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April 2025 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Breaking Bad season 2 viewing diary (second part) + Advanced narration audio (& bonus still image) for Journey Through Twin Peaks

A couple months ago, I shared the first half of this Breaking Bad season's viewing diary (the previous season was covered for the public many years ago). I intended to wait until June to finish the season but other plans fell through and I decided that last month's patron pick podcast (on Penda's Fen) was enough of an interruption. The time had come to conclude Walter White's journey through season two. As much as I enjoyed the first seven episodes, I was even more bowled over by the last six, from the introduction of one of TV's most memorable supporting characters (eventually a lead in his own spin-off) to the grand, novelistic season finale teased from the premiere's first moments. Above all, the fleshing out of Walt's immensely compromised ethos alongside his flinty focus (and the way these two qualities interact) impressed me deeply. I was also struck by the structure the show develops while pursuing its multifaceted storytelling strategy. There was certainly a lot to discuss in these overviews and in the process I stretched my two-paragraph-per-episode format to its limits. I'm not sure yet when I'll watch the next season - not to mention the two after that - but I hope to resume the series later this year. For now, I want to focus on Journey Through Twin Peaks and other video projects, which this month yielded a couple advances: the audio recording of my narration for the upcoming 37 as well as an image which will be used in that chapter (an "in memoriam" mosaic of actors who passed away before The Return). I also conducted my usual bimonthly patron poll to determine next months' podcast topic for the top tier - a close contention resulting in the first runoff poll in six months.

What are the April rewards?

Years ago, I launched several months of first season viewing diaries by writing about each episode of Breaking Bad up to that season's finale. Other shows introduced to my site during that period - specifically Mad Men and Veronica Mars - were eventually completed, but others were never resumed (including The Wire, The X-Files, and - considering its subsequent revival - The Kingdom). Of these, the suspense-driven Breaking Bad was one of the hardest siren calls to resist. Although I'm not currently publishing any non-Twin Peaks material publicly, my need for monthly Patreon $5/month tier exclusives provided a good opportunity to finally continue the series. With the first season - presented publicly - having established the premise for Walter White (cancer-stricken chemistry teacher turned meth manufacturer), the second season is keen on worldbuilding, revealing a whole community of criminals (and at least one memorable attorney), and I had a great time exploring that world when I viewed the season last spring. Since then I've kept this viewing diary in my back pocket for the proverbial rainy day - which February proved to be. I published the first seven episodes at the beginning of the month with plans to present the other half of this season (already written) in June, with hopefully more seasons to come after that although I haven't watched them yet. To refresh your memory of what's in those episodes - which I'm not just engaging with but watching for the very first time - I've included some screenshots at the end of this round-up as well as in the image above.

At the other extreme of the preparation spectrum, my work on the illustrated companions for my Lost in Twin Peaks public podcast release - which I advanced to the $1/month tier as their monthly reward - took way, way longer than expected...hence this February cross-post appearing halfway through March. I shouldn't have been surprised; in all its various capacities, from applying images alongside various episode categories to re-editing what was originally recorded for patrons, that public presentation has proved to be my most laborious project ever since it was initiated back in 2021. (At this point, the re-packaging has already taken much longer than the underlying episodes took to create which seems mindboggling.) Now, at least, one more step has been completed. Patrons can enjoy - with or without the audio context - vivid screenshots from each Twin Peaks second season episode, accompanied by in-the-weeds statistics (like which characters have the most screentime in each episode), and images from the historical context of the time: what was in the news, on magazine covers, or on rival channels. (To view the already published - and public - illustrated companions for the first and third seasons as well as Fire Walk With Me, check out this page.)

What are the February rewards?

In March 2018, I published my survey of the popular show's first season from a decade earlier. I plan to cover the remaining seasons eventually, and probably continue on to Better Call Saul afterwards. I'm watching this show for the first time and recording my reactions as they occur; this directory will be updated with new entries whenever they appear. (Update 2025: The first season is public while the rest are being published exclusively for patrons.)

Welcome to my viewing diary for Breaking Bad. Each day (except Saturday) I am offering a short review of another episode until concluding the first season. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (aired on March 2, 2008/written by George Mastras; directed by Bronwen Hughes): Walter and Jesse begin making meth again, but Walter sets some clear boundaries. Jesse is to stay out of the kitchen, and Walter is to stay out of the boardroom so to speak (or, more realistically, "off the streets"). Each member of the team is to know his limitations and area of expertise. Jesse has little discipline or skill when it comes to chemistry, but he know the drug business - where and how to move the product. Walter, on the other hand, is a brilliant chemist but (as his macho DEA brother-in-law constantly likes to remind him) it's a given that he couldn't handle the subtle social intricacies and navigation of force and power of the criminal underworld. One man is book smart, the other street smart: so it goes. Except, of course, it doesn't go that way at all. Walter's chemo and radiation treatments are taking their toll (he shaves his head once his hair starts falling out), rendering him incapable of finishing a batch he starts cooking. It's up to Jesse to learn from the master as Walter admits he has cancer and tells the young man he'll be sitting outside the trailer catching his breath if he needs any tips. More notably, Jesse's cautious pushing yields a small return for the risk Walter is taking, and so the timid middle-aged schoolteacher decides to follow his own advice to Jesse: "Grow some balls!" Enter Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz), a local distributor whom Jesse attempts to impress - winding up in the hospital for his efforts. Exit Walter White, nebbishy nobody who can cook killer meth but stays the hell away from the cutthroat side of the business. And enter, finally, "Heisenberg," the alias a gaunt, bald Walter adopts when he blows up Tuco's lair with some creative chemistry and forces his own terms on the finally impressed local kingpin.

My Response:

Welcome to my viewing diary for Breaking Bad. Each day (except Saturday) I am offering a short review of another episode until concluding the first season. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (aired on February 24, 2008/written by Patty Lin; directed by Tricia Brock): Having fully gone their separate ways, both Walter and Jesse have a lot to figure out. Jesse goes for an interview, thinking he's being considered for a sales position at a bank only to discover the interviewer actually has an "advertising" job in mind: standing on the sidewalk dressed as a giant dollar bill waving a sign at passerby. Jesse discovers the man currently holding this position is an old friend, Badger (Matt Jones), a goofball on parole who encourages him to start cooking again. Their session in the trailer goes terribly, with Badger good for little other than eating chips, cracking jokes, and nearly breaking Jesse's equipment (when a furious Jesse rides off without him, Badger fires a crossbow at the rear bumper - he can't even hit the tires with his absurd weapon). Jesse has now completely changed. Next to Badger, a more extreme version of his old persona, the young man seems as serious and short-tempered as Walter: he wears an apron, carefully identifies each instrument, and throws the results away when they are displeasing (in this inability to get the desired product, at least, he remains very much Jesse). Walter, meanwhile, is pressured by both family and friends to seek treatment. His old college pal Elliot Schwartz (Adam Godley), who profited immensely from their collaborations as young chemists, offers to pay for chemo and radiation, while Skyler stages an intervention which doesn't go as planned (both Hank and Marie wind up encouraging their in-law to do what he wants - as Hank puts it, "die like a man" - and Skyler is infuriated). A weeping Walter quietly says that "survival" for a year or two isn't worth the suffering and abasement, but the next morning he changes his mind. He still doesn't want his friend's help, though, lying to Elliot's wife Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) about the insurance and finally turning up, contrite and committed, at Jesse's doorstep once again to offer his partnership.

My Response:

Welcome to my viewing diary for Breaking Bad. Each day (except Saturday) I am offering a short review of another episode until concluding the first season. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (aired on February 10, 2008/written by Vince Gilligan; directed by Adam Bernstein): What was delayed for an entire episode can no longer be put off. Walter must kill Krazy 8...or free him. That he's even willing to consider the latter option speaks to how haphazard and hesitating his commitment to the criminal life remains; that he ultimately does murder Krazy 8 (yanking the bike lock against his throat as the desperate dealer swings a broken, jagged plate fragment behind him at his assassin) proves that Walter can find the ruthlessness his new occupation demands. Then again, he has an out, and it's not just abstract self-defense (which is real enough, demonstrated when the studious would-be killer writes a pro/con "kill Krazy 8" list, with numerous lofty principles in the "don't" category and one stark rationale in the "do" category: "He'll kill your entire family if you let him go"). No, it's also literal self-defense, given the plate fragment. Walter retrieves the plate from the trashcan, broken when he passed out after a coughing fit in the basement and reassembles it to see that a piece is missing (obviously Krazy 8 armed himself with it while Walter was out cold). The killer and the victim have been building a rapport, even discovering that the young man probably rang Walter up as a boy in his father's furniture store sixteen years ago. But now Walter knows it's all been cold-blooded calculation, so he finishes the job (a few pathetic incantations of "I'm sorry!" the only remaining evidence of his weak-willed desire for mercy). The Walter/Krazy 8 relationship/moral dilemma dominates the story, although there are a few other subplot strands: Skyler's sister Marie (Betsy Brandt) misunderstands a clumsy conversation about pot and concludes that her nephew (not her brother-in-law) is the subject; consequently Hank tries a "scared straight" tactic on Walter, Jr. by nastily ridiculing a methhead in his presence; and Skyler discovers Walter quit his job and tells him to stay wherever he is calling from that fateful night (little does she know the consequences). Finally, at episode's end, the immediate consequences of his entry into the drug business resolved, Walter turns to another important matter. He's about to tell his wife he's dying.

My Response:

Welcome to my viewing diary for Breaking Bad. Each day (except Saturday) I am offering a short review of another episode until concluding the first season. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (aired on January 27, 2008/written by Vince Gilligan; directed by Adam Bernstein): As with the pilot, a large part of this episode's "cinematic" quality is narrative. This is not an ensemble TV series with a sprawling cast of characters, each with their own storyline...at least not yet. "Cat's in the Bag..." has one fundamental purpose: demonstrating how Walter's entire life rotates around the consequences of the previous climax, in which he "killed" two drug dealers in self-defense, pretending to show them how to cook meth before poisoning them with phosphane. Krazy-8 (Maximino Arciniega) survived the gassing in the RV, and now Walter and Jesse have two tasks at hand. One of them has to dissolve the body of Emilio (John Koyama) in acid, a messy, ghoulish piece of work especially since it might involve chopping him up and placing different halves in different plastic containers. Shrinking from that possibility, Jesse decides to do the "easy" thing, dragging Emilio upstairs in his own house, and dousing him in the bathtub. Unfortunately, acid won't dissolve plastic - but it will certainly dissolve a porcelain bathub: near the end of the episode, the ceiling of Jesse's first floor collapses, with gruesome chunks of flesh and bone landing below. And yet, somehow, Jesse does have the easy job. After flipping a coin, Walter is assigned the far more stressful task: killing the very much alive, groaning Krazy-8, imprisoned in the basement with a bike lock around his neck. I suppose there's a bit of a subplot in the episode: after Jesse calls the house pretending to be a salesman, Skyler tracks him down and questions Walter about his identity; he cleverly finds the perfect alibi, claiming that Jesse sells him pot. Skyler is savvy enough to find Jesse but - fortunately for both him and Walter - not savvy enough to notice that he's dragging a dead body through his driveway when she shows up to accost him. Something I neglected to mention (along with many other details) in my previous write-up: Skyler is pregnant. She gets an ultrasound with Walter present, and the two parents-to-be find out that the child will be a girl. Skyler makes a joke about what it will be like when she's older, and Walter's face falls. Despite barely coming up in the episode - aside from his frequent coughing fits - Walter is, of course, dying. He will never get to see this daughter grow up, and that mortality hangs over the central hook of episode two: a man faced with his own death must find the nerve to kill someone else.

My Response:

Story (aired on January 20, 2008/written & directed by Vince Gilligan): Any number of small things could have gone differently and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) wouldn't be standing here, on the side of a desert highway in his tighty whiteys and ridiculously incongrous green shirt, weeping and holding a gun aloft, ready to fire on the armada of police cars he hears in the distance as they approach his meth lab RV with two dead bodies in the back. What if Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) hadn't run into his suspicious ex-partner when trying to unload his new product? What if Walter hadn't recognized Jesse, his former student, fleeing a raid, or what if Jesse hadn't been screwing the next-door neighbor when the DEA came knocking, or what if Walter hadn't chosen that particular morning to ride along with his cocky brother-in-law Hank Schrader (Dean Norris)...and what if he didn't happen to be out of the car when when Jesse made that fatal eye contact with Mr. White, the chemistry teacher who flunked him years ago but now wants in on his business? Despite this string of coincidences, these events, and this outcome, don't feel accidental. Instead they seem to emerge from the nexus of fate and decisive action. At every absurd, outlandish opportunity, Walter chooses to step in a particular direction. More importantly, everything unfolds against the stark backdrop of Walter's cancer diagnosis, exacerbating and inflaming what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill midlife crisis or even a steadily repressed, grinding misery that might never find expression at all. Three weeks earlier, Walter was a nebbishy teacher, quietly nibbling on his wife Skylar's (Anna Gunn's) vegetarian bacon and taking his son Walter Jr.'s (RJ Mitte's) good-natured ribbing in stride. ("How does it feel to be old?" the boy asks Walter on his fiftieth birthday.) Now, as the gun misfires and the sirens reveal themselves to belong to firetrucks and ambulances, Walter discovers that the same fate that condemned him has also spared him. Walter is a drug dealer, a killer (albeit, so far anyway, in self-defense), a criminal who seems to feel liberated by "breaking bad." And so it begins.

My Response:

Although binging has become the premiere way to view old shows - after all, why delay the gratification when you don't have to? - I've recently been taking a starkly different approach (in some cases, the slow process has unfolded over years, with extensive interruptions).

I try to spend an hour each week either watching or reviewing a TV episode in order to create viewing diaries for eight notable series. While I'll be waiting until I've finished an entire show before releasing many of these (building up a backlog, eventually, of hundreds of individual entries), I'm making a few exceptions as explained yesterday. In these cases, I'll be releasing just first-season viewing diaries...and Breaking Bad is the first up since it's the only season I've finished so far.

Keep in mind, in case you're expecting obsessive exploration, that these are viewing diaries, not extensive episode guides. That means a few things. They are short; I've settled on a format for viewing diaries which allows me to keep up a reasonable pace while still offering room to ruminate. Each entry is two long paragraphs: one to synopsize the story and re-orient the reader (especially those who haven't watched the show in a while), the other to relay my own first impression - which is the main point here. Most of the shows I'm watching for the first time. There won't be spoilers because I myself don't know what's going to happen.

If there's value for you here, it will likely come from enjoying my perspective and wanting to find out how I personally react to various episodes, or, more generally, from the pleasure of re-experiencing a show through a first-time viewer's eyes. In Breaking Bad's case, I had made a couple previous forays into the series without getting very far, and of course I was familiar with a few of its touchstones through cultural osmosis. Part of the fun for me has been discovering how the series does or doesn't meet those expectations. Hopefully you find this interesting too. See you tomorrow.

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April 2025 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Breaking Bad season 2 viewing diary (second part) + Advanced narration audio (& bonus still image) for Journey Through Twin Peaks

belated February 2025 Patreon round-up: EXCLUSIVE - Breaking Bad season 2 viewing diary (first part) + Lost in Twin Peaks season 2 illustrated companion advance

Breaking Bad viewing diary

Breaking Bad - "A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal" (season 1, episode 7)

Breaking Bad - "Crazy Handful of Nothin'" (season 1, episode 6)

Breaking Bad - "Gray Matter" (season 1, episode 5)

Breaking Bad - "Cancer Man" (season 1, episode 4)

Breaking Bad - "...And the Bag's in the River" (season 1, episode 3)

Breaking Bad - "Cat's in the Bag..." (season 1, episode 2)

Breaking Bad - "Pilot" (season 1, episode 1)

Viewing diary: first season of Breaking Bad begins tomorrow

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