Breaking Bad II - Always say "thank you" to Walt.

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I'll take Dexter. Homeland I am not a huge fan of, I mean, I watch it, but yeah.

I am looking forward to my guilty pleasure Revenge, however, which apparently will have a Sunday night slot, so there's that..
 
Not sure how someone could not know the first half ended a week ago, but I found someone who didn't.

Damn near broke her heart.
 
You guys, last night I dreamed that I was Skyler, trying to hide from Walter, who was coming to kill me.

I kept going to all the neighbors - all of them had elaborate pools and were having pool parties. Most of my hiding places were underwater. It worked. I managed to survive until I woke up.

(It was really disturbing, you guys. :( )
 
I'm taking this time to start and catch up on other shows like The Walking Dead. I was watching an episode last night and I Loved that one of the characters had a bag full of of Blue meth :heart: Keeping it in the AMC family
 
Read the worst article on Breaking Bad ever - The White Market | The New Inquiry

Actually I didn't think it was bad at all. A different take on the thing, to be sure, but he raises some interesting questions.

And this part is yet another area we've been asked to suspend not only disbelief but common sense:

"Finally toward the end of the fifth season, Walter is forced to explain to a new organization that customers will pay more for his product than, say, one that was 85 percent pure. The other manufacturer seems to accept Walter’s logic even though, as an ostensibly experienced dealer, he should know it doesn’t make any sense"

Not only does it not make any sense, it's not what happens in the real world, period.
 
I actually liked the article when it focused on the economics of the thing, but when it started with the white supremacy thing... It quickly turned to bullshit.

People tend to over-analyze this show. There was an article that tried to present the premise of the series as a metaphor for the failed War on Drugs and it was very poorly written.
 
He's not overanalyzing the show so much as how it's narrative seems to generally fit what is a fairly recurring theme in TV shows and movies: "white person enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants" (to quote him)

And that's hardly a "bullshit theory" or even novel idea, he's not the first to think it.
 
Not everything has to be about race and racism. Since he draws comparisons from The Wire, that is a show that successfully adressed some of racially oriented cliches and managed (mostly) to avoid them.

If anything, the presumption that the world that is "beneath him" is predominantly non-white - since we are talking about New Mexico and not West Baltimore for instance - smells far more of stereotypical racial grouping than this supposedly deep analysis of "white guy always prevailing". Now, this is something that can appear in some shows, but Breaking Bad clearly had powerful, intelligent figures that were both white and non-white.

He tries to prove his point based on the scene where Jesse is explaining the Mexican scientists what to do. It is a poorly written scene - in fact, the whole plot device of Jesse suddenly becoming very reliable and Gus seeing "loyalty" and potential in him - is one the main reasons why I rate season 4 lower than many people - but the racial undertones are non-existent IMO. There are zero racial stereotypes presented in that scene, and the scientists could have just as easily been white, black, mulatto etc.

Walt connecting with Aryan Nation as another "proof" of white supremacy made me laugh.
 
He completely ignores the fact that the first really good meth cook in the show's chronology is Gus's Los Pollos partner, who is not white.
 
I thought Gus was trying to make Jessie loyal so he could first use him against Walt, and then if Walt had to be bumped off, Jessie could still cook.

Made sense to me at the time.
 
gvox said:
Actually I didn't think it was bad at all. A different take on the thing, to be sure, but he raises some interesting questions.

And this part is yet another area we've been asked to suspend not only disbelief but common sense:

"Finally toward the end of the fifth season, Walter is forced to explain to a new organization that customers will pay more for his product than, say, one that was 85 percent pure. The other manufacturer seems to accept Walter’s logic even though, as an ostensibly experienced dealer, he should know it doesn’t make any sense"

Not only does it not make any sense, it's not what happens in the real world, period.

I was sort of on board with this part (but fuck, it's a tv show, a 100% authentic show about making meth would probably be shit) but once he got into the white supremacist bullshit my eyes nearly rolled out of my head.
 
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I waited until the last episode of this season aired before I started watching in order to power through all of them, and was glad I did. That really made the ending with Hank tie together, because every shot with that book was still fresh on my mind (there are a LOT of them!). Spoiler-wise, it's obvious to tell when a major character dies, just by dint of Vulture promoting an interview with the Mad Men/Breaking Bad actor the next morning, but I think lesser mentioned things like Teddy Hitler shooting that kid was a much more powerful surprise than a major cast member dying.

Lydia was a great addition to the cast, IMO, with a performance kind of....orthogonal to most everyone else on the show. There's a lot of cocky assholes colliding and manipulating and shooting each other on this show, so having her (also, a her) appear as a barely contained tornado of nerves came off very fresh. I can see how she and Gus complimented each other.
 
He completely ignores the fact that the first really good meth cook in the show's chronology is Gus's Los Pollos partner, who is not white.

I don't think he ignores that at all, I think that's part of his argument: that there were really good non-white meth cookers (and, clearly, better business men) before Walt shows up, and that basically Walt is sold to us as besting them all, including Gus.
 
Gus made it in the business for a much longer time than Walt ever will have. I still consider him the most intelligent guy on the show.
 
Definitely. Walt was lucky Hector hated Gus, whose ultimate downfall was letting his fastidious, cautious guard down to exact revenge.

You could also blame Tyrone, who really should have seen that there was a bomb strapped to the chair before Gus came in, as well as looking more thoroughly for Walt.
 
I still consider him the most intelligent guy on the show.

You read my comment about "and, clearly, better business men", right? I was obviously referring to Gus being presented as a better business man...but, he ends up being bested by Walt.

Your feelings on him notwithstanding, Walt still tricked him very well and obviously played on his inability to completely shed his "old country/cartel" grudges and habits (typical, Gus just has to kill the guy himself under some twisted notion of "honor" or whatever)...and this ultimately led to his demise. For all his "intelligence", he acted very stupidly and without his usual calculation/consideration of all the angles, and paid the ultimate price.

Gus was one of the more intelligently acted/performed roles on the show. But his character, in terms of the writing, the story, died in a moment of sheer stupidity.
 
I didn't mind the circumstances surrounding Gus' death. Mike's death revolved around his behaviour that was a lot dumber in many ways and he seems pretty white to me. The question of Gus' "honor" is something that I don't see being connected to his race, but to the fact that he's a sociopath and a sadist. But that's just me. In any case, I don't see Breaking Bad as a white supremacist show.

And that sentence just now made me laugh at how ridiculous it sounds.
 
Considering Hector, you know, fucking shot his best friend right in front of him may have slightly clouded his judgment. Plus, he'd been going there for a long time with no issues. How the hell would Walter have any clue about that? I think the biggest stretch, if there are any stretches at all, is Jesse having the wherewithal to think of that as a detail that could help Walt.
 
In any case, I don't see Breaking Bad as a white supremacist show.



i don't agree with all that much in the article, and i had typed a much longer post on my mobile only to lose it to stupid Verizon dropping out, but the point of the article was not that BB somehow advocates white supremacy in the KKK/WAR model, but that the white characters in it are superior to the other characters.

think of it as the "Dances With Wolves" model. white man fears native americans, white man befriends native americans, white man is taught about life and love by native americans, white man learns much from these so-called "savages," white man is redeemed by winning their respect, white man becomes a better native american than the native americans ever were.

only this is with meth dealers.

i think this comes down to the fact that WW is initially supposed to be accessible -- that he is from the (crumbling, dying) middle class, that he could be the viewer, and thus the viewer who likely has the money to afford cable and a nice TV is going to more readily identify with the Whites and their journey than they would if the story were focused on, say, Combo. that's more a commentary on the economics of television, especially for high end cable dramas, than it is a reflection of any ideology of the show or it's creators. the program may unintentionally advance the notion of white supremacy, but that's a reflection of the medium in which it exists.
 
I understand where he's going with it, and I was a bit facetious in that last comment, but I simply don't think Breaking Bad falls into that mold, for reasons already mentioned. I've already noted that the meth industry in New Mexico is not as racially homogeneous as the Native American tribe in Dances With Wolves, or as the drug trading in West Baltimore, to bring The Wire into the equation.

In Dances With Wolves, Costner is, as you've stated, more noble and more "Indian" than any Native American in the end. On the other hand, Walter White is the biggest piece of shit in the end. So I guess one could make an anti-white supremacy case, since the biggest asshole in a business of back-stabbers and criminals turns out to be the white guy. ;)

The point is - I don't see the analogy with Dances With Wolves, but I do agree with you that that film is a classic example of that kind of a problem that does appear in our pop culture.
 
The point is - I don't see the analogy with Dances With Wolves, but I do agree with you that that film is a classic example of that kind of a problem that does appear in our pop culture.



oh i agree -- i think that BB *isn't* the DWW model, whereas the author is arguing that it is. i think his overall point is correct, but i think he's done a not very good reading of BB to make it fit that mold.
 
To me, Walter White is doing a pretty poor job at empire-building. He'll never get to where Gus got. Simply killing Gus doesn't make him a better drug kingpin than Gus.

What Walt is really good at is making high quality product. If he hadn't gotten caught up in building a kingdom of his own, he might be in better shape now.
 
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