After spending literally hundreds of hours sprawled out on my couch staring into a flickering box of lights over the past six months or so, it occurred to me that I needed to either spend some serious time re-evaluating my recent life choices—an activity that tends to lead to hours of hyperventilating into a lunch bag—or, at the very least, make some basic attempt at justifying my titanic slothfulness. With most television seasons having wrapped up, now is an opportune time to analyze their relative merits so that you—the goodly FFWD reader—may avoid a similarly torturous look at the wreckage of your life. I give you: Holistic Television Reviews, by Kyle Francis, a tool with which to guide your (hopefully legitimate) procurement of these fine pop cultural artifacts. Naturally, these reviews will probably contain some spoilers (though I'll attempt to write around them when I can). Up first:

Breaking Bad: Season 2

Because there's no way to say this without sounding like a complete wanker, I'll just get it out there straight off: Breaking Bad is a show that loves duality. Every person, place and noun-like thing in it has two distinct levels of interpretation. The protagonist, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), is a genius high school chemistry teacher who is also the biggest methamphetamine cook in New Mexico. His partner, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is a burnout loser with the heart of an artist. Walter's sister-in-law, Marie (Betsy Brandt), is an X-Ray technician/kleptomaniac. Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) is a criminal lawyer in the sense that he's equal parts of both. At one point, Walter's house twists into a grimy metaphor for his slowly-rotting life, and taken as a whole, the entirety of season two seems to be a thoughtful, complex statement about the unforeseen consequences of choosing a criminal lifestyle—of “breaking bad,” to use the southern-American slang from which the show takes its name.

Before I go any further with the critical laudations, it should be said that my gut-reaction to the end of season two was disappointment. The imagery that opened each episode—a scorched pink teddy being fished out of Walt's pool, men in hazmat suits zipping up body bags on his driveway—is shrugged off with the season's final twist after a cheap attempt to connect the “innocence lost” symbolism to Walt by dressing him up in a silly pink sweater to match the teddy. Still, what's most disappointing about the turn is probably its build up. Taken on its own, the plot event that scorches the teddy and puts the bodies in Walt's yard is a pretty creative way of showing the unpredictable side-effects of Walt's morally reprehensible decisions (in this case, letting someone choke to death on their own vomit because it was fiscally beneficial to do so). Even though the show has contained this theme right from its very first episode, Walt's new baby and the growing chasm between he and his wife Skylar (Anna Gunn) certainly presented a much richer, much darker place to take Walter than creator Vince Gilligan eventually did.

With that one obligatory complaint out of the way, let's move on to why Breaking Bad is, despite its flaws, still an astonishingly good show, and easily the best written drama currently on television. For one, it's because it has one of the most brilliantly conceived, wonderfully complex protagonists of any television show, ever, in Walter. In season one, after discovering that he's dying of lung cancer, Walter decides to use his considerable chemistry genius for well-intentioned evil, cooking and selling meth in order to support his family after his impending death. Though his original intention is to divorce himself from the selling business entirely (hence the partnership with Pinkman), it isn't long before Walter is knee deep in blood (literally and figuratively) and in desperate need of an alias to deflect attention from criminals as well as the DEA—the latter of which is represented by Walt's cleverer-than-he-looks brother-in-law, Hank.

For me, the most rewarding part of season two was watching the once very clear lines between Walter's mild-mannered chemistry teacher persona and his literally black-hatted “Heisenberg” persona grow blurrier and blurrier. In one memorable scene, after Walt discovers his cancer has gone into remission, taking his flimsy moral equivocations with it, he explodes, demolishing a bathroom hand-dryer with his fists. In the subsequent episode, Walter's friends and family throw him a party, where he manages to aggressively alienate everyone, nearly coming to blows with Hank and feeding his sixteen year old son enough tequila to make him vomit into their pool. When he apologizes to his wife for his behavior, he makes the excuse: “I don't know who that was, but it wasn't me.”

"Aha," say the fans, shrewdly. "We know exactly who it was."

Still, for as good as season two gets, there's nothing to top the incredibly tragi-comic moment from season one where Jesse and Hank clean up the half-melted remains of a murdered drug dealer from Jesse's floor while a past version of Walter attempts to determine the exact chemical composition of the human body--when they can't determine what the last 0.5% is, the grad student he's talking to asks "well, what about the soul?," to which Walt replies "There's only chemistry here." Here's the surprisingly hilarious set-up:

In fact, season two is played much more for straight drama than season one as a whole, with very little approaching a dead-pan one liner like Walt's "so there's that," in the above scene. That isn't to say the (horrendously dark) comedy aspect of the show has been entirely done away with, though. About half way through, we meet Bob Odenkirk's Saul Goodman through his sublimely cheesy television advertisements:

Of course, when we do meet Saul in person, we see that for all of his cornball affectations, he's actually very, very good at his job. After discovering Walt's secret identity, he starts dispensing extremely blunt criminal advice with regards to prison shankings and money laundering, as well as equipping Walt and Jesse with some not-inconsiderable resources in the form of the thugs, cleaners and professional fall-guys he represents (all for a small, nominal fee, naturally). Sitting in his incredibly ostentatious office, complete with enormous marble carving of vaguely-litigious Latin words and darkwood desk, Saul is the devil in a cheap suit and Walt knows it. He accepts the serpent's help as part of the (moral and fiscal) cost of doing business, which makes sense on a plot-level, but Saul's introduction is a very clever turn for reasons more than mere comic relief. If the contemporary satanic iconography didn't make it obvious enough, Saul represents a huge escalation in Walt's criminal enterprise, yet another indication that Heisenberg is the one really running the show. If nothing else, he proves that Gilligan and Co. aren't afraid to keep the plot barreling forward even if, as the season's closing moments indicate, that way lies destruction.
And here, because I couldn't think of a way to work it into the text, is a funny mariachi music video that was used to establish the ever-present threat of the Mexican drug cartel for Walt and Jesse: