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4 hours ago, seamus2389 said:

 

That was a show that began and ended with Walter White and they put some time into the rest of the cast but that imbalance was never fixed which was a problem for me in the last season. If you are looking for tension filled show starring a bald white guy the Shield might be worth checking out.  After the Wire it would be my pick for top tv show. Both look like cops shows on the surface but underneath are two very different but devastating tragedies, the Wire is more social/ institutional while the Shield is very personal. They make for interesting rewatch companions in that way.

The forced tension is one of my least favourite parts of Breaking Bad. The cheap cliff hangers lose their effect pretty fast when nothing never comes of them and they're resolved in mostly undramatic ways. It's like click bait headlines.

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1 hour ago, Cordeos said:

He could have swallowed his pride taken a gift in the first episode and that would have been that

 

That was probably one of the things that worked for me about Breaking Bad, though. His falling-out with Gretchen and Elliot, especially how the two parties remember it differently, felt like a genuine character touch, rather than just narrative convenience.

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2 hours ago, Cordeos said:

He could have swallowed his pride taken a gift in the first episode and that would have been that

 

Yeah, exactly. He wasn't forced into this situation by any means, he chose it because he thought he had to/it was the one he wanted.

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I finished Breaking Bad.

 

 

Have to say that I got kind of bored of it at times, and when you look at the overall story I think ended up being way too long. It felt like the same scenes over and over, Walt lying to Skyler for example, without it really going anywhere. Same thing with Jesse, it's either Jesse shouting at Walt or the other way around. I don't understand their relationship as portrayed in the show, there are these rare moments where the show reinforces how much they care for each other deep down, but almost every interaction they have is them arguing (and Jesse has all of two facial expressions, either pissed off or depressed). That goes for Skyler/Walt too, outside of maybe the first episode I'm not sure there's a single moment with those two where they just have a normal interaction that shows that the two of them actually care for each other (I actually started skipping through some of their scenes together because nothing happens). Of course, later on Skyler doesn't, and at the very end Walt admits he did it all for himself, not his family, but he's still clearly supposed to care about them. They just never show why.

 

Walter Jr. I have no idea why they even included in the show. I mean, they never do anything with him, hell I don't think we see him in a scene where he's not with his parents or Hank/Marie except maybe the second to last episode. I just get annoyed when the show is treading water, which I think it was for a large portion of its episode. Sure, stuff happens, but it doesn't really lead anywhere, it's just about the drama of the moment and the family drama, well I never found that dramatic at all. I also got really fed up with listening to Walt come up with bad lies.

I imagine Gus is a villain that people like, but I didn't care for him. He felt like a walking cliché. All this stuff like with him walking into the sniper fire, those two mute assassins, Tuco etc. felt super cheesy and not intentionally so. It was never badass the way it wanted to be.

 

Anyway, on the positive side I quite liked Mike, and for the most part the show was shot quite nicely. They overused the 'camera at the bottom of a barrel' shot though, and I thought it looked pretty weird at times, like when someone is shuffling through dirt on the ground or something and you clearly see them wipe it off this glass plane.

 

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On 11/9/2016 at 10:23 PM, eot said:

The forced tension is one of my least favourite parts of Breaking Bad. The cheap cliff hangers lose their effect pretty fast when nothing never comes of them and they're resolved in mostly undramatic ways. It's like click bait headlines.

 

The difference between the Shield and BB is that tension of the Shield was within an episode, the cliff hangers are the ad breaks, by the end of the episode the particular crisis is over, in that way it operated like an episodic show. That changes in the fifth and 7th season but in both cases the fallout is equal to the build up and only a couple episodes in both seasons end on cliff hangers.

 

The Shield had alot of background tension regarding the Strike Team had so much illegal stuff they were trying to keep hidden from those outside the team and in some cases each other.In the third fourth they had stopped doing all of their illegal activity but still had the threat of it hanging over them which drove the remainder of the show.

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