‘Breaking Bad’: Boom

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Scarface portion of our program.

A few weeks ago, series creator Vince Gilligan shared with us the pitch he’d long ago given to various network executives about town: “I said, ‘This is a story of a Mr. Chips who transforms himself into Scarface.’ That’s about all I really know about the character ... (he’ll) undergo a complete transformation and turn into someone else completely.’”

Six episodes in, we got our Scarface. And ‘Bad’ returned to the formula of its pilot episode, teasing us at the start with a chaotic image and then spending the rest of the hour showing us how we arrived there. In the pilot, that image was Cranston in his underwear at the shaky wheel of a speeding RV. Tonight it was Cranston again, thankfully clothed but this time bald, very bald. He was walking through what appeared to be some kind of war zone in some scary neighborhood, while we simultaneously intercut to a scene in which Cranston’s Walter White gave Jesse a lecture in some earlier time –- a time when Walt still had his hair and the Mister Rogers wardrobe.

“This operation is you and me, and I am the silent partner,” he told Jesse in the interwoven scene, stressing that he wanted no part of the selling aspect of the business. “No matter what happens, no more bloodshed. No violence.” Well, so much for that, because here now was our suddenly hairless hero, his nose bleeding and his feet crunching shattered glass as he walked away from a smoky building holding a bloodstained bag.

It was a good start that –- as with the pilot -– had us eagerly buckling our seat belts. But this time the rest of the ride wasn’t half as thrilling, even though it seemed to try twice as hard. In my opinion, we saw too many cringe-worthy scenes pertaining to Walt’s chemo –- IVs, pills, hair loss, hole in his chest, vomiting, urinating –- and not enough emotion surrounding them.

And when Walter berated Jesse for not selling enough meth, I hoped that the episode was about to follow its own advice. “Come on, you’ve got to be more imaginative,” Walter told Jesse. “Just think outside the box here.”

Instead we then embarked on a storyline that led us to a remarkably unimaginative drug lord. After much buildup, we met Tuco, the man who took Krazy 8’s place as the wholesaler in the Albuquerque drug chain. The very first shot of him? He was picking his silver teeth with a very large hunting knife. He wore a heavy chain around his neck. He sat in a big leather chair. He screamed a lot. He beat Jesse senseless. In other words, eh. Nothing really new.

When Walt later arrived, asking for $50,000 -– $35K for the stolen meth and $15K for Jesse’s pain and suffering -– Tuco dabbed out a cigarette on his tongue. At that moment I had to roll my eyes a little. I get it: he’s bad, very bad.

I also scratched my head a bit when, seconds later, Walt took a piece of what we thought was crystal meth but was instead “fulminated mercury.” To show Tuco he really meant business, Walt mightily threw the mercury at the ground before him, causing an explosion that blew out windows and air conditioners, and set off a series of car alarms outside. It was a tremendous show of force that was an inauguration of sorts, Mr. Chips graduating to Scarface.

But when moments later he walked from the building with that bloodstained bag of money in his hand, you had to wonder: Here was an explosion that rocked the neighborhood, and yet the man closest to the blast was now walking away ... with just a little nosebleed? Is Walter White a superhero? (Because if so, he belongs on NBC.)

I’d hoped to back up my argument here with a little scientific research data, but -– sorry, Mr. White –- I nearly failed chemistry in high school and, well, there just isn’t much other than “mercury fulminate is a primary explosive ... highly sensitive to friction and shock” on Wikipedia.

In all, this was an episode that felt flatter than the rest, one that seemed to rely too heavily on props and outside machismo rather than the show’s much greater strength –- its core cast members and the interaction between them.

It should be noted, however, that each time this show has let me down even just a little bit, the very next week it seems to provide just what this ‘Bad’ blog orders, the perfect mix of action and emotion. Considering we only have one episode left –- ‘Bad’ completed seven of its nine intended episodes before the writer’s strike, and AMC has yet to announce if the series will be renewed -– here’s hoping that the trend continues.

When I asked Gilligan a few weeks back about the strike effect, he said that the work stoppage indeed robbed the show of “a really cool cliffhanger episode” that had long been planned for the season finale, but that his writing team did manage to rush through a seventh episode that still had an intriguing finish.

“Peter Gould, one of our writers, had written the seventh episode and the ending he came up with was pretty cool to begin with but it wasn’t a ‘cliffhanger,’ per se,” Gilligan said. And when word spread on Nov. 4 that the strike would indeed become reality on that very midnight, his writers went to work to “slightly curtail” the script before it was time for pencils down.

“There was no effort to turn it into something it wasn’t intended to be,” Gilligan said of the episode. “Hopefully, the audience will appreciate it for what it is. In my mind it doesn’t really have an intriguing ending on the scale of a season finale, but it is intriguing in the sense that it begs the question, ‘What is Walt going to do now?’ Something is unresolved, and so hopefully it works.”

-- Josh Gajewski