As much as I enjoyed it and appreciated how brilliantly it was done, the show was heavy and difficult due to the family involvement. It felt like Walt vs. Walt and everything else was heavy collateral damage. The characters are 3D, real, and consistent. At some point, you will come to cheer on each character, and on another point, you will hate them.
Walt was a victim of his circumstance, and cancer was the trigger. I guess when you've lived as a (sorry for the lack of a better word) loser for fifty years, and an opportunity to be someone feared (as opposed to respected) is there, you will be tempted to take it. I remember rooting for Walt in the first season because he was over-qualified but overlooked and trampled on.
As a woman, I was surprised to see that Anna Gunn and Skyler received hate for her character. I mean, I could not bear to watch while she was getting it on with Ted, and for a lot of scenes, I did find her annoying, the usual nagging mom. But as a woman who has dad issues, I'm alarmed by the hate she received because she was a "barrier to Walt's plans." My dad was not a drug dealer/ cook (LOL) but he was involved in shady deals. He would be out drinking until early AM most days of the week, and he'd justify it as work and doing it for us, his family. He got cancer and he's now gone. He earned a lot of money when he was alive with people who weren't there for him when he got sick. We used to be comfortable, but we lost almost all our money, and had hospital bills for debt. The family of the people he used to do business with was attacked with guns at one point. He told my mom he'd rather sell his soul to the devil than have his family starve, but the truth is, he has a drinking problem, and so much pride. My dad apologized to us before he passed on, but the trauma is still with me. At one point, my brother, mom, and even I thought the same thing Walt Jr told him -- why don't you just die already?
In my eyes, Skyler did what she could to keep her family safe, even receiving hate from Walt Jr several times. She didn't care if she looked like the bad guy as long as she would be able to protect them from Walt. But when she suggested that Walt kill Jesse because he posed a harm to the family, it goes to show that everyone would make morally questionable choices at some point, and we don't really have the right to judge. But the more you do evil, the less resistant you are to it.
As for Jesse, I'm really glad about how it ended for him, because you know he has a good heart and his conscience is intact. In the end I was rooting for Hank in his investigation, but I remember scowling at him during the first season when he'd be all macho and superior. The show had a way of messing up with your thoughts about all the characters.
I usually enjoy gripping crime and action but this hit close to home, especially when it came to the details about his cancer and how he navigated it and how it cost his family. Even so, I appreciated how it was made and am now enjoying watching and reading up on analyses. There were a lot of LOL moments which were actually parallels/ foreshadowing already, like that time Walt carried a bomb in the hospital in a baby bag and it got stuck to the elevator magnet and he yanked it off. In the next season, they end up using a magnet to destroy evidence/ Gus's laptop. Funny how Jesse learned from the expert (shown further in El Camino) but Walt would be busy arguing with Mike when Jesse brought up the magnet suggestion, which was parallel to when Jesse brought up the idea of filling the barrels of methylamine with water so that no one would have to die and know that a heist took place. Also, Hector was watching TV at one point which showed an explosion, which foreshadowed how he would die.
I enjoyed those subtle hints in Breaking Bad, and I didn't catch all of them in the first watch for sure, so it would be great to re-watch this in the future and see the things I missed the first time. This is part of what made it such a phenomenal show -- there's so much to appreciate, so much to observe and process, that a one-time watch wouldn't cut it. The cast and crew are phenomenal, everything was well-thought-out.
Submitted September 26, 2020 at 11:40PM by viol8thelaw https://ift.tt/335fNVT
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