I'm about halfway through rewatching season 4 of Breaking Bad, and I'd forgotten how involved Skyler was in Walt's deception. The whole "gambling" story. She was ride or die, even with their passive-aggressive sniping at each other.
And there's no way Walt could've pulled off the carwash deal without her. Skyler-haters are dumb.
I remember being annoyed by Marie's shoplifting subplot at the time, but now I see where that puzzle piece fits. And Betsy Brandt plays it fantastically.
I forgot about Walt destroying a brand-new Challenger and eating like $50K in legal fees just so he didn't have to admit Skyler was right about something. What an asshole.
This was Vince Gilligan's answer a year ago, when asked what he thinks happened to Jesse. At that point, he had written the script for the movie and was about to shoot it. ew.com/tv/2018/09/28/… 
I'd forgotten all about Walt and Jesse's knock-down, drag-out brawl in "Bug." How anybody ever sides with Walt on any of this shit is beyond me. His ego is just repulsive. All his misery is self-inflicted.
Skyler is at least as good a criminal as Walt is, probably better. Her ploy to convince the IRS that Ted was just incompetent, not criminal, was great. Maybe things would've been different if Walt had let her in from the start...
Just finished season 4. Lily of the Valley, man...
And some people were STILL on Walt's side. "He knew the kid would be okay!" No he didn't. That's why he was so relieved when Jesse told him. It was a huge gamble with a little boy's life. Just like he gambled with his next-door neighbor's life, with armed men in his house.
Walt justified all the lives ruined by his meth because at least with him, they were getting what they paid for. And they were just a bunch of drug addicts anyway. But putting an innocent little boy in the hospital... it's beyond Machiavellian. It's pure evil.
All the other people Walt had directly killed at that point were drug dealers, so after Krazy-8, those scumbags weren't keeping him up at night. But Brock, man. That little dude never hurt anybody.
The kid who played Brock must be 15-16 by now. I don't know how they'd bring him back for the movie without recasting. Like little Walt from LOST. Only a couple of years were supposed to have passed, but by the end of the show that dude was like 6'5".
Working through season 5 now. Hank, for all his macho bluster, is a fundamentally decent man and loves Walt like a brother. It blinds him to the obvious. And Walt manipulates him, using the truth to tell lies.
Once the writers knew how many episodes they had left, they started sprinting through plot points. I'd forgotten that the train heist was done all in one episode.
And the beginning of the end was... Walt whistling while he worked. That's when Jesse started to realize he was partners with a sociopath.
Walter has a chance to walk away with $5 million, without having to do another day's work or risk taking another life. He flatly refuses because his ego won't let him. His mistake with Gray Matter has eaten away at him for decades. He's like the Pete Best of meth.
The scene with Jesse and the Whites at dinner is laugh-out-loud cringey. Aaron Paul got an Emmy nomination for that episode and should've won.
That whole sequence where they're grimly dismantling that kid's dirt bike... Jesse should've walked, right then and there. He's the only one left alive for the sequel movie, and I hope that crime plays into it. That kid deserves justice.
A thing from season 4 that keeps bugging me is when Walt is telling the story about seeing his dying father. He says he's telling the story because he doesn't want Walter Jr. to remember him at his lowest. But it isn't about comforting his son. It's about his own ego. As always.
Mike told Walter the truth, right to his face. He cut through all the bullshit. He shattered Walt's forcefield of denial. And for that, he had to pay.
Season 5 was really two seasons, eight episodes each, a year apart. And if the show had been cancelled for whatever reason, episode 8 would've been a hell of a series finale. Sort of a Watchmen ending.
That scene by the pool: Walt and Skyler apparently reconciled, everybody chatting happily about nothing important, Walter Jr. pushing little Holly around in her stroller... One last moment of illusory contentment before Hank takes a dump and stumbles upon the truth.
I've never seen Laura Fraser in anything before or since, other than BCS, but she's so great as Lydia. She held her own with all these great actors, right from the start.
The depiction of Hank's panic attack, as he's driving home after realizing Walt is Heisenberg, is the closest any TV show or movie has ever come to capturing my own experience with them. It's pretty much like that. I'm doing okay now, but for a while I was just like Hank.
Once again, Walt's ego was his downfall. He went to visit Hank at home, and he could've walked away, but he just had to wave the GPS tracker in Hank's face. He had to prove he was smarter than Hank. And from that moment, the race was on.
Hank had his suspicions, but no proof. If Walt had just pretended everything was okay, he might've died of cancer before Hank could get him. But he just had to be Heisenberg.
Heisenberg is Mr. Hyde to Walt's Dr. Jekyll. The transformation is startling. There's no mistaking it when he gets that squint and that head tilt and starts pointing out how stupid the other guy is. All that ugly, repellent ego just radiates from him. Cranston, man.
"I posed as a meter reader. I put a bug in the tall kid's mom's place. For three hours straight, all he talked about was something called 'Babylon 5.'"
God, "Ozymandias" is an utter nightmare. All that tension, building up for five years, just explodes. All Walt's plans, all his lies and delusions, completely shattered. Still harrowing, no matter how many times I see it.
And STILL some people were rooting for Walt. Even after Hank. Even after Walt made a point of looking Jesse right in the eye and saying, "I watched Jane die. I could've saved her, but I didn't." I wish he wasn't dead, just so Jesse could still kill him.
The one good thing Walt did, one of the few good things he ever did in the whole series, was let Skyler off the hook. He knew the cops were listening, so he made sure to convince them he acted alone. He kept her out of prison, so at least the kids would still have a mother.
As it turned out, the most loving thing he ever said to her was: "You stupid BITCH." That's Heisenbergian for, "I'm sorry."
Rewatching the whole series over the last month, one of the fun things is finding the little connections I'd missed. Like, the kid who wanted the whole school to get A's after the Wayfarer 515 crash was the same kid who begged Walt to pass him or he'd have to go to summer school.
Tomorrow I'll watch the last two episodes, and then it's the movie on Friday. I don't know how they're going to put a capper on a show that already ended so perfectly, but I have faith in Vince Gilligan.
I'd forgotten that Charlie Rose was the one interviewing Gretchen and Elliott, drawing Walt back to the ABQ. Back then, we didn't even know Charlie was the worst guy in the history of the show.
