If I were to sum up the first half of this season of Breaking Bad, it would go something like this:

Skyler buys a car wash, Jesse has a party, Walt sulks and scowls, and Walter Jr. is asked what he wants for breakfast.

The second half of the season got a bit more interesting, with Jesse working directly for Hitman Mike, the Mexican cartel repeatedly disrupting Gus’s meth distribution by whacking a number of his nameless goons, and Hank finally getting out of bed and starting to investigate Gus. Also, Walt sulked and scowled, and Walter Jr. was asked what he wants for breakfast.

The languid pace of the show is nothing new: Breaking Bad has always felt to me like five solid show’s worth of content stretched out to thirteen episodes. It’s never bad, it can just take a while for things to happen or significant changes to develop. This week, however, a bunch of stuff happened, and it was all good.

Starting with Skyler, we see a cringe-worthy moment when she shows Walter Jr. the “cool” car she bought him, a PT Cruiser. It’s very safe, she explains, plus has a CD player so he can listen to tunes while he’s driving around! It’s so lame and sad when moms try to be cool.

Skyler is also dealing with her former boss and lover, Ted, who is in dutch with the IRS to the tune of $600,000. Worried that the paper trail will lead to her car wash front if Ted doesn’t pay his tab (she cooked his books when she worked for him), she arranges through Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk, cheerfully pessimistic and completely enjoyable as always) to arrange for Ted inherit the 600 grand from a mysterious dead person’s estate. Somehow, Ted doesn’t put two and two together, and thinks he is genuinely inheriting the exact amount of money he needs from a complete stranger, and then he also decides he’s not going to pay the IRS, either. Skyler finally outright tells him the money is coming from her. This is pretty dangerous: Skyler is trusting this idiot loser way more than she should, and something tells me he isn’t going to listen.

Walter Jr., while once again asked what he wants for breakfast (are the show writers just doing this to make us laugh at this point?), actually has a big part in the episode. He goes to visit Walt, who is still bruised and groggy from his brawl with Jesse. Walt breaks down weeping, apologizing to Walter Jr. for all the things Walter Jr. doesn’t even know about, and Junior puts him to bed, cleans up his place, fixes his broken glasses, and basically plays the role of the concerned dad for his own father. Walt also calls him “Jesse”, demonstrating that he’s not just apologizing to his actual son but also to the other kid he dragged into this nightmare of drugs and murder.

In the morning, Walt explains to his son that he doesn’t want to be remembered the way Walter Jr. saw him the night before, broken and weak, because that’s the only memory he has of his own father, that of a helpless, withered husk of a man. Walter Jr. then proves he is a better man that Walt: seeing his father at his weakest moment does not fill Walter Jr. with revulsion, but instead with love and compassion. Walter Jr. prefers this openly emotional Walt to the distant, distracted, and angry father Walt has been all season, and knows there is nothing weak or shameful about sharing yourself with someone who loves you, even if what you’re sharing is fear and despair. It’s great scene, finely acted by both performers, and hopefully will prove a turning point for Walt, who has been an unlikeable, incompetent jerk for the last nine episodes. It’d be nice to be able to root for him again.

(Where the White’s new baby is during this episode, I have no idea. They must have a 24-hour day care.)

Jesse Pinkman, meanwhile, is off to Mexico with Gus and Hitman Mike. To make peace with the cartel, Gus has agreed to share his meth formula, and he’s taken the visibly nervous and uncertain Jesse to the cartel’s lab to demonstrate how to properly cook their famous blue meth. The cartel’s chemist is unimpressed by the young, scruffy, and uneducated Jesse who can only identify chemicals by the appearance of the containers they are packaged in, but Pinkman steps up in a big way, giving orders, demanding that the lab be properly cleaned and sterilized, and essentially stating that things will be done his way, asshole. In effect, Jesse steps out of Walt’s shadow and becomes the version of “Heisenberg” that Walt hasn’t been able to realize lately.

It’s another great scene, and the only time in the entire run of the show where I really enjoyed both the character of Jesse Pinkman and the performance of Aaron Paul. In the past, I’ve always felt like we were being told that Jesse was a badass (by him constantly shouting “yo” and “bitch”) but never actually being shown that he was a badass. In this scene, surrounded by armed Mexican thugs, with the dangerous Gus Fring and Hitman Mike watching him, and confronted with a dismissive chemist calling him an idiot, Jesse stepped up, took control, and laid down the law. Even the normally stoic Mike and Gus smiled (a tiny bit), impressed with Jess’s handling of the situation. Hooray! Now we all like Gus!

Or maybe not. Jesse cooks his blue meth, and when the chemist injects the finished product into the Ronco Meth Purity Measuring Computer ($149.99 at Wal-Mart) the machine decides Jesse’s meth is pretty gosh darn pure! Jesse is rewarded by being told he now belongs to the cartel: Gus has apparently not bothered to inform him he’ll be spending the rest of his life on the cartel compound, cooking meth while surrounded by goons with guns. Now we all hate Gus again!

Or maybe not. Gus, Mike, and Jesse meet with the cartel don, the same guy who murdered Gus’s business partner (or maybe his former lover: he sure seems to have taken it personally). They toast the new partnership with some expensive tequila Gus brought as a gift. Poisoned tequila, as it turns out: the don and his capos all start dropping like flies. Gus himself popped some sort of poison-inhibiting pill before the toast, then made himself vomit (neatly and professionally, of course) in the restroom. Still, he’s not completely immune to the poison, and is barely able to keep his feet even while issuing a challenge to any un-poisoned thugs who might be lurking in the compound. It was a ballsy move to drink poison to convince the cartel that they weren’t drinking poison: sort of the ultimate Stinkhand (small price to pay for the smiting of one’s enemies). Plus, he showed faith in Jesse and protected him. We like Gus again.

With the goons dead, and the don floating in the same pool Gus’s old buddy/flame was slain beside, Gus, Mike, and Jesse flee, but not before one remaining thug puts a bullet in Hitman Mike. Jesse kills the goon, and peels off, with the gutshot Mike and the poisoned Gus in the car.

So. Quite an episode, I thought. Jesse was great ( for the first time ever, in my eyes). Gus was great. Mike, as always, was great (he garroted a dude). Walter Jr. was great. Walt stopped being a dick (hopefully this will continue) and was therefore great. Saul was great. Skyler probably fucked up by giving Ted a bunch of money, but hopefully that can be rectified by introducing Ted to the inside of a barrel before the end of the season. Great episode, my favorite of the entire run so far, I think.

With three episodes to go, it’s hard to predict how this season will end. Provided Jesse manages to get Gus and Hitman Mike back to the states alive (I actually yelled “Oh no!” when Mike got shot), they still have to deal with Hank’s investigation, Idiot Ted, and maybe some fallout from the cartel mass-murder.

It’s kind of funny that this week’s Breaking Bad episode photos are mostly of people sitting on a couch or a bed or in a chair staring blankly, which is pretty much what everyone is doing on Breaking Bad lately, and pretty much what everyone watching Breaking Bad is doing while they watch everyone on Breaking Bad do that.

This week’s show wasn’t as much of a new episode as a part two of last week’s episode: Skyler continues to try to buy the car wash for money laundering purposes, Jesse continues to bury his thoughts with an unending drug party, Walt scuttles around demonstrating that he’s wrong about everything, Hank mopes in bed, and Marie deals with Hank.

Still, I guess we can go into some detail as the plot inches forward.

Skyler comes up with a non-violent plan to buy the car wash from the reluctant owner. With the help of Saul, she hires an actor to pretend the car wash is contaminating the groundwater, a fake problem which will fake-cost $200,000 to fix, thus giving the owner a reason to sell to Skyler. Walt doesn’t think Skyler’s plan will work, but it does, thus continuing Walt’s two-episode arc demonstrating that he really doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

On the other hand, there’s a lot that Skyler doesn’t know as well. Seeing bruises on Walt’s face, she worries that he might be in trouble, which is adorable since Hitman Mike’s beating is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the horrific violence and danger Walt has been embroiled in.

Skyler also scolds Walt for buying some expensive champagne, because they’re supposed to be hiding their money, which is a little weird because she’s about to spend $800,000 on a car wash. I don’t know why a huge public cash deal for a car wash is okay while spending a little money on bubbly is a big no-no.

Jesse tries to reach out to Walt, inviting him hang out one evening, a small cry for help that Walt ignores. Jesse drives go-carts in a manic way, demonstrating that his mental state is fragile, something we already know from the last episode. He returns home, where his party has turned into an orgy of violence and vandalism and, well, an orgy. When things quiet down too much for his liking, he just starts throwing wads of money at the assorted scumbags in his house, I guess because he has no idea what else to do with it. We’ve got it, Breaking Bad: Jesse is an unhappy mess. Can we move on?

Meanwhile, Marie, at the end of her rope with the abusive and depressed Hank, attends open houses for expensive homes, inventing stories about who she is while stealing things until she gets caught and arrested. Hank has a cop buddy bail her out, and this buddy, out of pity, throws Hank a bone by asking him to examine Gale’s lab notes found at the scene of his murder. So, while still bed-ridden and scarfing Cheetos, we’re led to believe Hank may be on the verge of breaking out of his funk, doing some police work, and pick up Walt’s meth trail once again.

Not a bad episode, not a great episode, just a slow series of events that most shows would probably cram into a single episode, and the reiteration of information that we already know. This is the show treading water, but Breaking Bad still treads water better than most shows do anything else.

Case in point: on to Falling Skies! This episode had plenty of requisite annoyances: more personal discussions set to tender piano music, more annoying children, more general stupidity from the characters, more Pope being a filthy bore, but it added something new to the mix that made me sort of forgive it a little.

The survivors are planning an assault on the main alien structure, so Gruff Army Guy, Professor History, and Dreamy Teen go to take a closer look. They run into a woman living comfortably downtown in the shadow of the alien base. She says she was captured by the aliens but they let her go. So, here’s an idea: let’s trust her completely, because it’s not like we’ve ever encountered anyone else who made an evil deal with the aliens before, except for that guy last week who tried to kill us and turn over all our children to them.

Gruff Army Guy visits his former home because he feels responsible for the death of his family, and decides he’s so sad that he wants to stop fighting aliens, until a minute later when he decides he does want to fight aliens. Yay, I guess. Surprising nobody except the people on the show, the lady living downtown is working with the aliens, and the aliens send out a single Mech robot to kill Professor History, which is a great alien plan despite the fact that they’ve sent out a single Mech robot to kill Professor History like twenty times now and it always fails.

On the plus side, we get a look at a brand new alien! Which I have to admit is cool and interesting and makes me want to keep watching the show. We have the Mechs, who are pretty ineffective as sentries because they’re so easily heard and spotted and bamboozled and exploded. We have the Skitters, who we’ve suspected for some time aren’t really running the show, and now we have proof: while dissecting a dead Skitter, Doctor Lady and Religious Girl discover a harness inside it, implying the Skitters are slaves just like the Earth kids are, and that harnesses may actually turn other living creatures into Skitters, which is bad news for Professor History’s son and the other kid.

And now, the new alien. I don’t think they have a name on the show yet, but I’ll go ahead and call them Stalkers: they’re tall, skinny, and gray, and appear to be higher up on the chain of command. One of the Stalkers peers through the peephole of the lady’s apartment, which is pretty creepy. Moments later, the survivors give the traitor lady false information, then walk out of the apartment without even checking the peephole again even though a WEIRD SCARY ALIEN STALKER BOSS WAS JUST OUT THERE TRYING TO LOOK IN WITH HIS SCARY ALIEN FACE. Jesus, these people are dumb. But hey, new alien! That’s all it takes to make me happy. I’m a sucker.

Meanwhile, back at the school that the survivors are perpetually hanging around in, Pope is ugly and gross and saying angry things that are supposed to be funny, and has teamed up with Professor History’s youngest and most annoying son, and together they figure out that the best way to defeat Mechs is to shoot them with bullets made of Mech metal. Everyone at the school is excited about this and they cheer and make a lot of noise outdoors, because why not: it’s not like aliens have invaded the planet or anything, so there’s no reason to keep quiet and hidden during the daytime.

We’ve got a two-hour (sigh) season finale next week. I’m not sure what I’m hoping for: a good episode that will make this somewhat crappy season worth watching, or a terrible episode that will mean I don’t have to bother watching when it returns.

Finally, I sat down to watch the second episode of Alphas, but fell asleep in the middle. And then I forgot to record the third episode, and apparently the fourth episode aired and it didn’t seem worth recording that one since I’d missed the third and fell asleep during the second. So endeth my extensive, detailed recaps of Alphas. If anyone else is watching and it starts getting good, let me know.

Every week I think I’m finally done with Falling Skies, but my DVR keeps stubbornly recording it, and to tell my DVR to not record it means I have to push, like, three buttons, so I keep watching it, hoping it will get a little better. It hasn’t, really.

The recent storyline has a lone army guy showing up and saying, essentially, “I need to take all the children away from the camp because of ALIENS. And you parents can’t come for SOME REASON.” And the parents are all “No way!” And he’s all, “But, ALIENS! And, SOME REASON!” And the parents are all, “Okay, then. Good luck with taking our children away, I guess.”

To the shock of no one watching, this army guy has an evil plan to trade the kids to the aliens in exchange for the aliens letting the adults live in peace, and then the people from the camp find out this plan, and find the kids, and everything is resolved in a completely long and unexciting way in the course of two episodes. Also, some people we don’t care about get killed. We’ve also got that guy Pope back, and he continues to be gross and suck and talk about cooking, which is supposed to be funny because he’s a hardass, and hardasses shouldn’t know about cooking, you guys! There’s only two episodes left, so I’ll probably stick around for them, but if it doesn’t improve, I’m probably done with this show. I will summon the energy to push those buttons before next season, so help me.

The second episode of Breaking Bad aired this Sunday as well, and while nothing gruesome happened, it was still good in a number of ways (that number is one).

So. Walter knows Gus will have him whacked as soon as he finds a replacement chemist, and he plans to beat him to the punch. He buys an illegal gun (there is apparently such a thing in this country) and practices killing Gus for the first half of the episode, then requests a meeting. Hitman Mike informs Walt that there’s absolutely no way Gus is ever going to meet with him. Walt then approaches Gus’ home in the dead of night, but gets a phone call that lets him know that Gus is totally aware of his plan and that he should just go home. Still determined to gain the upper hand, he goes to visit Mike in a bar. Walt, in all his wisdom (he has none, we’re learning this week), thinks he can talk Hitman Mike over to his side, but Gus is Mike’s boss, and Mike, no matter that Gus coldly killed another employee right in front of him, isn’t going to cross his boss. And why? Because Mike is a professional. Gus is a professional. Walt, with all his planning and calculations, is a rank amateur.

This is really, really great stuff: Walt trying to be a criminal mastermind, even donning his badass Heisenberg hat, and getting essentially nowhere, because he’s not a mastermind, he’s a scared chemistry teacher who has survived to this point mostly on luck. And as a viewer, I’m an amateur as well. I see Walt planning his cold-as-ice assassination, and donning his black hat, and I think, “Yeah, go get him, Walt. Get gangsta. Clip his ass. ” And Walt, of course, can’t, because he’s way out of his league, and his plan to kill Gus and recruit Mike were incredibly naive. I loved the Walt stuff in this episode, as I almost always do. A great touch was giving Walt a cool soundtrack as he approached Gus’ house, only to have the music quickly dribble away as his plan was interrupted by the phone call.

Now to the stuff I generally don’t love. Jesse, for his part, spends the entire episode surrounding himself with people and noise, trying to keep a meth-fueled party going at his house for three days to avoid being alone with his thoughts. After appearing to toughen at the end of the first episode, it looks like he’s back to cracking again. Once more, he spends the entire show on the same set, doing very little. His scenes weren’t bad, but I just don’t much care for Jesse or the actor playing him, so his struggles don’t really have much of an impact on me.

Skyler has her own careful plans to become a crime lord, and they’re rebuffed as Walt’s were: after making an offer to buy the car wash she plans to use as a front for their drug money, she’s turned down by the owner who is still smarting from when Walt quit the car wash way back when. Hank, meanwhile, continues to rehab from his injuries while being a complete dick to his wife. And, in an exciting twist, Walter Jr. comes out of his room and has some breakfast, which is apparently all he does this season.

This is Breaking Bad. It inches along with flashes of brilliance and occasional bursts of extreme violence, just enough to keep the slow pace from becoming interminable. There’s always something great buried in it. It’s not always a lot, sometimes it’s just a little moment or turn in the plot, such as in this episode, where Walt’s seemingly badass and brilliant plan of bumping off Gus turns pathetic as Mike quietly beats the shit out of him and leaves him gasping on the barroom floor. But the little collection of great scenes every week, amid long bouts of not much else happening, keep the show worth watching.

I also watched Alphas. Oh wait, I didn’t. I meant to watch it. But I keep forgetting. That’s probably not a good sign.

Breaking Bad! It’s back! It’s good! It’s still slow as hell! (Spoilers follow)

I’m not a huge champion of Breaking Bad, but I do like it for the most part. Bryan Cranston is great, and I love Bob Odenkirk as his sleazy lawyer, and Jonathan Banks is fantastic as Hitman Mike, and, well, that’s mostly it for me. But those three are enough to keep watching, even if I’m not particularly in love with the show as a whole, and think Jesse is one of the most unlikable and unsympathetic and irritating characters ever put on television, and Hank is boring unless he’s out shooting drug dealers, and don’t care much for Skyler or her sister or anyone else we spend time with, really.

Aside from some of the cast and characters, what turns me off Breaking Bad has to do with the incredibly slow pace of most of the shows. This is a show where, basically, one thing happens per episode. Often, that thing is great, and the achingly slow pace helps make the brief outbursts of hideous violence even more shocking and wrenching. But there’s plenty of drag that doesn’t ever really pay off, too. There was an episode last season where the entire show was about Walt trying to kill a fly in the lab. I get that it was a metaphor, but it didn’t take me forty-five minutes to get it, and it certainly didn’t warrant an entire episode devoted to it.

At times, and this is only my opinion, I feel like the show is specifically written to assist the producers with their set logistics. If you see, early on, someone walking into a hospital, you can bet that character is going to spend that entire show on that hospital set. One episode, I think it was last season, had Jesse going to find a drug dealer at the guy’s house. And I just sat there thinking, Jesse is going to be inside this house for the whole show, because this is the only set they wanted to use this week, so they told the writers to write enough stuff so they don’t have to leave the set. And Jesse spent the whole show there.

Maybe it was the only set they had that week. Maybe they can’t afford to jump around like crazy between different locations. Maybe it makes all the sense in the world, from a production standpoint, to shoot the show this way. But it’s often tiresome to watch, and it feels like the writers might be tied to certain locations for certain episodes and just don’t have any choice other than to write long, drawn-out scenes so the show can park itself on these sets for longer than they should be.

Anyway. The first episode of this season picked up before the last season ended, showing Gale essentially talking Gus Fring into hiring Walt to cook meth, which just made Gale’s death at the end of last season even more tragic. Gale was extremely likable, and didn’t deserve to be executed (okay, he was a drug manufacturer, but an enjoyably nebbishy one), and his pushing Gus to acquire Walt’s talents just added insult to fatal injury.

The cat-and-mouse game between Walt and Gus continues, and it’s just as hard to believe as it was at the end of last season. Walt clearly has a gift for cooking high-quality meth, and Gus wants to own that gift, because otherwise the incredibly refined and discerning tastes of Arizona’s meth addicts will not be met. Like, what? Won’t meth-heads just do whatever meth is available to them? Are they known for being snooty and picky about their meth supply? The writers tried to defend this by Gale saying his meth simply wasn’t as good as Walt’s, but I just don’t see meth addicts caring as much as Gale seems to imply.

“Oh, no, this will simply not do,” says a stinky meth head, his monocle popping out as he pulls a horrified expression. “This latest batch of meth is entirely substandard. Here I came to you, sir, in the hopes of securing a high-quality shipment of meth to meet my desires of staying up for three days and nights clawing at my withered arms in my trailer, and you sell me this slop? I demand a refund, and I shall be taking my business elsewhere. Good day, sir.”

Whatever. Last season, Walt, to save his and Jesse’s lives, had Jesse kill Gale, the only other person in Arizona who can cook meth, I guess, except for Victor, who has been watching Walt cook for weeks. Gus arrives at the lab and after Walt pleads his case (Bryan Cranston was great in this scene, trying to sound defiant and logical but clearly terrified), Gus slashes Victor’s throat with a box cutter, presumably both because Victor had allowed himself to be seen by witnesses at Gale’s murder scene, and also to send a message to Walt: “Don’t fuck with me.”

Oh, wait, that message in its entirety:

“Don’t fuck with me. At least, not any more than you already have. Which is a lot. In fact, you’ve been doing nothing but fucking with me for a while now. You’ve killed my dealers and my lab guy. But don’t continue to fuck with me or I will kill someone else! No, I won’t go after your wife or son or baby, even though they’d be the perfect leverage to use against you to make you keep cooking meth for me, but maybe I’ll kill someone else who is extremely useful to me who hasn’t really done anything wrong! Yes, that’s right, I’ll kill another one of my valuable employees if you fuck with me a fourth time!”

So, yeah, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. AMC: Story Matters Here, Sometimes.

Some interesting details, though, during Victor’s death: Hitman Mike’s utter horror and surprise at Gus killing Victor. He even (briefly) pointed his gun at Gus as his hitman-y reflexes kicked in. Something tells me this will not sit well with Hitman Mike: you can’t watch a fellow employee get his throat cut by your impassive boss and not wonder if you’ll be next. Finally, a henchman who sees another henchman get killed, and has a reasonable reaction to it. Also note: I love Hitman Mike.

Also, while Walt was nearly barfing at the scene, Jesse composed himself, leaned forward, and locked eyes with Gus as Victor died. He later enjoyed a hearty breakfast. I think he’s over it. He clearly struggled with executing Gale, but he’s turned a corner. Like he said, everyone’s cards are on the table. Gus knows they are willing to kill, they know Gus is willing to kill. Everyone can get back to work, at least for the meantime.

As for everyone else, Skyler is showing signs of getting comfortable with a life of crime, using her baby as a prop to illegally gain access to Walt’s apartment in another seven-hour long scene. She’ll be running things soon, I imagine. Hank is recuperating, slowly, bitterly, and won’t be any fun to watch until he’s back on his feet being a badass.

I also was excited to see a sneak-peek of The Walking Dead during the show. That promo consisted of the sheriff wordlessly caving in a zombie’s head with a rock. That was, uh, it. AMC: Story Matters Here. Sometimes. But Right Now, Here’s A Dude Crushing A Zombie Head.  Also, considering Breaking Bad featured the most gruesome murder ever shown on TV (I think), a dude hitting a zombie in the face with a rock was pretty mild in comparison.