While the official TUIW list says otherwise, my personal choice for the best television show of 2009 was Breaking Bad. In its second season, the show morphed from a more serious Weeds into a meditation on male anxiety and fate with a story line (and especially a finish) straight out of Greek tragedy. As he sold off more and more pieces of his humanity, Walter White spent last year transforming from a desperate, cancer-ridden science teacher to a ruthless monster with fiery death literally raining down around him. As the chorus of anchors informed us in the beginning of this week’s episode, Walt can add 167 names to the list of people killed by his foray into drug dealing, and the question is how can he go on with his life, knowing what he’s done? And what of the terrifying, violent judgment once again creeping and crawling towards him?
Walt’s answer is to lie, as loudly and verbosely as possible, and hope that someone else will believe him. In his first scene of the season, down to his final match (a matchbook from the law firm of Saul Goodman), Walt resolves to burn all the money from last year’s big drug deal, but of course he can’t do it. Then at the assembly he tries to explain that the crash isn’t really that big a disaster; at least no one on the ground was hurt and the planes weren’t even full! Besides, people forget and move on. To Skyler, who finally pieces together how he’s been making all that money, he clarifies that he’s not even a drug “dealer,” just a “manufactuer.” There are, after all, a lot of angles to this thing. He tells Gus that he’s at a crossroads and is ready to leave the game behind, even if the look on his face when Gus mentions the possibility of making $3 million says otherwise. And to Jesse he describes his separation from Skyler as a temporary thing, even though the divorce papers she gave him suggest otherwise.
As for Jesse, he’s still at rehab, dealing with the part he played in this whole tragedy. And its not until his counselor reveals his own tragic past that he is able to take the man’s advice and embrace who he is. But, unfortuantely, as tells Walt, that’s “the bad guy.” He certainly seems like a very different Jesse from last year and an entirely new contrast to Walt, who flatly tells Gus “I’m not a criminal.”
Meanwhile, Skyler is juggling Flynn’s anger and Marie’s prying while having trouble explaining to others what it was she saw in Walt that made her leave. And, after he comes clean with her (and who was expecting it to happen like that? That fast?) she promises to keep his secret if he gets out of her life.
Bryan Cranston has always been otherworldly but here he piles on layer after layer of denial and delusion, building a performance that is at once kind of sad and kind of terrifying. Think about how long Walt must have spent looking up air collisions to come up with all the facts he spits out at the assembly or when he’s talking to Jesse. Or the way he’s just too tired and too beaten to put up much of a fight when Skyler finally confronts him with the truth. But there’s a tragic inevitability in that scene in Pollo Hermanos. Gus Fring’s reaction to Walt’s backing out is terrifyingly blank and I’m sure Gus (being the consummate professional that he is) has ways of coercing Walt back into business. But I’m also sure that Gus is a keen judge of character and already knows what we know: that it won’t take too much cajoling to bring Heisenberg out of retirement.
Tragic inevitability is a good way to describe how this show operates on a meta-level. There were the apocalpytic glimpses of the plane crash last year (including the pink bear’s eye, which is still around this week), showing us where Walt was heading long before he got there. This season’s tragic inevitability isn’t separated from the main storyline by time, but by space, as we got peeks of two gangsters working their way through Mexico and across the border to America. We know they’re violent, we know they’re fearsome, and we know that they’re coming for Heisenberg. Whatever that means for our hero, it can’t be good.
“No Mas” was slow by Breaking Bad‘s standards (Walt didn’t even do anything illegal), but I was still riveted by it. Every moment was pitch perfect (let me give a shout-out to all the dark humor and violent tonal shifts in the assembly scene, which may be the best single scene of a TV show this season since Lois and the tractor on Mad Men) and the show continued to stake its claim as the most visually and stylistically impressive on television. Breaking Bad is back and, wherever its headed, it can’t be good.
Jonah’s Score: 93
TUIW Grade: A
Michael
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awarshauer
