Breaking Bad, though, was television that never acted like it had to apologize for being television. It chronicled Walter White’s moral descent step by agonizing step, but along the way it managed to thrill, shock, and simply please its viewers on an episodic basis.
Each episode draws power from our knowledge of what’s happened before, whether we’re witnessing Skyler come to grips with Walt’s criminal career or waiting in agony for the Cousins to start shooting at someone we’ve come to care about deeply. Across sixty-two hours, Breaking Bad told a story with a beginning (Walt begins cooking), middle (Walt rises to power, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake), and end (Walt pays for his sins). You had to watch every one of those hours to fully appreciate the horror and the thrills of it all, and to appreciate callbacks like Leonel crawling toward Walt in the hospital, or Walt finding a familiar painting in the motel room where he first meets Uncle Jack.
But Gilligan (and several of his writers) had worked on The X-Files, a show that had successfully juggled series-long story concerns with weekly ones, so that you could enjoy the Monster of the Week episodes even if you’d missed the last three installments explaining what the black oil was. Breaking Bad didn’t have quite as stark a split between seasonal plots and weekly ones, but it worked very hard to offer a complete and satisfying entertainment experience every week, regardless of what preceded or followed it. Someone brand new to the show could put on “4 Days Out” and marvel at the desert imagery, laugh at the bickering between Walt and Jesse, and cheer their eventual escape from certain death. They wouldn’t fully understand the nuances of the White/Pinkman team, nor Walt’s complicated reaction to learning that his scan was cleaner than he had thought, but they’d get enough of it to follow the story, and likely to be roped into going back to the beginning to catch up.
In the world of Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu—a world that turned Breaking Bad from a low-rated critical darling to a smash hit by the end, thanks to all those who marathoned it on Netflix before watching the last episodes live—we talk a lot about what shows are ideal to binge and which ones are better off being savored over time. With its propulsive narrative and single-minded pursuit of Walter White’s soul (or the lack thereof), Breaking Bad is arguably the greatest binge show ever, but because it was created in a pre-streaming world, and because Gilligan had begun his career in an environment where viewers only watched week-to-week, it was also an extraordinarily satisfying experience to watch it as it aired on AMC. The Jesse-come-latelies who marathoned it on their tablets didn’t have to wait in agony for a week to find out what happened after Jack’s goons started shooting at Hank and Gomez, let alone the thirteen months we had to endure to learn Gus’s response to the murder of Gale. But there was a kind of perverse pleasure in that agony, as well as a chance to fully marinate in all the turns of plot and character and theme presented with such verve in every episode. As part of a marathon, “Fly” is an odd little detour in the midst of the rising tensions between Walt, Jesse, and their employer; as the only installment of the series for that week, it’s a richer and more complicated meditation on the Walt/Jesse partnership, the death of Jane, and Walt’s growing recognition that everyone would have been better off if he’d died a long time ago.
(Binge-watchers also get to experience the passage of in-show time far differently—and far truer to the pace of the story—than people who watched on AMC. When you rush through the whole story in only a few weeks, the fact that the bulk of the series covers only a year in the life of Walter White seems less surprising.)
It helps that the show was as beautifully directed as it was vividly written. Television is a visual medium, but the realities of TV production schedules and budgets meant that its directors had largely given up on attempting the kinds of dynamic, meaningful compositions which cinema had long made routine. But a few shows over the decades—X-Files among them—aspired to let their pictures speak at least as loudly as their words, and the work of Gilligan, John Toll, Michael Slovis, Michelle MacLaren, and others on Breaking Bad set such a gorgeous standard that it helped create the seemingly oxymoronic phrase “cinematic TV.” The images tell so much of the story of Walter White that certain episodes (“Grilled,” “Fifty-One”) could probably be watched on mute with very little missed.
Because the series was told from Walt’s point of view as he defeated one foe after another, it had the unintended consequence of getting the audience to identify and even empathize with him far more than they probably should have—not just in the misogynist bile directed at Skyler, but in the more general way Walt’s entire career remains celebrated by some corners of Breaking Bad fandom, where there are those who still consider him the show’s hero, who still believe (despite Walt’s words to the contrary in the finale) that he only ever went down this road for the sake of his family, and who view the entire series as a celebration of Walt’s badassery.
That point of view has infected too many of the show’s imitators, which revel in their protagonists’ terrible deeds without ever really considering how they came to commit them. And even the ones with sharper moral clarity seem to have misunderstood the lesson of the show’s pacing. It’s not that slow is inherently better than fast, but that slow can pay enormous dividends if you use the time wisely, by filling all those in-between moments with insight into how the characters think and feel, and how their world operates, so that when the story begins to sprint ahead, we can watch it with the clarity gained when it was just ambling along.
Just look, again, at that moment in “Ozymandias” where Walt stares at his terrified wife and son and finally begins to see himself through their eyes rather than his own self-aggrandizing point of view. My goodness, but that is everything a storyteller should hope to achieve in a longform medium. The entire series built and built and built to that moment—and then to its more muted sequel in “Felina” where Walt admits to Skyler who and what this was all really for. That is the entirety of the grand story Vince Gilligan and company told, all sixty-two preceding hours of it, packed into a couple of lines, and a couple of anguished expressions on the face of the incredible Bryan Cranston.
That is what television can do that no other medium can, and what this magnificent drama managed to do better than any show before or since.
The following was my original review of “Ozymandias,” written in less than forty minutes following the episode’s completion, for reasons explained below. It has been presented exactly as it was written that night, including my mistaken use of the phrase “stomach pen” instead of “stomach pain.”
“Mama.” —Holly
Funny story, folks. Late last night, I found myself in my local emergency room, dealing with a lot of stomach pen that was revealed to be a bad case of appendicitis. I’m okay, and am even lucky enough to be in a hospital that has AMC in high-def (what are the odds?), but I’m writing this review while both high on painkillers and feeling, even after the surgery, incredibly sick to my stomach.
I am, in other words, in the perfect physical condition to have just watched “Ozymandias.”
I didn’t imagine Breaking Bad could top the final sequence of last week’s episode for tension and power and ability to induce a state of complete, nauseous panic. I was wrong. “Ozymandias” is one of the very best episodes of this great, cruel show, but also one of the most sickening.
After the teaser flashes back to the first time Walt and Jesse came to this curse spot in the desert—back when Walt could still imagine the drug business being easy, harmless money, and when he could focus more on Skyler’s proposed name for their incoming baby girl—we pick up in the same spot (with the RV fading out and then Jack and Hank’s cars fading in) with the shootout between Hank, Gomez and the Nazis all done, in the only way it could be. Steve is dead. Hank is badly wounded and still hopelessly outgunned, and Jack has long since decided to kill him. We see that Walt still has some level of humanity, and love of family, left in him, as he sacrifices his buried treasure in a futile attemp
t to save Hank’s life, but Hank knows what’s what and takes a bullet to the head …
… which finally sends Walt over a cliff, as he spends most of the rest of the episode lashing out at the people who have been dumb enough to care about him. He gives up Jesse’s location to the Nazis, blaming him for his role in Hank’s murder (because he has no ability to hurt Uncle Jack), and decides that this is the perfect moment to tell Jesse about how Jane died. In all the years since season two, as I’ve turned over and over in my head the idea of how and when Jesse might find out about this—coming closest in season three’s “Fly,” also directed, like this episode, by the amazing Rian Johnson—I never imagined that Walt might be the one to come right out and tell Jesse, and to do it out of nothing but pure spite.
And yet as terrible as the desert aftermath was, with the Nazis getting their hands on both Walt’s cash (most of it, anyway, as Uncle Jack leaves Walt with one barrel—one barrel and $11 million as payoff for all of Heisenberg’s awful crimes—as a sop to Walt-admiring Todd), it was nothing compared to the later scene at the White residence, with Skyler demanding, D’Angelo Barksdale-style, to know where Hank is, then trying to protect her son with a carving knife from the evil, evil man she married. I thought that Skyler and Marie fighting over the disposition of Holly a few episodes ago was as emotionally low as this show could go, but then we had Walt and Skyler brawling on the living room floor while Holly screamed and Flynn jumped in to save his mom, driving Walt away from his family forever, and briefly trying to take Holly with him.1
Walt has always justified his meth cooking as something he was doing for his family, but as his wife and son stare at him like he is history’s greatest monster, and as he steals his baby daughter from her terrified mother, his actions are exposed for what they’ve always been: indefensible.
Though even now, Walt isn’t all gone. Holding Holly in the bathroom, and hearing her ask for her mother, at least breaks the spell long enough for him to realize that he can’t take her, and that he has to do everything he can to protect Skyler from the consequences of his actions. His call to the house is, on the surface, yet another disgusting expression of Walter White’s pride, but it’s really just another performance by master thespian Heisenberg: doing everything he can to make sure the cops think all fault belongs to him, and that Skyler (who, I think, realizes what he’s doing as the invective gets angrier and angrier) is simply his blameless victim. It’s the only decent thing he has left to do before he hops into the minivan of Saul’s guy and prepares for his new life in New Hampshire as Mr. Lambert.
The only downside to watching this episode while impaired is that I can’t do full justice to its genius in this review. I’m too punchy right now, and should probably just be laying down. Maybe later this week, I’ll revisit it with a longer, more coherent look. Because this was incredible, and horrible. Hank and Gomez are dead. The Nazis have Walt’s fortune, and have a brutalized Jesse as their prisoner to help Todd cook meth. Marie is a widow. Flynn has had his entire worldview shattered. Nearly everything bad that could happen to these people has happened. And we still have two hours, a machine gun and a ricin capsule to get through.
Oh. My. God.
1 Because of tonight’s circumstances, my wife was in the hospital room with me as I watched the episode—her first Breaking Bad ever. Unsurprisingly, she did not respond well to the Holly abduction scene, and to the absolute despair of Anna Gunn’s performance. Threw her into the deepest end of the pool possible.
Once again, we start with Usenet and with Timothy W. Lynch. Sci-fi nerds always wind up ahead of the curve, and his Star Trek recaps helped put me on the path to writing this book. Unlike Walter White, he still teaches, but I like to think of him as The One Who Recaps.
Thanks to Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, Thomas Schnauz, Moira Walley-Beckett, George Mastras, Sam Catlin, Gennifer Hutchison, Rian Johnson, Kelley Dixon, and the other members of the Breaking Bad creative team who were available to answer my questions, both during the run of the show and long after they had all moved on to other jobs. Thanks, too, to Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Giancarlo Esposito for their memories over the years.
My editors at the Star-Ledger and HitFix were also hugely supportive of me as I was covering the show across its five seasons, as were my current bosses at Uproxx as I took all those old pieces and started pulling them apart for this format.
Eric Klopfer and Emma Jacobs at Abrams provided great insight into both the decade-old material and the stuff that was brand new, challenging assertions I had made early in President Obama’s first term and pointing out linkages in character and theme that hadn’t occurred to me when I was in among the episodic trees rather than stepping back to gaze at the whole forest. My once and future writing partner Matt Zoller Seitz, whose Mad Men Carousel set the template for this sort of recap collection, was once again a great sounding board, as was my agent Amy Williams.
Finally, thank you to my mother-in-law Cima, who was the one in the house the night before “Ozymandias” insisting I go to the hospital for what I thought was just an upset stomach, but which turned out to be an appendix ready to rupture. Thanks to my mother Harriet, and my stepfather Jeffrey, for being there for me in the hospital that day and night. And thanks especially to my amazing wife Marian, who had my back throughout a nightmarish hospital stint, and who ran interference with the nurses who kept insisting it might not be a great idea for me to be recapping a TV show under these circumstances.
With good reason.
Copyright © 2017 Alan Sepinwall
Foreword copyright © 2017 Damon Lindelof
Cover and endpaper illustrations copyright © 2017 The Heads of State
Published in 2017 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016960259
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2483-1
eISBN: 978-1-68335-077-4
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