Breaking Bad Episodes

'Breaking Bad': Take a peek at season 4

’S fourth season won’t hit your TV sets until July 17 (19 days from now!), AMC knows that you’re jonesing for a taste. That’s why the network has released a three-minute preview video that offers clips from the upcoming action and interviews with key cast members. We are told by Bryan Cranston (a.k.a. chemistry teacher-turned-meth king Walter White) that the focus this year is on “Walt owning this new man, accepting that he is capable of doing these heinous things that come up throughout season 4 for him to survive. There’s nothing boring about Walter White’s life now.”

Meanwhile, Aaron Paul (Walt’s partner, Jesse Pinkman, sporting a shaved head) notes that the season “starts off at a full sprint” and that Jesse is in a “very dark, sad, distant place.” The video is worth the watch if only to hear Giancarlo Esposito (drug and poultry lord Gus Fring) laugh while warning: “All I can say is just wait and watch and hang on to the edge of your seat… because it’s coming. All of it’s coming.

Breaking Bad – ABQ (S02E13) | the400club

Is the series’ treatment of the consideration and consequence of choices. One of the most remarkable aspects of the series is its uses of the ‘cold open’ or ‘teaser’ that in many cases opens a television series episode prior to the credits and the main action. The final episode of Season Two brings to a climax what are arguably the most striking and confounding cold opens in television history to date: those of “Seven Thirty Seven”, “Down”, “Over”, and “ABQ”, the titling of which is the terrible, crowning glory of the series’ already notable achievements in extending unity beyond the internal matter of episodes to their external naming.

More notable and important than the base cleverness of the series’ operation that is revealed in this season finale is its culmination of developed significance. The episode brings to a near cosmic conclusion the consequences of choices made in the pursuit of greed throughout the series. Hand-in-glove with the possibilities of so-called ‘narratively complex’ television (Mittell), with this final episode of what to me seems a unified and complete series  Breaking Bad dramatises and makes legible the social consequences of individual greed that are otherwise confused and blurred by the speed, density, breadth, distance, and anonymity of relations afforded by the current global economy. This seems on one hand to not deserve notice at all: the climax of the episode and the season seems to be so obvious in its causal chain and judgmental implications as to be unremarkable. However, the density of the stylistic patterns woven into, and revealed only through, the episode’s cataclysmic climax demand remarking upon due to what is revealed by the unmasking of their subtlety: the cloak of invisibility provided by the complexity that disguises relations between the pursuit of greed in a globalised, accelerated economy and its consequences, and keeps its prosecutors blanketed from responsibility.

Throughout the season the audience has been haunted and teased by the spectre of a disembodied eye (a symbol of insatiable greed in Jewish folklore), twinned but removed from a scorched, pink teddy bear. By the end of “ABQ” it becomes known that these are not tied to the physical demise of Walter, his family, or his protégé. However, their relation to other stylistic elements patterned through the season serves in my mind to weave a web of responsibility and guilt that—in reference to a cultural context of increasingly complex and untraceable networks of corporate greed and its consequences—connects the individual pursuit of greed with widespread social destruction. Look for—in the wake of this finale, now shockingly noticeable—splashes of the colour pink, and placements of teddy bears, throughout the season, and connect their placement to Walt’s involvement in a socially cancerous trade. Developing such subtle, seemingly missable, elements of style the series internalises and invites us to search ever harder to understand the consequences of individual choice within an increasingly social, opaque network of individual responsibility.