So Breaking Bad is back and I know you all must have been feeling that same gut wrenching anxiety about how they were going to justify a second season finale that wasn't so much a game changer as it was a genre changer.
Remember that? When two passenger jets collided over Albuquerque after you kept us staring at a pink bear for a whole season? Remember that little plot maneuver?
Suddenly the ghost in the machine is seeming a little too ominous for a scientific show. Are we saying things about good and evil? Science vs Religion? What's God got to do with Breaking Bad?
A lot of people seemed put off by the season 2 endsplosion. Not Soprano's cut-to-black put off, but not necessarily excited about the new dimension of biblicalesqueness to the show.
I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand it is a pretty big bump, tampering with the reality level of your show. Once planes start crashing for apparently divine reasons, your plots on a runaway train car to nowhere'sville and you spend your last few seasons just digging your hole deeper and deeper (see Lost). Next thing you know we're all in a matrix, time travel is possible, this is not a pipe etc.
On the other hand, maybe you can pull it off? The show's been pretty good so far...
OK, let's hear it. Who is God according to Breaking Bad?
Well apparently Heisenberg is God. Or at least he's getting his ass worshiped by gangsters, which even if he isn't God, is pretty dope.
This metaphorical throwing the plot hat over the deity fence definitely cranks up the metaphysical volume knob to 11.
A science teacher becomes a drug dealer,
who then becomes a murderer (on a couple of levels),
who then becomes a messiah to poor Mexicans and slightly gay looking yet extremely deadly gangsters!
It's a classic American story. Horatio Alger and shit.
You gotta like these two guys:
Hey.
What's up.
Let's get down in the dirt.
K.
Look how nice these suits are!
I know.
Our suits will never be the same.
I was slightly worried when the gangsters came up against this little girl and her goat.
Hey. Nice goat.
Stay the fuck away from my goat.
It's ok little girl. We just wanted your goat to have this car. It's a pretty cool car.
Who are these harbingers of doom? These men with gazes like hot marble slabs? So gentle to little girls and goats yet so deadly to innocent migrant workers. Who are these men who walk with fire and destruction literally licking at their feet?
They're Heisenberg's apostles.
In the end we are reminded that the messiah of the underworld has a different kind of apostle. The kind who will kill your ass if you stare at his shoes. Seriously. Eyes off the bright shiny skull shoes! NO LOOKING!
So Walt's future is heading out to him, on foot through a desert, but with a frightening level of resolve. Heisenberg is definitely alive and subconsciously kicking. The Chicken Guy, Gus, he's back in play. Oh and Jesse is some kind of existential bad ass who gets the crazy eye a little too easily now.
And to top it off you're getting divorced from these:
I'll tell you what.
It's gonna be a long season!
Everybody Break Bad!
Pink bears and colliding jets, guess I'd better get on this one.
Posted by: Caroline Hagood | March 25, 2010 at 02:06 PM