Stand Alone

I’m almost caught up on Breaking Bad – I’ve watched all except last week’s episode, but I wanted to write about the episode that aired two weeks ago, at the same time as the Lost finale. It was one of those scenarios where I watched all of twitter get really excited about that night’s Breaking Bad episode, and I thought “Huh – I wonder if I’m going to remember that there’s some supposedly astounding episode in season three by the time I actually catch up.” There was no question. “Fly” stands out from Breaking Bad in the same way that “Pine Barrens” seems distinct in The Sopranos, “Exposé” is a separate thing from the rest of Lost, or “The Body” is markedly different from the rest of Buffy. I love this about television, and I think it’s something unique to the form – the strength of the episode structure means that each episode always has the potential to be very, very different than what’s come before. It doesn’t happen often, and many of the more sophisticated, narratively interesting shows attempt to undermine the episode as a structural force, so that one episode flows into another with very little resistance. Deadwood used this technique to an extreme, often beginning episodes exactly where the last one left off. Some of this fluidity is undoubtedly underlying the concept of the television series as being “novelistic,” as a weaker episode structure more resembles the role held by chapters of a novel. But even in those cases, the residual force of the episode as a unit combines with the reality of producing television (each episode may have a different set of writers or a different director; each episode has its own budget for guest stars, special effects) to make it perpetually possible that any given episode might be something completely weird and different.

Such was the case for “Fly,” an episode that abandoned every cast member except for the two leads, and stuck them in an underground lab while they tried to kill a fly for nearly the whole hour. Alan Sepinwall writes that episodes like these are called “bottle episodes”: episodes produced with the goal of costing as little as possible in order to reserve money for guest appearances or awesome explosions in the season finale. “Fly” uses only two of the show’s actors, and it takes place entirely on sets already built for the show almost all of which are indoors, which cuts out the expense of shooting on location. It would make sense for an episode like this to be a departure from the show’s typical tone or style of storytelling, and in some ways that was the case. There were no gorgeous wide shots of the desert or sudden gross-out images of a decapitated head attached to a turtle. It was not a depiction of Walt being torn between two different lives, as so much of Breaking Bad has been – none of the usual scenes where a cell phone call interrupts an important life event, or Walt is called away from his meth deal by a family emergency. Still, “Fly” was overwhelmingly invested in many of the things most characteristic to Breaking Bad. It was an episode that allowed both Walt and Jesse ample time to consider the narratives they have constructed about their lives and to think back through their past actions and work out what went wrong. And somehow, even in the restrictive space of the lab, “Fly” manages to ratchet the tension so effectively that by the end, I was actually covering my eyes while Jesse teetered on the unstable top step of a ladder.

“Fly” is like nothing so much as a Beckett play, and so it’s no wonder many people hated it. There’s no action, nothing happens, why is he so obsessed with that stupid fly, what are they even talking about right now, etc. etc. etc. Episodes like these, those that stand out from the rest of a show, tend to be controversial. (Think of how many people hated “Exposé,” myself included). In many instances, it’s because an audience member may not care for whatever it is that specific episode is doing – if you really hate Beckett, you probably hated “Fly,” and that’s okay. If you cannot stand musicals, then Buffy’s musical episode will leave you cold, and nothing Joss Whedon did would ever make you feel otherwise. I do think, though, that there’s something deeper happening when an audience resists one particularly unusual episode of a television show. Those episodes can feel a little like a violation, or a betrayal of a contract. We know by now that an episode of Buffy is supposed to look and sound like one thing in particular, and we’ve been watching for the past six seasons because we like whatever that is. The idea that any random episode could just go off the rails from what we anticipate is unnerving, because it upsets the norm and hints at an instability we didn’t previously realize existed.

This is exactly the reason that shows can jump the shark, but it’s also the reason that television can be so fascinating over the long term. Even the shows most inextricably rooted to a formula have the potential for a single episode to derail the status quo. In any week, the show you’ve been loving as Happy Days may choose to send the Cunninghams to Hollywood, thereby giving Fonzi a chance to waterski over a marine predator. But on the other hand, every new episode is also an opportunity to be a costume drama, or a farce, or some bizarre metafictional exploration of minor characters. Or a Beckett play – but just for an hour.