Last night’s Breaking Bad finale was just as awesome as expected, although it represented a shift for the show that I hope won’t be entirely permanent. Unlike previous moments of high tension in the show (okay, okay, that’s basically every episode, but still…), the focus was entirely on Walt’s business with Gus and Jesse, and Skyler, Walt Jr., and Hank fell way into the background. It was a great episode, moving from Walt’s newly confident adversarial relationship with Gus to his decision to take out poor Gale and then forcing that burden onto Jesse, but it lacked an aspect of Walt’s life that’s provided such high stakes in the past. Now that Skyler knows about Walt’s criminal life, the constant sense that Walt was trying to build a house of cards has faded, and the only thing he has to risk now is his own humanity, which he seems quite comfortable squandering. Watching Gus transform into the merciless drug kingpin we always knew he was made for a great episode, but I hope Breaking Bad won’t lose the balance between Walt’s family and his criminal enterprise in the future. (A future which is now assured a fourth season, by the way!)

There are several great interviews with both Bryan Cranston and Vince Gilligan that went live after last night’s episode, but what I found most fascinating was this question and answer from Alan Sepinwall’s interview with Vince Gilligan.

…Last season had a very clear plan, and you were laying seeds for the plane crash from the very beginning. So this year, you didn’t have anything like that in your head going into it?

…this season was kind of a different deal in a lot of ways. One sense was, as a reaction to the pre-ordained feeling of season two, we wanted this season to feel as if it was being lived in in the moment for us writers. Therefore, we kind of winged it. We tried to be as true to the characters as we could, we tried to let them tell us where they were headed, and we tried not to oversteer them into scenes we thought would be fun scenes. Rather, we tried to listen to the characters and see what they wanted to do and where they were headed. That’s really the approach we had to season three, and it had its positives and it had its negatives, too for us. It was a different way for doing it. Going forward into season four, if there’s yet a third way of structuring a season, maybe we’ll try to find it just to keep things fresh and interesting.

Gilligan goes even further into this process in the interview, but what it boils down to is an insistence that there was surprisingly little planning ahead of time and that the season came together one episode at a time. I’ll admit right now that this goes contrary to my beliefs about what usually makes good television and why some shows fall flat, but I’m glad to have been proved wrong in this area. After so much anxiety about the ending of Lost, about shows that get cancelled prematurely, about the weight audiences put on series finales, and the pressure to pull together plot strings, my position has been that the best TV shows know ahead of time when they’re going to end, and plan accordingly. For most TV shows, I still think that’s the case, particularly for those shows where plot is as important or more important than character studies. Some degree of planning makes it easier to work around the multiple real-world obstacles that beset television production schedules, but it also means that each episode can be more purpose-driven and less likely to be a misstep in the bigger scope of the season.

Yet clearly, it is possible to put together an amazing season of television with very little advance planning – at least, it is if you’re Vince Gilligan. I think it works because Breaking Bad isn’t set up as a mystery and because its suspense comes as much from the characters as it does from any particular plot line. Mysteries live and die by their plot structures, by the tiny clues and meticulous timelines. This is one reason why a mystery show like Damages has the flashforward narrative structure it does: when you put the end at the beginning, everyone knows where all the pieces need to end up. Maybe tiny details like Walt’s second cell phone or the broken windshield matter just as much on Breaking Bad, but ultimately it doesn’t matter what seals the deal on Skyler’s suspicions as long as something does. Of course, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what kind of show it is if the showrunner isn’t also as brilliant as Gilligan clearly is.

Can’t wait for season four. Up tomorrow, the return of True Blood. Whoo, sexy vampires!

After finally catching up with Breaking Bad, I watched last night’s episode live and ended with my hands clapped over my jaw, which continued to hang agape for at least two minutes after the episode’s end. “Half Measures” built slowly with the realization that Jesse wanted to kill the guys who killed Combo, the meeting with Gus, various side stories with Skyler and Hank, and the final confrontation that ended with Walt taking out a guy with his car and then without a moment’s hesitation, getting out of the car and shooting another guy in the head. The whole thing happened with stunning speed, which is a testament to the care with which Breaking Bad deals with pacing. I’ve mentioned in the past that the show pays special attention to incredibly long scenes and long takes – “Half Measure” certainly took advantage of that, perhaps most obviously in the scene where Mike tells Walt about his career as a beat cop. That long, contemplative monologue form has become a signature for the show. But on occasion, Breaking Bad takes the opposite tack and knocks you over with something you didn’t even see coming. Tortuga and the exploding turtle would be one memorable example of this, but Walt and the Aztek is right up there on a list of Breaking Bad scenes that shock you at lightning speed.

What made that scene all the more shocking, though, was one of Walt’s lines earlier in the episode, something he says as he tries to talk Jesse out of revenging Combo’s death. Walt tells Jesse he can’t kill those men because Jesse’s not a murderer. “I am not, and you are not,” Walt says. That statement is astonishing from a character who killed two men within the show’s earliest episodes and then stood by while Jesse’s girlfriend choked to death on her own vomit. But in each case, those deaths were accompanied by visibly strained consideration from Walt. Emilio’s death is particularly fraught as Walt sits on the floor and chats with him about his father’s furniture company, but our perspective on Jane’s more spontaneous death was similarly marked by long shots of Walt’s face as he contemplates his own actions. There can be no doubt that Walt is a murderer, but it’s much easier to justify it as something else when we watch him struggle with each event.

Walt comes to a decision.

The deaths at the end of “Half Measures” are very, very different. For the first time, we watch Walt kill someone with no images of his reaction and almost no visual narration of his thought process. The last images we have are of Walt sitting at the dinner table after hearing the story of Tomas’ death on the news, and coming to some strong but completely inscrutable resolution. We then watch a long build up of Jesse falling off the wagon, loading his gun, trying to gather himself for the task at hand, and then walking toward his intended victims, nearly in tears. It is a Wild West showdown sequence, ripped from the moment in every western when the hero faces down the villain in the main thoroughfare, remixed into a scene from a drug war where there is no hero. All of our expectations are focused on this experience for Jesse and his image of himself as the bad guy, and then all of those expectations collapse as Walt swoops in like an angel of death. There are no shots of his face while he’s driving, just the silhouette of the car mowing down the meth dealers, and barely a second’s glimpse as he stops the car and runs to take out the surviving victim. Jesse’s horrified reaction is our reaction, and Walt shows no trace of regret. If there was any doubt before, there is no way an audience could ever look at that man now and see anything less than a murderer.

The Wild West

It seems trivial – you begin with a man declaring that he’s not a murderer, and you end with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. But when that man is the protagonist, when the scene of the murder is so efficiently brutal, and when all of the props the show has so consistently maintained to justify that man’s actions are swiftly removed, it leaves you with your mouth agape. Mine still is, nearly a day later.

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.

I want to write about Treme, and Doctor Who, and also Friday Night Lights, which returned to NBC for its fourth season on Friday night. I want to write about all of those things, but I cannot, because I’ve spent the last few days pounding through the first season of Breaking Bad, and at the moment, my entire TV brain is consumed by how amazing and disgusting and brutal that show is. I had planned to hold off writing anything about it until I actually catch up through season three, which is currently airing on AMC, but the downside of that decision is that I can’t write about anything else, because all I’m watching right now is Breaking Bad.

At the same time, I’m watching Breaking Bad much more slowly than when I blast through a season of The West Wing or, yes, Friday Night Lights, because to watch more than two or three episodes of Breaking Bad in a single day is to flirt with soul-crushing despair. I’ve been hearing that seasons two and three are even better, and I’m both thrilled and worried by that assessment, because if this show gets any more harsh or unrelenting, I’m going to have to rock myself to sleep while whimpering softly.

What does a show have to look like in order for me to be this concerned about my own mental well-being? It helps to start with a sufficiently bleak premise – Breaking Bad’s protagonist is a guy named Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico who decides to start cooking meth after being diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. He does it largely for the money, as he’s worried about how to support his wife, disabled teenage son, and unborn baby after he’s gone. Even though Walt’s motives are primarily mercenary, though, there is an aspect of this venture that taps into something deeper about his character. Meth is a way to make money for his family, but Walt is also awake, and frightened, and challenged, and sexual, and violent for the first time in his life. I imagine this feature of Walt’s character will become more developed in the next seasons, but when it surfaces very briefly in season one, it’s almost scarier than the rest of the show.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White on Breaking Bad

Almost, but definitely not quite. My fear for my mental stability has a great deal to do with Walt, but is mostly a product of Breaking Bad’s uniquely brutal style of storytelling. Essentially: terrible, unthinkably awful things happen on this show, and then you have to deal with it. I wrote last week about the magical erasable quality of most traumatic events on network television shows, and Breaking Bad is the ultimate inversion of that formula. There are a lot of ways this manifests itself on the show, but two features stand out. First, the show has a gruesome attentiveness to the details of physical decay. Walt coughs constantly. It is a debilitating, hacking, paralyzing, gasping for air cough, and the show has no problem derailing the momentum of a plot line so that we can sit and watch Walt cough for a few seconds. There is a difference between knowing a character has cancer, and never being allowed to forget that he has cancer, and Breaking Bad is really only interested in the latter. In the same light, corpses, broken glassware, dirty ventilation filters, basements, and the New Mexico landscape are all painfully present on the show, and if Walt breaks a piece of glassware, the show is almost more interested in watching him sweep up the mess than why he broke it in the first place.

The other technique that dominates Breaking Bad’s storytelling is the use of incredibly long scenes. Where most shows give you thirty seconds or a minute of conversation at most before shifting our attention elsewhere, Breaking Bad is perfectly happy to linger on a scene as long as possible, particularly if it is incredibly painful to watch. In the third episode, Walt is trying to decide whether or not to kill a man, and he sits down on the basement floor and talks with him. They talk for nearly nine minutes, an eternity on television. No other character arrives, there are no cuts in and out of other scenes, there’s not even that much to look at. It’s two guys sitting in a dark basement, and one of them is deciding whether or not to kill the other one. We believe that gaps and breaks create suspense in fiction, so that when something dramatic happens at a commercial break, you have to wait to find out what comes next, and the waiting is excruciating. To some extent that’s true, but Breaking Bad is a study in the tension that refuses to let you look somewhere else. It’s too easy to decide to kill a man and then just do it – it’s so, so much worse to have to sit there, watching Walt try to puzzle through the consequences for killing him or keeping him alive.

I am definitely looking forward to watching the second and third season and seeing how this show develops. But there is a part of me that is absolutely dreading it.