One Last Time (We Promise) With Breaking Bad

For the past six years, Walter White has reigned as the king of television on top of his empire of meth. As of last Sunday, the king is officially dead. Whether I mean that figuratively or narratively will be revealed later (I’ll warn you when the spoilers show up), but by any definition, America’s love affair with Breaking Badhas officially reached an end point with the series finale.

No, I'm not tearing up. There's just so much smoke in here suddenly.

But I come not to bury Walter White, but to praise him. And his wife Skyler, son Walt Jr., brother in law and DEA agent Hank, and the myriad of other Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns that made up the show that has been called the best television show ever. Despite a decidedly unglamorous setting (meth labs among unattractive downtrodden people in Albuquerque, New Mexico) and a cast of people who seemed, you know, real and not like caricatures, somehow this taut, tense little show found a way to worm itself into our collective bloodstreams and leave us just as addicted as the wasteabouts we were watching each week.

Through preternaturally solid and consistent writing, precision directing that would make German auto engineers jealous and award-winning acting, Breaking Badlet us see a story that started off utterly sympathetic and turned horrific. The basic premise, that sad-sack high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns that he has terminal cancer and so decides to cook meth with a former student to raise the easy money he needs to ensure his family’s survival after he’s dead, is well known, even for those who haven’t watched the show. What was fascinating though was how much the characters that we initially believed would be the victims, like wife Skyler, turned out to be just as morally ambiguous as the character we started off with. The cheap and easy classification of this show is that it is another in a long line of anti-heroes that we love despite knowing that we shouldn’t. What made Breaking Bad different, though, was that at his core, Walter was never an anti-hero; he was a villain, right from the start. We just didn’t notice it until we, like the rest of Walter’s family and associates, were so deeply enmeshed in the chaos that we couldn’t turn away from him.

In retrospect, we all probably should have seen the writing on the wall.

It’s a testament to how well Breaking Bad did things that the episode that sounds the most dull on paper, Season 3’s “Fly” which followed Walt and Jesse through one long, interminable night stuck in their underground meth lab and unable to leave because of a delicate chemical process all the while being tormented by a single fly that’s managed to find its way into the otherwise perfectly sealed lab, seem interesting and tense. Because no one just talked about the weather in this show and every line of dialogue could be interpreted multiple ways, we as the audience sat through 45 minutes of two men chasing a fly around a lab and couldn’t stop watching because we knew that what was really going on was that Walt was carrying a secret that he couldn’t tell Jessie – namely that the previous season, he was in a position to save Jessie’s girlfriend from dying and actively chose not to, mostly to keep Jessie loyal to him. The continual ratcheting up of tension and dread, which started with a terminal cancer diagnosis for a man who just turned 50 and who’s wife is seven months pregnant, meant that learning that your life is about to end ends up seeming like light-hearted fun by season five.

And so we watched Walter build up his empire, all under the nom de plume of “Heisenberg”, the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll. Before long, it becomes clear that Walter has long since stopped making meth, and in the process becoming one of the most powerful drug lords in the southwest, just because he wants money for his family – he’s doing it because it’s the only way to get the respect and the fear that he’s long craved and never been able to claim as a low-paid, disrespected high school teacher. In the fifth season, Skyler, who has long since showed her true colors by helping Walt launder the massive piles of money that he’s acquired, brings Walter to a storage facility that she’s been forced to rent just to house the mound of money, well into the millions of dollars. “How much is enough?” she asks him. “How big does this pile have to be?”

Thus marking the first time in history a wife ever got angry with her husband for making too much money.

Walter agrees to retire, but not happily. We’re led to believe that Walter is corrupted by his experience, turning more ruthless as he amasses power, but in reality Walter was really just becoming what he always was inside. Walter White was the persona – Heisenberg was the reality. Meanwhile, just as he is out for good, his DEA agent brother-in-law finally makes the connection that the meth empire he’s been hunting for the last two years is being run by none other than his own family member, setting into motion a blitzkrieg of final episodes that bring us to the end of our story.

Spoiler-phobes, skip the next paragraph. I go back to spoiler-free mode after it.

With all this drama, then, it was odd that the series finale chose to go the way of safe television, an unconventional choice for a show that was so bound up in allowing the worst of all possible things happen to its characters. There was no ambiguous Sopranos-style ending here. As such, the episode felt like a victory lap, to use the phrase of my friend who watched it with me. The episode was almost fan-service, showing Walt outsmart everyone that he had to confront and even resorting to an almost Robert Rodriguez-level of ridiculousness involving a hidden machine gun in the trunk of a car. In the end, Walter’s family is ruined – his son hates him, his wife is broken an unemployable due to her association with him and has moved herself and her kids into a dingy basement apartment. The various drug dealers and kingpins are all dealt with, most of whom are killed outright. And in the end, we’re down to Walter and Jessie, the two who started this whole mess, staring each other down and the audience wondering which one is going to kill the other. Walt, knowing that his cancer has returned for good and that there is no survival for him now that his crimes have become public knowledge tries to manipulate Jessie one last time into killing him. Jessie, for once, is able to resist, telling Walt that if he wants to die so badly, he should kill himself and then tearing off into the night in a stolen car, weeping and broken but finally free. Walt however, unbeknownst to Jessie, has already been fatally wounded in the epic shootout that occurred moments before and makes his way over to the meth lab, appreciating the setup that produced the purest form of meth and was his signature contribution to the world. Walt collapses to the ground, dying as we always assumed he would – in his lab, just as the police finally arrive to arrest him for good, thus allowing the Scarface that we knew we shouldn’t like something like a final getaway. And a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.

"I love you, meth bin. Never leave me."

And maybe it was because the final episode, while powerful and as satisfying as an ending to a beloved show can be, never really hit the high emotional stakes that I wanted to, but for me, the true finale was “Ozymandias”, the episode airing three weeks ago when Walt’s vast criminal empire finally comes truly tumbling down at the same time as several major characters are killed in the desert.  At the moment when Walter White finally allowed himself to rip off the mask and become the monster, the show utterly proved how fearless and rare it was. There have been “the best television show”s before and there will be “the best television show”s again. But here’s one that deserves its moniker, regardless of how monstrous or good the characters were. 

Broadchurch will break you

So, I kind of don't know where to begin with this. Broadchurch, y'all. Easily the best eight hours of television I've seen in a while.

For those of you not on top of your BBC America summer re-airing game, Broadchurch is a self-contained series about the murder of a young boy in the small seaside town of Broadchurch, England. I was initially a little hesitant because, although it stars David Tennant's native Scottish accent* as a world-weary police investigator, it also features the death of an 11-year-old kid. As the stepmom of an 11-year-old kid, I was ... wary.

But dear Lord am I glad I tuned in. (WARNING: ALL OF THE SPOILERS AHEAD!)


First things first: The acting in Broadchurch is astounding. David Tennant -- known and loved by everyone as the Tenth Doctor -- here just vanishes into his role as a detective fresh off a failure of a child-murder case, who's so mentally destroyed by that last case that he's become dangerously physically ill. He's standoffish, brusque, rude, and dismissive (and not in the lovable Doctor way); but through all of it he communicates how deeply he cares not only about finding the truth, but also about providing what healing he can to the family members who have to struggle through the aftermath. His performance is breathtaking. I didn't for a minute see Doctor Who, or even really (after the first few minutes) David Tennant; he's entirely Alec Hardy, and Broadchurch is worth the viewing for his performance alone. But David Tennant isn't the only reason to watch. His partner Ellie Miller is played by Olivia Colman, who I'd never heard of before but who was also marvelous. So much of the emotional resonance of the final episode (and by extension the impact of the series as a whole) rests on her reaction to the reveal of the killer, and she nailed it. From disbelief and shock to disgust and rage and absolute heartbreak, we saw it all break across her face. And all the secondary players are similarly wonderful -- in particular Andrew Buchan, who plays Danny's father with a painfully believable mix of feeling trapped in his small-town life and destroyed by Danny's death. He's overcome by, alternately, rage and despair, and I totally bought both, even though his performance is for the most part quiet and contained.

Broadchurch has been compared to The Killing -- in essence it's the same set-up, with an entire season focused on the murder of a single child and the efforts to solve the crime. But where The Killing devolved into grief porn and a red-herring jamboree, Broadchurch manages to investigate each of the suspects and discard them, one by one, without feeling manipulative as each new suspect is thrust forward. There's a kind of humanity in the investigations, even as the town, in its desperation to blame someone for Danny's death, tears apart one suspect (played by David Bradley, in whom you will see nary a hint of Filch or Frey and who will make you weep). The town's reaction is believable, if not particularly forgivable, and as each suspect is examined, you believe that he could have done it.

In the end, the killer (SPOILER, SERIOUSLY) is Joe, Ellie's husband and the father of Danny's best friend. It isn't a case of garden-variety child molestation, not quite; Joe claims to have been in love with the 11-year-old Danny and killed him in a panic that Danny was going to stop spending time with him and tell someone where he had been sneaking off to. Joe hadn't been a suspect, more a quiet presence in the background managing their lives while his wife investigated the crime he committed. In the end, the horror of his act overcame him, he turned himself in, and Ellie's world fell apart.

The TV critics I read all warned me that Broadchurch would shatter me. And they were not wrong.


*Fox, in its infinite wisdom, is remaking Broadchurch and setting it in small-town USA. Playing Alec Hardy will be ... David Tennant with an American accent. The Beebs has also commissioned Season Two of Broadchurch for the UK, although it's not yet settled whether Tennant, Colman, or both will be back for round two. Regardless, I'll be watching.

The Henriad

It should come to no surprise to my fellow erudite TV Sluts that the folks across the pond are adept at creating one hell of a Shakespeare adaptation.  After all, THEY INVENTED SHAKESPEARE. It should also come as no surprise to any Anglophiles that Ben Whishaw is adorable and an amazingly talented actor. Anyone who has seen him in The Hour or Bright Star knows what a mad gifted artist he is.

Usurping my crown is, like, way not cool, bro.

But did you also know that Tom Hiddleston (aka our favorite comic villain, Loki)  is also hot and is playing Prince Hal in the BBC adaptation of The Henriad, entitled The Hollow Crown, airing in the U.S. on most PBS stations? That is a true fact that I just said. 

Drinking and whoring? Yeah, I can handle that. 

Yes, the Brits have gone and done it again. If you're feeling like you need a brush-up on your Willie Shakes, and you weren't able to make it up to the Stratford Festival in Ontario this year, take heart. The BBC adaptation is, SHOCKINGLY, very good. I have borne witness to so much bad Shakespeare in my life, that it does me little heart good to see it done well. Last night, PBS aired the oft-forgotten Richard II. True, it doesn't have the name-recognition and cache of the more popular and commonly performed plays, but it has a driving plot and some damn good soliloquies. We all know that performing Shakespeare is the litmus test of an English-speaking actor, and I was pleased with the Richard II cast. Shakespeare really is one of those cases where the actors' job basically is to get out of the way of the language. In this production, the cast performs with such honesty and the language percolates off the actors' tongues with crystal clarity, which just makes the whole production that much more compelling. 

The plot of Richard II is thus:  Richard II (Whishaw) was the last Plantagenet king of England. ("What's a Plantagenet," you ask? Go back to school!). He is replaced by the first Lancaster king, Henry Bolingbroke/Henry IV (Rory Kinnear). Richard is a young and ambitious king, but he's very wasteful and he spends too much time on buying useless crap from Italy. He also doesn't choose his counselors very well, which seems to have been a common thread among European royals. Richard starts renting out parcels of land to wealthy noblemen to raise money to fund his wars against Ireland. (That England. Always picking on the Irish.) He also seizes the land of his well-respected uncle, John of Gaunt (FUCKING PATRICK STEWART), after John of Gaunt dies.

But wait! There's more! Richard has a cousin named Henry Bolingbroke, who was John of Gaunt's son, and he is PISSED. Not only did Richard seize his land, but he had also exiled Henry six years earlier. 

You were in Skyfall? No way. Me, too.

Richard leaves England to fight a war in Ireland. (Again. WTF. Stop with the Ireland invading already.) While he's gone, Henry assembles an army and invades England. Richard's allies all desert him in his absence, and he returns to England. Henry takes him prisoner and ensconces him in a castle in Pomfret, where he languishes until a plot against Henry unfolds. An assassin takes it upon himself to murder Richard. Henry now feels like he has blood on his hands and jaunts off to Jerusalem to absolve himself of sin. Because that'll help.

I guess that didn't go well.

The only thing that bugged me about this production was, at the end, Richard's body is dragged into Henry's throne room (which is apparently where he sits all day...yawn). The scene pans up from two men standing over Richard's diapered dead body, to a sculpture of Christ and two disciples that is hanging from the ceiling. I was like, come on. COME ON. Come, on really? It's not that I found that offensive in a religious way (since I'm pretty much a heathen). I simply found it heavy-handed from an artistic standpoint. Richard II was murdered by political enemies, but martyred? Really? CAMMAHHHN.

The next installment of The Hollow Crown is Henry IV Part I, with Jeremy Irons as the much older Henry IV and Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal. Michelle Dockery is apparently taking a break from being all weepy over Matthew to make an appearance as Lady Percy. 

I may be too sexy for this crown.

The Hollow Crown is airing on PBS as part of Great Performances. You can watch it online  or check your local PBS listings for air dates and times. 

Is this why I had a dream that I was Rosalind in As You Like It last night? Imma gonna go with yes