I suspect that in the next episode, Jessie will help the Gus & his henchman Mike cross the Mexico border safely. Upon crossing safely the US territory, Jessie will execute Gus and Mike. Baaam!
another Amazing episode plus cinematography at the Dessert just WoW, Look like bryan Cranston Nail this episode for his Emmy award next year! (Best Actor) which donald draper lends for the meantime
I just caught this tv show in a front page of IMDB last week and downloaded all season and it's a great show.
The last episode is really great, you never know who did it. IMO, when Gus said there will be an appropriate response is an indication that he might do something to someone close to Jessie coz of his stubbornness with regards to Walt not wanting him dead. Plus, he has all the resources to pull off with that kind of a plan. Poisoning the cartel is also an indication that he poisoned the kid.
But from the looks of it and how Walt has truly evolved into a real criminal and his pride and with the direction of the show, he could have poisoned the kid. Him looking at the plant when he was at the pool, and he got into a fight with Jessie, he could have taken the poison which was hidden in a cigarette.
Last edited by Impenneteri; Oct 6, 2011 at 12:55 PM.
I just caught this tv show in a front page of IMDB last week and downloaded all season and it's a great show.
The last episode is really great, you never know who did it. IMO, when Gus said there will be an appropriate response is an indication that he might do something to someone close to Jessie coz of his stubbornness with regards to Walt not wanting him dead. Plus, he has all the resources to pull off with that kind of a plan. Poisoning the cartel is also an indication that he poisoned the kid.
But from the looks of it and how Walt has truly evolved into a real criminal and his pride and with the direction of the show, he could have poisoned the kid. Him looking at the plant when he was at the pool, and he got into a fight with Jessie, he could have taken the poison which was hidden in a cigarette.
Nice to see additional Fan of the show here In PEX konti lang yata tayo eh! but its all good!
agree with your assessment but the fight between them happen about 2 episode before this, Here what if you have a copy of the last episode try to go 18:47ish of the scene you can see HUEL (saul bodyguard) frisking jessie play it in SlowMo you can see huel pocketing the cigarettes in his Jacket after taking it from jessie. its almost like Saul and Walt really have a plan to poison brock but again we will never know who did it? were just guessing! but in my heart its say its walt the guys is a freaking genuis when push beyond the edge. can't wait to see who did it! 3 days go before season FINALE!
Nice to see additional Fan of the show here In PEX konti lang yata tayo eh! but its all good!
agree with your assessment but the fight between them happen about 2 episode before this, Here what if you have a copy of the last episode try to go 18:47ish of the scene you can see HUEL (saul bodyguard) frisking jessie play it in SlowMo you can see huel pocketing the cigarettes in his Jacket after taking it from jessie. its almost like Saul and Walt really have a plan to poison brock but again we will never know who did it? were just guessing! but in my heart its say its walt the guys is a freaking genuis when push beyond the edge. can't wait to see who did it! 3 days go before season FINALE!
i just watched what you've said and it's likely that huel did it with a switched. He grabbed the pack with poisoned cigarette in jessie's right pocket and placed the new pack on his left, that's why when Jessie was about to smoke outside the hospital in the later scene he was holding the pack of cigarettes with his left hand since the new pack which Huel replaced was placed on Jessie's left pocket. But in order to make this switch then Huel must be a really good thief back then.
The most likely scenario in the finale is what you've said or they'll explain Gus's "there would be an appropriate response". OR the two scenario I've said is intertwined, meaning Gus ordered that to Saul and Saul told his bodyguard Huel, since Saul is not in good terms with Gus so he's forced to do it or he'll get wacked.
I've read somewhere that the finale would indicate that Walt will be hated by the fans, so poisoning the kid must be one of them or killing Gomez the partner of Hank.
Last edited by Impenneteri; Oct 7, 2011 at 12:28 AM.
Can't imagine Mr White poisoning a child even if Vince Gilligan said this character is going to go from 'Mr Chips to Scarface' by the end. Besides, I think it's supposed to go for 5 seasons so we still have one season to go before 'say hello to my little friend'.
Excited na ako para sa Season finale.. 'Face Off' Who is facing off or is someone's face literally will come off. I wouldn't put it past this show
Hi! I have always been wanting to discuss the show with other filipinos, but it really seems that this show is not popular in our country. And, frankly I dont understand why this is the case here since this show has been the best I have seen so far. Anyway, it's nice to know that there are other pexers who love this show.
Hi! I have always been wanting to discuss the show with other filipinos, but it really seems that this show is not popular in our country. And, frankly I dont understand why this is the case here since this show has been the best I have seen so far. Anyway, it's nice to know that there are other pexers who love this show.
well as saying goes You Can't Please Everyone and breaking bad is no exemption to that phrase especially here in our country. who love korean soap operas and singing shows..
Can't imagine Mr White poisoning a child even if Vince Gilligan said this character is going to go from 'Mr Chips to Scarface' by the end. Besides, I think it's supposed to go for 5 seasons so we still have one season to go before 'say hello to my little friend'.
Excited na ako para sa Season finale.. 'Face Off' Who is facing off or is someone's face literally will come off. I wouldn't put it past this show
thanks for the link nice read! btw a few more hour's to go before the Finale can't wait!
Last edited by sTaRter_01; Oct 10, 2011 at 11:07 AM.
There are older ones of Bryan Cranston and Vince Gilligan in that same site.
As far as likability, I'm in US and even here, people I know don't watch BB. Even my husband stopped watching it after about two episodes. The high rating shows here are American Idol type shows.
Great ending. It had something to do with the plant after all, that's why he looked at it in the last episode.
Saul is my favorite character. Saul's secretary was funny, gusto pang kwartahan si Walt. I really thought that Walt's house will blow up when he asked his neighbor to check the house for him.
Now what will be the story for season 5? What about Mike?
Wow, I was wrong about Mr White being able to poison a kid. Not only that, he had his neighbor check the house for him first. He's willing to endanger anyone's life. even the innocent ones.
Last season na ang sunod. I hope they don't take as long. Ano tingin niyo sa ending, will Walt kill Jesse or will Jesse kill Walt? hehe, parang at least isa sa kanila patay eh.
Para sa mga adik ng BB na tulad ko, here's a couple of articles..
From AVClub- Vince Gilligan Walks Us Thru Breaking Bad Season 4 part 1 of 4 link
When Breaking Bad’s fourth season began airing, the show had been off the air for more than a year, and had left fans hanging with the question of whether Walter White’s desperate gamble to keep himself and his partner, Jesse Pinkman, alive would be successful. In the interim, the show won two additional Emmys (for performances by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, as White and Pinkman, respectively) and accumulated the kind of buzz only rarely seen by TV dramas—it became a show viewers simply had to see. So the pressures on season four were higher than they’d ever been. Showrunner Vince Gilligan recently walked The A.V. Club through each episode of the nail-biting season. Spoilers abound, so beware.
“Box Cutter” (July 17, 2011)
Walter and Jesse wait for Gus Fring’s reaction to the murder of Gale Boetticher.
The A.V. Club: You’ve talked about how in season two you had a firm plan, and in season three, you improvised a little more. When you went into “Box Cutter,” how much did you know about where season four was going?
Vince Gilligan: We knew a little less than what we knew in season two. Season two was the only season where we knew exactly where we would end at the beginning of it all. That came about through many, many hours of beating our heads against the wall—very laborious work, which is probably why we haven’t repeated that formula since. This season has been a little closer to the way we broke season three, which is to say we knew we had a little drama going between Walt and Gustavo, and we knew we had all the ingredients for a major game of chess, as it were. But as to exactly how this game of chess would play out, we didn’t have that completely nailed down at the beginning of this season.
AVC: At what point did you figure out how Walter was going to escape the situation? It seemed like there was no way he wouldn’t eventually be killed.
VG: It seemed to us that Walt’s thesis at the end of season three would probably be sound. It’s a terrible thing to say, “We have to kill our competition in order to survive,” but we felt like that was enough. Walt says, in so many words, “If we kill our competition, we live.” And that’s a terrible choice to have to make, but it seemed like, on the face of it, Walt should be correct in his thesis. And so going into this episode, we essentially wanted to milk all the drama we could out of this situation yet nonetheless have Walt’s thesis stand the test that he alone is able to run this lab, and that he won’t do it without Jesse. If Jesse is killed, Gus has basically, as Walter puts it, an $8 million hole in the ground. This is really an episode about a very powerful, very smart guy getting bent over a barrel. Gus is in a position he’s not used to, of having to give in to an underling. He does not take kindly to it, to say the least, hence his message to Walt and to Jesse by killing Victor.
AVC: When Gus kills Victor, that scene is almost entirely silent, just the sounds of his footsteps walking around the lab. When did you make the decision to strip the conversation out of that scene?
VG: It’s funny. I remember it that way as well, that it’s a very quiet scene, and yet what’s interesting about it is it’s quiet only on one side of that equation. Walt actually speaks wall to wall throughout the scene, as he’s basically arguing for his life and then toward the end begging for his life. People remember that as a very quiet scene but actually there’s lots and lots of dialogue. [Laughs.]
But yes, as far as Gus goes, he never says a word until he’s leaving the scene, until after the action is over. That was an early thought on the part of the writers and myself, that we should play it that way because it fits with who he is. He’s more Michael Corleone than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. He does not explain his actions; he doesn’t give away anything. He doesn’t tip his hand until the moment that he acts. It seems in keeping with Gus’ character that he would not give anything away, and that, in turn, would make him all the scarier. You really have two choices in a scene like that: Either the guy’s screaming and ranting, and in a sense that defuses tensions—lets the air out of the balloon, dramatically—or you have a guy who’s not giving you anything, who’s very hard to read and yet who’s putting on a raincoat. And that in itself, his action of putting on the rain jacket, speaks volumes. We felt like that was an eerier, more dramatic way to go.
AVC: You’ve set up a lot of situations where Gus and Walter are at polar-opposite points, either in how they’re reacting to a situation or in what life is putting them through. In this episode you have that in a microcosm, where Walter is talking and talking and talking and Gus is just silently going about his business. How did that develop throughout the season?
VG: These are two very different men, and I guess we always realized that. Walter White is a man who is one of the world’s greatest liars. He is a man who lies to his family, lies to his friends, lies to the world about who he truly is. But what I think makes him a standout liar is that first and foremost he is lying to himself. He still sees himself as a good family man who does things for very pragmatic, practical reasons. He doesn’t examine himself too closely; he doesn’t see the truth of his reality. And Gus Fring is someone who does know who he is and where he fits into the universe. He does accept that he is, in fact, a bad guy. Walter White doesn’t see himself as a bad guy.
If you start with that premise, you come to realize that Walt wants to be Gus Fring, even though he probably won’t admit it. He chafes at having to work for someone like Gus who is as smart, or probably smarter, than he is. That chafes him, the idea that he’s second best in any way, shape, or form. It came to us early on, talking it through for hours and giving voice to these realizations about these characters, that season four would turn out to be something of a chess match between two master players. We kept joking that it was sort of Spassky versus Fischer in Iceland. For most of this season, if not all of it, Walt was gonna be Spassky.
AVC: You don’t plot everything out, but how much do you know about these characters’ backstories? How much did you know about Gus’ history, for instance?
VG: I hate to admit it, but surprisingly little. [Laughs.] We have floated ideas about who Gus is. But, oddly enough, we have nailed down very little. And that is, honestly, because I like to keep things open and mysterious. I like to keep our options open. For the same reason we have hinted that Walt’s mom, for instance, is a real character but we haven’t nailed down too many specifics. We’ve gone so far as to never even show a photo of her or let the audience know where she lives. I guess it, in some neurotic fashion, is me wanting to keep my options open. And also my philosophy that these characters, or characters in general, are sometime more interesting the less you know about them so you, the viewer, can create some of the backstory for yourself.
All through episode eight, Gus Fring is not wanting people to know about his background. He apparently has some backstory that’s deep and dark and allows him to avoid getting killed at the end of episode eight, but we’re wondering this whole time, “Who is this guy? Who was he in Chile? What is he trying to hide?” To be honest, we haven’t quite nailed that down. It has something to do with the Pinochet government, we think, but that’s about as close as we’ve gotten. At the end of the day, try not to nail down anything that we don’t have to.
AVC: How did you come by this thought that characters are more interesting the less you know about them?
VG: I guess from watching movies, from being a viewer and a consumer myself. I think back about how I was intrigued by what was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Throughout that movie, there is this very important MacGuffin or dingus or whatever the Hitchcockian term would be. But there’s this plot element of this very important suitcase that John Travolta and Samuel Jackson are carrying around, and everyone is intrigued by what’s inside it. People get a glimpse of it, but they never nail down what’s inside it. I find that intriguing. I enjoy it when I’m given by the creator of a show or a movie all the elements that will keep me interested in the story, but leave a few aside so I can do a little of the work myself. I enjoyed that kind of storytelling and I want to tell those kind of stories myself.
“.38 Snub” (July 24, 2011)
Walter launches a plan to kill Gus. Jesse, tormented by thoughts of killing Gale, begins a party that never ends.
AVC: What were the discussions about Jesse’s character this season?
VG: I want the actions the characters take on Breaking Bad to always have consequences. I guess that in itself was a reaction to years and years of television, watching TV shows in which the characters would have some life-changing event where they kill someone or they get wounded and the next week they’re basically back on their feet and there’s no emotional repercussions. That is not reality as we know it to be; it’s a TV reality. That’s because television has to maintain a sort of a stasis and keep the characters more or less in one spot from week to week to allow for continuity, so the viewer can tune in and tune out as they choose. That’s just what television does, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a structural conceit of television that is time-honored, and it goes back to the beginnings of the medium. But it’s not reality.
We knew Jesse had to have some serious reaction to killing Gale Boetticher, who is as decent and innocent a meth cook as I ever hope to meet. We knew Jesse had to not take that lightly, that moment where he becomes a murderer. But we didn’t want to do the obvious thing as far as Jesse’s reaction went. We talked for weeks on end about how Jesse should respond to this. We decided we liked best the idea of a slow-burn reaction that is not what the audience expects. When in doubt, do what the audience does not expect.
We started at the end of “Box Cutter” when Walt is asking Jesse, “Seriously, are you all right?” and we leave the audience alone with Walter, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for Jesse to break down in tears or go into shock. Instead, he’s eating pancakes and bacon, and he’s just chowing down and seems completely all right for this terrible experience he’s been through, which in itself is an interesting delayed reaction. But now in “.38 Snub,” we start to get an inkling that he is in fact damaged. It presents itself in that he doesn’t want to be alone. He needs loud music; he needs to be surrounded by other people. In my mind, he needs to do anything and everything possible to take his mind off this terrible experience—hence the world’s biggest, or longest-lasting, party that he throws for himself.
AVC: This episode is directed by Michelle MacLaren, who is your regular producer-director. What does she bring to the show?
VG: Michele and I have been working together for probably 13 years. I got to know her back when we were doing The X-Files. My boss, Chris Carter, hired her as a line producer on that show. She and a woman named Melissa Berstein and our actual line producer, Stewart Lyons, the three of them run the day-in, day-out production in Albuquerque. When Michelle is not actually running production, she is directing for us. She directed three episodes this season. And as always, just like she did in season three and even in the first episode [she directed] in season two, before she was a producer, she just knocked them out of the park, every single one of them. And I’m very proud to say that the first thing she ever directed was a script I wrote of The X-Files back in the year 2000-2001. But she is just a natural at it and we’re very lucky to have her. As we’re lucky to have Adam Bernstein, who directed the first episode, who just did a bravura job at that. He and Michelle are our two lynchpin directors throughout the life of the series. They’ve both directed more episodes of Breaking Bad than any other two directors.
AVC: TV has always been more of a writer’s medium, but how is it helpful to have strong directors who can turn out these sequences that are silent, as Breaking Bad often does?
VG: It’s indispensable to have strong directors that you have a good working knowledge of and you know you work well with, because it takes a lot of worries off your plate as a showrunner. You know what you’re going to get. And that, I guess, could sound like a double-edged sword. If you know what you’re going to get, does that infer you don’t expect to be surprised in any kind of unusual and positive way by the footage you’re going to get? But the best way to put it with directors like Michelle and Adam is, I know what I’m going to get and it’s going to surprise me. I know I’m going to see things in the dailies that I did not picture when I was reading the script or writing the script. But, nonetheless, I know I’m going to get something interesting. I know it’s going to be at least as good as I pictured and very oftentimes better.
AVC: One of the frustrations that some fans have had with this season is that there’s been what feels like very little Walter. He’s still the lead, but he’s powerless and cornered in a lot of ways. Why did you decide to back him into a corner he essentially can’t get out of?
VG: I was worried about that when we started doing it. I’m not surprised to hear that folks are frustrated by not seeing Walt prevail. I get that, and I worried about that myself. But to me, what better way to show that our protagonist is dealing with a man who is more than a match for him than by seeing week in and week out that every move Walt makes, every chess move, if you will, is counter-moved and stymied by his opponent? We are playing a long game in this season. We are playing a 13-episode chess game, the outcome of which will be very much in doubt throughout the whole season.
And that chess game does start with the second episode of this season. In the previous episode it looks like ultimately, even though Gus sends a very scary message to Walt and to Jesse, it looks like Walt wins because he gets his way, in simplest terms. He doesn’t get murdered, and he is back to work. He’s still cooking. But now we start to realize, as Jesse says at the end of the first hour, “The message is if I can’t kill you, I’m sure as **** gonna make you wish you were dead.” So thus begins the chess game, and thus begins Walt’s dawning realization that he is an indentured servant and that life is going to get worse and worse for him unless he can beat this man at his own game.
“Open House” (July 31, 2011)
Hank’s spiraling mood puts stress on his marriage to Marie, and she responds by giving in to her problems with stealing things. Meanwhile, Skyler tries to buy the car wash.
VG: We love Marie, the character, my writers and I. And we love Betsy Brandt who plays Marie. And like RJ Mitte, another wonderful actor in our ensemble, we very often in the writer’s room will sit around and say, “How do we get more Marie? How do we get more Walter, Jr.?” And sometimes those two characters get a little short-shrifted because they are not front and center of the ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Whenever we can get either of these characters more front and center in an episode, we’re very thrilled.
To that end, we’ve got this storyline going this season that Hank is bedridden and having been very grievously wounded last season, he is in very bad shape and has a long road to recovery. We loved the idea of having him not be particularly heroic about his bedridden state. We decided early on it would be more interesting to see him not be particularly noble in his suffering and to take out his pain in a lot of ways on his wife. It’s the old expression: The boss yells at the man, and the man goes home to his wife and yells at her, and the wife yells at the kid, and the kid kicks the dog. It’s the idea that **** tends to roll downhill. Hank, through all the suffering he’s doing, he’s passing along that suffering to the last person he should be beating up on psychically, which is his wife who loves him very much. And then we loved the idea of how would Marie take out her frustrations and her fears, and we came up with the idea of having that present itself though a reappearance of her kleptomania. We thought that’d be a fun thing to do. The writer of that episode, Sam Catlin, did a really good job of coming up with these moments. She’s looking for another life, but she’s not actively ready to leave her husband or anything like that. So she takes these little vacations in the form of visiting these open houses for a couple of hours at a time, and it’s just this respite for her. Then she wants to take things, these odd trophies from these visits. We liked the quirkiness of it. It seemed like a fun way to express what was going on inside her.
AVC: Everything that happens can be tied back to Walter in one way or another. In this episode it seems like Hank and Marie’s marriage is crumbling and the thing that gets them back on the right foot—the folder in Gale’s apartment—also is indirectly involved through Walter. How much do you talk about Walter’s ties to what’s happening, or do you let that evolve naturally?
VG: No, it definitely does not happen naturally. We have this wonderful ensemble cast—it’s an ensemble and yet it’s not. Everything always returns to Walt in a sense. Walter White is a guy who suffers from cancer but also in a very real yet metaphorical sense, he is the cancer of the show. He is a cancer on his family, and these decisions he makes as a person, these decisions to cook meth and be a criminal and do the things he does, are having a very clearly, very long-term adverse affect on everyone around him, everyone he loves. They affect Jesse, his partner. But they also affect his wife and his children and his sister-in-law and his brother-in-law. We go to great lengths to include all these different characters in every episode. We go to great lengths and spend a lot of hours in the room trying to figure out how Walt is affecting their lives this week. It all flows back to Walt. He’s the engine who drives their lives. Hank doesn’t know that Walt has anything to do with his current situation. But the audience does and can always make those connections.
AVC: How did you approach what Skyler’s storyline was going to be this season?
VG: I think Skyler is the most pragmatic character on Breaking Bad. She hates this situation that her estranged husband has put the family in, but she essentially was forced to play chicken with him last season, and she lost. There was an episode last season where he called her bluff. He showed up at the house even though she had told him to leave forever. He said, in so many words, “I dare you to call the police. I don’t care whether you do or not.” And she lost that game of chicken. She’s not availing herself of perhaps the most obvious choice to most people, which is, you better get this guy out of your life. If she’s not willing or able to avail herself of that choice, she really only has one other choice, which is, “I gotta do my part to make sure he doesn’t go to prison and thus ruin our whole family. In a very pragmatic sense, there’s one thing I can do in this equation, I can help him launder his money and therefore help the family. And primarily help my sister and her husband get back on their feet after Hank’s terrible wounding at the hand of the two cousins last year.” She’s nothing if not pragmatic. She’s moving forward in this attempt to launder Walt’s money, and we see the beginnings of that in this episode where she attempts to buy the car wash, which is, to her mind, the best fiction that she and Walt can tell the world.
This is also where this idea of the “story” begins. I use “story” with quotation marks around it. Way back when we first met her in the pilot, she describes herself as a writer, and we’ve gotten little dribs and drabs throughout the seasons of this idea that she’s kind of a frustrated writer and this is going to be her greatest creation, this story that she and Walt present to the world. The whole idea of this fiction that allows them to launder this money is very much a creation of Skyler’s. It’s a way for us as writers to keep her front and center in the story because we love her character so much and also it makes sense to us on a lot of levels that she would try to keep the family together no matter what.
AVC: This episode has some very dark moments where it really does seem like Hank and Marie’s marriage is going to fall apart. Did you ever consider going further with that throughout the season?
VG: In general, we always do our best to let the story tell us where it needs to go. I guess the short answer is we don’t look to make things particularly dark, nor do we look to make them particularly sunny. We do our best to listen to the characters and let them tell us where they need to go. That sort of organic storytelling sometimes leads us to moments that we are uncomfortable with, that we think to ourselves, “Gosh, we’re not going to give as much of Walt winning this season; he’s going to by stymied at every turn,” and, “Gosh, Hank, who’s such a likeable guy, is yelling at his wife and being cold to her. He’s being a real ******* here. I don’t like him so much this week. What do we do about that?”
We bite our nails a little bit in the writers’ room, and ultimately we decide to let the chips fall where they may. That’s why this show’s the way it is. The best way to keep a show unpredictable, ironically, is to be true to these characters and let them tell us where they need to go. That’s the height of unpredictability, when the writers themselves don’t quite know where it’s going to go next, but instead they are taking their leads from their understanding of the characters. That is, to me, the best kind of storytelling, and that’s what we’re striving to do.
From AVClub- Vince Gilligan Walks Us Thru Breaking Bad Season 4 part 2 of 4 link
“Bullet Points” (Aug. 7, 2011)
Walt and Skyler launch their big lie to explain how they’ve been able to buy a car wash; Jesse seems to be in increased danger from Gus’ operation.
The A.V. Club: A few episodes this season started out about one thing, then pivoted around the halfway point to something else entirely. How did you land on that structure?
Vince Gilligan: Walt and Skyler enter that episode needing to accomplish a very specific, concrete goal, and that goal is to sell Skyler’s story—that they have come into this large amount of money through Walt’s illicit gambling. That addiction has practically torn the marriage apart, and it’s made life miserable, and it explains all of Walt’s strange behavior over the last many months. That looks to be the big drama of the episode. The writer of the episode, Moira Walley-Beckett, does a great job setting up what it is you’re going to see in the earlier scene where Skyler’s saying, “Okay, here’s your script. First you’re going to say this, then I’m going to say that, and you should cry a little. We should talk through every beat of this. Let’s leave no stone unturned, let’s make sure we sell it perfectly.”
In classic dramatic fashion, the story gets told, and it gets told well, and the night is a success in that regard, but the old expression, “Men plan and God laughs,” comes into force here. Suddenly, what we thought was the drama of the episode—will Hank buy Walt and Skyler’s story or will he not?—suddenly gets deferred, and we realize there’s a much bigger issue at stake, which is whether Hank will figure out that Jesse Pinkman shot Gale Boetticher. We’ve got much bigger fish to fry dramatically. We like those kind of moments, because it feels like real life. We’ve all had those moments where, you know, you go into a doctor with a hangnail, and you suddenly realize you’ve got cancer. It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.
AVC: One of the things people said about this episode is that it’d be really easy to poke holes in Walt and Skyler’s story if you really wanted to try, and it seems like you guys acknowledge that by showing that Walt can’t count cards to save his life. Do you think the characters are aware that their story is essentially unbelievable?
VG: Well, give me some examples! [Laughs.] I thought it was a pretty good story myself.
AVC: Well not unbelievable, obviously, because Hank and Marie do believe it. But do you think that Skyler and Walt are aware that the story could fall apart very easily?
VG: Yeah. They’re concerned about being caught, about the suspicion being shined on them and their story beginning to unravel. I think that’s inherent in the scene itself that Skyler’s so dead-set on dotting all her Is and crossing all her Ts that she goes to these great lengths of writing a script for them to memorize. I think that’s inherent in that great attention to detail—the fear that they’ll get caught.
AVC: You brought back the car wash this season in a big way. What do you think that adds to the show, beyond giving the characters a way to launder money?
VG: I think it’s another example of the question you asked a little while ago. Essentially what I was saying was that we try to bring the past back into the present, and I like the idea of this car wash which we only really saw, prior to this, in the pilot. We saw this second job that Walt had that he didn’t really enjoy so much, that basically showed what a drudgery his life was. Bringing that back and using that in a sort of ironic sense to help him further his criminal goals seemed like a fun thing to do.
AVC: This episode has Gus and Mike deciding what to do about Jesse. How much did you know about where that story was going?
VG: We tried to work several episodes ahead. The first question we started off with was, “Do you know at the beginning of a season where it’s going to end?” We don’t typically, and we didn’t this year. But we do try to work at least three to four episodes ahead. In the writers’ room, we don’t say, “A fun thing for the next episode would be for Mike to take Jesse out into the desert, and we’ll figure out when we break the next story what we’re doing for that.” I’d be too scared of painting ourselves into a corner to work that way. We don’t embark upon a moment like that before we have the broad strokes figured out. What is the plan? Why is Mike taking Jesse out into the desert? Why would Gus want that? What’s his ultimate goal? We try to think three or four or five episodes ahead and have as much of the future plotting figured out in broad strokes as possible before we start nailing down the immediate scenes we’re doing.
“Shotgun” (Aug. 14, 2011)
Jesse’s trip into the desert with Mike turns out to be designed by Gus to drive a wedge between Walter and Jesse and bring Jesse further into the organization.
AVC: How much of Gus’ plan is him trying to drive a wedge, and how much of that is legitimately recognizing something in Jesse?
VG: I guess that’s up to the viewer to decide. As I was saying earlier, I don’t want to nail down anything more than I have to. I want folks to have these water-cooler moments the next day where they can have really energetic discussions about questions such as that. My own personal opinion is that a lot of this dates back to “Box Cutter.” There’s a moment at the end of that episode where Gus cuts Victor’s throat and lets Victor drop dead onto the floor. Walt looks like he’s about to vomit, and he looks completely terrified, as most of us would. Then Gus happens to glance at Jesse, and there’s this long shot of Jesse. We hold on Jesse quite a long time as he slowly leans forward. There’s this moment of, if not connection between the two, there’s this moment of, for my money, Gus seeing a strength, a resilience, and an anger in Jesse, a substance in Jesse that he didn’t see before.
And marrying that realization with the realization that Jesse had the wherewithal to go kill Gale, suddenly Gus Fring realizes that this guy who he’s never given a second thought to may have more substance than he previously would have guessed. So I think primarily, yes, what Gus is doing by having Mike take Jesse out on money pickups is he’s starting to drive a wedge between Jesse and Walt, but I think maybe he does see some worth, some utility in Jesse. And he had probably first noted that in the first episode of this season.
AVC: In this episode, Walter gets drunk and says something that causes Hank to reopen the investigation of Gale’s murder and discover Gus’ connection. How prideful do you think Walter is? How important is it to him to be recognized?
VG: I think Walter is the most prideful character you will ever come upon. I think he is driven by so many demons that he himself won’t cop to what we were speaking of earlier: that he’s the world’s greatest liar and the biggest victim of his lies is himself. He lies to himself more than he does anybody else, and that’s saying a lot. I think he does not recognize within him this unquenchable pride and endless need for approval. When he hears his brother-in-law go on about what a genius Gale Boetticher was, and he’s hearing this man mistakenly give credit to someone else for Walt’s own work, it just drives him up a tree. He can’t stand it, and he does something very short-sighted and self-destructive. He comes just short of saying, “It was me! It was not this idiot Gale!” He gets as close as he possibly can without giving himself away completely. And in that very prideful and self-destructive fashion he gets the ball rolling again on Hank’s investigation. That is part and parcel of who Walt has always been. We’ve had many episodes where his pride goeth before the fall. It’s always fun to come up with those moments, because they are absolutely true to Walt’s fundamental character. We love the irony of the bad guy causing himself a whole lot of grief that he didn’t need to suffer, but for the pride that he possesses.
AVC: This episode launches the major story arc for Hank, when he figures out that Gus is a criminal, even if no one else will believe him. When did you figure out that story point, and how naturally did it all flow from there?
VG: We had that idea within the first few weeks. I’m not a chess player in real life; I’m a terrible chess player. But I do love the analogy of playing chess as it relates to what Walt and Gus are doing and as it relates to what we writers try to do. We’re trying to play a very deep game; we’re thinking five or 10 or 15 moves ahead. We don’t always succeed, but that’s the intent. And to that end, that idea of Hank becoming wise to Gus Fring and to the fact that he’s a drug kingpin, it felt like a natural development. Hank is one of the integral characters on the show. He represents law and order, and if he remains completely unaware of Gus Fring and his culpability and his criminality, then we’d be missing a beat. We’d be missing out on a lot of fun. So I think that idea probably dates back to a season before, but the actual structure of how he comes to this realization was something we started putting into the works probably two or three weeks into planning out season four.
AVC: You talked a lot before season three about how Skyler couldn’t remain ignorant of Walt’s actions because she’s very smart. Hank is also very smart. How much do you worry about making him seem too stupid?
VG: We worry a lot about that. We try to do as much as we can without falling over that edge. I think Walt—at least for the present, or for the recent past—has been sheltered, not by Hank being dumb or dense, but by the fact that love blinds us to a great many things. I think Hank has a real love for his brother-in-law. He sees the best in him. And he sees him in a very specific way, as an egghead, and as someone who is very much the opposite of what Hank is. I think his respect for the man and his years of seeing him in a milquetoast fashion has, if not blinded him to who Walt really is these days, then colored his perceptions of the man to the point that Walt will not easily fall under Hank’s suspicion.
We also try and make Walt as smart as he can be, with a few dopey moments, like when he brags to his brother-in-law that Gale Boetticher is not that smart. A few moments like that aside, Walt is pretty smart around his brother-in-law and keeps himself safe. We’re always trying to keep everybody as smart as possible. What we don’t want to ever have happen is the story moving forward just because of a big dopey lapse on one character’s part. If we’re going to have a character make a mistake, like Walt being prideful to Hank and thus making a tactical error, we want those moments to stem from fundamental character flaws that we’ve already established.
AVC: You’ve described much of the interaction in the show in terms of games. Is that how you see human interaction, moves and counter-moves?
VG: Well, I don’t know if I see human interaction that way in real life. In the writers’ room, our responsibility is to tell a good, interesting dramatic story. To be showmen, as it were. And to that end, we’re doing our best to come up with scenes that are as dramatic as possible. With all of that in mind, I suppose the best way to derive these moments of drama and produce them is to think in terms of gamesmanship. I’d like to think all of human interaction is not that, although every now and then it seems like that. At the end of the day we’re creating a simulation of reality, and we do our best to make a scene as real as possible, but obviously [Laughs] no one in the history of the world has lived as dramatic a year as Walter White has lived. The drama is always heightened; it always has to be on a TV show, otherwise it’d probably be too boring to watch.
AVC: This episode has a very cool musical moment when Jesse and Mike are out making the pickups; the song with the Spanish lyrics is playing. Who makes the music choices on the show?
VG: We have two wonderful folks who are responsible for all the music on the show. We have our composer, Dave Porter, who writes the original music for the series. And then we have Thomas Golubic, our music supervisor, who is responsible for coming up with all the music that Dave does not actually write for that particular episode. Thomas has a very eclectic, very deep knowledge and good taste in music and he comes up with these wonderful songs for us.
Although, having said all of that, that particular song didn’t come from Thomas; it came from the girlfriend of the writer of that episode. The guy who wrote that episode is an old buddy of mine I went to NYU Film School with 25 years ago. His name is Tom Schnauz and his girlfriend, Maya Bloom, was listening to the radio one day—I’m not sure where she heard the song. I think the artist, I want to say her name is Ana Tijoux, or something like that. Thomas very readily agreed that that song would go great there and proceeded to get the rights. He doesn’t just find the stuff for us; he then figures out how to legally close the deal and use the music. He works with a very tight budget and works wonders. The music budget is a fraction of what the music budget is for other shows. But because of Thomas’ good taste and his many friendships in the music industry, he’s able to get us some outstanding music at a cost that we can afford.
“Cornered” (Aug. 21, 2011)
Walt says the wrong thing, causing Skyler to run away and ponder her options. In the meantime, Walter figures out Gus’ plan, but expresses it to Jesse in the worst way possible.
AVC: There have been instances in this show’s history where it seems there’s some moral force behind the scenes telling characters that they’re on the right or wrong path. This episode has one in which Skyler flips the quarter and it keeps landing in Colorado. Do you think there is some moral force in the Breaking Bad universe?
VG: I think the Breaking Bad universe is populated with people who wish there was a moral force at play, that there was a guiding hand at work. Actually, jumping ahead to our next episode, Jesse Pinkman seems to say as much when he’s talking to his 12-step group. He’s hoping for judgment. I think you’re on to something here with the idea of flipping the coin, of asking fate what one should do, and if that wasn’t fate taking a hand and continually landing in Colorado. This is a character seemingly asking the universe what direction her life should take. She nonetheless goes in a different direction, which is what I think makes Skyler interesting in that episode. She wants some sort of divine guidance, and yet she seems reluctant to take it.
AVC: Outside of Hank, when people get these so-called messages they always seem to ignore them. Is that just something baked into these characters?
VG: I guess it is. Maybe my writers and I have a finely tuned sense of irony, or maybe it’s just as simple as the idea that these are characters who, for better or for worse, give guidance to their own lives, and they are willful characters and they are characters who believe in free will. They don’t necessarily do the right thing, but they are active, and active characters are always more interesting than inactive or passive characters. I guess that’s one of the things we like about these characters: their activeness, their willfulness.
AVC: This is the episode where Walt lays out to Jesse Gus’ plan to drive a wedge between them. Walt is right about everything, but he’s a real jerk about it. There’s been a lot of that this season. How do you write a scene like that?
VG: [Laughs.] That scene was written by Gennifer Hutchison, who used to be my assistant on The X-Files. She wrote that episode, and our wonderful director of photography Mike Slovis directed it, and they both did a great job. The conceiving of that scene in the writers’ room was fun because sometimes the messenger can be right, but his manner of doing it is so annoying and obnoxious you don’t want to hear it. When we conceived of that line where Walt says, “This is all about me,” it speaks volumes of who that character really is and how he perceives himself. His self-importance and his ego are pretty nakedly on display in that one moment. He’s not wrong, but he’s still a douchebag.
AVC: In this episode he gives the “I’m the one who knocks,” speech. At the time, he seemed absolutely the furthest he could be from that guy. Over the course of the season, that changes. How much of this season was about that journey?
VG: Although I think he truly believes it at the moment he says it to Skyler, I think he’s in deep denial of his true place in the universe at that moment. And yet, through true will and sheer desire to be the man who knocks, he finds a way to become that man as the season progresses, and it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But you’re right: The moment that he says that in episode six, he is far, far from being that character. He’s definitely the guy who opens the door despite his best wishes otherwise.
AVC: This is also the episode with the Dodge Challenger. Was that product placement? If so, how do you work those sorts of advertising opportunities into the show without making it seem like product placement?
VG: It’s always a tricky maneuver to make use of product placement—and the very beneficial help it gives our budget—and yet not make us feel like we’re shilling for a big corporation. It worked out very well in this case. We did two instances of product placement this season. We did the Dodge Challenger and the videogame Rage, we did a tie-in with them. A lot of people think we did one with Denny’s at the beginning of this season, but the truth is we had to pay Denny’s to shoot in their restaurant, but I’m grateful they let us show their corporate logo. I thought it was hilarious, watching this horrible murder and then going to Denny’s afterward.
As far as product placement goes, we knew as writers that we wanted Walt to buy his son a very snazzy car for his 16th birthday, a car that would very quickly become a source of great friction between Walt and his wife. And, to that end, once you decide you need a snazzy new car as a plot point then the question is: Will any company out there like to do business with us and help us defray our very substantial and tight production costs? It worked out great for us because it was not your typical dreaded version of product placement that you have nightmares about in which suddenly all the action in the scene has to stop so all the characters can do a commercial. In fact, as you’ll see, the product is particularly ill-used in the next episode. [Laughs.] I’m so glad Dodge is so cool about this. They knew, obviously before they said yes to this, that this car would ultimately wind up being torched, but they were cool with it. God bless ’em.
AVC: This is the episode that ends with Skyler talking about needing to protect the family from the man who is supposed to protect the family. How much of her coming back is that she does enjoy this life, being good at this sort of thing?
VG: I think no one deludes themselves in Breaking Bad as much as Walter White does. I think he truly enjoys being a criminal, that he gets great pleasure from it. It makes him feel like a man, makes him feel alive, although he denies it. He deludes himself and says what he does he does strictly for his family. I think Skyler’s motives are a bit more pure in that respect. I think she does believe she is protecting her family from the man who “protects” the family. But having said that, I think she’s got blinders on as well. It seems from an emotionally detached standpoint the best thing she could have done early on is call Walt’s bluff back in season three and tell the police and tell her brother-in-law exactly what Walt was up to and let the chips fall where they may. But now she is irrevocably deep into Walt’s criminality, and she’d be going up the river right alongside him.
As you say, she’s good at what she does, and she’s pragmatic. In her heart, it’s the best and only avenue that remains because she doesn’t have the will or the heart to call the cops on her husband and then ruin her family. She’s not thinking in terms of the violence that’s inherent in a career in the meth industry, and she should be. And she will, obviously, as the season progresses. She’ll realize just how dangerous this world could be and stop thinking simply, “What if the police catch us?” and start thinking, “What if the bad guys kill us or kill my husband?” But right now, that is only starting to dawn on her. I think her sin here is mostly one of a lack of imagination for how bad things can get. For the most part, she does what she does in order to protect her family. It’s just a bad way of going about it.
“Problem Dog” (Aug. 28, 2011)
Hank lays out a devastating case against Gus Fring to his colleagues, while Walter spirals downward and Jesse returns to his 12-step group.
AVC: How much did you have to work in the writers’ room to keep Hank from catching Gus? It seems like the whole back half of the season is about keeping him one step away from Gus.
VG: Gus makes it easy to not catch Gus because Gus is so damn smart. He is a brilliant adversary. But Hank is brilliant as well, and he is dogged. He will never let up. And this episode, written and directed by Peter Gould, is wonderfully done. I love that last scene in which Hank lays out to his boss and his former partner what he thinks in going on here, that he believes Gustavo Fring is some sort of a meth kingpin. For seven episodes, this has been a lopsided game of chess between Walter White and Gustavo Fring, with Walt very much the loser so far. But now it’s as if Hank Schrader’s coming to play as well. In this episode, it looks like he’s going to be a pretty formidable opponent.
AVC: This is also the episode that has Jesse’s monologue about the “Problem Dog” of the title. You guys do a lot of people just talking for two or three minutes, and that’s sort of an unusual choice in TV drama.
VG: It’s funny. We think of our show primarily as a visual show. Some of our proudest moments are moments in which there’s no dialogue. But you’re right, we’ll either have scenes with little or no dialogue for minutes on end, or we’ll have scenes where people basically monologue and these soliloquies, these earthy soliloquies. The short answer is we like these kinds of scenes so much because we have the actors to pull them off. We’re blessed with Aaron Paul in this instance, and Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn. We have actors, in other words, who are more than capable of pulling off these scenes. And I suppose if they weren’t, you wouldn’t see so many of them on our show. We’d find other ways to tell the story. We have these amazing tools in our toolbox, these amazing actors, that allow us the opportunity to swing for the fences dramatically in these monologues, and we go for it.
AVC: This is the episode that introduces the ricin cigarette that hangs over the rest of the season. There are a lot of potential poisonings this season, yet this particular version does not pay off. Did you have a concern with that in a “Chekhov’s Gun” sense?
VG: No. We always say steal from the best, and it is indeed the old Chekhov philosophy of if you’re going to introduce a gun in act one you have to fire it by act three. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here, except that our acts one and two and three go on a lot longer than any episode. We string out our Chekhovian moments over a lot more real estate than Chekhov was able to do in any one play. That’s the beauty of doing a television show with, in this case, 13 hours of story in any one season. We essentially look at the season as one big story, and then we parcel out the moments as best we can. But we love doing things in that Chekhov sense.
AVC: Are there things from earlier seasons that you’re still waiting or hoping to pay off?
VG: Yeah, definitely. The most coy way I can answer that is that there are several things that I think are still outstanding. I guess one of them that goes without saying is the dramatic engine that started this whole series, which is Walt’s cancer diagnosis. That’s certainly something we have not forgotten about, and that is something we will touch base on in one form or another as we draw to a conclusion in our last 16 episodes. But there are other things as well. Definitely we spend a lot of time looking to the past, and looking to previous episodes in an effort to tell a satisfying story by not leaving many, or any, hopefully, loose ends hanging out.
Tomorrow: “Hermanos,” “Bug,” and “Salud.”
Wow, I was wrong about Mr White being able to poison a kid. Not only that, he had his neighbor check the house for him first. He's willing to endanger anyone's life. even the innocent ones.
Last season na ang sunod. I hope they don't take as long. Ano tingin niyo sa ending, will Walt kill Jesse or will Jesse kill Walt? hehe, parang at least isa sa kanila patay eh.
its was Vince Gilligan mom who potrays Walter neighbor
I rather See walt going down to cancer rather than be killed by jessie..
Originally Posted by mike168
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
