Breaking Bad 1.01 - Breaking Bad
Jan. 2nd, 2011 06:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roginI'm so obsessed with this show at the moment that I decided that I'll use the squee of the moment and do episode by episode reviews for it while I still feel that passionate.
Almost no one on my flist seems to watch it so it'll be a little bit of preaching into the dessert I expect, but I really love it, it induces a lot of thinky thoughts and I think I might want to come back to these entries some day.
Structure-wise I'm going to divide my reviews into three sections, one for the general review that contains only spoilers up to the episode, a section about the chemistry in each episode and a section that reviews the episode in context of the whole series so far, marked so that it's hopefully not hard to avoid spoilers.
In case this for some reason peaked your interest but you have never heard of BB go to my list of 11 reasons why you should watch Breaking Bad.
So on to the review of the pilot episode.
The first ep is a pilot and while it already is very good, it has some of your standard pilot quirks. The characters are a bit over their usual top, to introduce them quickly to the viewer and there's lot of fast developing action. Needless to say that the show gets better when it takes more time to develop its plot and gives the characters room for nuance. That's not to say it's not amazing though.
We get thrown directly into the action. Pants are falling from the sky and an RV is speeding through the dessert until it crashes and an obviously scared middle aged man in his underwear jumps out of it and explains to the sound of police sirens approaching that he did it all for his family. Meet Walter White.
As Walter stands their in his underpants pointing a gun at the empty road, the very picture of desperation, we cut back to a few weeks earlier to see how he ended up in that position.
He's a fifty year old chemistry teacher, a family man. He seems mild mannered, a little nerdy and maybe a bit boring. His life sure as hell doesn't inspire envy. He spends his days teaching apathetic students and works a second job at a car wash, where his students make fun of him. He can't sleep, money is tight, his teenage son is handicapped and his wife Skyler pregnant with another baby while not working herself as it looks like.
We witness how Walter is pushed around by his boss at the carwash and then comes home to his birthday surprise party where his macho brother in law Hank focuses all the attention on himself and his exploits as a DEA agent. The day ends with him getting a rather loveless handjob from Skyler. Walter's life is sad. Ultimately it's not horrible, Walter has a job a family who loves him (even if they walk all over him), but he's simply unable to stand up for himself. He's a showcase for someone who's afraid to take risks, who has let his life pass him by. He missed out on academic success and he clearly hasn't exactly lived much in exchange.
The next day Walter breaks down at his job at the car wash and gets rushed to the hospital, more worried about the bill for the trip than his health. It turns out he has lung cancer, stage three, the doctor tells him, inoperable, nothing they can do except prolong his life with expensive chemo.
This scene, where Walter focuses completely on a spot of mustard on the doctors coat is already a pretty amazing display of Bryan Cranston's mad acting skills. The whole thing is so bleak, so quiet and so insane at the same time. Walter is not an extroverted person, he can't cry or yell, he just shuts down, the news slowly sinking in. He'll die.
And somehow that is what it took to finally wake him up (he describes his state as awake later in the episode when Jesse asks him, why he's going dark side all of the sudden). He doesn't tell his family about the cancer but he can't go on as he was either, so in a fury he quits his job at the car wash. He picks up Hank on his offer to ride along to another meth lab bust. As he's waiting in the car he watches the meth cook flee the scene and recognizes him as a former pupil. Meet Jesse Pinkman.
Walt drives to the house Jesse's aunt left him and proposes (or rather blackmails Jesse) to cook crystal meth together. This first real dialogue between them already displays the comedic and dramatic potential those two characters have. Walt with his extensive vocabulary and scientific approach totally clashes with Jesse's woudbe (or actual) gangsterdom. Jesse always calls Walter either names or Mr. White (the later more often when he's distressed).
Their weird teacher/student relationship is ultimately what carries the show.
Walter is starting to change massively, he's had it with backing down, almost developing a whole new persona. He and Skyler go shopping for clothing with their son and some beefy teenager make fun of his son's handicap. Walt quietly leaves the store through the back and then burst in through the front kicking down one of them and stomping on his leg. He's so cold and furious the three guys flee the store.
It's like now that he has nothing to loose any more, Walt can suddenly take risks and get away with it too. He finds it exhilarating.
He raids the schools lab equipment and withdraws his savings from the bank to get Jesse buy an RV they can use as a mobile meth lab (later in the series we see how exactly Jesse got the thing and it's hilarious). The scene where Walter displays the lab equipment and how much more he knows about chemistry is another brilliant piece. It even shows that in some ways Jesse is the smarter of the two, certainly the saner. To Walter this is another mad gamble he is taking, to Jesse it's serious business. Jesse means to get rich and high while Walter plans to die at the end of this.
They drive off into the dessert and get cooking.
Every scene with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul is pure gold. Walt's face when he repeats "cowhouse" is priceless. He takes off his clothes, because he doesn't want to smell like a meth lab, which I found a little weird. No chemist as anal as Walter would cook without a lab coat or at least a separate set of clothing (as he notes some of the chemicals are dangerous, so you don't want to expose too much skin to them), but watching him cook with an apron in his undies is so much fun I can't hold it against them (and he's not pretty which is another very lovable thing about the show).
The cooking montage is a thing of beauty , especially with Jesse messing around all the time.
As doubtful as Jesse was towards their arrangement the quality of Walter's meth convinces him completely. Walter is a bit shocked when Jesse wants to sample the goods which serves to illustrate how removed Walter is from reality. It's obvious that Jesse's a junkie but Walter really thinks he can have some sort of "clean" meth business, where they only manufacture a high quality product and he can ignore the ugly side.
Jesse goes off to sell their new meth to the dealer Crazy 8, who is surprised Jesse doesn't want to buy and wants to cut him out immediately to get to the rest of the meth and the new cook. They drive into the dessert where one of the dealers recognizes Walt from the raid. Jesse knocks himself out and Walt can barely persuade them to let them live long enough so he can show them his meth recipe. It's obvious they're gonna kill the both of them afterwards, so Walter heats water and throws in the red phosphorus, diving out of the RV, while the two dealers collapse from the phosphane gas inside.
One of the dealers started a fire behind the RV so Walt has no choice to put a respirator on himself and the unconscious Jesse and drive off. When he crashes the RV we're at the point where the episode started. Walter is a complete wreck and attempts to shoot himself but forgets the safety and then jumps when the gun goes of unexpectedly. Yes, he really is no good at this. On the other hand he just killed a man and when it's only fire trucks that rush right past him, he and we know that he'll get away with it, at least for now.
Jesse wakes up and they both pretty much can't believe what happened.
We cut to Walter washing (literally) money, he took from the drug dealers (makes sense if it was in there with the phosphane) and then he goes to bed. Skyler senses that he's not telling her something but instead of spilling the episode closes on him making love to her.
His little dance with death has definitely worked for him.
The chemistry of 1.01
I'm not going to write down detailed cooking instructions for obvious reasons, just discussing the processes used on the show. I love it that the chemistry on BB adds up to such an extent. It's a thing of beauty.
1) Methylaminesynthesis from Pseudoephedrine
The process they use on the show seems to be common in the drug scene, because it's fairly easy to do and the chemicals are not all that hard to get (With a full grown lab you'd do things very differently to be less messy).
He starts out from pseudo ephedrine (which would not be sold without a prescription over here) from sinus pills which already has the right stereochemistry on the chiral C in the final product (only the S-enantiomer is active), you just need to get rid of the hydroxy group which is done on the show by reduction with Iodine and red phosphorous (P4) (in situ generation of HI).
The problem with this is that if you don't work carefully you get a dish of side products, which Walter is obviously very good at avoiding. Also there's PH3 gas formed that smells like rotten fish and is quite dangerous (it's what he later creates intentionally to kill the dealers). It's not exactly hard to do, but pretty poisonous and also not all that easy to purify, which is where Walter's skill and patience comes in on the show. Also Walter wants a pure product, while most manufacturers probably just want a high yield so they leave in the dirt.
2) Phosphane gas
Same as Walter explains: red Phosphorous and water gives phosphane gas.
P4 + 6 H2O + heat ---> PH3 + 3 H3PO2
Easy to do, but usually nobody does it on purpose, it's more an unwanted side reaction which is why you avoid water when working with red phosphorus.
1.01 within the show (spoilers!)
It's the beginning of it all, sets the stage and introduces the main topics of the series. One is different takes on masculinity, with Jesse's gangsta attitude and Walts need to get control over his own life and also over his family. There's also Hank, with all his macho policeman staginess, who is interesting because Walt is turning to drugs right under his nose, partly inspired by Hank and certainly to an extent loving the notion that he, the little teacher is outsmarting the streetwise DEA agent, who has become a role model for his son. Walter Jr. is also interesting, because he has been dealing with his handicap all his life and thus makes it harder for Walt to just feel sorry for himself.
Later on it's often emphasized that Walt cooks meth, because he doesn't want to leave his family in depth after expensive chemo therapy. In the pilot though, Walt does not even contemplate chemo. He sees his fate as sealed and while he wants to leave his family money it's not such a pressing cause, certainly non that justifies the meth. Skyler is an able bodied, educated woman who has the support of an extended family in Hank and Marie. There is no doubt she could get along on her own. But Walt becomes obsessed with this idea to provide for them.
It's already pretty clear that's part of something else. The desperate notion to do something memorable with his life before it is over. In a way his cancer diagnosis sets Walt free. He suddenly has an out of feeling small and insignificant, the worst thing has happened so he doesn't have to be afraid any more (little does he know).
Vince Gilligan said in an interview that Walter is like cancer on Jesse. I found that very interesting and it really is true that Walter in the beginning is roping Jesse in. As things progress Walter influences Jesse a lot and he's acutely aware of that. Walter could attempt to help Jesse instead he pushes him from a crappy amateur into the higher levels of the business.
For all his attitude Walt's opinion matters a lot to Jesse and he has had a hand in Jesse's downfall early on.
While Jesse went to Walt's school he was already living with his aunt, who he obviously loved very much. She died of cancer and left Jesse her house. This must have been around the same time Walt flunked Jesse and he dropped out of high school. It looks like he started early on drugs but it's probably those conspiring circumstances that pushed him deeper and deeper into the scene. In the beginning of the show he loses his lab, after his exploits with Walt he even tries to get a normal job, Jesse in the beginning of the show is by no means past saving, Walt just doesn't care to try.
Ahem, this whole thing turned out rather long, but I guess that comes with the pilot territory. I'll try to be a bit more compact next time.
Almost no one on my flist seems to watch it so it'll be a little bit of preaching into the dessert I expect, but I really love it, it induces a lot of thinky thoughts and I think I might want to come back to these entries some day.
Structure-wise I'm going to divide my reviews into three sections, one for the general review that contains only spoilers up to the episode, a section about the chemistry in each episode and a section that reviews the episode in context of the whole series so far, marked so that it's hopefully not hard to avoid spoilers.
In case this for some reason peaked your interest but you have never heard of BB go to my list of 11 reasons why you should watch Breaking Bad.
So on to the review of the pilot episode.
The first ep is a pilot and while it already is very good, it has some of your standard pilot quirks. The characters are a bit over their usual top, to introduce them quickly to the viewer and there's lot of fast developing action. Needless to say that the show gets better when it takes more time to develop its plot and gives the characters room for nuance. That's not to say it's not amazing though.
We get thrown directly into the action. Pants are falling from the sky and an RV is speeding through the dessert until it crashes and an obviously scared middle aged man in his underwear jumps out of it and explains to the sound of police sirens approaching that he did it all for his family. Meet Walter White.
As Walter stands their in his underpants pointing a gun at the empty road, the very picture of desperation, we cut back to a few weeks earlier to see how he ended up in that position.
He's a fifty year old chemistry teacher, a family man. He seems mild mannered, a little nerdy and maybe a bit boring. His life sure as hell doesn't inspire envy. He spends his days teaching apathetic students and works a second job at a car wash, where his students make fun of him. He can't sleep, money is tight, his teenage son is handicapped and his wife Skyler pregnant with another baby while not working herself as it looks like.
We witness how Walter is pushed around by his boss at the carwash and then comes home to his birthday surprise party where his macho brother in law Hank focuses all the attention on himself and his exploits as a DEA agent. The day ends with him getting a rather loveless handjob from Skyler. Walter's life is sad. Ultimately it's not horrible, Walter has a job a family who loves him (even if they walk all over him), but he's simply unable to stand up for himself. He's a showcase for someone who's afraid to take risks, who has let his life pass him by. He missed out on academic success and he clearly hasn't exactly lived much in exchange.
The next day Walter breaks down at his job at the car wash and gets rushed to the hospital, more worried about the bill for the trip than his health. It turns out he has lung cancer, stage three, the doctor tells him, inoperable, nothing they can do except prolong his life with expensive chemo.
This scene, where Walter focuses completely on a spot of mustard on the doctors coat is already a pretty amazing display of Bryan Cranston's mad acting skills. The whole thing is so bleak, so quiet and so insane at the same time. Walter is not an extroverted person, he can't cry or yell, he just shuts down, the news slowly sinking in. He'll die.
And somehow that is what it took to finally wake him up (he describes his state as awake later in the episode when Jesse asks him, why he's going dark side all of the sudden). He doesn't tell his family about the cancer but he can't go on as he was either, so in a fury he quits his job at the car wash. He picks up Hank on his offer to ride along to another meth lab bust. As he's waiting in the car he watches the meth cook flee the scene and recognizes him as a former pupil. Meet Jesse Pinkman.
Walt drives to the house Jesse's aunt left him and proposes (or rather blackmails Jesse) to cook crystal meth together. This first real dialogue between them already displays the comedic and dramatic potential those two characters have. Walt with his extensive vocabulary and scientific approach totally clashes with Jesse's woudbe (or actual) gangsterdom. Jesse always calls Walter either names or Mr. White (the later more often when he's distressed).
Their weird teacher/student relationship is ultimately what carries the show.
Walter is starting to change massively, he's had it with backing down, almost developing a whole new persona. He and Skyler go shopping for clothing with their son and some beefy teenager make fun of his son's handicap. Walt quietly leaves the store through the back and then burst in through the front kicking down one of them and stomping on his leg. He's so cold and furious the three guys flee the store.
It's like now that he has nothing to loose any more, Walt can suddenly take risks and get away with it too. He finds it exhilarating.
He raids the schools lab equipment and withdraws his savings from the bank to get Jesse buy an RV they can use as a mobile meth lab (later in the series we see how exactly Jesse got the thing and it's hilarious). The scene where Walter displays the lab equipment and how much more he knows about chemistry is another brilliant piece. It even shows that in some ways Jesse is the smarter of the two, certainly the saner. To Walter this is another mad gamble he is taking, to Jesse it's serious business. Jesse means to get rich and high while Walter plans to die at the end of this.
They drive off into the dessert and get cooking.
Every scene with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul is pure gold. Walt's face when he repeats "cowhouse" is priceless. He takes off his clothes, because he doesn't want to smell like a meth lab, which I found a little weird. No chemist as anal as Walter would cook without a lab coat or at least a separate set of clothing (as he notes some of the chemicals are dangerous, so you don't want to expose too much skin to them), but watching him cook with an apron in his undies is so much fun I can't hold it against them (and he's not pretty which is another very lovable thing about the show).
The cooking montage is a thing of beauty , especially with Jesse messing around all the time.
As doubtful as Jesse was towards their arrangement the quality of Walter's meth convinces him completely. Walter is a bit shocked when Jesse wants to sample the goods which serves to illustrate how removed Walter is from reality. It's obvious that Jesse's a junkie but Walter really thinks he can have some sort of "clean" meth business, where they only manufacture a high quality product and he can ignore the ugly side.
Jesse goes off to sell their new meth to the dealer Crazy 8, who is surprised Jesse doesn't want to buy and wants to cut him out immediately to get to the rest of the meth and the new cook. They drive into the dessert where one of the dealers recognizes Walt from the raid. Jesse knocks himself out and Walt can barely persuade them to let them live long enough so he can show them his meth recipe. It's obvious they're gonna kill the both of them afterwards, so Walter heats water and throws in the red phosphorus, diving out of the RV, while the two dealers collapse from the phosphane gas inside.
One of the dealers started a fire behind the RV so Walt has no choice to put a respirator on himself and the unconscious Jesse and drive off. When he crashes the RV we're at the point where the episode started. Walter is a complete wreck and attempts to shoot himself but forgets the safety and then jumps when the gun goes of unexpectedly. Yes, he really is no good at this. On the other hand he just killed a man and when it's only fire trucks that rush right past him, he and we know that he'll get away with it, at least for now.
Jesse wakes up and they both pretty much can't believe what happened.
We cut to Walter washing (literally) money, he took from the drug dealers (makes sense if it was in there with the phosphane) and then he goes to bed. Skyler senses that he's not telling her something but instead of spilling the episode closes on him making love to her.
His little dance with death has definitely worked for him.
The chemistry of 1.01
I'm not going to write down detailed cooking instructions for obvious reasons, just discussing the processes used on the show. I love it that the chemistry on BB adds up to such an extent. It's a thing of beauty.
1) Methylaminesynthesis from Pseudoephedrine
The process they use on the show seems to be common in the drug scene, because it's fairly easy to do and the chemicals are not all that hard to get (With a full grown lab you'd do things very differently to be less messy).
He starts out from pseudo ephedrine (which would not be sold without a prescription over here) from sinus pills which already has the right stereochemistry on the chiral C in the final product (only the S-enantiomer is active), you just need to get rid of the hydroxy group which is done on the show by reduction with Iodine and red phosphorous (P4) (in situ generation of HI).
The problem with this is that if you don't work carefully you get a dish of side products, which Walter is obviously very good at avoiding. Also there's PH3 gas formed that smells like rotten fish and is quite dangerous (it's what he later creates intentionally to kill the dealers). It's not exactly hard to do, but pretty poisonous and also not all that easy to purify, which is where Walter's skill and patience comes in on the show. Also Walter wants a pure product, while most manufacturers probably just want a high yield so they leave in the dirt.
2) Phosphane gas
Same as Walter explains: red Phosphorous and water gives phosphane gas.
P4 + 6 H2O + heat ---> PH3 + 3 H3PO2
Easy to do, but usually nobody does it on purpose, it's more an unwanted side reaction which is why you avoid water when working with red phosphorus.
1.01 within the show (spoilers!)
It's the beginning of it all, sets the stage and introduces the main topics of the series. One is different takes on masculinity, with Jesse's gangsta attitude and Walts need to get control over his own life and also over his family. There's also Hank, with all his macho policeman staginess, who is interesting because Walt is turning to drugs right under his nose, partly inspired by Hank and certainly to an extent loving the notion that he, the little teacher is outsmarting the streetwise DEA agent, who has become a role model for his son. Walter Jr. is also interesting, because he has been dealing with his handicap all his life and thus makes it harder for Walt to just feel sorry for himself.
Later on it's often emphasized that Walt cooks meth, because he doesn't want to leave his family in depth after expensive chemo therapy. In the pilot though, Walt does not even contemplate chemo. He sees his fate as sealed and while he wants to leave his family money it's not such a pressing cause, certainly non that justifies the meth. Skyler is an able bodied, educated woman who has the support of an extended family in Hank and Marie. There is no doubt she could get along on her own. But Walt becomes obsessed with this idea to provide for them.
It's already pretty clear that's part of something else. The desperate notion to do something memorable with his life before it is over. In a way his cancer diagnosis sets Walt free. He suddenly has an out of feeling small and insignificant, the worst thing has happened so he doesn't have to be afraid any more (little does he know).
Vince Gilligan said in an interview that Walter is like cancer on Jesse. I found that very interesting and it really is true that Walter in the beginning is roping Jesse in. As things progress Walter influences Jesse a lot and he's acutely aware of that. Walter could attempt to help Jesse instead he pushes him from a crappy amateur into the higher levels of the business.
For all his attitude Walt's opinion matters a lot to Jesse and he has had a hand in Jesse's downfall early on.
While Jesse went to Walt's school he was already living with his aunt, who he obviously loved very much. She died of cancer and left Jesse her house. This must have been around the same time Walt flunked Jesse and he dropped out of high school. It looks like he started early on drugs but it's probably those conspiring circumstances that pushed him deeper and deeper into the scene. In the beginning of the show he loses his lab, after his exploits with Walt he even tries to get a normal job, Jesse in the beginning of the show is by no means past saving, Walt just doesn't care to try.
Ahem, this whole thing turned out rather long, but I guess that comes with the pilot territory. I'll try to be a bit more compact next time.