Breaking bad is no more for me. Bryan Cranston steered the character his almost inevitable demise in a final gun-lobby driven orgy of bullets, and a nice little ricin poisoning to boot.
The runaway ego locomotive finally hit the bufferrs after a marathon 5 series. Relatively speaking the ending of s4 was more dramatic, more satisfying with the 'face off' title becoming obvious in the demise of Gus'. In the last episode though, there are no new lines of investigation, no more but history for blue meth and Heisenberg. A certain closure yes.
BB has had its low points - much of the first half of series four left man viewers a little cold, some series two were a little conceptual. Gus and Jesse always seemed slightly plastic charcters who lacked a certain continuity or perhapsnjust had a bit too much dove in them to be credible. Saul the lawyer was a little over acted, a little too sharp scripted to be true. The two strongest character portrayals without a doubt , mike and hank, were never allowed to give the audience the satisfaction of nailing Heisenberg. They had rather ignomonious deaths too.
Maybe I need to watch the whole thing from episode one again at less than three episodes per week, because I do not quite buy the transition from WW to Heisenberg, which is shown when he tells the small time cooks to use the right stuff and stay off his patch. That was the 'show', the writer's cards laid on the table, and a little too early. The lovely juxtaposed contrast between his beige life in his ugly MPV and matching blouson, with his growing shadow lifestyle is palpable, but the rise of his alter ego is to me at least, lacking. It is more of course that he is unleashing the thrusting man from the pussy-whipped suburban 'make do' ....it is a little thin on reality for this being set in the USA, a such bright chemist and foundernof a company would ditch his economic future to be a 'charity case' high school teacher even if him and skyler did have an unexpected pregnancy.
Skyler is though a believable foil to Walter White. Bucksom, one of the high school cheer leader types, she strikes me as a bit thick, but she is at least direct and never as easily hood winked as we might expect. She becomes the linchpin for much of whole story, we never know if she will go with Walt's plans or buckle in and confess to her sister.
However the script, the plot and the character delivry twists, turns or simply meanders, the final episode does tie up all the loose ends. His family get a route to a wad of money. He cuts off the export market with ricin. Jack's gang get gunned down and jesse set free to live in madness. The end of the line for the blue crystal meth'.
The audience do not get a lot of satisafction. We do not see justice being done. Even though we can be a little look warm on Agent Schræder's personality and methods, we want him to bring our man in. Gus we wanted dead, even if we liked him more than the runaway ego Heiseberg-White. We dont want to see jesse's love interest, Maria, gunned down. Yeah it makes robot todd nicer to strangle. It gives non hope for jesse.
This is the thing, there is no moral in the end game other than violence begets violence and crime never pays. Most of all, it is long, long ago in the storyline since we have seen the effects of crystal meth' on users. There comes no reminder. Jesse is perhaps using. They intertwined the prostitute and the ATM family nicely into earlier episodes reminding us where all the green back comes from and at what cost to people.
Also where is Walt's ingenious chemistry? In the end he lashes up a remote controlled M60 mechanically instead of perhaps maybe gassing or poisoning them all like Gus did to the cartell. He could of course repeated his gustavo Lab explosion, or made a fancy bomb or made Uncle Jack's gang all delirious with a batch of lsd.
So no smart chemistry, no Hank putting the handcuffs on, no moral about crystal users out there, no happy ending for anyone. No giga-thermal explosion to make te man a mythical legend, swept to immortaility in his own vapours. He bled to death on the floor of a lab. For me all that is broken and bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment