Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 19, 2019 17:58:40 GMT -8
Yeah, "Hermanos" was easily the highlight of the season for me for exactly that reason. I also think that whole scene is great because it gives more character to Hector, who's a really wonderful character even when he's in a wheelchair just making googly eyes. (Maybe my second-favorite villain. Mark Margolis is really, really good at facial expressions, what can I say.)
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Post by otherscott on Sept 23, 2019 6:20:20 GMT -8
I'm not close enough to the end of the series to say this for certain, but I think one of the big reasons I'm not so huge on this show can be summed up as such: going into this show, I heard a lot about what a great villain Gus Fring is. And Giancarlo Esposito is good! But I actually feel very comfortable saying that, despite only being halfway through the season, I think Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is the better villain. This might be anti-hype (since I've never heard anyone even mention Lydia before I started watching the series), but there's a more compelling reason for that, which is that I think both the show's writers and the show's fandom overrated how interesting it is for characters to be untouchable in their evil. I think Walt is significantly more interesting in the early seasons, when he's an awful and manipulative person, but he's not actually very good at being an awful and manipulative person, and when most of his really awful deeds (e.g., Jane, making Jesse kill Gale) are not premeditated evil, but consequences of him being in over his head, things that could have been avoided if he was an evil genius like Gus. I think it's tempting to describe Gus as a power fantasy, but I think the more accurate term is to call him a Mary Sue - he's too perfect in his evil. Versus a weasel like Lydia, who is in over her head and comically bad at pulling off her schemes, but still poses a legitimate threat long-term even as she's a reluctant ally in the short-term. I've been meaning to comment on this for a while, but I think the key to understanding the Breaking Bad characters is that they all are centered around Walt, and are defined by his relationship to them. I think that sounds like a bug rather than a feature, but I think it's also part of the fabric of the story Breaking Bad is trying to tell. It is really the story of the moral fall of one man. So I think in seeing Gus as this power fantasy evil genuis, I think the reason the show displays him as that is because that is how here appears to Walt, and that is the role he takes in Walt's story. I think if we had a more omniscient series view than we do, one that is not quite so much Walt's story and Walt's story alone, we would see a much more interesting nuanced view of Gus. As it is, the show throws most of the nuance with its secondary characters to really dig deep on Walt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the tactic the show took. It's pretty common in movies but less so in TV for obvious reasons.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 26, 2019 19:47:17 GMT -8
"Ozymandias" is not the best episode of television ever made - not by a long shot - but jesus is it brutal.
One of the reasons the episode is not the best episode of television ever is that after painting themselves into a corner with Walt's total depravity this last season and a half, they've decided to make Walt look good by comparison by replacing the show's complex antagonists with a bunch of faceless neo-Nazis. (Jesse voice: "Heil Hitler, bitch!")
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 26, 2019 20:09:13 GMT -8
I actually agree with that criticism, and I'm surprised it isn't brought up more often. Making the villain sof the final season into actual neo-Nazis is an easy way for the writers to gin up sympathy for the show's increasingly unsympathetic lead. (I guess it doesn't bother me that much because by the time we reach the back half of Season Five, the show is running on pure adrenaline, so shifting the measures of villainy to render Walt more sympathetic isn't as noticeable.)
I love "Ozymandias," but I probably wouldn't call it the best episode of TV ever - and the only critic I've heard consistently grant it that label is Sepinwall. Though truth told, he didn't fully love it upon his first viewing, largely because he watched it from a hospital bed shortly after his appendix burst. (Oh, on that note, hope you're feeling better.)
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Post by otherscott on Sept 27, 2019 5:23:23 GMT -8
I also don't think "Ozymandias" is very close to the best episode of television ever, and I actually prefer the next episode, "Granite State", both as an episode and (minus the last 20 seconds) I would have preferred it to be the real end of the show.
I think part of the reason that I don't think Season 5B is AS great as many people say (in my first top 10 list I had it ranked behind the massively underrated Season 6 of Mad Men) is that Breaking Bad had set itself up so well that the degree of difficulty to nail the ending isn't that high. You just have to give Walt some serious sense of consequences as a natural result of the things he's done. And the show does that, and does it effectively, but I think the real value of the show is in the set up, the conclusion is just going to be the natural end to the brilliant way the show did that set up. An episode like "Ozymandias" was always going to happen, and I think a great deal of what people loved about it is the catharsis of actually finally seeing it.
I think I'm taking away from the craft of the episode in saying that, though, which I really shouldn't. The episode is terrifically done. It's 100% a great episode, it's just that it's great in very predictable ways, and was fairly easy to execute from a story perspective.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Sept 27, 2019 6:29:20 GMT -8
I also don't think "Ozymandias" is very close to the best episode of television ever, and I actually prefer the next episode, "Granite State" , both as an episode and (minus the last 20 seconds) I would have preferred it to be the real end of the show. I think part of the reason that I don't think Season 5B is AS great as many people say (in my first top 10 list I had it ranked behind the massively underrated Season 6 of Mad Men) is that Breaking Bad had set itself up so well that the degree of difficulty to nail the ending isn't that high. You just have to give Walt some serious sense of consequences as a natural result of the things he's done. And the show does that, and does it effectively, but I think the real value of the show is in the set up, the conclusion is just going to be the natural end to the brilliant way the show did that set up. An episode like "Ozymandias" was always going to happen, and I think a great deal of what people loved about it is the catharsis of actually finally seeing it. I think I'm taking away from the craft of the episode in saying that, though, which I really shouldn't. The episode is terrifically done. It's 100% a great episode, it's just that it's great in very predictable ways, and was fairly easy to execute from a story perspective. I agree. It's a great hour of television-no question about it. If someone said it was the best hour of tv ever, I wouldn't argue that strongly against it. It's, as you say, bulletproof from a craft perspective. But it also feels almost inevitable.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 28, 2019 9:55:21 GMT -8
And... it's over. Until I have an El Camino viewing party with a Netflix-having friend, anyway.
All in all, a very good show, and a very good ending. (Jeez, Scott, can't believe you think "Granite State" would be a better ending.)
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Post by otherscott on Sept 28, 2019 13:01:14 GMT -8
I’ve always liked quieter grace note endings, even to very action packed events. I think Ozy would have made a heck of a penultimate episode and a real conclusion to the main action, with the real finale dealing with the psychological aftermath. “Felina” kind of lets Walt win in his own weird way which I wasn’t super thrilled with.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 28, 2019 13:13:09 GMT -8
I’ve always liked quieter grace note endings, even to very action packed events. I think Ozy would have made a heck of a penultimate episode and a real conclusion to the main action, with the real finale dealing with the psychological aftermath. “Felina” kind of lets Walt win in his own weird way which I wasn’t super thrilled with. So the thing is, I kind of agree that Walt "wins" and don't love that. But at the same time - imagine the show ending on "Granite State," with Skyler prison-bound and catatonic, and Jesse spending the rest of his life enslaved by Meth Damon? I think that's a significantly crueler ending. I also think that Walt looks worse in "Felina," because it's where he admits to the audience what we all knew: it was never about his family, it was all about his egotism; his true love wasn't Skyler or Junior; it was his "baby blue" meth. I think letting the series end with Junior rejecting Walt's drug money in "Granite State" lets Walt end the series as a beleaguered family man rather than a selfish bastard. That would be the real victory for Walt, not him spiking Stevia or gunning down some Aryan brother-hoodlums.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 8, 2019 20:12:39 GMT -8
Hey, by the way, I started watching Better Call Saul. It's an interesting show so far - but I have the sinking feeling that once Gus gets involved it'll stop being so compelling. Right now, though, it's interesting seeing the show swap from genre to genre. And "Five-O" is heartbreaking. If the entire show is this good, I might end up liking it better than the source material, which I never would have expected.
Also very weird - realizing that a show set in 2003 is now a period piece.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Oct 9, 2019 12:42:12 GMT -8
Hey, by the way, I started watching Better Call Saul. It's an interesting show so far - but I have the sinking feeling that once Gus gets involved it'll stop being so compelling. Right now, though, it's interesting seeing the show swap from genre to genre. And "Five-O" is heartbreaking. If the entire show is this good, I might end up liking it better than the source material, which I never would have expected. Also very weird - realizing that a show set in 2003 is now a period piece. Only about half-way. The 'Mike half' stops being interesting in Season 2, and the show never quite rectified that structural oddity.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 9, 2019 16:32:06 GMT -8
The Mike half wasn't all that interesting in Breaking Bad either, if we're being honest.
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Post by ThirdMan on Oct 9, 2019 17:27:46 GMT -8
While I'll certainly agree that Mike's involvement in the BCS story isn't always essential, I nevertheless find Jonathan Banks to be a very compelling performer.
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 9, 2019 20:08:35 GMT -8
I think I'm at the point where I consider Better Call Saul to be near Breaking Bad in quality, even if it probably won't ever match it in my mind. It's much more of a slow burn than its parent show, which may be why it took a couple of seasons for me to fully buy it as a BB prequel. But at its best, it's pretty spectacular, and both shows rank among the best of the decade.
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Post by otherscott on Oct 10, 2019 9:29:46 GMT -8
I still don't think Better Call Saul is quite near Breaking Bad's level. I think there are parts of the show that get close, the character work between Jimmy and Chuck is as good as anything Breaking Bad did from a character level. But I think people who say they are similar in quality tend to undervalue Breaking Bad's greatest strength, the way it is constantly able to ratchet up the tension in its later seasons for pretty much every minute of every episode.
That ability is something that tends to fade over time after not watching the show, tension doesn't hold up as well in people's memory like great moments or great thematic material or great character work. Which is why I've always thought that Breaking Bad will not age as well as the other greats of the 2000s. The consistent claiming that Better Call Saul, which is a very good show but not really one of the greats of this era, is on the same level as Breaking Bad is a good example of that I think.
(This analysis does not apply to people like Quiara, who believe Breaking Bad is only a very good show in and of itself, rather than a great one.)
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