We're two episodes into the second season of Breaking Bad and for the sake of ease/catching up, I'm going to combine these into one super review. For those of you just looking for the headline, its this: you should drop what you're doing right now and catch up with Breaking Bad. As far as I'm concerned, it ranks with Mad Men and Lost in the upper echelon of current television.
For those who are unaware, the show focuses on Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher whose shitty life gets even shittier when he finds out he has lung cancer. Faced with a growing pile of medical bills and the dire financial situation of his family after he dies, Walter decides to put his chemistry skills to use...by cooking crystal meth. The premise most immediately reminds one of Weeds, but that's where the similarities end. In a way, the difference in the shows reflects the difference in the drug they deal with. Weeds is a goofy, winning show that deals with humor and satire (at least until things went off the rails a little in the third season). Breaking Bad is bleak and desperate; crystal meth does indeed destroy lives.
The second season of Breaking Bad starts with the arresting image of a stuffed animal that's been kind of blown up and charred floating in a pool. Its detached eye floats towards the pool trap. We don't come back to that image (I imagine we won't get there until the finale) but it was definitely a stunner. From there, we go back to the closing moments of season one, as Walt and Jesse's new drug dealing partner, Tuco, pounds away on an underling. Walt and Jesse then run off to their car where Walter does some quick math, realizing that he needs to do 11 more deals to get the money his family needs. 11 weeks. That should be doable, right?
Of course, things don't go according to plan when Tuco stops Walt and Jesse from escaping. That underling? He's dead, despite Tuco's insistence that Walt use his science skills to save him. Now, suddenly, Walt and Jesse are loose ends that Tuco may need to tie up, leaving them to spend the rest of the episode in a paranoid stupor. Its Jesse who first suggests that they kill Tuco before he kills them, in a fantastic scene where Walt picks apart the flaws in Jesse's plan to shoot first and hope for the best. However, once Walt realizes he's being followed too, he comes around and decides, once again, to fight Tuco with science. The plan is to lace some meth with ricin, which will poison Tuco but allow them to escape suspicion.
Meanwhile, Skyler's barely hanging on, as she shows in a scene where Hank comes and tries to get her to bury the hatchet with Marie. Instead, Skyler explodes, in what may have been her best scene of the show. The weight of Walt and Walt Jr.'s distant and mysterious behavior is taking its toll on her.
All of this comes to a head in the first episode's bang-up final moments, where Hank shows Walter the body of Gonzo, Tuco's other lackey, at the junkyard. Walt and Jesse assume that means Tuco's decided to kill everyone and that means its time to go. Walt rushes home with the gun, but just as he's getting ready to tell Skyler everything, Jesse pulls up into his driveway, with Tuco in the backseat holding a gun to his head.
But Tuco didn't kill Gonzo and, in the second episode, we find out that Hank and the DEA are kind of closing in on him. Left with no options, Tuco kidnaps Walt and Jesse to whisk them away to Mexico. Well, Walt anyway. Jesse's expendable and Tuco gets ready to kill him when Walt sweeps in and saves the day.
Meanwhile, with Walt missing, Skyler somewhat patches things up with Marie and distributes missing person flyers around the neighborhood. She's also brought in Hank and a friend of Hank's from the police to help. All in all, this subplot kind of distracted from the awesome of Walt's story (which we'll get back to in a moment), but it let Hank, Skyler et. al. learn that Walt has a second cell phone. It also put Hank on the trail of Jesse and his Monte Carlo.
But, back to the desert, where Tuco and his hostages are holed up with Tuco's sick uncle. Jesse and Walt try and fail to give Tuco the poisoned meth (which seems like it would have been too subtle to work fast enough for them) and time is running out before Tuco's cousins come and sweep them all away to Mexico. Fortunately, opportunity presents itself when Tuco makes lunch for everyone. Walt and Jesse get a chance to slip the poisoned meth into Tuco's burrito, but his uncle sees them do it. This set up the second most awesome scene, where Tuco's uncle successfully gets the poisoned burrito away from Tuco and off the table.
If that scene was tense, it was nothing compared to the one where he tried to warn Tuco of what his hostages had just attempted. The bell that he used to communicate was an especially Hitchcockian touch and it made the scene so much more suspenseful. It was an absolutely brilliant touch and it really drew out Tuco's interrogation/realization. Once he put all the dots together, Jesse went back to plan one - bum rush Tuco. But not before Walter got in one of his finest lines to date: "we tried to poison you because you are an insane, degenerate piece of filth, and you deserve to die."
That led to the first big fight, where Jesse got the better of his captor and ended up busting him one in the gut. But before they could get away, they heard a car coming. But that car did not bring Tuco's cousins, as expected, but instead Hank. He and Tuco got into a massive firefight that ended with Hank killing Tuco.
So after two episodes, Hank and Jesse are stranded in the desert, once again without someone to sell to. Meanwhile, Hank now knows that Walt has a mysterious second cell phone and Jesse was cavorting with Albuquerque's number one meth dealer. This season's definitely humming along and I am totally hooked.
Seven Thirty Seven - A
Grilled - A-
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