Thomas F. Cook

CARRIE. I don’t understand why they are giving away all the new plot points in both the “This season on Carrie…” trailer, as well as in the story telling itself. I mean they basically just let you know in the very first scene that not only the gymnasium, but the entire school, the entire town, and they even describe a giant crack in the ground that goes directly from the school auditorium to Carrie White’s house. So… what is the purpose of watching this? I do think the girl that’s playing Carrie is perfect. I don’t think lessening the monster aspect of the mother will help the story. Carrie is a perfect tragedy in a sense. She brings about her own demise through her hubris and pride. I don’t agree with it, but it’s the definition of tragedy, and I think the original is moving in a way that only tragedies can be. A good, well written, genuine tragedy, is not tear jerker, but something that chills you. Brokeback Mountain, in spite of how “tragic” it seems, is not in fact, a tragedy. Ennis Del Mar is the main character of Brokeback Mountain, even though both characters seem to be on equal footing for most of the story and movie (and, apparently, play as well). But Ennis actually gets what he wants. He wants a relationship with Jack Twist but on his terms — in the mountains away from prying eyes. He gets it. And even though it may be terribly sad because of our own feelings about a man, living alone in a trailer on the distant edge of some awful town in Wyoming, Jack’s shirt that he stole enclosed by his own, and without a friend to name — he lived the life he wanted. He never expressed a desire to live with Jack (unlike Jack, who did). In the story, he is mystified by his wanting to have sex with a man, which is one of the many reasons why people thought the character was bi-sexual. Technically, he is bi-sexual in that he has sex with Alma, his wife and later Cassie, his girlfriend. But emotionally, he does not connect with them, or express very much love to them. In the movie, (and I’m not sure she’s in the story), the Cassie girlfriend is pretty clear that she has Ennis’s number.

Anyway — Carrie is a good tragedy. They weaken it by making the mother understandable and somewhat sympathetic.

THE SOPRANOS. I never watched the first episodes of the Sopranos and didn’t come into the show until about the 4th or 5th season. I can say, easily, after watching the first two episodes, that it is vastly inferior to Breaking Bad — and I don’t know if I would even put it in my top ten. I can’t remember what I put in my top ten for the Times contest, but Breaking Bad was my number 1 show and it still is. I haven’t see the Wire which was everyone’s number 2. I had thought that Sopranos might be in there if it hadn’t started in 1999, which made it ineligible. But even if was eligible, I know I wouldn’t vote for it. It doesn’t hold up. James Gandolfini, who used to use the same video rental store as I did, is lost in the part in those early episodes. Lorraine Bracco is a horrible actress and I’ve always thought so. Stiff, wooden. She can barely say hello believably. I think her best acting is done in those scenes she has later with her own therapist — Peter Bogdanovich. Edie Falco is probably the best actor in the show, at least at the start.

THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW. This is called something else in England. However, this season I find almost all of the contest utterly horrible and uninteresting. The guy with the fucking pig nose ring should just go drown himself somewhere — I hate those piercings and I don’t care if he or anyone else thinks they’re beautiful. Tattoos as well. Also, throuples don’t work. I once knew 3 guys that claimed to be in a relationship but you could tell that it was 2 of them in a relationship with the 3rd hanging on because he didn’t want to lose out. (Eventually they threw him out.) It is imbalanced. It doesn’t work. It’s the equivalent of the three body problem in science. Another 3 person couple I knew was actually 2 slaves and a master. So that’s an entirely different thing.

And the accents. Oh God these lower class British accents are getting harder and harder to take. They’re so screechy and it sounds like their vocals cords are being twisted. I’d much rather listen to an Irish or Scottish accent than lower class British. I guess I’m Catherine Tate in those sketches where she has to break the bad news to her children that daddy wasn’t able to buy any brie during his trip to France.

Season 5

Anthony Hopkins said playing Hannibal Lector was easy. Simplest thing. Just make him polite, he said.

That’s kind of what Jesse Plemons did with this character Todd Alquist who shows up in Season 5.

I remember being much more horrified by his psychopathology than when watching it the second time around. This time, he just seems stupid. At the end of this long, really brilliant series, (recently named the #1 television series of the 20th Century by both critics and viewers), after nearly everyone is dead including his horrific family, he’s so stupid he doesn’t even seem to realize what has happened. His last line is cut off when Jesse wraps a chain around his neck and chokes him to death. His last line is, “Mr. White…” and you’re left with the distinct feeling that he was going to say, “Mr White, I think somebody did this on purpose.”

But I’ll get there. I think this season actually saw fewer deaths and murders than in the previous seasons, but I could be wrong.

Killing the entire crystal meth gang with Gustavo Salamanco and Gus Fring’s deaths does not end the problems for Mr. White and Jesse Pinkman.

The season opens in the German company Madrigal offices. We don’t know it, but Gus Fring has been working with Madrigal all along (much of this is learned in the follow up series “Better Call Saul.”). One of the executives in that company decides to kill himself using a portable CPR, before police can question him about his association with Gus Fring. Body Count = 225

Lydia, the American Madrigal employee who has been helping Gus send crystal meth to Germany — asks Mike to kill the 11 men who worked for the now dead Gus Fring. He refuses, so she asks another of the men named Chris to do the job instead. Chris kills one of the men named Chow and then invited Mike to talk about their predicament in an attempt to kill him next. But Mike suspects a set up, and kills Chris instead. Body Count – 227.

In the 3rd episode, Walter suggests using a Pest Removal company as a way of cooking their meth. This is the episode where the horrifying Todd becomes a character, although at first he doesn’t speak and seems kind of like an extra.

The 5th episode is the great train robbery and, at the end, one of the most horrific moments of the series was when Todd waves at a little boy who is riding his bike and then shoots him because he, Todd, had been told that there can be no witnesses. He had no feelings about killing a child and this act sets Jesse, who has great feelings about it, on a terrible spiral that will almost get him killed. Todd’s true psychopathic nature was revealed in that moment. It’s probably even more horrifying when they put the bike and the kid in the vat that dissolves everything to goo.

Body Count – 228.

Finally — it probably isn’t worth going over the plot points — Walter White shoots Mike and Mike dies by the river. One thing I’d probably need to look at again, is why Mike is able to anticipate and outsmart every single person on the show, except for the one who kills him.

Body Count – 229. R.I.P. Mike. But you’ll have 6 years of working coming up on Better Call Saul so it’s okay.

After not getting the names of the 9 or 10 remaining men that worked under Gus Fring from Mike, Walt goes to Lydia and gets the names. She gives him the 9 names and also proposes to work together to ship crystal meth to the Czech Republic. In this episode, Walter refuses to speak to Jesse because Jesse has quit the business. (The breakdown of Walter and Jesse’s relationship, which has always been a volatile one where they are constantly yelling at each other, has always been a little bit of a mystery to me. It may be a little forced, or it may be Walter’s pride, again, getting angry at Jesse for not seeing his greatness.) This is also the episode where Walt also hires the white supremacists — an interesting choice, given his descent into evil. He hires the white supremacists to kill all 10 men who used to work for Gus Fring.

Body Count – 239.

Declan (a drug dealer and cook who Lydia of the Madrigal company has been using) is asked by Lydia to hire Todd as their cook. The cook they use is lousy and makes a substandard product. While she’s hiding in the underground meth lab, the white supremacists come and massacre everyone in Declan’s gang. I counted ten bodies, but it was hard to be sure how many were killed by the White Supremacists.

Body Count – 249 (Mike)

In the scene in the desert, which has been called one of the greatest episodes of television, and the greatest episode of Breaking Bad, Walter and Jesse, who have been fighting badly, are handcuffed and put into different cars. They’re there in the first place because Walter hid all his money in six oil barrels and buried them in the desert. Hank was able to manipulate Jesse into pretending he was dead and sending a picture of the “dead” Jesse posed next to an open oil barrel of money. Walter, eager to protect his barrels of money, makes a very unwise decision to call the white supremacists he’s working with to come and kill the people trying to steal his money. But then, seeing it was Hank and Gomez, he calls it off and surrenders. Hank, also suffering from immense pride, puts Jesse in handcuffs in one car, and handcuffs Walter and puts him in another. But then the white supremacists show up, and they decide to kill Hank, Gomez and anyone else and take the money. Jesse hides under one car in a dirt depression, and Walter flings himself to the floor of the car he’s in. But Hank and Steve Gomez are caught in the open. Gomez is killed.

In the following episode, which is the other half of this long episode, they kill Hank. They bury Hank and Gomez and leave Walter in the desert with one barrel of his money. They take Jesse at Todd’s insistence that he needs him in order to learn how to cook meth. Jesse is enslaved.

Body count – 251. (Hank and Steve Gomez)

Walter has taken to hiding in Vermont and Jesse is a slave. He tries to escape and to punish him, the psycho Todd calmly kills a woman Jesse was in love with.

Body count – 252.

And then in the last episode, the finale, Walt “saves” Jesse by confronting the white supremacists who are now cooking “blue meth” with Todd and Jesse’s assistance. He has rigged an automatic in the truck of his car and triggers it by tackling Jesse and holding him to the ground. This kills 3 of the people in the gang, while “Uncle Jack” is still alive so that he can be killed by Walt. Todd was able to hide and is killed by Jesse with a chain around his neck. I think this is the 2nd time Jesse has killed anyone. Walt tells Jesse to go and Jesse leaves after they acknowledge each other’s presence with a nod — or maybe they’re acknowledging the hell that they’ve been through. Walter calls Lydia who is sick with a cold, but has actually been poisoned by Ricin. Finally, Walter dies after fondling some of the meth cooking equipment. He dies with a slight smile on his face. In “Better Call Saul” it’s confirmed that Lydia died in the hospital and Walt died in the meth lab. So 4 gang members, Todd, Lydia and Walter.

Final Body count = 259.

There are a few more deaths to come in the El Camino followup movie, which I think was a mistake and probably took away from some of the great moral center that Jesse (and Aaron Paul, as the actor) provided.

There is no one in this series, other than Jesse, who actually has a moral code that cannot be broken or bent. And it’s an interesting — a very interesting idea — that perhaps our morality is not as “solid” as we would normally attribute to ourselves. We come across this idea all the time, especially when you have to start asking yourself how did an entire country (Germany) decide that it was okay to exterminate an entire race, as well as dissidents, “dirty” nationalities like Roma people (Gypsies). And so on. This question has been one of the major dominant questions of the last 80 years or so, primarily because of the Holocaust. But you could go back much further to the colonial era and ask how do people set aside their morality in order to extinguish another race of people, or how to this day, there is this notion of “Southern Hospitality” or “Southern Charm” where the people of the south consider themselves to be so civilized and superior to others, while out back their men are whipping blacks or raping back women? Walter is the prime example of this moral slide, and the story is largely his — albeit within an even larger story between the Salamanca family, the cartel, and Gus Fring and his lover. And the series itself is somewhat guilty of moral relativity or moral praxis by focusing so much on the manufacture of meth but only periodically showing the devastation it causes. (And then it’s such a minor kind of devastation — like Jesse, Skinny Pete and Badger do lots and lots of meth, but they never seem to have much of an issue with it. About the most horrific depiction of meth use was the scene where the woman pushed an extraordinarily heavy ATM onto her boyfriend’s head which crushed it, and then she shot up. All this while a dirty child was in one of the other rooms, a child which Jesse saves.)

But with the exception of Jesse, everyone compromises themselves. The Walter White story started, more or less, when he gave up his shares of the Gray Matter company for $5,000 which then went on to become worth billions of dollars. Hank may be single minded in his determination to get the “bad guy,” but he also compromises himself practically every day when he laughs, for example, at the headless body of one of the drug workers or makes fun of “beaners” as he calls Mexicans. Skylar makes a decision to support her husband’s criminal behavior, and then begins laundering money for him. Her sister is a shoplifter who sees nothing wrong in giving a gift to Skylar that she has shoplifted. She is more offended by the fact that Skylar chose to return it, than by being caught stealing.

I think, also — this comes after some time thinking about it — Jesse is also the beating heart. He’s the human being. None of the others, including some really innocent people like Steve Gomez, or the father/air traffic controller who killed himself after letting two planes collide in the air — are really human in the way Jesse is and the way William Faulkner may have recognized.

Anyway, the series was brilliant. It deserves being ranked #1 of the 22st Century. I think if The Sopranos hadn’t start in 1999, it might have come down to those two being ranked #1. This series slowed, in my opinion, after Gus Fring was killed. But ending it there would not have been satisfying because we were following someone who was actually a smaller player than the people in that story.

The follow up “Better Call Saul” takes places prior to Jesse meeting Saul Goodman and after Saul escapes to a new identity in Nebraska. The overlap is very brief — I think there’s a scene where Jesse asks Kim if “Saul Goodman” is a good lawyer. She says, “He used to be,” and then leaves his life for the next six years. After she returns, the whole Walter White episode has come and gone.

The series is also notable for the fact that it only covered about a year and a half. Time was compressed in a way I haven’t seen in television.

-33-

I’ve come to realize because I’ve been watching about 18 or so seasons of Top Chef on demand, all of which I missed when I stopped watching television 10 years ago, that there are several types of reality shows.

1. The Upper Crust. These are generally skill and talent shows, but I don’t include any of those with a live audience. So that eliminates America’s Got Talent, So You Think You Can Sing, or Dance, or Whatever. The voice. America’s Got Talent. That leaves shows like Project Runway, Top Chef, Blown away (Glass blowing), Great British Baking, and I think I saw a Graphic Design show once. The catch and the reason these are relatively good shows in the field of “reality” is that they are all enormously talented people, just to make it onto the first episode. By the end, it’s almost a given that 2 or 3 people are losing even though they are excellent in their field. I think that’s why Top Chef keeps having repeat players.
   
   Another nice thing about the Upper Crust shows are that they generally don’t hate each other. Their annoyances tend to be minor, like someone whistles or has an annoying laugh.
   
2. The middle class level of the reality show is the kind that most resembles the novel and movie “They Shoot Horses Don’t They.” Contestants here mostly try to make it to the end and are sometimes put through meaningless tasks and feats of strength and so on. This would be Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelor and other dating shows, and also I think, the talent shows with audiences: America’s Got Talent and American Idol. The Miss America, Miss Universe, Mrs. America, Mr. Leather, all the state competitions (Miss Ohio, Miss California), and even the Little Miss competitions, also belong in this category. All of them are either simply endurance competitions or come very close to endurance, rather than talent. What is called “talent” is almost nothing of the kind, except in rare instances. And of course there is a whole freak show aspect that American Idol exploited ruthlessly and probably justified it by saying “look at William Hung.”
   
3. And then there’s trash. There’s always trash in America. This would be, I’m guessing, the possession of just one cocaine addict, or former cocaine addict: Andy Cohen. Trashy housewives of Name Your City. They all have the Mar a Lago face. They are all examples of how women can be sado-masochists and destroy themseles, all while thinking they are beautiful. Donald Trump belongs in this category even though his show fit into #2.
   
   

Season 4

I’ve lost all my notes so I’ll just go by what I remember and what I can recall from Wikipedia’s descriptions of each episode.

I couldn’t remember when it was that Gus Fring, played by Giancarlo Esposito, walked in and casually slit the throat of his watcher.

It was the beginning of this season. That watcher’s name was Victor and he had proven to Walter, I guess, that he could make meth just as easily as Jesse. The whole point of killing Gale in the previous season was to protect Jesse and Walt. (Remember that Walt always has his self interest at the forefront of his mind. He may have protected Jesse in having Jesse kill Gale, but Gale was being trained to replace Walt, in the long run. This small theme (that Walt is the only one capable of making this meth), comes up several times.)

Body count = 200.

In episode 4, I think, Mike is riding in the cargo hold of a truck which gets attacked by people from the Salamanca gang, I believe. They kill the driver. Shoot up the truck. Mike was able to flatten himself to the ground enough that he was grazed on the ear, and then when they open the truck he kills the 2 goons.

Body count = 203.

The Salamanca gang uses gas to kill two of the men guarding the chicken truck that’s transporting meth in its containers. Body count = 205.

In one of these episodes which lead to a long arc, Walter creates ricin in the lab, puts it into a tiny vial and tries to persuade Jesse to kill Gus. He has an opportunity when Gus, Mike and Jesse go down to meet the Salamanca gang, but he refrains or is interrupted. Jesse has been hiding this vial in a cigarette, which he keeps upside down in his carton so he knows which one it is.

In a flashback, we learn that Gus and his former lover, Max, approached Hector with their crystal meth and Hector, who is now the bell ringing invalid in the nursing home, had Max shot through the head and forced Gus to watch him bleed out. This explains some of the long running hatred between the cartel and Gus. It also explains, to an extent, Gus’s meticulous nature, and it confirmed that he is gay. Body count = 206. (But this one wasn’t related to Walter in any way.)

A sniper attacks Gus’s distribution operation and one of his guards is killed. Count = 207.

Episode 10 of this season is called “Salud” which is a toast, like to your health, I guess. It’s also the season where Gus poisons almost the entire Salamanca gang [I know I’m getting these names wrong. This is not the Salamanca gang, it is the Mexican cartel, and Don Eladio, who had killed Max so many years ago, is the leader of it.] It begins as an episode where Jesse is brought down to Mexico to cook meth as pure as Walter White can and then Jesse learns he is being “sold” in a sense, to the cartel. (Another theme that will come up later in the series, toward the end: slave labor.) Gus prevents Jesse from drinking the tequila, but he drinks it himself because he has taken some pills to help counteract the poison. It barely does, but it does the job by killing Don Eledio and all the other bosses. I believe I counted 9 or 10. One person has to be killed because he didn’t drink the tequila. The Wikipedia page says Jesse commits that killing which I know must be true or it would have been done by Mike. So body count is now 217 or 218, depending. Don Eladio is played by Steven Bauer who didn’t have too much of a career after being so prominent in Scarface with Al Pacino. A quick glance at the wikipedia entry for the character explains that the cartel is made up of 3: Hector Salamanca, Juan Bolsa, who is killed in one of the earlier seasons, before the creation of Gus’s superlab, and the Salamanca psycho twins that were killed earlier. Don Eladio took over and was the one who started ordering the shooting up of the delivery trucks, and the sniper who killed one of Gus’s guards.

The whole series, in some sense, is a fight between Gus Fring and the two men who ran the cartel. Walter’s accidental involvement, which is where our point of view is, and really begins, in a sense, with Jesse, just makes it possible for Gus to take his revenge. By having a chemist who can make a better product, Gus has the power to strike back after twenty years.

Finally, in the last episode, after a whole of plot twists and turns, Walter, in order to kill Gus, persuades Hector Salamanca to connect a bomb to his bell. Gus goes to visit Salamanca to torment him, along with his bodyguard Tycus who replaced Victor, the one that Gus killed with a box cutter. With Gus standing in front of him, Salamanca rings the bell repeatedly until the bomb goes off, which kills Tycus, Salamanca and blows half of Gus’s face off. Gus walks out of the room, but keels over and dies. Later in the episode, Walter rescues Jesse who has been kidnapped and, for the second time, forced into slave labor to make methamphetamine. The two men who kidnapped him — I’m not sure who they work for. They may work for Gus who they don’t know yet is dead. In any case, Walter kills both of them and rescues and Jesse, and in order to prevent his brother in law Hank from discovering anything, they burn down the lab.

I’m not sure if either of them knows this, but they have independently been saving each other from being killed. First Walter insisted that he needed Jesse to cook (and that was probably true because of the physical demands it made on him) and later, Jesse refused to cook anything if they were to kill Walter. So despite their almost constantly hostile and even violent relationship, there is an attachment between the two of them that really exists.

Body count for this season: 222 or 223, including the flashback killing of Max from twenty years ago.

The article in the Times today is about Trump outpacing the court in illegal construction, etc. Building it before they can decide. This is his normal speed of business — at least as far as construction goes.

And if you listen to him, he always talks about it — “We’re ahead of schedule, under budget,” and so on.

Doesn’t matter if it’s true — nothing does in his world. It’s what you say that matters. And in construction, the almost uncountable business failures he’s had, and even the wars he’s started, it’s always got to be done fast and quick. Now, now, now. Psychologically, he probably thinks that if he doesn’t push it through quickly, it’ll be bogged down in paperwork, which is often the case of most construction jobs. But… there’s only one construction job I can think of in New York City which actually never got completed. And that’s because the tower started to lean and the project was declared unsalvageable (it’s still down there near the South Street Seaport, empty and probably in danger of collapsing one day).

But when he purchased the old Bonwit Teller building, he had promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he would preserve several pieces of the building, including the art deco relief work was at the top.

Well they tore the building down and he didn’t keep his promise. (Wasn’t in writing, but he probably wouldn’t have cared if it was.) He claimed they were useless and ugly. This was one of the first stories I heard about his criminal mind. So the fact that he’s pushing this new construction at breakneck speed is not unfamiliar. The ballroom might be finished before he dies, but fortunately — you just have to look at Las Vegas — everything constructed can be torn down. Las Vegas is a little weird in that it seems to think that it should be torn down. Most places, including D.C., like a mix of new and preserved.

One of the oldest “things” in New York City is not McSorley’s pub or 6 Weekhawken Street, it is the Battery Park fence. It was erected in 1771 so it is 255 years old this year. Bowling Green itself was formed in 1733. There had been a statue of King George III and the fence’s posts were all topped with crowns. During the revolution, the statue was torn down and all the posts’ crowns were knocked off. No kings! No kings!

But the fence remains.

The ballroom will come down in my lifetime. The “arch” will not be built. The gilding will be removed. One way or another, it all comes down. This is the law of entropy.

My will states that I should be cremated and then my ashes and the ashes of my dogs buried together with a marker in a cemetery in upstate New York which has been, to a small extent, a family cemetery.

But in an article about “art coffins” that they make in Ghana, I almost want to change that to the Premum Obama Finest Lagar Beef coffin.

I think in some cultures — many cultures in fact — death is as scary and frightening as it is to those of us in the United States, who are fat and lazy and uncomfortable with just about anything that challenges us. But I think because it’s more open there, people, in general, treat death with the same imagination that you get with music.

The news that Galliano has withdrawn from the Met Gala costume party is good news, although what we’re getting, of course, is not the actual story. What almost certainly happened, especially after Alice Tisch wrote to the board and told them to drop him, (What they made public is that her email said it was a ‘failure of governance’), is that they told him to gracefully withdraw, and he did. But it prompted me to try to find my review of the movie/documentary they made about him that I saw at The Quad. The movie seemed self serving and Galliano seemed like one of those sorry/not sorry types.

(E.G., he had presumably never heard of the holocaust and didn’t know what it was, according to the rabbi that had given him his cultural lessons. Except his conviction was for praising Hitler, and telling some other patrons at this cafe that they would have been in the gas chambers. So right there, even after his conviction, he was lying to the rabbi. He wasn’t seriously interested in finding out why he was so offensive. He hates Jews then and he hates them now.)

But I realized when I looked at “the dashboard” of my review web site or whatever this is supposed to be, that I’ve got more than 200 pages and I have no way of finding anything. So I’ll be looking to add a search bar, using Duck Duck Go, I hope. And not google. Fuck you google, for going along with Trump’s lunatic Twitter presidency and renaming Lake Ontario on your maps. Did he even bother to sign an executive order this time? Or was it too much effort to take his dick out of your mouth to see if it actually needed to be done. Sorry to disturb you at work, Stormy Google.

Bing didn’t. See below. (Update. They changed it. Fuck Bing. Fuck Google. Huzzah for Mapquest which, being almost unused anymore and only benefited by keeping the name.)

Judy Bernly: “Don’t you tell me what I can or can’t be serious about, or what is or isn’t me! If I want to play S&S and M&M and all those other bondage games, or even smoke pot, that’s my business!”

December 21, 1937. Jane Fonda. 88
Jan 19, 1946. Dolly Parton. Died today, 2026. 80
September 1, 1939. Lily Tomlin. 86
January 3, 1932. Died May 2024. Dabney Coleman. 92

What a loss for the world and for readers and sensible people. And what fun that movie was.

Season 3

Anna Gunn (pictured) got the worst of it in this series: both as the character she played (Skylar White) and the actor in real life. While Bryan Cranston soared into the heights of acting fame and Aaron Paul became someone nearly everyone wanted to bed, she became — and still is to some extent — someone those horrible fans actually loathed.

It’s pretty common for people to confuse the actor with the acting, but I think the hatred of the character is what fueled the hatred of the actress, and I think they, the fans, are utterly and moronically wrong about both the character and the actor.

I’m up to season 3 and this season is really where the series starts to slow down, starts meandering, goes off on paths that might have a tangential relationship to the basic theme. Part of the problem with any long running and successful series is that actors and their agents start demanding more screen time, money and involvement in the plot. The union rules in England vs. the U.S. are extremely different, so it makes more sense for the English produce a show that is basically a single season of six episodes, like “Baby Reindeer,” or, in the case of a hit show like “Downton Abbey” a story line that kills off or gets rid of the actors who have offers to do other work. (I’m not sure it worked out for Dan Stephens, but so be it.)

But the main point of this season, I think, other than drawing Walter and Jesse further into this drug world, is to lure Skylar into the crime. When she intuited at the end of Season 2 that her husband is a drug dealer, (he’s a distributor, not a dealer, Walter insists, which kind of reminds me of those gay men from ages ago who insisted they would never ever be passive in that kind of a relationship, but only the active one, or the one penetrating).

Skylar tells her lawyer about all of it and the lawyer states unequivocally “leave immediately.” She doesn’t, of course. But, as the lawyer tells her, the instant she doesn’t leave she becomes an accessory after the fact.

[There was a great moment in the relatively poor television version of the Bernie Madoff story where the two sons visit their lawyer and explain that their father has admitted to running a massive ponzi scheme. But it’s okay, they say, because “dad’s” going to make sure everyone’s taken care of before he turns himself in. The lawyer immediately stops the conversation, mid-sentence and says, “You’re talking about an ongoing crime.” They were so spoiled and deluded they didn’t even think about the fact that “making things right” is just “making things right with stolen money.” And once they know, their only choice, if they don’t want to go to jail, was to turn him in immediately. I believe they did. But in that sad true story, both sons died – one of suicide, and Madoff died in jail. Only the wife survived, and she had nothing left, except whatever they allowed her to keep.]

Well Skylar in this case thinks she’s protected because she won’t have to testify against her husband. Already she is starting to think like a criminal. But what she fails to take into account is that they can prosecute both of them without requiring either to testify against the other. Her naivete leads her to committing crimes and eventually entering into the money laundering aspect of it drug dealing. But with her, I didn’t think there’s any indication that she consciously wishes to break bad — and that is probably one of the over-arching themes of the show. Did Walter go bad because society mistreated him at every turn, or did he break bad because he really wanted to. Anthony Bourdain, in the documentary that came out just after Covid restrictions were lifted, talked about how he knew he was going to become a heroin addict and didn’t have to, but that he wanted to. I’m not a Bourdain guru like some people, but I thought this was beautifully honest. That same question is going to rise in importance as this series goes on. It might even be the final question — the dying question.

Now, onto the body count. Where were we. I believe we were at 175 bodies that can be directly or indirectly attributable to Walter White’s decision to start cooking crystal meth and his pride which appears to be a wound that will not heal or even close up a little.

The end of Season 2 introduced Saul Goodman (every criminal needs a lawyer), Mike, the cleaner, and Gustavo Fring (Gus), who is one of the two main dealers in the area — the other dealer that controls the territory is a Mexican group called the Salamanca Cartel. The beginning of this season introduces “the twins” — nephews of Hector Salamanca, who are there to avenge their cousin Tuco’s death. (Remember that Hank was the one who killed Tuco.) The twins in either episode 2 or 3 of this season are recognized as they try to use an illegal migrant truck to cross the border. I guess because they were recognized, they kill everyone on the truck and the driver of the truck as well. The dialogue later said 9 bodies plus the driver. I counted 12 people in the truck plus the driver, but I’ll go by the dialogue. So

Body count: 185.

The psycho twins also kill a lady in order to steal her mini van. +1 Donald Margolis (Jane’s father) is heard over the radio that he killed himself after the air traffic disaster: +1. In episode 7 of this season, the twins are encouraged to go kill Hank (not Walter) by Gus Fring, but Hank first pins one of the twins with his car and then manages to shoot the other twin in the head. An anonymous woman is killed but I can’t remember why. I also have in my notes “Miss Paketewya” and “Indian cop” killed by psychos. After this shootout, Hank is gravely injured, one twin is dead and the other has lost his legs. So I’m going to +4 not including the one twin because he isn’t dead yet.

Body count: 191.

But in the next episode, Mike injects the still living twin with something that gives him a heart attack, and a character named Bolsa, who has become Fring’s enemy, is surrounded by Federales and he and his body guards are all killed. +4 or more (I’ll have to watch it again).

Body count: 195.

Through various plot twists, Jesse meets a young woman who will become important to him. But right now her importance is that she has a son named Brock and her little brother named Tomas. Tomas is the one who killed Combo. Combo was killed because he was in someone else’s territory and they made a little kid do the killing. After some fights and so on, the drug dealers kill little Tomas, (+1) so Jesse vows to kill these drug dealers. This time he comes close, although you have the distinct sense that he will not be able to do it, or that he will fail and get himself killed. But before he can do anything, Walter runs the druggies over with his car. He jumps out and shoots the still living one in his head. He does this with almost no hesitation. (+2)

Body count: 198.

And finally, at the end of season 3, Jesse kills. He has to or he will be killed himself. Walt warms him through some trickery that if he doesn’t kill his new assistant (an oddball character named Gale Boetticher) they will kill him. Jesse’s only way to stay alive is to be Walt’s assistant and with Gale being a possible and better replacement, he has no choice. Oh, and they are also grooming Gale to become Walter’s replacement as well, so Walt isn’t exactly looking out for Jesse at this moment. In fact, I think before Walter is brought back to the lab by Victor (the new watchman after Gus killed the first one for no reason at all), he was on his way to kill Gale himself.

Anyway, Jesse has, basically, a 20 minute head start because of where they are in the city. The season ended on a kind of cliffhanger because they never showed Jesse actually shooting Gale. But he did and Gale is +1 for the 3rd season.

I think Aaron Paul won his first Emmy for this season or episode.

Body count: 199.

-30-

Season 2

In the second season, we are introduced to an insane, psychopathic, distributor named Tuco. Tuco is a character who loves to kill — probably gives him some sort of sexual endorphin filled rush which is why he has no qualms about doing it over and over. His relationships are all transactional — he beats one of his “lieutenants” (I’m making up ranks and things) because he made an innocuous statement which Tuco misinterpreted or purposely got enraged over, and then, a few minutes later, comes back and throws the body on the ground and screams at him (the corpse) that was too much of a bitch to take a beating. The other lieutenant dies in a freak accident, but this just makes Tuco laugh. For the series, the body count is now 4.

It also, incidentally, makes Hank, Walter’s brother in law, laugh. These two are supposedly on the opposite sides: one bad and one good. Hank poses for a picture with the headless body, thumbs up like Trump with his weird ass thumb, and kind of the way those horrible soldiers in Iraq posed with the Iraqi hostages with their thumbs up and grins. [And we wonder why people in the south gathered around a lynched black body hanging from a tree to have their picture taken. They were the same, they just weren’t part of the “thumbs up” culture.]

The series did a little bit of regression here, I think. Walter becomes a little bit more scared than he was in the first season — he seems to be a little bit too shocked at some of Tuco’s behavior, given that he’s already killed 2 drug dealers himself. But this regression was probably necessary because by now they knew the show was a hit and they probably had a showrunner involved who was planning how to tell the multiple stories over 5 seasons, etc. You can’t start at the end, so they stepped back a little and made both Jesse and Walter a tiny bit more frightened and naive.

Jesse has a fight with Walter in one of these episodes, and starts to choke him, but he backs down. He does not kill. Later, in the episode where they’ve been kidnapped by Tuco who is going to take them down to Mexico to escape the DEA, Jesse shoots Tuco in the stomach during a scuffle. But it isn’t Jesse who kills him. In fact, Tuco doesn’t seem to be very much bothered by the stomach wound and has a shootout with Hank who has come to this remote location to look for Jesse — having found a few clues that tie Jesse to Walter. Hank is the one that shoots Tuco in the head, calm and steely, and kills him. Body count: 5. This is helpful for Walter and Jesse, as they get away from someone who was undoubtedly going to kill Jesse for being useless and kidnap Walter to Mexico. But in furtherance of the plot, it creates a gap in the distribution market. Tuco was the distributor in the Albuquerque area — the one who brought the drugs up from a Mexican cartel near Juarez and had a network of dealers and second level dealers to sell it to all the meth heads in Albuquerque. Without a distributor, Walt and Jesse can’t make 2 pounds of meth every week and sell it for $36,000 a pound, or whatever they’re getting.

The interaction with Tuco, however, leaves them shaken to the core. In spite of the fact that earlier in the series, when Tuco stole all their money as well as their drugs, Jesse, who was told by Walter to go get their money, got beat up — I may be remembering this wrong — and ended up in the hospital. Walter, who is going by the name Heisenberg, goes to the same gang hideout with what is, supposedly, a bag of crystal rocks. (They call it glass because it isn’t cloudy). Walter demands his money but Tuco attempts to throw him out. At that moment, Tuco decides to smash the “crystal” but it turns out to be an extremely potent explosive. The entire place it destroyed — Walt hit the ground knowing what would happen — and walks away with his money and his drugs. So being that shaken when Tuco was on a machine gun rampage with his brother in law doesn’t really make that much sense. But we’re talking trivial details.

The plan Walter comes up with to explain his “absence” without revealing that he had been kidnapped, is to get naked and stand in the middle of a gas station candy and soda store. For this he has to go an extensive series of counseling and during one of his sessions he “confesses” to the therapist that he made it up, because he was sick of people fussing over him and he was sick of the medicine and he was sick of the nausea. So he left, and then used the naked episode to try to convince people he had a fugue episode. This isn’t actually true, but it’s a believable truth to a therapist. At this point, Walter has lied so often: to his wife, to himself, to his son, to Hank, to Jesse, the school where he teaches, that you almost get a sense of the good lying and the bad lying. Like when he makes up reasons for his wife, they are utterly unbelievable and everyone can see right through the lie. With the lie to the therapist, there’s a bit of truth in there, and so the lie is delivered more successively by the actor and it is, almost, believable. If we didn’t know the rest of the story, we’d probably accept it as true.

We have to remember that almost all of us listen to things that people say and believe what they say. It’s practically impossible to do otherwise. I’ve known some (maybe one person, actually) people who never accept what people say at face value. But for most people, if someone comes in and says, “Oh look what I bought at Sax this morning,” we believe an almost uncountable number of things that person just stated. We believe that person went to Sax, in the morning, bought something there, had an uneventful rest of the day, and is now showing it you. They could have stolen it from Sax. They could have stolen it from another store. They might have been arrested, been caught in an accident. Someone could have given it to them. Maybe it’s an old purchase and it wasn’t today at all. Maybe they’re trying to distract you from something completely unrelated to a purchase. But we believe, for the most part, the things people say because that is our nature. It would be next to impossible not to believe that people are generally not trying to fool you or lie to you. They might be exaggerating, engaging in some hyperbole, telling a tall tale, talking about the fish that got away — but we kind of enjoy that sort of lie.

Since this analysis was really meant to look at how the series deals with “Good and bad” — Walter’s descent into badness or maybe even evil — Walter is the obvious character, but Hank’s character, in my opinion, essentially starts out bad and, maybe as he goes on, becomes a little bit more good. He is a horrible racist even though he has a Mexican partner who puts up with being called a Beaner. He’s a pretty terrible husband. And what’s most awful, in my opinion, about Hank is what a lazy thinker he is. In the rest of the season, we’ll come to see that he’s actually a pretty clever agent. There is a person who the gang (at this point in the season it’s Walter, Jesse and a new character, Saul, the lawyer) hires to pretend to be Heisenberg and takes money in order to go to jail. Hank, alone, doesn’t buy it. That’s because he has good instincts and probably the same instincts as criminals have. He is blind to his brother in law, right now. But, culturally, he is so irritatingly middle class, middle America. He’s part of the very large group of people who think Hillary Clinton was talking about them when she referred to half of Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables.

[Incidentally, that phrase probably cost her the election. It doesn’t seem possible that something so small could change the outcome, but I think it did. For one thing, every supporter of Trump thought they were in that basket. She clearly said, “half” his supporters, but that’s not what they heard and she should have known that nobody would make the distinction between one half and the other. Secondly, it was a beautifully written phrase: memorable, sharp and accurate. It has lasted, probably, beyond any other phrase of that season. Make America Great Again has become a movement, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful, sharp or accurate. You could probably substitute “Great” for “White” and get at the real meaning. Deplorables was effective because it was true, while Maga is just a disguised and invented nostalgia. Anyway…]

Hank’s wife is a shoplifter who cannot admit she has a problem, but she also is extremely judgmental and a racist, so she is full of “bad” while pretending to be middle class and hypocritically judging all the other bad people: Mexicans, drug dealers and so on.

Jesse is my favorite character and it could be because Aaron Paul is such a lovable actor, not because the character is someone you would want to fall in love with. If there’s any of the bobble heads I’d all in love with it’s probably Badger. But I think Jesse’s role in the entire series is probably as “pretend bad.” He is possibly, one of the only good people on the show, and I’m including the CP son who became a kind of disability spokesperson and hottie when the show was running.

Also in this season, Jesse found a girl living next door to him whose name is Jane and is a “recovering” drug user (heroin) — she likes to lace her heroin with a little crystal she says. After meeting Jesse, she falls off the wagon very quickly and becomes re-addicted to heroin, with all the messiness and crap that goes with it. Her father is Q, from Star Trek — John De Lancie. He is, perhaps, very close to the end of his patience with her. All drug addicts of this nature end up exhausting their parents ability to keep caring. In any event, Walter, who has made an acquaintance with someone who can sell their enormous quantity of blue crystal meth, has to break into Jesse’s apartment to steal it. Jesse reveals where it is in a heorin and meth drug haze that he won’t remember, and Walter gets the stash. Then Walter sees Jane start to vomit and choke on her own puke. He rushes over to help her — turn her on her side — but then stops and lets her die. None of this would have happened had Walter not shaken Jesse to try to wake him up and find out where the crystal was. In doing so, he knocked Jane over onto her back and she had earlier mentioned to Jesse that they had to sleep on their side in case they puked while they were sleeping in their high.

Body count: 6.

Other bodies that I don’t need to enumerate because they don’t relate to Walter turning to evil (yet): Combo — a small time dealer that gets shot on the street by a little kid in a bike (this kid will become an important plot point later) — 7. An informant named Tortuga (Spanish for tortoise) who gets his head chopped off by a cartel and attached to a land tortoise in the desert: body count 8. And then Jane’s father, having a nervous breakdown while trying to run an air traffic control screen, allows two planes collide in mid-air, right over Walter’s house and neighborhood, 167 passengers. I’m doing body counts based on associations as well as direct killing by Walt.

Body count: 175 — just about all of these people would be alive if Walter White didn’t decide to cook meth to make some money to pay for his cancer treatment and to leave his family some $$$ when he found out he was terminally ill.

-30-