For some reason, not quite sure why, I’ve binge-re-watched the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad over about a month.
A long concentrated dose of pure evil and depraved bloody violence has it’s own cathartic draining effect, but it remains a marvellously constructed morality-play drama, characters and plot lines. It was good to get all the vividly remembered scenes stitched back together in some semblance of order. Hank remains the only “hero” here, he dies for Walt’s sins. The structure with the out-of-timeline preview scenes at the front of each episode makes a lot more sense second time around – whole theses to be – have been – written about that.
However, since I first saw BB I have, of course, watched the whole of “Better Call Saul” and “El Camino” – the spin-offs based around Saul Goodman and Jesse Pinkman, the two (males) who survived BB with their lives – so lots of the temporally confused scenes are in fact shared across the whole collection.
Which sadly means I’ll probably have to re-watch BCS again too! Rats!
Saul jokingly mentions “Cinnabon” during the final episode of BB – a remark whose significance cannot even be noticed first time through. The significance to me is it takes me back to “the holiday season” – half a year, September to January in the southern US – and the sickly pervasive smell of cinnamon and sweet vanilla with everything. Just typing the words is enough! And the reverse is true. The slightest hint of cinnamon and the whole series comes flooding back – debilitating. Which probably answers my first question – why was I rewatching it? A subconscious olfactory trigger no doubt. Hurdle overcome.
Anyway, I only intended to post one thing in this writing hiatus, the music, the song from the final scene. Already well documented of course, but I had to Google to re-find that it was a 1971 song by Badfinger. “My Baby Blue” sounding like it was written for the 2008 script.
[I should say that clip is edited, maybe to avoid the spoiler that he discovers the source of his own blood, and the reason he collapses and dies, hoist by his own petard during the original scene. Will have to find a more representative clip …
Best comment @Carelock on YouTube:
I like to think Vince Gilligan was riding in an RV one day and Baby Blue by Badfinger came on and he just built a show around it…
Highly creative either way?
So I should add, it was the creative process that really had me intrigued – I am trying to write after all. Huge amounts of the whole five series worth of story-line must have been conceived in some detail before any of the asynchronous preview scenes could have been created and included in earlier episodes?]
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