BRomine and BArium...if anyone was wondering. Crystal Methamphetamine = C10H15N. So no, they don't correlate.
The title refers to likable antihero Walter White (Bryan Cranston), whose metaphysical (I'm not qualified to use that word but fuck it) wave breaks when he finds out he's got some bad lung cancer...and it breaks bad, as he uses his Chemist superbrain to come up with a great recipe for crank and slowly becomes the meth kingpin of Albuquerque, NM.
What's amazingly pertinent about this show is its portrayal of the Mexican cartels that keep popping up in the news (Sidenote, they rake in about $8 billion a year on pot; wouldn't you rather that money go to our economy? dumb-dee-dumb dumb dumb). They're turning my namesake Arizona city into New Juarez. I take offense, as usual.
"It's just basic chemistry, yo."-Jesse Pinkman
And along comes a woman, helping make a troubling situation much worse. But that's just what babes like Jane (Krysten Ritter) do. Tonight's episode propels that argument based on the already-in (p)reviews I've seen.
But at the heart of this Coen-brothers-esque story of drug wars, family breakdowns, and uneccessary violence is the ancient conflict of MAN VS HIMSELF.
Walter has accepted an inevitable death after a life he sees as unacceptable, cowardly, and trite, despite having known true love and produced a good son (with a new daughter about to pop out). Now, his good intentions do what good intentions were born to do: create havoc and turn to shit.
To paraphrase one review (ign.com, I think), he is using the illegal narcotics trade to benefit his family without concern for the adverse affects of his crystal product on the many other families that the drug will trickle down to. This amounts to blind self-centered-ness that isn't quite greed and really isn't at all noble, though I take the side of Walter because it's nice to be able to do things your own way once liberated by the impending forecast of your own mortality.
However now that we have found out his cancer is getting 'better' and his chances for survival have largely increased, he seems to trick himself into believing that since the trian is already rolling, and the adventurous danger levels rise, he is happy to keep conducting, showing outward signs of maliciousness when his terf is threatened, even when his authority is questioned by his D.E.A. brother-in-law regarding letting his 16-year-old son gulp down tequila at a family pool party (and I agree with all the other reviews when I say that the tension in that scene was outrageously fucking convincing). Cranston certainly deserved his Emmy for that, though the Emmy came first.
Without getting too in-depth, my predictions for the way the season ends involve the deaths of 2 of our non-White (family) characters, which will blatantly show the viewers that Walt's grand plan is a failure, not because he isn't making the loot he needs to leave his family with, but because these casualties (and there've already been a few) were avoidable. But in the cartel business, life is cheap and the product is what matters. You lose a few soldiers, the war wages on, and everybody with their lighter to the pipe gets to dream ignorantly while their mind dies and the world around them crumbles. Let's just hope this isn't too precognitive for the lives of the many who live on the border between the States' (organized ineffective and obtuse law) and the Cartels' (lawless, effective, and epidemically terminal).
We're all just waiting for that moment when Hank (D.E.A.) discovers the mystery man they're after is his once-spineless, mild-mannered to a fault brother Walt. Someone will end up with more than just egg on his face and/or cuffs on his wrists.
You can win little by little, but it takes no time to lose it all.
Memorial Day Addendum: Here's an interesting synopsis/review of last night's episode:
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/05/breaking_bad_phoenix_throwing.html
and a podcast with the creator and a writer:
http://podcast.amctv.com/breaking-bad/breaking-bad-insider-212.mp3
Links:
http://www.waltswarning.com/
http://www.amctv.com/originals/breakingbad/
one SEXY Bad girl
No comments:
Post a Comment