the meth trade. Extorted by Walt, he begrudgingly gets into the supply end of the drug trade. He often has to execute Walt’s will and is traumatized when that almost immediately leads to murder and losing all that is important to him (both material possessions and people),

Hank Schrader – Walter’s brother-in-law, he moves up fast in the DEA. When he has some initial success in Arizona, he is briefly moved to lead a joint task force in El Paso before the brutal murder of an informant leaves him shocked. He struggles to recover professionally (and personally once he is nearly killed by Hank’s enemies) and relate to his wife, who goes through a number of problems related to her boredom,

Marie Schrader – Hank’s wife, who is a nurse (when the writers remember to have her doing anything work-related), she shoplifts multiple times and is generally a pain in the ass to both Hank and Skyler. When Skyler becomes despondent, she and Hank take in Walter White Jr. and the new baby,

Walter White Jr. – A young man in high school, he struggles with his cerebral palsy and the fact that his father has cancer. He gets multiple cars and calls his father out on lies as he gets older. While his father tries to get him to succeed by playing by the rules, he starts pulling away from his parents and insists he be called Flynn,

Gus Fring – An entrepreneur who runs Los Pollos Hermanos chicken chain and a Laundromat. He offers Walter a position in a state-of-the-art meth lab, but does not want Jesse. When his hand-picked assistant for Walter is killed, he is forced to accept changes to his organization . . . and that does not sit well with him. He instills terror in Walt, even though to the general public he appears to be a strong anti-drug advocate,

Mike Ehrmantraut – Gus’s enforcer, he takes Jesse under his wing. Acting in some ways as a surrogate father to Jesse, he helps get the young man off drugs and he becomes a partner in Walter’s budding business when Walter ascends to be the area kingpin,

and Saul Goodman – A lawyer originally hired by Jesse and Walter to get one of their dealers out of a jam, he is a criminal lawyer. Money laundering for Hank and Jesse, he is unethical, but helps get them out of numerous jams (even though he complicates Hank’s life by helping advise Skyler on how to pay off one of her corrupt friends’ debts).

Breaking Bad is notable on the acting front in that it finally was a vehicle for Bryan Cranston to headline. Cranston is an amazing character actor, but before this his longest-running role was in the supporting role as the father on Malcolm In The Middle. Breaking Bad is the execution of the potential Cranston illustrated in all of the minor roles and he lives up to the promise by sustaining the role of Walter White. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give about Cranston’s performance is that it takes a number of seasons before one loses sympathy for Walter White, despite the volume of despicable acts he has enacted (by the end of the first few episodes, there is already a riding body count at the hands of Walter). Cranston makes Walter White distinctive, getting through long, terrible monologues when the character lies with utter implausibility and making pleas for his life in a way that is completely credible. Walter lies virtually the same way every time, but Cranston sells it so well that the viewer gets more agitated at the stupid characters surrounding him buying the lies more than the fact that Walter is lying to them!

Cranston is supported by Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler as alternately strong and mopey, RJ Mitte who is utterly convincing in portraying a character with a more serious form of CP than he has, and Dean Norris, who plays Hank as far more exuberant than competent. Supporting cast like Giancarlo Esposito (Gus), Bob Odenkirk (Saul), Aaron Paul (Jesse, bitch!) and Jonathan Banks (Mike) flesh out the dangerous world of the meth trade to look and feel like a distinctive and real place.

But for all the realism, Breaking Bad is hardly enjoyable to watch. For the most part, the series is a man’s constant betrayals of his own principles, his family, and whatever came before in his life that made him into the milquetoast who is present at the start of the series. Walter White is the ultimate survivor, but that does not mean his journey is worth watching more than once.

For other works with Dean Norris, please check out my reviews of:
Little Miss Sunshine
The Cell (2012)
The Negotiator
NYPD Blue - Season 1
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Total Recall

6/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Endgame And Chess Match: Breaking Bad’s Split Final Season!

The Good: Good plot progression, Moments of character, Moments of performance
The Bad: Much more predictable than prior seasons, Fewer impressive performances than in prior seasons, All of the characters end up unlikable
The Basics: I start with the end with Breaking Bad’s final season, which is engaging as it progresses towards its end, though the characters almost universally become unlikable.


Days before the complete series Blu-Ray set of Breaking Bad is to be released, my wife has been doing a binge viewing of the new (to us) series. We do not have cable and neither of us had a huge interest in the series. One of my wife’s friends, who seems to watch whatever is trendy at any given time, bugged her for years to watch the series and she finally decided to take his advice. She’s been hooked since episode one and I’ve generally enjoyed what I’ve seen of the show, but I’ve had to do things like go to work over the last few days (while she has stayed home and watched Breaking Bad and done things around the house). Thus far, ironically, the only season I have seen in its entirety is season five.

Season five of Breaking Bad is a sixteen-episode season of AMC’s highly-acclaimed, fan-beloved television series. The final season of Breaking Bad represents the longest time period in the entire series; over a full year of the two years that Breaking Bad’s story occurs over. It is impossible to discuss the final season of Breaking Bad without revealing some important plot points from the fourth season of the show (though I’ll mention the “what,” I won’t delve into the “who” or “how” to preserve it for those who are still watching the series for the first time). That said, the story of Walter White, a high school Chemistry teacher who gets lung cancer and sees the likelihood that his treatment will bankrupt his entire family leads him to manufacture crystal meth in order to pay the bills, reaches a climax that is not unlike that of Nancy Botwin from Weeds (reviewed here!). Like Botwin, at this point in Breaking Bad Walter White has the opportunity to go legitimate and leave the drug business behind, but his own character flaw leads him to take over the empire left by the prior season’s bloodbath.

Following the murder of Gus, there is a power vacuum in the Albuquerque, New Mexico drug trade. Walter White, indebted to Jesse for some final expenses involved with clean-up, decides to continue his meth-making operations. That leads Walter, Jesse, and Mike to go into business together. Rather than find a single location for a new meth lab, Walt strikes upon the idea (when Saul Goodman is showing the trio around to various potential locations): keep the lab mobile by partnering with a bug fumigation company. While the residents of a house are out, the team plans to enter the tented homes, set up their crystal meth-making equipment and make a batch of Heisenberg’s ultra-pure blue meth. Using a young man from the fumigation company, Todd, the newly-formed mini-cartel robs a train of a thousand gallons of methylamine. But the train job has an unexpected consequence and in the wake of Todd’s actions, both Mike and Jesse want to be bought out. With pressure to keep Gus’s network of imprisoned dealers from talking growing on Mike and Jesse’s desire to move on to a line of work that no longer involves potential casualties, both men try to get Walter to sell his share of the methylamine for a fraction of its worth. After Walter takes extreme actions, which is par for his course, he and Todd partner to refine the methylamine into crystal meth and the financial gains they make are extraordinary.

But when Walter gets out of the business after Skyler finally convinces him that he has enough to survive on and provide for his family, Hank discovers the truth about his recent past. With his cancer reasserting itself and Hank hounding him to try to expose Walter as a criminal mastermind, Walter begins to burn every bridge in his life. As his life spirals out of his control and the body count rises, Walter abandons Jesse and his family and flees to New Hampshire with a new identity. But when his former business partners – both legitimate from Gray Matter and illegal, represented by Lydia’s international cartel – take all that he built, Walter feels pressure to return to New Mexico and take back all that he has lost.

In the final season of Breaking Bad, Walter White becomes a thoroughly unlikable character. Unlike Weeds, Breaking Bad makes a compelling-enough argument for White (who has essentially gotten out of the business alive at the season’s outset) to get back in the game for just a little longer. White’s previous fortune has been spent by Skyler (to pay the IRS debt of her former boss), he has some debts and with the camera evidence of Gus’s shady dealings on a hard drive in police custody, Walter has some new expenses he needs to take care of. In other words, he is back at square one, looking at his family’s finances being threatened. But as his friends and allies peel away from him, Walter becomes obsessed with ruling his own little meth empire and that plays poorly, even after he remakes his fortune (and then some many times over). Breaking Bad continues the degenerative arc of Walter White by having the character continue to get deeper and deeper into the criminal underworld as a result of his activities. Part of what makes the final season so troubling is the viewer is expected to empathize with a character who is using the services of neo-Nazis to carry out his will and the show never quite addresses that a “good guy” would have issues working with hate-mongers (on top of their being killers and drug dealers). Working with such unsavory people makes Walter White into an unsavory person himself, a man who kills, shoves his wife around and is willing to kidnap a toddler in order to further his own desires.

Walter White has long been selfish, but in the final season of Breaking Bad, his fatal flaws are revealed to be obsession and, of course, hubris. His history with Gray Matter leads him to refuse to undervalue himself and his business, which makes sense, but he misses a number of far simpler solutions than the ones he ends up taking. For example, Mike and Jesse are both willing to sell their share of the methylamine for five million dollars each; Walt never proposes that he buy both of the men out using his first round of profits. This is a vastly simpler solution (especially with Lydia in the mix) than the convoluted plan that leaves one man murdered, Walter’s arm grossly burned and the feds in possession of most of the money from the buyout!

Like all worthwhile television, Breaking Bad is about characters, not just the plots they hatch. In the final season of the show, the essential characters of Breaking Bad are:

Walter White – Now the top of the crystal meth-manufacturing chain, he has the chance to get out with his life, but he chooses to start making meth again. With a train job planned to get the key ingredient he needs, Walter is poised to restart his business with a potential $300,000,000 inventory of meth. But when his partners abandon him, he allies himself with neo-Nazis, Todd, and Lydia’s international exporting network to create a new cartel. When he gets enough money for his family, it is all put in jeopardy by Hank learning that he is Heisenberg. That leads to a fracture in his family as Marie and Hank try to keep the White’s kids after Walter and Skyler finally reconcile and in the fallout, Walter fights viciously to protect the millions of dollars he has made. Trying to keep Hank at bay when his cancer comes out of remission fails and that leads Walter to a predictable bloodbath that leads him to sacrifice everything,

Skyler White – Deeply depressed over how Walter has the opportunity to get out with his life and does not take the opportunity, she becomes despondent. Not wanting her son and daughter around Walter and his lifestyle, she sends the children to her sister and brother-in-law’s. She launders as much money as she can through her car wash before she realizes that Walter is making far too much to make that a feasible plan. When she shows him her storage locker of cash and reconciles with Walter, her family is brought back together before Hank finds out and tears everything apart,

Jesse Pinkman – Learning of the methylamine on the train, he is the one who comes up with the plan to take the fluid without any casualties. But when Todd makes the job go sideways, he wants out. That puts him at odds with Walter yet again and that leads him back into the drug-abusing lifestyle. But when Walter gets out of the business, he wants nothing of him or his money and Jesse is enslaved by Uncle Jack’s new cartel,

Hank Schrader – Following the death of Gus, he becomes obsessed with cleaning up the loose ends left by the cartels Gus created and destroyed. When none of Gus’s lieutenants talk in prison, his obsession grows, even as he is promoted to the head of Albuquerque’s DEA office and ordered to leave Mike alone. When he finds the inscription in Walt’s copy of Leaves Of Grass, he has the epiphany that puts him on the right track to find Heisenberg! Desperate to get a confession out of Walter (given that he has remarkably little physical evidence tying Walter to Gus’s operation), he tries to extort Skyler until he finds an even more useful asset who is motivated to get revenge upon Walter,

Marie Schrader – Hank’s wife tries to help Skyler out when she becomes despondent. But when she learns that Walter is the man Hank has been searching for for years, she pushes Hank to bury Walter. She tries to take Walter and Skyler’s children, but Hank stops her. When Walter goes on the run after he is entrapped by Hank and Jesse, she becomes obsessed with finding Hank,

Walter White Jr. – He is the last person in the world to believe in Walter and trust him . . . even as Walter lies to him about new cuts and bruises to his face (which he passes off for being an effect of exhaustion from his chemotherapy),

Mike Ehrmantraut – He is drawn back into the business following Gus’s death because of his knowledge of Gus’s operations. In an uncharacteristically human move, he spares Lydia’s life, though he does not trust her at all. He takes responsibility for the business operations of Walter’s new empire, even as he tries to keep the nine members of Gus’s operation who are imprisoned quiet through payoffs. When his lawyer exposes him and Hank harasses him (even after he is retired and just wants to spend time with his granddaughter), he is forced to run,

Saul Goodman – The lawyer finds himself in peril yet again thanks to Walter White. It is his contact who helps Walter disappear. Much to Walter’s chagrin, he is the one who quietly suggests offing Hank and Jesse throughout the season,

Todd – A young man who is eager to learn Walter’s business (as opposed to continuing to fumigate houses), he has an uncle who has prison connections that can execute Walter’s will (and enemies). He reveals his willingness to do whatever it takes to get into Walter’s good graces when he kills a witness to the train job. He starts cooking the meth for Lydia after Walter gets out of the business and leads Uncle Jack to spare Jesse’s life when Jack wants to make more refined product than he is able to,

and Lydia – Gus’s exporter, she was integral to building Gus’s empire through the company that owned Los Pollos Hermanos. Paranoid in the wake of Gus’s murder, she tries to extort Mike into killing the nine people who could rat her out from prison. When she puts a hit out on Mike, it puts her in Mike’s crosshairs, but Walter quickly discovers her usefulness. Building a meth empire in the Czech Republic with Walter’s blue meth, she is dismayed when Walter leaves the business. She starts working with Todd and accepts his imprisonment of Jesse in order to keep her new empire alive.

The final season of Breaking Bad is surprisingly unremarkable on the acting front. In fact, the only truly remarkable performances this season come from Anna Gunn, who plays Sklyer. Gunn is given the chance to actually display some range in this season. Gunn plays despondent well and when she has to play her character with an undertone of rage when Walter takes the baby, she is incredible. Instead of playing cold and without any chemistry in this season, she brings a new feeling to her character for much of the final season of Breaking Bad.

The rest of the cast of Breaking Bad is adequate in the final season. Bryan Cranston is consistent as Walter White, as is Aaron Paul as Jesse. Laura Fraser (Lydia) and Jesse Plemons (Todd) gel well with the established cast of Breaking Bad, though neither are truly superlative. Fraser plays Lydia as nervous well, but Plemons plays Todd with a youthful, eager quality that makes him seem initially like an ambitious workaholic . . . instead of the psychopath that he is (apparently) supposed to be. Even later in the season when his character’s actions make him more clearly into a heartless sociopath, Plemons does not play the role with any real depth to emote that level of complexity to his character.

Ultimately, though, the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad is a surprisingly fast-paced season of television that is devoted to tying up the loose ends of the prior four seasons. It does that very well, even if it is essentially two very different arcs making a fractured season with split stories. Walter White’s brief empire and his fleeing from it makes for a satisfying end to all the unlikable characters of Breaking Bad.

For other works with Bryan Cranston, please check out my reviews of:
Argo
Total Recall (2012)
John Carter
Contagion
Drive
Little Miss Sunshine
Clerks: The Animated Series

7/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |