Warning: If you didn't watch all of the Breaking Bad episodes that aired this year, you're about to spoil yourself...
There you have it. The first half of Season 5 left a few things to be desired and left us on a cliffhanger that was both appealing and kind of a let down. Hank was going to figure it out eventually, so the fact that he found out wasn't really a huge surprise. But it's a fun cliffhanger, if only because it makes us think about what’s going to happen when Season 5.5 begins. Where does Hank even begin on this?
The actual half-season was worthwhile, if not a little too fast-paced. I’ve read more than one opinion that this season wasn’t up to the caliber of other seasons and I see the point. But again, it’s a half-season, and here’s why I keep bringing it up: Every season of Breaking Bad has started slow. The process was typically to repair the damage from last year; build some themes for this year; prepare for the end of the season; cash in on those themes.
Season 5ish still followed this format.
The damage was repaired pretty quickly, but maybe a little too quickly. It was what, three or four episodes before Walt, Jesse and Mike were all back in business? Breaking Bad works better when things get a chance to simmer a bit. Someone at The A.V. Club suggested Season 5 would’ve worked better with a 10/10 episode split (instead of 8/8, which is what they got) and yeah, it's hard to disagree with that. Still, the damage from last year was repaired and some themes are half-way built to our grand finale.
The only real fault here is that Breaking Bad’s writers tried to pick up every piece from last season and move forward at the same time. Among the things we saw this season: Walt going Full Heisenberg, Skyler moving the kids out (and her rollercoaster rebellion from Walt while working at his side), Hank becoming the new department head at the DEA, Mike pushing away and then coming back into the fold, Walt bringing the gang back together, Saul finding a new place to cook, the entire business relaunching in a post-Gus world - and this was before Todd shot that kid.
The two things that needed to happen this season (after all of the repairs) were pushing Mike out of the way and putting a heel-turn on Walt. They combined the two in the episode before the finale, though it happened so quickly it’ll take some time to digest. A little bit of air between the season halves will probably do everyone some good.
But Mike’s death still wasn’t quite as deserving as I had hoped for the character. While the episode was good and it played with us a bit -- will Mike get away clean or won’t he? -- Mike deserved a better death. Maybe he didn’t deserve something on par with Gus' epic end, but there should’ve been more time for his departure to be dealt with. Ideally, the whole “Mike on the lamb” thing could’ve been spread over two episodes, culminating in that scene with Walt. As it happened, the whole thing, from when the lawyer was caught to Mike's death, took about 20 to 30 minutes of TV time.
Now, obviously, there was something important about that -- Mike, the ultimate professional, dying in the heat of the moment at the hands of an ego-driven buffoon -- and in the grand scheme of things this will probably look better somewhere down the road. But it doesn’t right now. Aaron Paul hyping the episode beforehand didn’t help much either.
Granted, the overall fast pace of the season made the errors stand out a bit more. I think it’s because of how well the writers deal with the gaps between the action in every other season. There was no space for those gaps this year.
Pictured: Building an empire.
But on the other hand, for how quickly things went, they went pretty smoothly. I can’t count how many times a character in any random TV show are given some kind of quality that is completely unearned. There were a number of times where that could’ve happened easily in this season and it never did. Think about Walt and his heel-turn. We saw him feigning emotion a number of times, pushing people away he loved, demanding praise where he didn’t deserve it, unapologetically taking things that weren’t his and so on. It was an easy transition because the writers and Bryan Cranston planted it within Walt early on and were just waiting for the right time to expose it. That patience and planning paid off well.
Amid all of this chaos, nothing was out of place. Everything happened in the order it was supposed to happen.
Our best moment of the season was Todd shooting the kid - as strange as that sounds. Introducing Todd was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off well. Todd shooting that boy showed just how well the creators can use action and dialogue to build to something so shocking; it showed how well they can blindside us still. The funniest part is that, in the grand story arc of the series, this was probably the most frivilous portion of this batch of episodes -- and yet, it was the most important thing to happen.
What was missing most was the emotional impact on a lot of these things - and before someone puts it in the comments, yes, they did address a lot of the emotional impact, but those things never got the full treatment. A full season gives us insight into those gaps. While we saw quite a bit in the rift between Skyler and Walt, the time needed to fully dig into those character reactions -- Jesse and Mike to Todd shooting the kid, Hank taking the new job, the family more or less stumbling and succeeding -- is more than they had.
So when you take into account that the season isn’t over and that they had to crunch a lot of things into it, it was pretty good. It’s on the same track as every season before it and, judging from that one flash-forward, the best is yet to come.
In other words, we’re set up for a good finale next year. Stay tuned.
Source : ign[dot]com
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