holy cow, this show is stalling big time. it's been in limbo for a while, but man, it needs some drastic changes. i bet they're gonna wait until the end of the season again to turn up the heat and have something totally crazy or shocking happen, which will then once again have little to no consequences.
i mean, they've got great writers. they really know how to write dialogue, how to create interesting characters and interesting scenarios and interactions. the show looks great too. great cinematography. but gilligan needs to grow some balls and mess with his characters more. at this point i think he might be the one holding the show back. he's outright admitted that he's not willing to mix up the structure, the setting or the main players. he said that he "loves his characters and the setting too much". now if that didn't make everyone's alarm bells go off, i don't know what will.
i'm glad they seem to have gotten over the showy-ness of that one part in the first ep though. nothing similar has happened since. well, not much has happened since, really.
don't get me wrong, i actually dig the jesse arc right now. i understand it. i love how fucked up it is and how careless he is and that a minor disaster is inevitable for him at this point. i love that he still hasn't learned his lesson etc. and of course he's having a rough time dealing with his murder of gale. but you know, we've been there! we really have. we need something more or something else altogether.
marie, too - yeah, i like her character a lot and i buy it, i buy what's happening to her, again. and yes, that's what happens to obsessive people. they slip into the same old patterns again with minor variations whenever something goes wrong. it's believable and it's well written - BUT it makes for boring television. been there, done that, you know? especially when it's just one of many characters in a script that's simply going through the motions at this point. i think it's great what happened to hank and how he's dealing (aka not dealing) with it and i love the marie/hank dynamic and all the little details, because it's so real and so true. it is so precisely written; this is exactly who these characters are. it's painful, but totally believable. yet, of course, it doesn't seem to lead anywhere plot-wise. it's just stagnating. and to think that hank probably had the most interesting arc last season...
and as of now, skyler is probably the single most interesting character this season. the only one developing, the only one actually interested in moving things forward, making changes, desperate to DO something. it's curious how in yesterday's episode she actively had to fight walter's urge to simply plod along with no plan but plenty of paranoia; in a way she's fighting the whole structure of the show right now. interestingly, this is something that seems to happen a lot on breaking bad: character's acting or spelling out the problem with the show's writing. like walt in the first ep: "so what's our next step?". ouch, i thought to myself. they shouldn't have let him spell out the very thoughts of the writing staff. or walt's monologue in last season's "fly" episode, when he went on and on about how he had lost his purpose, how he's been in limbo for a long time, how everything's changed etc. all of it applied to the show at that point as well. but for once it was great of the writers to acknowledge walt's situation, instead of trying to fight it with the usual baby step sub-plots. and it would have been a chance to mix things up a bit more. but that didn't happen - not until the final episode at least, whose events once again turned out to have barely any repercussions.
that said, i'll continue to watch the show. and i hope it's not ALL downhill from here, but i'm not all that optimistic. for what it's worth, most of the characters are still great and have plenty of potential, the acting is superb and the writers CAN still write. they just need to grow some balls and come up with more interesting plots and introduce some major changes. kill off skyler or something, then let walt deal with the consequences and go nuts, abandon everything, destroy the lab, go on a hunt for gus. i don't know! do something! something tangible needs to be at stake again.