Better Call Saul (AMC Series/Breaking Bad Spinoff) (1 Viewer)

jbutler said:
these first two episodes made me get a real hankering for BB, so since i had already revisited s02e08 for saul's first apperance, i just kept going from there and man, i am loving my fourth watch of the series.

hard to believe that - at least according to my memory - that it only gets better (at least through the end of the fourth season). also hard to believe that i'm still noticing new things even this fourth time through.
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because it is the greatest show in the history of tv.
 
Chicken Rob said:
because it is the greatest show in the history of tv.
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WRONG

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I know I sound like a broken record, but the Wire year that is about the schools is a significant enough drop to keep it from the #1 slot. I would go so far as to drop it out of my top 3, maybe even out of my top 5, but definitely top 10. I expect it to drop further with Better Call Saul being a reality now! (back on topic)
 
Chicken Rob said:
I know I sound like a broken record, but the Wire year that is about the schools is a significant enough drop to keep it from the #1 slot. I would go so far as to drop it out of my top 3, maybe even out of my top 5, but definitely top 10. I expect it to drop further with Better Call Saul being a reality now! (back on topic)
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i don't see how the school season of the wire can cause it to fall so far, but the final episode of breaking bad doesn't poison that season enough to do some damage to BB's place. the bad taste i have in my mouth from the final ep of BB only grows more bitter as i rewatch the stellar build-up.
 
I thought the final episode of BB was pretty good. Sure, it felt a little rushed, and it wasn't a perfect ending, but Walt was never about being perfect. He simply was trying to teach and take care of his family. In the end, his teaching led his student to create an even better meth and his family was taken care of. What more would you want?
 
Poker Zombie said:
I thought the final episode of BB was pretty good. Sure, it felt a little rushed, and it wasn't a perfect ending, but Walt was never about being perfect. He simply was trying to teach and take care of his family. In the end, his teaching led his student to create an even better meth and his family was taken care of. What more would you want?
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i thought it was a complete break from the reality created within the show. i wrote a longish post on CT about it when it first aired (for anyone who hasn't finished BB, spoiler galore below obv):

jbutler16 on CT said:
alright i rewatched the finale tonight. i've been thinking about it quite a bit, too, and a lot of it really is not sitting too well with me. i've read so many gushing, laudatory reviews, but i just don't think the finale fits with the five seasons that came before.

my primary issue with the show is one of theme. as anyone who has read anything about the show has heard, the intention was to take the character of walter white and "turn mr. chips into scarface". gilligan also talked constantly about how the show had a moral center and how walt was going to get his comeuppance.

the finale abandons the scarface endgame and allows walt too much success and self-respect. it shows him with newfound perspective on his motivations and a willingness to subvert the most selfish motivations in order to succeed in his latest goal of enriching his family and giving them a chance to live free of prosecution. he also succeeds in retaliation against the nazis and is allowed a death that keeps alive the myth of walter white which would have been eviscerated had he been led into the DEA in handcuffs at the end of ozymandias.

my secondary issue is one of execution (with a bit of a thematic problem as well). throughout the entire series walt has shown himself over and again to be a second rate gus fring. he succeeds in some things, but he's primarily forced to live and die by his improvisation. his improvisation is often quite good, but nevertheless, his plans often blow up in his face and he's forced to take two steps back before moving forward.

in the finale, literally every single thing went his way. from the time the keys fell from the visor he could do no wrong. i'm more than willing to give dramatic license to television and movies and certainly breaking bad has used that license previously, but not so consistently as a way of favoring the protagonists. gilligan himself even acknowledged on a recent podcast, it's a rule of drama that serendipity is well-used when it gets characters into trouble, but it is much too often exploited when used to get characters out of trouble.

here, all the coincidences favor walt and/or the desired dramatic conclusion of the show:

- volvo keys fall into his lap
- volvo required no ice-scraping/heating, etc.
- badger/skinny pete are expert laser pen marksmen (forget the fact he's even able to locate both of them)
- elliot and gretchen stand perfectly right in front of the window so they can get lasered
- walt slips past the DEA/FBI/APD watching his skyler's house
- walt successfully plants the ricin in the stevia
- lydia sits at the table where walt plants the stevia
- todd agrees for walt to come to the nazi compound
- the nazis look in the car but not the trunk when he enters
- the nazis allow him to park perfectly so as to aim him M-60 precisely at the right angle and level
- all the nazis die except jack and todd die straight away and he and jesse are allowed to personally kill the ones who the audience most want to see die
- walt falls to his death precisely before the police swarm the place so that he can die without the indignity of cuffs and perp walk

one or two of these, okay. all of them, i almost feel like i was trolled. overall, the episode was just too "clean". everything was tied up with a bow. that's just not how the series has been until now. even the nazis' deaths were too easy thematically. every other "villain" has been complex and nuanced. there was no drama in the nazis death because nazis are some of the easiest go-to villains of all time. who cares if nazis die? no one. contrast that to tuco's or gus' deaths. sure, we were glad to see walt prevail in those instances, but the characters deaths had weight because we gave a damn about the characters themselves.

i wanted to see walt get his true comeuppance which simply could not be accomplished by allowing him to die in a blaze of glory fashion. he got what he wanted: his family is very likely to see the money he left with elliot and gretchen; skyler (at least in the fictional world of breaking bad) is likely to be able to parlay hank's and gomie's bodies into some type of favorable treatment; and he was able to go out knowing that his endeavors weren't "for nothing" as he often worried. frankly, i think ozymandias should have ended the series but with the nazis executing both walt and jesse in the desert.

the finale didn't undermine the series for me, but it was a letdown.
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jbutler said:
i don't see how the school season of the wire can cause it to fall so far, but the final episode of breaking bad doesn't poison that season enough to do some damage to BB's place. the bad taste i have in my mouth from the final ep of BB only grows more bitter as i rewatch the stellar build-up.
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It's probably because they handled the actual issues in the school season so poorly from the perspective of someone in my position in the industry. I cringed severely in almost every episode. Often screaming at the TV. They kind of got a lot of things wrong in a very distracting way for me.

I agree with breaking bad's finale fail, but since every single other episode is so strong, I accept the cartoon ending. I would have preferred they all die in the desert except Jesse, who lives life enslaved. Much darker ending. America would not have stood for it.
 
Chicken Rob said:
America would not have stood for it.
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which would have been exactly the point after gilligan spent the previous five years talking all kinds of shit about how he crafted the structure of the show specifically to subvert the expectations of the audience. then the show gets massive in the last season (or two) and he completely caves and makes the most insincere, false happily-ever-after pap, guaranteed to satisfy the johnny-come-lately hipster fans. i cringe just remembering it now.
 
Chicken Rob said:
It's probably because they handled the actual issues in the school season so poorly from the perspective of someone in my position in the industry. I cringed severely in almost every episode. Often screaming at the TV. They kind of got a lot of things wrong in a very distracting way for me.

I agree with breaking bad's finale fail, but since every single other episode is so strong, I accept the cartoon ending. I would have preferred they all die in the desert except Jesse, who lives life enslaved. Much darker ending. America would not have stood for it.
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Do you work in the city of Baltimore in the public school system?
 
BB's ending was certainly a little rushed but I did get a whole lot of satisfaction seeing that creepy 'Opie dead-eyed piece of shit' Todd get his due at the hands of Jessie.
 
daschuck77 said:
BB's ending was certainly a little rushed but I did get a whole lot of satisfaction seeing that creepy 'Opie dead-eyed piece of shit' Todd get his due at the hands of Jessie.
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that's one element of the story i had no real quarrel with because despite his flaws, jesse was always the pure-hearted character and it makes sense that he would have some semblance of a rally (even if, like chicken, i pictured him ultimately getting the short end of it by the end of the episode).
 
The one thing I didn't really get during the final episode of BB was Jesse's blissful woodworking dream scene (the only dream scene of the entire series) with the snap cut back to his current condition. Is it a hint at his actual future, or a reminder that the storybook ending could never exist for him? I think it's the latter.

After he kills Todd and drives off into the night he has a crazed animalistic look in his eyes, like that was the event that pushed him over the edge. Considering Jesse's personality, having nobody at all left in his life, can he really get over all this in the near future and become Alaska's finest carpenter?
 
BB and other spoilers below. Though if you haven't read Shakespeare by now, you probably weren't about to...

Even Shakespearean tragedies end with a glimmer of happiness. The protagonist (Walt, Hamlet, Romeo, Othello etc) eventually winds up in a place where there can be no out. They vanquish their foes (not possible if the Nazi's live, or the blue meth continues to flow), but their final stance against their foes lead up to their own death - except Othello of course, because when he is about to be "perp walked" he manages to die just in time... just like Walt.

Could the whole thing have been rolled into 3-4 episodes? Maybe. I would have liked to see Walt get the ricin and put it into the packet. Finding Badger and Skinny Pete. Then everything else that made the final episode work out, even though there would have been the usual 2 steps forward and 2 steps back for Walt as he tried to bring things to a conclusion. This would have dragged out the ending more than it should have though. Perhaps if it was a 2 hour finale, they could have made feel less rushed, but just like Shakespeare, BB ends in a pile of dead bodies.

A truly "American" or "Hollywood" ending would have put Walt driving away just before the police arrive, and that would have sucked. Instead, what we got was Walt like King Lear was eventually overwhelmed by all that he has gone through, and he dies.

Slow clap for BB.
 
Poker Zombie said:
BB and other spoilers below. Though if you haven't read Shakespeare by now, you probably weren't about to...

Even Shakespearean tragedies end with a glimmer of happiness. The protagonist (Walt, Hamlet, Romeo, Othello etc) eventually winds up in a place where there can be no out. They vanquish their foes (not possible if the Nazi's live, or the blue meth continues to flow), but their final stance against their foes lead up to their own death - except Othello of course, because when he is about to be "perp walked" he manages to die just in time... just like Walt.

Could the whole thing have been rolled into 3-4 episodes? Maybe. I would have liked to see Walt get the ricin and put it into the packet. Finding Badger and Skinny Pete. Then everything else that made the final episode work out, even though there would have been the usual 2 steps forward and 2 steps back for Walt as he tried to bring things to a conclusion. This would have dragged out the ending more than it should have though. Perhaps if it was a 2 hour finale, they could have made feel less rushed, but just like Shakespeare, BB ends in a pile of dead bodies.

A truly "American" or "Hollywood" ending would have put Walt driving away just before the police arrive, and that would have sucked. Instead, what we got was Walt like King Lear was eventually overwhelmed by all that he has gone through, and he dies.

Slow clap for BB.
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you're missing my point. the problem is not with the screenwriting structure - obviously no one wants to watch a minute-by-minute breakdown of how this or that thing happened - but with the lack of faithfulness to the show's tone and trajectory. i agree that theoretically, yes, those things could have all been done.

however, that is precisely the problem. this is how walt approaches everything - with a scientist's precision and faith that his theories can be put into practice in the real world if he can only control for all the contingencies. except we've seen through four seasons how every single time he's smugly figured things out on paper, they blow up in his face when he tries to actually do what he worked out in theory. he fails. yet, in this last episode, literally everything he attempts works perfectly to accomplish his most important goals. in doing so, the show completely betrays the themes that have been massaged so gracefully for the entire five-season run until that point.

you say that walt winds up with no out, but that's not correct. he had to go runner-runner-runner-runner-runner. in previous seasons, he would have set the deck only to see the machine jam and a new deck produced for the hand. but in this final episode, his set deck was dealt just as he designed and he binked it.

he wanted to provide for his family and he did that. he honestly did not care if he died, so that he did is of no consequence. what's more, even the direction and editing of the show clearly intended to communicate that his was a hero's death. gilligan said over and over that the show was intended to force viewers to follow a man who turned bad and confront their continuing sympathy for someone who hurts others for his own selfishness. how does he do that in the finale? by having walt kill nazis? no audience member cares. they are forced to confront nothing. they get to see walt go out in a blaze of glory and see him die knowing that all the convoluted machinations he put in place over the previous days will work out perfectly. it was a joke of a finale and a sell out of the faithful audience who believed gilligan would have the balls to follow through.
 
Watched all 3 episodes tonite. Loving this show. Great characters as usual and looking forward to the ride!
 
I'll hold off on any spoilers for now but enjoyed last night's episode. Finally starting to see the quick-witted survivor scam artist at work! And the moronic Kettlemans crack me up.
 
i haven't watched last night's episode yet, but my only complaint thus far is that they haven't played the theme song in its entirety.

by one of my favorite contemporary country singers and guitarists, junior brown:

 
I thought I saw it somewhere a week ago or so.... maybe it aired after an episode? Just like an MTV video, the dude and his guitar, jamming away.
 
BGinGA said:
I thought I saw it somewhere a week ago or so.... maybe it aired after an episode? Just like an MTV video, the dude and his guitar, jamming away.
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it might have been used as an outro to an episode or something. i stop the playback as soon as the "next week on..." clip is over.
 
Great show. Been a BB fan since day one. For some reason after watching latest show I called the number on the billboard...1-505-842-5662...kinda sounds like Mrs.Doubtfire...
 
Just caught the latest episode on our DVR, hilarious, still loving the show.
 
So lame, counselor. Don't be ripping off my patented humor, it puts you on the road to Saulsville!

jbutler said:
e-cards available on the website. can't believe they made one for courage.

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courage said:
So lame, counselor. Don't be ripping off my patented humor, it puts you on the road to Saulsville!
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i was chatting with a guy who does a lot of criminal defense and he had a good line: "i like the show, but i just don't want it to become a how to. i spent a lot of years figuring this out."
 
Holy crap I just started episode one. Hilarious courtroom defense.

I haven't read this thread (for spoilers obvs) but in case it hasn't been mentioned, all episodes posted in great quality on amctv.com for a limited time depending on when the episode was released. 2 more weeks for ep 1 as of this writing.
 
surprised to see now one weigh in yet on monday's episode. maybe the best - certainly the second best at least - of the series so far. i'll call it now that jonathan banks will win an emmy this year for that episode. if someone wants to lay me 4:1 i'd bet it and i'd bet even money that he's nominated. wouldn't be surprised to see other nominations for the episode either. it was very, very nearly perfect.
 

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