No-no, I thought the review was fair and it’s still clear that you do like the show (your description of Walt’s pleas was nice) : ). I’ll blame my bias again asI say that there has never been a point for me in the show when I’ve thought, “Hmm, things are going a bit slowly,” but that’s just me. Chris/t, I like to watch a show that consists entirely of a therapist talking to a patient for 30 minutes, so who am I to think clearly about that sort of thing.
Yes, I can see that they have been sloppy about some things, including Gus. I wonder how much of a corner they might paint themselves into sometimes, and it seems that when things get this elevated, it’s almost easier to end up with some holes.
I was forced to see the Matrix 2 (after reading what I thought was the leaked screenplay which I later realized was a fake leaked screenplay), but the ending resulted in my refusing to see any more Matrix movies because of the corner into which those people painted themselves, among myriad other reasons.
Anyway, the point of that was I’m afraid Breaking Bad is reaching a point at which they won’t have much left.

Thanks for reminding me about the eyeball and its rattling about the house!

By the way, is there a way to do some formatting when leaving comments?

I’ve been watching Breaking Bad since day one, and it’s much better than I gave it credit for in this post. I think the writing is generally excellent, it just gets stretched a little thin sometimes, and some of the stuff with Gus at the end of last season didn’t make much sense to me. They built him up as this criminal mastermind, but then showed him personally meeting with his low-level street dealers (if he was smart, his dealers wouldn’t even know who they were working for). And then his strange choices in this first episode don’t really work for me. Still, good show.

Also, the eyeball was from last season, which started with a bunch of debris from the plane crash winding up in Walt’s pool. The eye was from a stuffed animal, and it made a bunch of appearances last season rattling around the house.

I can understand the criticism of the pace and setting (in fact, I remember reading an account by someone who had worked on that fly episode’s set. This person claimed that this was a money saver episode that was intentionally limited to one set, but I never thought to consider how many of the other episodes are like that too).

Personally, I appreciate the unusual pacing, but then, I enjoy the “unusual pacing” of haughty classic literature (not that I’m making a comparison in quality here though I probably like the show more than you do, but not by *that* much). If the show is surviving by cutting corners like that, then I’m all for it. I’ll take some slow Breaking Bad to get me more Breaking Bad. I’m usually captivated by the molasses too and maybe that’s kudos to the actors/writers though I’ve tried to show the show to friends who have actually fallen asleep! Interesting formula though: to save money but keep interest, we will limit a bunch of shit and then have one crazy ass thing happen too.

In the show’s defense, it did halfheartedly try to explain why there are no other suitable meth cooks around. Yeah, I don’t know why Gus doesn’t go after the family (he even saved Hank). Since I’m clearly exhibiting bias, there’s got to be a reason besides lazy writing! Like, I swear Gus said something relevant about family in the past at some point (I didn’t even remember what that fake eye thing was).

Yeah that boxcutter scene was pretty disturbing. Can you think of another scene, even in film, that matched that length of grisliness? There have been more gruesome scenes in film, sure, but just sitting there and making us watch the whole thing (something like 1 minute)? My memory is going, I swear.