opinions on breaking bad & better call saul

[VoanHead]

I thought it was a pretty damn good show. Sure, it has its moments of, in my own personal opinion, unbelievable crap listed here and hidden to avoid spoilers for people who haven't seen the show yet:

Spoiler

• That one time Mr.White threw the fulminated mercury next to his feet when confronting Tuco and somehow came out unscathed from that giant explosion.
• Jesse schooling a bunch of mexican chemists who don't know how to cook meth as good as him, how tf am I supposed to believe these professional chemists haven't made something as good as what Walter and Jesse have made?
• The Fly Episode, shit was nothing but a filler episode.

I could go on but overall the show gets an 8/10 outta me. Most entertaining live-action show I've seen, and Better Call Saul so far has been some good shit I've seen these past few years. Can't wait to see how it ends.

[maxmanium]

56 minutes ago, stupid ass said:

you KNOW i gotta ask what you thought of jack's gang getting shredded with a machine gun

 

Very clever. They make you wonder the whole season where that machine gun is gonna come in.

[Doomkid]

Most shows insist on wasting my time with plot threads that go nowhere, or "fake foreshadowing" or whatever. Both BB and BCS avoid that mind-numbing approach to writing, and I really love 'em for it.

 

The funniest complaint I've ever seen about BB is that it "glorifies drugs". That's how you know someone is criticizing the show without ever having watched it!

 

(Saul, while dodgy at times, still seems to be a "mostly good" person who still fucks up, whereas Walt just happily dived head-first from neutral right down to evil... Saul is way easier to root for than Walt even when he does bad things, imo.)

 

9 hours ago, General Rainbow Bacon said:

 

@MFG38 It doesn't take off until about episode 5 in the first season.  After that you'll be hooked.  

This is a common opinion in BB comment sections and stuff so I'm not at all surprised to read it here, but it always made me laugh - I can't think of another show where a half-melted corpse/bathtub combo tore through someone's roof and guts splattered everywhere in just the 2nd episode. If someone isn't hooked by then, I think BB is likely not the show for them, lol.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

12 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I can't think of another show where a half-melted corpse/bathtub combo tore through someone's roof and guts splattered everywhere in just the 2nd episode. If someone isn't hooked by then, I think BB is likely not the show for them, lol.

I was going to mention the same exact episode! In fact, the ending was so memorable that "Guts" is one of the few TV episodes where I can not only remember the title, but also the fact that it was the second episode. Usually I pay no attention to episode titles, I can only remember a few from BB and a few from the Sopranos, but I couldn't even tell you which season the episodes were in, in most cases at least. It's one of the most memorable and morbidly hilarious episodes ever.

[tsocheff]

[General Rainbow Bacon]

@Doomkid: Yeah, I remember that.  But that's not when the story really begins to unfold.  I mean, that's not when HE becomes HIM.   

[Obsidian]

At current I haven't sat down and watched it myself, but I will say that I appreciate a piece of media that's difficult to watch for more reasons than just quality. From what I've heard it gets pretty harrowing as it goes on and I find that idea fascinating, probably for the same reasons that I find horror games compelling as a concept. It's definitely on my big ol' list of Shit To Watch.

[CBM]

better call saul seems boring and uneventfull compared to breaking bad

[LadyMistDragon]

Amazing. Probably just a touch overrated but it deserves every accolade heaped upon it. It's not entirely predictable, unlike certain other popular TV shows, but not in some crappy mystery box way either.

[Serum]

Great show, especially season 5. I'll never forget the crawlspace scene. Acting/direction/sound engineering at its finest

[Koko Ricky]

It's a very fine show, with solid directing, acting and storytelling...but it's dwarfed by how much more effective Better Call Saul is at all of that, and more. BB sets up an interesting world, but populates it with several principal characters that are incredibly grating. 

 

Walter, his wife, her sister, and Jesse, all have writing issues. It's hard to describe, but I just don't think they're strongly written. Saul is better at creating engaging and charming characters.

[Ralphis]

It's in the top tier of all-timers.

 

BB is below the Sopranos, but I would accept someone saying it's a 1A. BCS is excellent too and I may prefer it, but I don't think it would be as great without having seen BB first. Ozark was mentioned earlier and it's fine enough, but it was wish.com BB.

 

My personal list for these types of shows goes something like: Sopranos > BCS > BB > The Wire > everything else

[Bauul]

I watched the first season, and to be honest I didn't rate it. All the drama seemed to be derived from the incompetence of the main characters, it was just Walt and Jessie getting out of scrapes of their own making. I found it pretty uncompelling. I think I watched episode 1 of season 2 a bit later, found it was basically the same, and never had any interest in going back.

 

If we're talking top tier TV shows, the absolute pinnacle for me is the Chernobyl miniseries. Absolutely everything about it was a masterclass.

[Sergeant_Mark_IV]

On 6/27/2022 at 2:55 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

My entire BB knowledge begins and ends with the memes.

These memes are 100x funnier if you know what are these scenes they are referencing and how depressing they were meant to be.

[Archanhell]

2 hours ago, Sergeant_Mark_IV said:

These memes are 100x funnier if you know what are these scenes they are referencing and how depressing they were meant to be.

 

[Kyle07]

I would like to start, but don't know if I should just start with Better Call Saul.

[tsocheff]

i would be good to start with breaking bad mainly for characters that appear in bb first before bcs

[LexiMax]

BB is a good show.  My only issue is with the ending.  Warning, a lot of spoilers here.

 

Basically every bad choice Walt makes from the first episode on seems to come from some sort of misplaced pride and anger at the world that wronged him.  Generally, in the world of Breaking Bad, bad choices lead to bad consequences.  And yet, at the end of the day, Walt dies on some version of his own terms.

• His family wants nothing to do with him.  Yet they will get his money, courtesy of Elliott and Gretchen.
• He learned the hard way that there are tougher people in the world than him.  And yet he manages to exact revenge on all of the people who wronged him courtesy of Ricin and a trunk machine gun.
• Oh by the way, pretty much everybody who ever wronged Walt in his criminal dealings is also dead - including Mike Ehrmantraut.  Mike sussed out what kind of man Walt was from jump street, and his only crime was speaking truth to power.
• He kills the only person who knows where the rest of his money is.  But his family is already going to be well provided for with what he gave them, and he's going to be dead soon so what use does he have for the rest?
• He set Jessie free.  And yet from the first scene Jessie's cooperation was coerced with threat of being turned into the police - the only reason they're standing across from each other is because Walt put them in that position.
• The very last scene is Walt wistfully looking over a meth lab, reminiscing over the very thing that spun his life out of control.  Is he actually sorry things got this far?
• He's dead.  But he was dead from Episode 1.

As far as endings go, it's at least passes the smell test and neatly wraps up a bunch of loose ends, but I feel like the writers lost an opportunity to pull one last "fuck you" on Walt.

 

As a point of comparison, in The Sopranos Tony has a completely different outlook at the end.  Like Walt, Tony is an Anti-Hero, and also like Walt, he dies in the end - though from an assassination and not self-inflicted - but the circumstances are very different:

• Tony just won a Pyrrhic victory over Phil Leotardo in a mob war.  This war leaves his own mob family decimated with only the possibly-traitorous Paulie left standing.  This makes them easy prey if New York decides to move in and assert their dominance.
• Even though Tony survived, the FBI is likely to indict Tony.  Even if Tony is dead, they'll likely seize assets that belong to both his actual and mob families, leaving both in a worse place.
• The former ray of sunshine Meadow has fallen for Tony's lies and has a good chance of being mob-adjacent through her career.  The mental health of his son AJ is still very much in question, likely to be made much worse by the assassination.
• He is "fired" by his own therapist.  Throughout the series, Tony gained considerable self-knowledge, but none of it translated into long-term self-improvement.

So basically, Tony is fucked, he knows he's fucked, he's checked out, and that bullet in the back of the head in he gets in Holsten's leaves several plot threads purposefully unresolved.  The audience doesn't even get the satisfaction of seeing him die, it just cuts to black.

 

That's Tony the anti-hero.  Someone who makes bad choices, refuses to learn from them, and in the end the universe makes him suffer for his choices, without giving him a last-minute redemption arc.

Edited June 30, 2022 by AlexMax

[Majin]

On 6/30/2022 at 1:28 AM, AlexMax said:

BB is a good show.  My only issue is with the ending.  Warning, a lot of spoilers here.

 

Basically every bad choice Walt makes from the first episode on seems to come from some sort of misplaced pride and anger at the world that wronged him.  Generally, in the world of Breaking Bad, bad choices lead to bad consequences.  And yet, at the end of the day, Walt dies on some version of his own terms.

• His family wants nothing to do with him.  Yet they will get his money, courtesy of Elliott and Gretchen.
• He learned the hard way that there are tougher people in the world than him.  And yet he manages to exact revenge on all of the people who wronged him courtesy of Ricin and a trunk machine gun.
• Oh by the way, pretty much everybody who ever wronged Walt in his criminal dealings is also dead - including Mike Ehrmantraut.  Mike sussed out what kind of man Walt was from jump street, and his only crime was speaking truth to power.
• He kills the only person who knows where the rest of his money is.  But his family is already going to be well provided for with what he gave them, and he's going to be dead soon so what use does he have for the rest?
• He set Jessie free.  And yet from the first scene Jessie's cooperation was coerced with threat of being turned into the police - the only reason they're standing across from each other is because Walt put them in that position.
• The very last scene is Walt wistfully looking over a meth lab, reminiscing over the very thing that spun his life out of control.  Is he actually sorry things got this far?
• He's dead.  But he was dead from Episode 1.

As far as endings go, it's at least passes the smell test and neatly wraps up a bunch of loose ends, but I feel like the writers lost an opportunity to pull one last "fuck you" on Walt.

 

As a point of comparison, in The Sopranos Tony has a completely different outlook at the end.  Like Walt, Tony is an Anti-Hero, and also like Walt, he dies in the end - though from an assassination and not self-inflicted - but the circumstances are very different:

• Tony just won a Pyrrhic victory over Phil Leotardo in a mob war.  This war leaves his own mob family decimated with only the possibly-traitorous Paulie left standing.  This makes them easy prey if New York decides to move in and assert their dominance.
• Even though Tony survived, the FBI is likely to indict Tony.  Even if Tony is dead, they'll likely seize assets that belong to both his actual and mob families, leaving both in a worse place.
• The former ray of sunshine Meadow has fallen for Tony's lies and has a good chance of being mob-adjacent through her career.  The mental health of his son AJ is still very much in question, likely to be made much worse by the assassination.
• He is "fired" by his own therapist.  Throughout the series, Tony gained considerable self-knowledge, but none of it translated into long-term self-improvement.

So basically, Tony is fucked, he knows he's fucked, he's checked out, and that bullet in the back of the head in he gets in Holsten's leaves several plot threads purposefully unresolved.  The audience doesn't even get the satisfaction of seeing him die, it just cuts to black.

 

That's Tony the anti-hero.  Someone who makes bad choices, refuses to learn from them, and in the end the universe makes him suffer for his choices, without giving him a last-minute redemption arc.

this is well written and well put, i like to analyize writing within media and i agree with you. it's observable in he bb universe that there is an invisible, poetic force in the world that catches up to people. Jesse was never an overtly malicious nor malevolent person and despite the innumerable tragedies he experiences, he persevered until he was truly free. He was the only one to dabble into the underworld and escape from it in the form of an optimistic ending for him with the ambiguity of a life reset. 

 

when walt died i was like "that's it?"-- he committed innumerable atrocities, you can't apply "fair game" to many of them as he is consciously complacent in the death of innocents and inadvertently caused hundreds to die and suffer.

 

He domineering, so let him lose control and have everything go wrong

He is cunning, so let someone outwit him and tear down his plans

He chronically egoistic, so let him die an unsatisfying death in a dumpster bin with an embarrassing reputation

 

despite season 5 supposedly showing the lowest walt has been, this doesn't effect him. he quite literally runs away from the situation and returns months later to tie up loose ends, essentially completing every motivation he had, dying on his own terms, being remembered as a 500 iq criminal mastermind, personally killing his enemies, giving money to his family and more. 

 

it's unsatisfying literature and i believe  this was done with the intention of pleasing the fans rather than following up with a deserved ending

 

[Doomkid]

I've heard a lot of people say Walt deserved a worse ending, but that's just so fucking bleak, and would be bad writing in a different direction in my opinion. He already completely destroyed his family life, killed a bunch of people - no one left alive has any love for him. Everything he had even resembling a life or happiness is long, long destroyed. He dies a husk of man who will be remembered as nothing but a villain, but he at least managed to do one last good-ish thing before he dies. There's multiple ways he could have died and it still been a satisfying ending, but depriving him of any chance to do one last halfway decent thing before dying a hollowed out shell of a man would have been uncharacteristically dark even for BB, and would have also been out of character for Walt, who was always this weird mix of good and evil rather than being some cartoonish villain.

 

I know it's just a show, but I feel like actively desiring him to get an even worse, even more miserable and joyless fate than he already did requires a level of darkness in the viewer that I don't have. The dude died empty and alone with not a soul on Earth who would have anything good to say about him. In the "BB universe", only the sickest puppies alive would have anything approaching admiration for him. That's punishment enough in my eyes, rather than just being utterly dark, having all the shit he went through take not only him down and all the people he killed down, but also taking his innocent family down by not getting any of the money he made, leaving them with literally nothing to show for their supposed father figure who is now dead - as if the way things played out as-is wasn't bad enough! Personally I'd have just been left with this empty sense of hopelessness as the credits roll, and I consider that truly unsatisfying.

 

(I like talking about it though, it's interesting seeing different perspectives on it)

[amackert]

Loved Breaking Bad. It was the first show I binged from start to finish over a couple week timespan. El Camino was decent (albeit pretty slow), and Better Call Saul was surprisingly great. It's slower than BB overall, but its most intense scenes may outdo a lot of BB's craziest ones.

[LexiMax]

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I've heard a lot of people say Walt deserved a worse ending, but that's just so fucking bleak, and would be bad writing in a different direction in my opinion

 

I don't think it would've had to have been too much bleaker, if I'm being honest.

 

How about this - Walt doesn't take the stray bullet.  He survives, is arrested, and sees the inside a prison cell.  With Walt in jail, Elliott musters up the courage to go to the police, so the drug money Walt was going to give to his family - money they don't want in the first place - is done away with.  Walt succumbs to his illness in a prison hospital with the knowledge that he saved Skyler from prosecution, killed the gang, and saved Jessie.

Edited July 13, 2022 by AlexMax

[Wyrmwood]

My girlfriend just started re-watching it after what 7yrs or so after it finished. I would have thought my memory of the show would have faded a little after all that time. I can watch Avengers or James Bond movies and not be able to provide a plot synopsis after a week but I remember Breaking Bad so vividly I'm not ready to rewatch yet.

 

It's says quite a bit that I remember that period of Walts life better than I remember parts of my own.

 

It was an awesome show and I think they finished it off before it got stale and personally I thought they ended it pretty well. Not every great story needs to have a great ending anyway, sometimes it's about the journey not the destination. Stephen King is one of my favorite modern novelists but a lot of his endings are pretty weak, the ending of It was crap but it was still a great book. Heard a few moan about the ending of Breaking Bad, not heard anyone give me a better one.

 

The supporting characters were also great, Mike, Saul, Jessie, Bogdan's eyebrows all great.

 

One thing I did notice as my girlfriend was watching, Jessie does a Homer and is much, much dumber in the first season. Cow houses!

[Doomkid]

1 hour ago, AlexMax said:

I don't think it would've had to have been too much bleaker, if I'm being honest.

 

How about this - Walt doesn't take the stray bullet.  He survives, is arrested, and sees the inside a prison cell.  With Walt in jail, Elliott musters up the courage to go to the police, so the drug money Walt was going to give to his family - money they don't want in the first place - is done away with.  Walt succumbs to his illness in a prison hospital with the knowledge that he saved Skyler from prosecution, killed the gang, and saved Jessie.

 

I'd be alright with that ending - it's much more reasonable than what I usually envision when people say they wish Walt had a worse ending, or that he shouldn't have been able to go out the way he seemingly wanted to. (I've probably spent way too much time reading/replying to Breaking Bad stuff on YouTube..)

 

I never considered saving Jesse/passing on the money any real form of redemption, just a decision to go out with a final humane act, but I've heard some people say he didn't even deserve that since for a few moments it almost portrays him in a positive light. Jesse being freed (and in my humble opinion, some of that shitty drug money being "converted" into money usable for good by his now-fatherless family) were both things I was glad to see though, and in some way Walt himself seemed like a perpetually-troubled individual during any given moment where he wasn't cooking, so I almost feel like the shittiness of his very existence was punishment enough, but of course that'll vary from person to person.

 

Plus, I kinda liked that last moment where Walt goes and checks all of Jesse's settings in the lab and almost looks proud of him, in the way a teacher would be proud of a greatly improved student. Despite being such a piece of shit, he genuinely loved Jesse as a surrogate son in his own twisted way. It's good that he never got any sort of forgiveness from Jesse for all the shit he put him through, and that they didn't share any words before Jesse sped off in the car. Walt dying presumably without any forgiveness on Jesse's part is also a reason I'm satisfied with the ending, Walt didn't deserve any closure on that front beyond freeing him.

[DJVCardMaster]

Yesterday's episode of Better Call Saul was just better than Breaking Bad, you can't change my opinion.

[out_of_service]

Breaking Bad is easily one of my all-time favourite television shows of all time. Loved everything about it. Such a monumental experience.

[Ludi]

Better Call Saul is personally my favorite show of all time. The new episode blew me away. NEVER expected Gus to do the dirty work himself besides what happened with making an example out of Victor to scare Walt and Jesse. 

[Ludi]

On 7/13/2022 at 2:03 PM, Doomkid said:

 

I'd be alright with that ending - it's much more reasonable than what I usually envision when people say they wish Walt had a worse ending, or that he shouldn't have been able to go out the way he seemingly wanted to. (I've probably spent way too much time reading/replying to Breaking Bad stuff on YouTube..)

 

I never considered saving Jesse/passing on the money any real form of redemption, just a decision to go out with a final humane act, but I've heard some people say he didn't even deserve that since for a few moments it almost portrays him in a positive light. Jesse being freed (and in my humble opinion, some of that shitty drug money being "converted" into money usable for good by his now-fatherless family) were both things I was glad to see though, and in some way Walt himself seemed like a perpetually-troubled individual during any given moment where he wasn't cooking, so I almost feel like the shittiness of his very existence was punishment enough, but of course that'll vary from person to person.

 

Plus, I kinda liked that last moment where Walt goes and checks all of Jesse's settings in the lab and almost looks proud of him, in the way a teacher would be proud of a greatly improved student. Despite being such a piece of shit, he genuinely loved Jesse as a surrogate son in his own twisted way. It's good that he never got any sort of forgiveness from Jesse for all the shit he put him through, and that they didn't share any words before Jesse sped off in the car. Walt dying presumably without any forgiveness on Jesse's part is also a reason I'm satisfied with the ending, Walt didn't deserve any closure on that front beyond freeing him.

 

I personally think that Walt freeing Jesse wasn't really a redemption for Walt, considering the torment Jesse went through under his thumb. Truly awful what happened to him, even if Jesse wasn't exactly an angel. Walt was a monster that could never be redeemed. In my opinion, the worst thing that Walt ever did was, funnily enough, destroy the meth lab. After the lab's construction process throughout most of BCS, I'm amazed Mike would EVER work with him after the fact. 

 

I do agree with the idea that Jesse leaving Walt without forgiving him was the right move on the part of the writers. It would have felt too swayed in Walt's favor otherwise.

[Chezza]

I just started watching it recently actually. Middle of season 2. I'm enjoying it so far!

[Ludi]

On 6/28/2022 at 12:55 AM, Obsidian said:

From what I've heard it gets pretty harrowing as it goes on and I find that idea fascinating

 

Yeah, especially season 5. The horrific events that happen (w/o spoilers) happen as a result of the actions of the characters throughout the whole series, so it's at just justified. 

 

I like Better Call Saul more personally. Y'all saying it's boring probably didn't watch past season one, I'd argue it has better character development with all the action of BB. Plus, BCS helps add context for why some characters (Saul, Mike, Gus, Hector, etc.) act the way they do, and ultimately makes BB even more compelling as a result.