For All Mankind: The Life and Career of Mick Foley

I never have much to say in these posts, but this is a pretty strong documentary as far as WWE docs go. I attribute that mainly to Mick Foley's career being intersting in its own right. From Foley's first experience at a wrestling live event to losing his ear to his crazy matches in Japan involving C4 explosives and barbed wire to his time in WCW then ECW then WWE, there's rarely a dull moment. It's great to see faces like Vader, Terry Funk and Paul Heyman chiming in on what makes Mick special. There are a lot of people outside WWE on this doc, which isn't the case with the Triple H doc I watched earlier. Anyway, this one was better than the Triple H doc, but neithe is going to appeal oa non-wrestling fan.

12 Years a Slave

This movie tried so hard to be artistic. So, so hard. The story itself is such an intriguing one and the performances were great, but everything else about the movie annoyed the hell out of me. From the random shots that last way too long of people's faces as they stare off in the distance to the same goddamn shot of swampy waters to show the passage of time, I just can't understand why the movie was made the way it was. It was 133 minutes, but at least 20 minutes of it was spent on trying to make the film appear artsy. Sometimes I just want movies to focus on telling a compelling story. All this stupid shit took away from the story. Still, a story about a free man who was forced into slavery for 12 years is compelling as hell. This movie is worth a watch even though the filmmakers did everything they could to to detract from the overall experience. I honestly have no idea why this won the Oscar...

Triple H: Thy Kingdom Come

It's Wrestlemania time and I'm on a real wrestling kick. I heard good things about this documentary so I sought it out. I love wrestling documentaries. They are just a lot more enjoyable to me than to go back and watch old matches from a wrestler's career (most wrestling dvds are just compilations of matches rather than documentaries). Watching wrestlers from the past and present talk about someone's career is something of which I will never get sick. It's a little tough for me to not watch one about Triple H with a cynical eye, however, because he is now married into the McMahon family and everyone is going to put a positive spin on anything they say about him. Some interesting aspects of Triple H that I've never really seen discussed before:

The beginnings of his relationship with Stephanie McMahon and how the locker room initially reacted.

His relationship with Undertaker.

His dealings with Eric Bischoff.

His upbringing in Nashua, NH (his parents are pretty weird).

Anyway, this isn't the greatest documentary in the world, but it's pretty interesting to me. It certainly gave me a bit more respect for Triple H. It's easy to forget how much hard work and motivation it takes to get to the top of any business, especially one as difficult as professional wrestling.

Gathering Blue

Marissa and Keith both read this one last year, and I've got little else to add. It's a spiritual sequel to The Giver, and two more remain. This is my first foray into young adult fiction since reading Little House on the Prairie in September of 2012 - that's a year and a half ago! Not a bad rut to fall into after I spent so many early Back-Blogged posts lamenting how shitty children's literature was and how much of it I had left in my backlog.

Anyway, I've got little to say here; I'm guessing the tetralogy taken as a whole will feel greater than the sum of its parts, but that's not to say Gathering Blue was an uninteresting or worthless read on its own. Still, there's so much young adult dystopian fiction these days that I can't imagine this one is particularly special in any way. Time will tell; I'm sure I'll finish off these next two books in little to no time at all.

24: Season 4

Day four and the show just keeps on delivering. This time Jack is dealing with nuclear threats... again. 

Already closing in on the halfway point of season five, so these "days" are starting to blend together for me. Trying to compartmentalize this season, here are the highlights I recall best: Jack is the bodyguard for the Secretary of Defense now, and has fallen in love his daughter (Audrey); terrorists hold the US hostage threatening to meltdown every major nuclear power plant in the country; Air Force One is shot down losing the President and the nuclear deployment codes; IMHOTEP IS THE HEAD TERRORIST!; an EMP takes out downtown Los Angeles; Tony and Michelle are split up; Tony and Michelle get back together; terrorists manage to steal a nuke and deploy it on a carrier missile headed for LA; Jack saves the day at the last second and is then forced to fake his own death before taking off into the sunrise to start a new life for himself. 

Really fun season with a bunch of great episodes. My two favorite have to be the one where Jack and Paul make a last stand at a sporting goods store as a bunch of mercenaries move to storm in and kill them, and the other is when that random couple camping in the desert have to keep the Football out of the hands of the terrorists before Jack can rescue them. Then there's the one element of this season that really bugged me. There's that son of the two terrorist you meet at the start of the season -- Behrooz. After everything has gone to shit and both of Behrooz's parents are dead, CTU uses him in a trade to get Jack back from the enemy's custody. We see the trade happen, Behrooz gets thrown into the terrorists' van, they cut out the implanted locator chip on him, and that's it. We never hear from Behrooz again (unless I'm missing something). I'm assuming he's been killed, but it's just weird that no one ever talks about him again even when the day is done and the threats have all been neutralized. As Jack struts off into the sunrise in the final scene, I really wanted him to freeze for a second and just shout out, "Ah shit!! Behrooz!" Then just shrug his shoulders and keep walking. 

Onwards to season five. 

Les Misérables (2012)

This is the second time I've seen this movie and the third time I've heard it; my sister watched almost the entire thing in the backseat while I took the wheel on a family road trip last summer. It is the second distinct Les Misérables movie I have seen. I have seen both a professional rendition and a high school rendition of the musical. I have seen two separate "Les Misérables in concert" blocks on PBS, one from the mid-'90s and one from a couple of years ago. The entire original soundtrack to the musical is in my iTunes library and several of the songs appear in my "Top 50 Play Counts" custom playlist. I have read Victor Hugo's original 1400-page novel. I am, in short, ridiculously and intimately familiar with this production and its story on nearly every level. I'm not even a big theater guy, and while plenty of people are more into Les Misérables than I am, I suspect very few of them love it as uniquely and specifically as I do.

I had anticipated the movie - a film version of the musical, I mean - for years and years. First came the years where I hoped it would one day be made. Then came the years it was rumored to be in pre-production. Then came all the casting news and the various disappointments and sighs of relief that accompanied them. Then there was close to a year of filming news, sneak peaks, and eventually advertising. And finally, a day I had anticipated for close to a decade had arrived, and "Les Misérables the Musical, the Movie" was a real thing. Given all that hype, there were only two outcomes possible when it came to my personal reaction to such a project. The movie could meet every lofty standard I had set for it in my head, or it could fall horribly short and disappoint me in so many ways. Of course, it did neither of those things. I saw it, digested it, reflected on it, and came out thinking that it was just fine. Not excellent. Not a travesty. But just kind of fine. And then I barely thought about it again for an entire year and then I recently watched it again, trying this time to figure out what exactly made it so blandly passable for me. And I think I figured it out on this second go-round. I'll try to state this simply and carefully.

What I wanted this movie to be was a faithful film adaptation of the musical. I wanted to hear all of my favorite songs, but to witness their power in a new way. I had already seen plenty of talented singers belting out the stirring and emotional lyrics in different ways, and I knew there would always be new renditions of those songs to discover or look forward to seeing one day. As a point case, take "I Dreamed a Dream." This is a song about how far Fantine has fallen from a lifetime of idyllic summers and passion and love, to a destitute fired factory worker unable to provide for her own daughter, and it's arguably the entire production's most representative number. I have heard singers more talented than Anne Hathaway just nail this one; what I wanted, in a film version, was to see flashbacks, for instance, of Fantine's pleasant memories of her life with her former lover; I wanted to see a montage, I guess, packing all kinds of visual information in for the sake of the character and her history in a way the stage version is unable to do. In general, I wanted a more visually rich version of an already wonderful story. I understand through her lyrics that Fantine has suffered greatly, but now that there's this big budget movie, show me. "Don't tell; show." That's what I wanted.

What this movie turned out to be was the musical itself, with impeccable production value and set and costume design, played back to me in close-up tracking shots. Many of the most emotional songs were sung in single takes, always by the actors themselves with no dubbing whatsoever. And while this was impressive and a great display of true singing ability and all, and while Anne Hathaway won an Oscar more or less entirely because of that single-take performance of "I Dreamed a Dream," I simply didn't want to see actors face-acting their way through these songs. Anne Hathaway sure can sell anguish, but I would have preferred for the movie to let the song itself sell that anguish; we got that much in the musical, and no one comes away from that song wondering just how anguished Fantine is, even before we could see the pain on her voice or hear the gasping imperfections in the song's performance. There's a song late in the production called "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," in which Marius, the sole survivor of the battle at the barricades, laments the loss of so many friends. It's totally powerful stuff in the musical, especially when his fallen comrades filter in behind him under an intense spotlight, looking totally ghostlike and just sort of lingering there. It's a simple, easy stage trick, but it helps sell the point - so many young lives lost! - a great deal more than a solitary shot lingering on an actor's face

So, yeah. the details were impeccable and the scope was enormous, but ultimately the movie didn't quite deliver me what I had hoped for. I suppose now I can go back to spending ten years hoping for another film adaptation of the musical. That's all it took for a Spider-Man reboot, right?

A few more thoughts, mostly positive, and then I'm done.

• I loved that Taylor Swift was not cast as Éponine. That's the singular most endearing character in the musical, and one you're just completely capable of falling in love with. Taylor Swift can sing and maybe she can act, but she doesn't have the necessary pathos for such a tragic figure. A Taylor Swift Éponine would have found a way to throw some sassy attitude into "On My Own" and given it some independent woman vibes. There's a place for those - most places in this world, really - but Éponine's signature performance is not one of those. Furthermore, I loved that Samantha Barks was given the role. She absolutely knocked the part out of the park in one of those aforementioned PBS concerts I'd seen a few times, and I could think of no person better suited for the movie.
• I also appreciated the way the movie tweaked the order of the songs so that they flowed more naturally as a story. For example, in the original musical, "I Dreamed a Dream" is sung after Fantine is fired, but before she resorts to prostitution. The movie flips it around so that "Lovely Ladies" comes before "I Dreamed a Dream," which makes so much sense that I don't know why the musical does it the other way. Maybe it's got something to do with the real-time, real-space aspects of a stage production, and certain set pieces needed preparing, or certain performers needed adequate breaks, or something.like that. I don't know. Similarly, in the movie they've bumped "Do You Hear the People Sing" to come immediately before the battle at the barricade, rather than coming on the night before the battle, and prior to "One Day More." It also makes sense to stick "On My Own" in front of "One Day More," since Éponine shares the same sentiment in both songs, and why not use her solo performance to establish those feelings before repeating them in the cast-wide collaboration later? Frankly the biggest improvements made here were based on the order of different performances.
• I did not care for the movie adding a new song, "Suddenly," to the show. The song itself is fine, but one beautiful aspect of Les Misérables is the subtle and symbolic repetition of so many little strings and chords and melodies. To bring in an entire new song that shared no elements with any other number just felt unnecessary to me, especially given how drastically they reduced so many other songs for time-related purposes.
• Seriously, where's the four-hour extended cut where we get every song in full? Don't tell me they never even filmed significant chunks of some of those songs. Even if they knew they'd be cutting them, they must have filmed them, right?
• Casting is a sticky issue here. Obviously the studio went for big name screen actors who can sort of sing in most cases, fleshing out the main ensemble with small time stage actors who can really sing. That's fine by me, and given that what I wanted all along was a movie version of the musical, I suppose in a nutshell I preferred having great actors with non-excellent voices instead of tremendous singers with limited screen acting talent. But, given the way the movie was shot and edited - long shots on faces, with songs in single takes - some of the actors' singing shortcomings were really put under a spotlight. He's taken a beating for it already and I don't need to pile on, but this was especially true for Russell Crowe's Javert. That's just such an authoritative role of unwavering absolutes, and the movie really could have used a stronger performance on that front. Javert shouldn't be so utterly outdone by Valjean, especially when Valjean is just Hugh Jackman. Elsewhere, Jackman and Seyfried were passable, Hathaway was great, and Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter were fine in a vacuum but made for a tonally inconsistent pairing between his hammy sleaze and her dark edge.
• For all of my complaints about the lost opportunities that came during all the powerful solo songs when the available screen space was wasted on long shots zoomed in on singing faces, I need to give credit where it's due, which is on most of the ensemble pieces. Never has "Look Down" been more amazing than it was taking place with hundreds of people amid stormy weather and rough waves. And establishing songs like "At the End of the Day" are greatly served by a camera jump-cutting from gritty downtrodden extra to gritty downtrodden extra. Still, nothing tops the way the finale, a reprise of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" was shot, using the barricade as the gates of heaven with all the fallen characters singing joyously and waving flags. Powerful shit, guys! Potent stuff.

Okay, last minute final note. I realize as I read over this whole post that I sound fairly blasé about this movie. Make no mistake - it's a solid B execution on an A-plus production, for an overall A-minus. Pretty good! Pretty, pretty good.

24: Season 3

The sun has set on Day Three, and Bauer is still kicking ass and taking names. In season three, the threat is biological. 

Man, what a good season and what a scary nemesis. This story arc revolves around the danger of super deadly virus being released in the country unless the US government follows the demands of another vindictive psychopath. This season has huge, game-changing events. First off, Kim is now working along with her father as an analyst at CTU (and is dating Jack's partner in the field); an entire hotel is exposed to the virus killing hundreds; Jack is forced to kill his boss and the head of CTU; Jack is addicted to heroin; and, possibly the most exciting part of the season, Jack has to go rogue and break a prisoner of his out of jail and return him to Mexico all outside of CTU's help. (That Russian Roulette scene... so good!) However, all of that pails in comparison to easily the most shocking moments during the season finale -- a fight on the LA SUBWAY. I lived in LA for about 7 - 8 years and have never seen or rode the subway. Heard fables of its existence. Once I even thought I caught it out of the corner of my eye. A glimpse of the entrance while passing through Hollywood and Vine, but when I looked back it was gone. To see it here, and to see that it's big and filled with real people, that was mind-blowing. 

Three seasons down... five to go.

24: Season 2

Another day is done. This time, the threat was nuclear. 

24 cranked out another great season. Jack picks up the pieces of his fractured life following the tragic events of the first season and returns to help save the day. Now some terrorists are once again holding the country hostage as they attempt detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, with the possibility of hiding larger, more devious plans for America. Jack is on the ground floor butting heads with CTU as they try and figure out who's on first, Kim is running away from a psychopathic, murdering father who she works for as a nanny, and President Palmer is doing his best to prevent the country from entering into another World War. Just another day...

The show is still gripping with big cliffhangers at the end of every story arc. It's easy to binge on. Though, I'm beginning to think that we're missing another story here. The story of how Jack Bauer's great, great grandfather accidentally ran over a gypsy with his horse back in old country, who later inflicted a curse upon the whole Bauer family. A curse that states once a year for 24-hours, everything is just going to go horribly wrong. It's kind of ridiculous how crazy everyone's stories can get. Kim is by far the most confusing. While trying to escape a murderer, she gets stuck in a snare trap, is taken in by some forest recluse who tries to capture her, escapes, makes her way to a local convenience store to phone for help (already thinking her father is dead), then some lunatic holds-up to the store... I mean, it just doesn't end. 

Ultimately, the show is good. Still good. Hopefully will continue to be good. However, it's a little crazy how bad things go for everyone on a constant basis. It's even crazier how Jack Bauer isn't dead yet. The guy jumps out of a plane right before the nuke it's carrying detonates and survives. Gets tortures --- literally -- to death, but comes back to life and survives. It's bonkers. For that, I get pulled out of the show a bit just because it's absolutely so damn over-the-top. The show is like Jack, though. Despite how crazy and bizarre it seems, it yields results. Good results. 

Space Jam

When rumors broke that LeBron James was going to be involved in a sequel to Space Jam, my reaction was the same as every other twenty-something American man: something like, "Aww man, really? You're going to ruin that part of my childhood with LeBron James?" But that lasted about three seconds before two cold truths occurred to me. One, I could care less what LeBron and Warner Bros. did in their free time together. How many times have the Ninja Turtles been rebooted at this point? How long until Spider-Man gets another reset? Just because something I loved as a child had the audacity to come back and try something new doesn't do anything to diminish the original product I loved as a child. Right? And - far more importantly here - two, in no way was Space Jam an important part of my childhood. I hadn't even seen the beginning ten minutes of the movie. I was never all that into basketball. It was with this glaring second issue in mind that I decided to watch Space Jam last night for the first time in at least fifteen years. I was stunned. Nothing about this movie makes any goddamn sense.

Someone has already covered, in great detail, the absurdity of the basketball game itself that takes place in the movie. (Here's a link.) The game doesn't feature a single block, rebound, or foul, and 86% of all points scored come by virtue of the dunk. There's just one missed shot in the whole game. The score changes abruptly and inconsistently at times. The Monstars turn the ball over just once, miss one shot, and score nine three-pointers to the Tunes' zero, yet somehow the Tunes win the game. This is literally impossible. Anyway, reading that breakdown is well worth your time and I won't dwell on any other details from the game itself.

No, what I want to tear apart is everything outside of the game. The plot, if you will. Now, quick disclaimer. I get that this is a kids' movie. I get that it's not going to feature intricate character arcs and I know some sloppy dot-connecting will be hurrying us through a good chunk of the story. But even for a kids' movie, this made no goddamn sense. The story starts with Danny DeVito's reptile businessman character, the bad guy, worried about the future earnings prospects of his run down outer space amusement park. Long story short, he discovers Looney Tunes on TV and decides that he will kidnap them and bring them back to "Moron Mountain" where they'll essentially be some sort of slave labor zoo exhibit. Anyway, he sends his minions to Earth in order to kidnap Bugs Bunny and friends. It turns out that Looney Tunes takes place in the center of the earth - seriously, had this ever been established in any way? - and once the space minions get there the Tunes surrender almost immediately. But Bugs Bunny is a wiseass, as we all know, and he convinces the little space bugs to play a game of basketball with their freedom on the line. The space bugs agree, then go off and siphon the talent away from real NBA all-stars and Shawn Bradley. The Tunes respond by kidnapping Michael Jordan through a golf course hole in order to enlist his help for the upcoming game.

Let's throw the brakes here and revisit some of that nonsense before we get too far ahead of ourselves. First, an advanced civilization capable of space flight has arrived to take prisoners, but they have enough integrity to say, "hey, fine, if you can beat us at basketball, we will not kidnap you." What the hell? And then they steal NBA talent and spend the whole game viciously fouling the other team anyway, so where exactly do they stand on the moral spectrum? Secondly, Shawn Bradley? Thirdly, the Tunes are faced with the prospect of being kidnapped and forced to perform their craft in a strange and foreign land... so they kidnap Michael Jordan in order to force him to perform his craft in a strange and foreign land. More moral ambiguity, no? Who are the good guys here? Who are the assholes? I've got a whole host of other questions, ranging from how the interconnectivity of the regular universe and Looney Tunes universe works; we see Jordan's kids watching Looney Tunes on TV, implying that it is a cartoon created and broadcast by actual humans much like in our world, so if it's a real actual series of events going on at the center of the Earth, I mean, why? How? No time for that, of course - Bugs or someone else could have delivered a two-sentence C-minus explanation of this and it would have sufficed. Instead, it's never even mentioned. And what about the prospect of Elmer Fudd playing on the same team as Bugs Bunny? Or Sylvester playing alongside Tweety? Half these charcaters actively try to kill each other whenever Looney Tunes is on - can they really work as a team?

It turns out, they don't need to do so, because they've got a one-man team in Michael Jordan. But we're getting ahead of ourselves; they also get Lola Bunny, a character specifically created for this very film. She gets all of three scenes. In the first, she schools Bugs on the basketball court and warns him not to make eyes at her. In the second, she does the exact same thing in the real game to one of the Monstars. And in the third, she's about to get absolutely pancaked by one of the Monstars doing a WWE style body slam off the backboard, but then Bugs shoves her out of the way and takes the hit instead. That's it. That's the entirety of Lola Bunny's screentime in the entire goddamn movie. Furry fetish fuel forevermore, all thanks to three meaningless scenes. (Do not do an extensive image search on "Lola Bunny" at work. But, do one at home. You need to see this stuff.)

Oh, meanwhile the NBA has decided to postpone every single game because four all-stars and Shawn Bradley are suddenly unable to play basketball. Imagine that!

So at any rate, the game happens. At the end of the first half the Monstars are up something like 60-18. I dunno, it's in the box score if you follow that link from above. By the way, reptilian Danny DeVito is here now, watching the game, even though its taking place at the center of the earth and he never made the trip to Earth in the first place. Just roll with it. Anyway, DeVito gets all pissed that his minions didn't siphon the talent away from Michael Jordan, who is clearly the best player of them all. But wait! DeVito was never in on the plan to play basketball in the first place. He just said, "bring me the Looney Tunes," and has no right whatsoever to be upset about his minions' methods of doing so. Regardless, here's where an already shaky movie just stops mattering on any level beyond watching cartoons dunk basketballs. Jordan cuts a deal with Danny DeVito, saying that if the Monstars lose, they need to give the NBA players their talents back, but if the Monstars win, Jordan will go to Moron Mountain in place of Bugs and company. DeVito accepts.

What the fuck, Space Jam?

Jordan, a family man with a wife and kids and a career and a life back on earth, suddenly doesn't give a shit about being abducted by aliens.

Reptile DeVito, who shows no regard for human rights in the first place, actually accepts the deal instead of just kidnapping everyone, Jordan included, regardless of the game's outcome.

If Reptile DeVito wants basketball players, he already has five in the form of NBA all-stars and Shawn Bradley, who have shown slavish loyalty to him all movie long, and so if it's basketball you want to bring to Moron Mountain, why not just blast off right now with this team in tow?

And the Monstars have already shown that they are able and willing to siphon away the talents of any NBA player, so why the hell aren't they doing that to Michael Jordan here and now!?

It's all inconsistent and horribly plotted and worst of all it makes no goddamn sense! Even for a movie that exists solely to show a cartoon basketball game, it makes no goddamn sense.

It probably isn't worth worrying about. The Tune Squad wins, but not before Wayne Knight and Bill Murray get involved in the game for no reason. How do they win? What magic gameplan switches were made by Jordan in the second half? None. None at all. Jordan just tricks his teammates into thinking they're chugging down steroids when he uses a water bottle labeled "Mike's Special Juice." So, a placebo effect. A placebo effect is the difference between getting outscored by forty in one half and outscoring the opposition by forty in the other. That's an eighty point swing. This implies that the Tune Squad on the placebo effect is worth about 160 net points a game more than the Tune Squad without the placebo effect.

I'm done here. This was just so fucking stupid. It had every right to be, and I expected no less, but holy hell.

Breaking Bad: Season 5, Part II

I want to talk about two things here - Breaking Bad's finale and the show's overall legacy.

First, the finale. A lot of Internet chatter back in September - not the majority of it, but still plenty to notice - suggested that perhaps the show had given Walter White too much moral redemption and had allowed him too happy an ending in what had always been a show about, you know, "breaking bad." I understand this criticism; while avoiding moral absolutes, the show had absolutely pushed its main character into increasingly darker places throughout its run, so to end things with Walt going out on his own terms was a bit of an eleventh hour tonal shift. Still, let's review what Walt accomplished.

Yes, it's true that Walt ended up accomplishing these things that he had set out to do:

• Died before being taken to prison
• Left a sizable amount of money behind for his family
• Created a lasting legacy for himself

And it's true that he also did the following noble or otherwise decent things on his final day:

• Took out a murderous gang of Nazi drugrunners
• Freed Jesse Pinkman, an on-and-off son figure, from slavery as a meth cook
• Killed Lydia
• Confessed to his wife that it was his ego, more than his family's wellbeing, that kept him cooking meth for as long as he did

But he also:

• Did get caught, if not arrested
• Ended up utterly despised by his son and wife
• Caused extreme financial and emotional hardships for his family
• Indirectly got his brother-in-law killed
• Spent several months dying of lung cancer, alone, in a New Hampshire cabin
• Lost the vast majority of his drug money fortune
• Bled out in a meth lab

I don't think the Walter White of Season 1, were he to watch the series finale, would think that anything really went according to plan. Walt only "went out on his own terms" insofar as he had hit absolute rock bottom in the third-to-last and second-to-last episodes. I'm curious how the "that was too tidy and happy" camp wanted to see the show end. With the Nazis prospering? With Jesse dead? With Skyler and Flynn just completely broke and forever ruined? With Walt having learned nothing at all during his his horribly depressing stint in New Hampshire? Make no mistake - Breaking Bad did not give Walter White a happy ending; it gave him a sliver of redemption after chipping away at his code of ethics for six solid years.It gave him no more than what he deserved, or what he had earned. After all, at the end of the day, Walt was still the show's protagonist and main character, and no matter how obvious it was that we were meant to root against Walt by the end, if not much sooner, we'd be lying to ourselves if we pretended not to love his ability to think on his feet, to improvise, and to essentially MacGyver his way out of so many drastic situations.

All I'm saying is, it was okay to root for Walt in the finale, since Walt had repented and suffered to such severe degrees. Maybe the biggest problem with the final season is how rushed the ending is; we see Walt at his absolute lowest in the gripping "Ozymandias," we see him soften up a great deal in "Granite State" as some six months or so come to pass, and then we see just about everything go right for him, one last time, in "Felina." "Granite State" was the least memorable of those three episodes, but perhaps it could have and should have been stretched out even longer. I understand the show not wanting to drag out its ending, but as viewers I don't think we fully come to appreciate just how much time Walt has spent in self-imposed solitude, disowned by his family and unable to contact another living person. It's that lengthy sentence, after all, that transforms him from the angry, stewing asshole he was in "Ozymandias" into the tired, broken, and sort-of remorseful guy he was in "Felina." For me, this off-screen time lapse is essential to appreciating the ending of Breaking Bad. The show could have ended pretty easily with "Ozymandias" or even a modified "Granite State" if it wanted to be about one man's absolute fall from grace. Instead, they gave us "Felina," intentionally ending the story of Walter White with a glimmer of redemption... while still avoiding any semblance of a happy ending at all. (Where does Jesse go now that he's a known and wanted felon? How will Marie and Skyler ever mend their bridges given what one's husband did to the other's? Is Skyler really still safe from persecution, given her total complicity in Walt's money laundering? What the hell is in store for Brock going forward? What kind of daddy issues will Holly grow up with?)

I said I wanted to talk about the show's legacy, but I've run long here already, and frankly, I don't have much to say beyond heaping praise on the show, and praise for Breaking Bad is abundant here on the Internet, so why bother? I'll say that whether or not Breaking Bad was the greatest show ever, it made for an absolutely beautiful eulogy to the "angry white man" antihero genre that's been so in vogue for fifteen years now. I mean, how do you try to follow this act, Low Winter Sun? What more can you bring to the table, Ray Donovan?

I've probably seen about a hundred TV shows from start to finish. I'll miss this one dearly.