Tag: Breaking Bad season 3 (Page 3 of 4)

Breaking Bad 3.4 – Dirty, Damp, and Deep in the Valley of the Sun

April 11, 2010 /

I begin this week’s “Breaking Bad” blog with a confession: it’s the first episode this season where I didn’t have an advance screener, which meant that I was watching it along with the rest of you. The reason I confess this is because it also means that, in order to get my blog knocked out as quickly as possible, I had to watch it live on the TV set in my office, which is TiVo-less. It’s the set in the living room that has the TiVo, and…well, that’s recording “The Celebrity Apprentice” for me. Hmmm…suddenly, what was intended to be an attempt to earn your sympathy has abruptly become fodder for insult. This has gone terribly wrong. Perhaps I’d better go ahead and get to talking about “Breaking Bad” in order to try and save face. (Yes, I know: it’s far too late for that.)

Well, Jesse might be clean, but he’s clearly no smarter now than he was when he was still using. Kids, here’s your lesson for this week: if you’re ever driving a bullet-riddled RV and find yourself in desperate need of fuel, do not…repeat, do not…try to use methamphetamine as currency. While I can appreciate the need to take Old Faithful for a spin for “work” purposes, when it comes to potential witnesses trying to pick it out of a line-up, it’s hard to conceive of a more memorable vehicle. It kinds of stands out in a crowd, you know? I’ll give it to Jesse, though: ever since admitting to himself -whether rightly or wrongly – that he’s the bad guy, he’s developed balls of steel. Trading gas for meth with a state trooper right there in the store…? That’s pretty fucking ballsy, you’ve got to admit. The best line of the scene, though, had to be when Cashier Cara offered her concerns about the addictiveness of meth and Jesse assured her that it had been blown way out of proportion. (“It’s a media thing.”)

We had some great scenes from Saul Goodman this week. Of course Saul’s got a class action lawsuit working against the airline. He’s just that kind of guy. I loved both the guy we saw in his office (“You’ve been the victim of a terrible accident, some discomfort is to be expected”), as well as the phone call later in the episode, where he assures someone that they needn’t have had a wing fall on their house and that even a bag of peanuts is enough to get them into the lawsuit. Awesome. Mike’s mikes turned up a fierce war of words between Walt and Skyler over her revelation that she’d fucked Ted, a conversation which led Walt to offer one of his typically nonsensical declarations (“I’ll suit myself to his face!”) and found him heading over to the office to confront Ted in person and give a predictably ineffective performance.

Damned shame about the potted plant, though. Poor bastard only had a week left ’til retirement…

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Breaking Bad 3.3 – Scenes from the Power Struggle in Albuquerque

April 4, 2010 /

There is a theorem within the entertainment industry which states that there is no television series or motion picture, no matter how good it may be, which cannot be made at least a little bit better by the additional presence of Danny Trejo, and the accuracy of this theory was once again proven with tonight’s episode of “Breaking Bad.” You may recall Mr. Trejo rearing his head…pun totally intended…during Season 2, but tonight we got a bit more insight into his character…including, most importantly, why he’s called Tortuga. Never has someone who works in the criminal underworld ever suggested that you “come around back” and seen it result in something good happening, and, unsurprisingly, this was no exception to that rule, particularly since it was a flashback, but now we know how far back the Cousins have been involved in Walt’s affairs.

But let’s be honest: although they may have played a key part, tonight’s episode wasn’t really about the Cousins. It was about the power struggle within the White house. We’d seen this coming, with Skyler demanding that Walt stay not only out of the house but, indeed, out of her life altogether, while Walt was refusing to accept this position and offering dipping sticks as a peace offering. It wasn’t until good ol’ Saul Goodman’s pep talk last week, though, that the little light bulb above Walt’s head suddenly went off, leading him to decide that she was bluffing in her claims that she’d call the police on him. So what does he do? Well, first, he gets the pizza off the roof, then he ensconces himself inside and declares that he’s not leaving. It’s an intense war of wills between the two of them, and it’s rough going for us viewers, too, because, hell, who knows where the hell this is going? They’ll do any damned thing on this show!

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Breaking Bad 3.2 – For There Ain’t No One For To Give You No Pain

March 28, 2010 /

Say what you will about the band America, but hearing the strains of their song “A Horse With No Name” kick off this week’s episode of “Breaking Bad” was a perfect way to remind us that, although Walter White may have begun his transition from Mr. Chips to Scarface, when it comes to his taste in music, he’s still got a looooooong way to go. Given everything he’s done since the beginning of this series, it’s no wonder that he’s looking more than a little twitchy when the cop pulls him over, but how typically Walt to try and use the plane crash as an excuse to get out of a ticket, then getting huffy when the cop doesn’t accept it as valid. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who groaned audibly when he got out of the car to approach the officer. Seriously, who does that? Apparently, the man who’s expressing his First Amendment rights does that, which is why he quite deservedly got pepper-sprayed for his belligerence.

Once Walt found himself being thrown into the back of the squad car, it was only inevitable that Hank would find his way into the proceedings, and so he did, though his first appearance finds him in mid-discussion about the investigation of Olive Oil and his brethren, who went up in smoke at the end of last week’s episodes. Gomez’s less-than-casual comment about Hank’s “famous blue meth” having not been seen in 29 days leads me to suspect that we won’t go much beyond 30 before there’s a change on that front. After Walt rescues Hank from his clink (kids, remember: no matter how legitimate it may sound when you’re delivering it, nothing makes an apology seem less sincere than staring at your feet the entire time you’re delivering it), the two have some approximation of a heart-to-heart talk, and I feel certain that Hank’s uncertainty about Skyler’s refusal to let Walt see the kids is going to resurface again, especially since she shut Hank down the moment he tried to bring it up at dinner.

By the way, having Hank once again underline his belief that Walt is a textbook underachiever only serves to make me anxious…and not necessarily in a good way…about how he’ll react when he inevitably finds out that his brother-in-law is Heisenberg. I’m reminded of how one of Lex Luthor’s computers took all the facts available to it and deduced that Superman’s secret identity was Clark Kent, but Luthor declared it to be an impossibility because the computer didn’t know Superman the way he did, and he couldn’t accept that Superman would ever deign to take on such a lowly persona. Mark my words: Marie’s going to be in on it before Hank is.

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Breaking Bad 3.1 – I Blame The Government

March 21, 2010 /

The first image that really catches our eye is that of some poor bastard hauling his dirty, grimy self across the ground. He looks, in a word, pitiful…and as we’ve just seen a truck driving along the dusty road and another man wandering about with seeming calm, we have to presume that the aforementioned gentleman on the ground has but a short amount of time left on this earth.

But, then, we start to get mixed signals when a second man is seen crawling in the dirt, then a third.

By the time the shot cuts to reveal a veritable legion of dirt crawlers, with the ominous score only serving to underline the palpable nervousness of the bystanders in the village (i.e. the ones sitting or standing rather than crawling), we have to ask: “What the hell’s going on here?”

A car pulls up. A man with silver skulls on the toes of his boots steps out. Make that two men. Are they twins?

Oh, but it’s too late to consider the genetic origins of these guys, because now they’ve started crawling. This is getting downright creepy…and that’s even before the group begins to rise to their feet and enter a highly disturbing candle-lit shrine, to which they add a sheet of paper.

It’s a Santa Muerte shrine. On the paper is a pencil sketch of Heisenberg. In short, these guys are praying that Walter White will be dead soon.

Season 3 is officially off to an awesome start. Welcome back, “Breaking Bad.”

Given the end of Season 2, it’s no surprise that the first thing tackled post-credits is the inevitable repercussions of the airplane crash. You probably spotted the guest appearance by Ashleigh Banfield, but the other newscasters are actually from Albuquerque’s NBC affiliate, KOB. It’s an easy segue back into where we left off last season, offering a look into how it’s affected the residents of the city…including, of course, one W. White, who’s busy burning money on his barbecue grill. If there’s any sight more horrifying than watching cash go up in smoke, it’s got to be Walt having second thoughts and, in the process, setting his robe on fire. It was a must-do, though: right about now, the money is really the only thing in Walt’s life that he can stop from going up smoke.

Certainly, his marriage is shot to hell, a fact underlined by Skyler’s inaugural appearance in Season 3, which takes place as she’s attempting to kickstart the divorce proceedings between herself and Walt. It’s a meeting borne of emotion rather than intellect, however, with Skyler desperately trying to ignore the attorney’s comments and suggestions until the cumulative effect of her protestations finally begin the process of collapsing her resolve. The tension between her and Walt, Jr., doesn’t help the situation any, and once her sister starts to get on her case, Skyler can’t deny it any more: she’s got to ask Walt outright what the hell he’s got going on in his world that he’s been too afraid to reveal to her.

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“Breaking Bad” returns to AMC for Season 3. Will you be there?

March 18, 2010 /

Well, I certainly will be, that’s for sure.

The writers of Bullz-Eye – and, by extension, Premium Hollywood – have never been afraid to throw their love behind television series that aren’t necessarily embraced by the general viewing public, and it’s no surprise that AMC’s “Breaking Bad” falls into that category. Certainly, it gets a great deal of love from the nation’s TV critics, but in fairness, it does have the sort of premise that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to mass consumption: a high school chemistry teacher with a pregnant wife and a teenage son with cerebral palsy is diagnosed with stage-three terminal lung cancer and, in order to provide for his family, decides to start making meth.

Bryan Cranston, previously known primarily for his work as Hal, the patriarch on “Malcolm in the Middle,” took the role of Walter White – the aforementioned meth-maker – and ran with it. Indeed, we’re pretty sure that the only times he has stopped running since the premiere of “Breaking Bad” have been to accept his back-to-back Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

Although Cranston is the only member of the ensemble to win thus far, he’s not the only one to have been nominated. His co-star, Aaron Paul, pulled in his first nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2009 for his work as Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s partner in crime, and it would not surprise us in the least if 2010 found Anna Gunn in the running for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series. (Season 3 is, we have been reliably informed, somewhat Skyler-centric.)

Now, if you haven’t been following “Breaking Bad” but you’ve heard good things and have been wondering if there’s way you can possibly catch up in time to watch the premiere of Season 3 without feeling completely lost, you’re in luck: AMC has managed to successfully distill the first two seasons of the show into one reeeeeeeally intense six-minute video. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go back and watch Season 1 and Season 2 in their entirety when you have the chance, but this will definitely put you in a position to sit comfortably in front of the TV with the rest of us on Sunday night.

Now, as you may have seen elsewhere, Bullz-Eye was fortunate enough to visit the set of “Breaking Bad” in January, where we were provided with the opportunity to have lunch with series creator Vince Gilligan, then followed that up with dinner with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. And prior to that, the Winter 2010 TCA Tour provided me with several other “Breaking Bad” opportunities: a one-on-one with Aaron, followed by a chat with Bob Odenkirk, the “Mr. Show” alumnus who now plays the series’ resident attorney, the ever-slimy Saul Goodman, and then wrapped things up by (quietly) participating in a roundtable interview with Cranston, Paul, Gunn, and Odenkirk.

Yes, we realize that’s a lot of information to take in before the premiere, but at least you can’t say we don’t provide you with a great deal of preparatory material…including this sneak preview of what you can expect on Sunday night:

Season 3 of “Breaking Bad” premieres on Sunday, March 21, at 10 PM EST/PST.

(Be sure to meet back here after the season premiere – and every episode thereafter, for that matter – to check out our blog!)

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