Wednesday 7 April 2010

Breaking Bad: I.F.T - The War Of The Whites


I should say that that my pithy little sub-heading stands for the increasingly bitter chess match of emotional devastation going on between Walt and Skylar, and not the uprising of some racist crusade. Jokes are always funnier if you explain them right. Right..Hello?

- First of all loving the title, which of course must stand for Skylar's brutal, cliffhanging revelation at the end of the episode. I.F.T = I fucked Ted. Basic wordplay is awesome.

- I liked this episode more then last week, and while we perhaps are quite low on thrilling gangster shenanigans, this saved the Walt vs. Skylar war plot from being slightly tiresome and distracting, as last week suggested it might be. It was tightly written and brought back that awesome slow-paced confidence that is the signature of this show, and it played out like a vicious slice of blackly comic melodrama, In which husband and wife try to get what they want from each other through manipulation and back-handedness. Now who says TV genre isn't inter-changeable.

- I'm pleased that the show did something with Walt breaking into Skylar's house, that it was actually a cunning move from Walt and not just an act of aimless desperation.

- More praise for Anna Gunn this week, who held her own against Bryan Cranston as so few people do.

- Now with the bulk of complimenting the show's deftness with dramatic intensity, lets move to the more outwardly badass moments from this week shall we. Danny Trejo returned in flashback form as the deceased Tortuga, who we last saw as a disembodied head crawling across the desert on a turtle. ( How awesome is this show.) Well in this week's cold open, we got to see how that came to be, as Trejo got beheaded by our fearsome cousins in a Bar back room.

- The cousins meanwhile, we seen in present narrative in a meeting with Gus Frings, Walt's shady drug-dealing boss man. Giancarlo Esposito is a great actor, and I'm loving his performance thus far and look forward to more of him. Frighteningly controlled. Frings put the cousins on the back-burner through his fairly awesome dealing, but those guys aren't going away.

- Jesse, meanwhile spent the episode calling the answer machine of his deceased girlfriend, which at first I found a little insipid, but when the machine got disconnected mid-call, that was some poignant shit.

- But this episode was in many ways the fusion of gangster Walt and Family man Walt, thus far they have existed in different universes, one denying each others existence, seem to be melding into one single deluded monster, as Walt wins back his family through amoral means.

- perhaps the show's second best hour of family drama thus far, behind the season two masterpiece ' Down' which will never be topped I think.

Rating: 8/10

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