THE SHIELD REVISITED / Season 2, Episode 9 & 10: “Co-Pilot” / “Coyotes”

A&V Stimuli takes a look back at this critically acclaimed and ground breaking cop drama, with another of many semi-regular installments covering it from its first to its last episode.

Season 2, Episode 9: “Co-Pilot”

After wrapping up the Armadillo storyline last episode, it seemed odd that the following episode would be set fourteen months earlier (and BTW, it’s been fourteen months since the first episode happened?  If I went through half the stuff that has happened in the last season and half of the show, I would’ve gone into a sanitarium).  I can only imagine how bizarre it was to watch “Co-Pilot”, since it seemed a prologue to all of what’s happened during the show so far didn’t seem necessary.  After watching it, I’m not sure it still does, but it’s not a waste of time either.

For one, we get to see the Strike team being formed, in both people and what they will ultimately become.  Vic and Shane are just working cases (and for one of the rare time in this show, wearing suits to work), when Vic gets Assistant Chief Gilroy (before he became “incarcerated Gilroy”) to pull a favor and get him in charge of a new Strike Team in Farmington, and with the assurance that he will produce results immediately.  So when the newly formed team gets there eyes on a drug dealer taking over territory, and the normal methods of police work aren’t producing fast enough results, as Vic says, “I think we need a shortcut.”  He swears this will be the only time they’ll do this and he seems to believe that earnestly, but then again, we the audience know different.

This of course leads to several busts (including then alive Rondell from season one), and eventually using Connie (still alive, and surprisingly cleaner looking than she’s ever been) to trick herself out to plant drugs in drug dealer Lionel’s house.  This leads to a rather icky scene where Vic and Shane overhead via microphone Connie being raped (all in the background of a carnival and vomiting clown) by Lionel, with Vic almost blowing the whole thing by going (but ultimately prevented) to help her.  They get Lionel, but get in David’s crosshairs as a result, which lead to Crowley (you know, before he was shot in the face by Vic) being put into the Strike Team to keep eyes on them all for David.  And we all know how bad that ends for detective Crowley…

For the other partnerships, things don’t start off that badly.  Dutch is pegged immediately as the rube of the new squad house (and what work it must have taken to have it emptied like it was when the episode starts), arrives late enough that he doesn’t get a choice of desks, let alone choice of partners.  He’s put with Claudette and another veteran detective on a kidnapping case involving Mexican kidnappers and a brutally raped Salvadorian girl who escaped her captors.  They confront a negotiator the family hired to get the girl back, and try to convince him to give them the kidnappers, but thanks to Dutch’s keen observation and empathy with Claudette as an investigator, get the negotiator to trap the kidnappers. 

Danny and Julien go on the first day of patrol together and things go well for them (excluding of course, the naked, bloodied Salvadorian girl that they run into).  Julien is a straight shooter who thinks he can do better than most of his peers, but like most green cops, doesn’t realize he has to sometimes not do the right thing.  Take a man Danny and Julien bring in for stealing groceries for his family; groceries he wouldn’t have to steal if a punk in his apartment complex wasn’t stealing the man and other people’s food stamps.  Danny deals with the food stamp stealer by basically giving him a chance to stop and walk away without getting arrested by simply leaving what he stole on his porch for them to pick up later.  What could have been a dicey arrest turns into an deal that the thief agrees to and does immediately.  Its not just a matter of arresting people, but just making sure things are even in uneven times.

What that story does is show how much police work in this show is about negotiation.  Vic at the end of the episode can only lament upon his slightly illegal escapade into busting Lionel, “That was pretty easy, wasn’t it?”.  Vic may have been a good cop once, but here might be the point where he decided he can start getting away with twisting the law a little bit more, but as a result, doing so became less and less easy to do.  In a way, this mirrors the complex and risky steps the Strike Team needed to get rid of Armadillo.  Could they have done the same a year earlier?  Probably not, or at least, not as well.

By the end of the episode, everything is set up pretty much where the pilot started.  All the relationships are set up and all the problems are laid out, but we kind of know where its going to go, which cuts the dramatic impact of the episode down dramatically.  “Co-Pilot” is a nice diversion, but in the end, it’s a diversion we as viewers didn’t really need.

--Asst. Chief Gilroy before he became ex-Asst. Chief Gilroy.

--Odd seeing the Barn minus people.

--Funny blooper with one of the soundguys appearing briefly in the Strike Team room.  In the widescreen releases, not sure about the fullscreen releases.

--Pretty good editing avodiing showing the naughty bits of a bloody naked woman.

--Connie before she became dead Connie.

--Rondell before he became dead Rondell.

--Funny meta moment with church stuff being removed from the Strike Team room; the pilot was filmed in achurch before being moved into a set.

--Fucked up backstory behind Dutch's ex-wife.

--"I hate to say this, but I think we need a shortcut."  Surprising to see that much doubt in Vic when he says that.

--Don't remember Connie being this clean.

--Barfing clown during the sting operation; random, but nice flavor to the scene.

--Another odd blooper with the cameraguy popping up during the sting op.  The dangers of widescreen...

--Crowley before he became shot in the face Crowley.

--Interesting to note how well Crowley and David know each other.

--"Credit's overrated."  Might be Claudette's motto.

--Oh, the beginning of the unusable men's room.

--Dutch gets punked for the first time by Vic.

--Uh, yeah.  Lem gets checked out unknowingly by Julien.  

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars

 Season 2, Episode 10: “Coyotes”

After the brief detour in “Co-Pilot”, “Coyotes” sets the end of this season into motion with a few big problems.  One comes immediately when Lanie’s report on the Barn is leaked to the press, and it outright holds blame on David and Vic for its not-so-sterling reputation.  This fragile alliance was strained as it was throughout the season, but both men find themselves put into damage control.  On David’s end, he’s brought into to talk to the chief of police, and has to negotiate to keep his job, albeit for a while longer.  Either way, the message the chief lays out is pretty clear: win or lose, once the primaries begin, he’s out.  So David is left with little option but to win, because his career as a cop is going to get flushed anyway.

Vic has his own problem in this episode, and that’s in the sudden and bizarre appearance of his former boss, Gilroy (John Diehl).  I say “sudden and bizarre” because he’s under house arrest for his land grab scheme last season, and that he appears at Vic’s house, begging for help to get out of the country.  This is suspicious enough, but with this coming on the heels of the Barn report, is even more so.  Add to that, the newest addition to the Strike Team, Tavon (Brian White), who clearly is an outsider to the inner circle that the Strike Team is now.  So while Vic and Shane head off to handle Gilroy, this leaves Lem to work with Tavon to bring down an illegal chop shop ring.  While Tavon does not know anything about the team’s plans with the Armenian mob money train, he proves he’s not some completely by-the-book addition, playing a good game of “good cop, bad cop” (Tavon being the bad cop) to get the head of the ring.  Tavon does bend the rules enough to earn Lem’s respect, but the rest of the Team would rather keep him out of the money train plan.  He can bend the law, but break the law is a whole other thing.

In Claudette’s case this episode, she comes in with a shaken perspective on Vic, the Strike team, and David, causing her interactions with them in this episode to be nothing less than venomous.  She knows they were involved with the Armadillo mess earlier in the season and murder in the Barn in “Scar Tissue”, and is in a position that she can’t really prove it, but won’t let them forget that she knows.  She can bend the rules like Tavon, but knows she’s working with people who have outright broken and burned the law behind them.  Still, she soldiers on, working with Dutch somewhat reluctantly on a breaking and entering that left an old woman dead.  For a good portion of this episode, Claudette’s mind is not on the case, but still trying to dig up evidence on the Armadillo murder.  Eventually, she gets back into her groove and finds the robber, a drugged out transvestite (whose found in such a zonked out state, you almost think they discovered a zombie in this drug den), and puts the Armadillo case on the back burner.  She has let go of the matter for now, but hasn’t forgotten it, as the rather quiet terse exchange between her and Vic at the episode’s end suggests.  If they were friends before, they definitely aren’t now.

Danny and Julien’s case this week is quaint by comparison, trying to help a very pregnant gangbanger who barely survived a beating.  She’s not concerned for the well-being of the kid (her boyfriend/baby daddy is not in the picture anymore), and when Danny suggests her adopting the kid out of the blue, even less so.  Danny is in a bad place, with the whole mad widow storyline and being held responsible for letting Armadillo getting killed in the cage, so it seems like a desperate move to hold onto something that could be a good thing.  She’s been getting the shit end of things this season, and her life doesn’t get better by the last few episodes.

Meanwhile, Vic and Shane are setting up Gilroy’s escape to Mexico, and it becomes clear that Gilroy didn’t so much escape house arrest, as he was let go by Lanie to entrap Vic in a criminal act.  They pull off a difficult escape out of that situation, but one that leaves Lanie without a case to stand on (after all, if Gilroy was let go, without really a connection or Gilroy’s wire evidence of Vic for his escape, any case would be circumstantial at best), and has her being shown the door by the department, who are revealed to be the one’s responsible for leaking her report.  It’s another big theme of The Shield at play this episode with Claudette, Lanie, and even Danny: shit spills down, especially when it comes to covering your ass.  The higher-ups can tolerate some corruption when it comes to getting the job done, and are ruthless when it comes to protecting themselves from the blowback.

The kick of this episode comes in Gilroy’s supposed plan to escape to Mexico becoming a reality, with him getting a small amount of cash out of the funds the Strike Team stole from Gilroy’s safe deposit box.  The rest went to a hitman, who will kill Gilroy if he’s discovered crossing back into the U.S., pretty much damning Gilroy into exile.  It’s a rough fate for Vic’s former boss and friend, but despite that, Gilroy leaves Vic with one message, “I got greedy.  I lost everything.  There's a lesson there."  That final dialogue from Gilroy is more than true, especially as the show ends this season and begins another season with those words coming back to haunt the Strike team.

            

--"I just don't like not liking my job."

--"He's my cousin.  It'll screw up Christmas."

--"What about the hut, the rice and the beans?"  "That's when I wasn't really going."

--"You made me pay my own hitman?"

--Aw, can't Vic and Claudette make up?  Yeah, probably not.

--Directed by Davis Guggenheim, a regular TV director now known more for his documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Breaking Bad Revisited / Season 1, Episode 4: “Cancer Man”

After the tension of the first three episodes, “Cancer Man” served as a bit of a respite in this short first season.  It was an episode that took time to focus on both Walt and Jesse’s home life, or complete chaos resembling a home life.  Both cancer-ridden teacher and former meth making student have just finished getting rid of two drug dealers (and in each cases, went badly), and have went their separate ways.  In a way, it made sense, seeing as how they made a decent amount of cash, at least enough for Walt to not leave his family completely penniless.  And considering their luck with Crazy-8 and Emilio, it seemed best not to tempt fate again.

Jesse has some of drug buddies Skinny Pete and Combo visit, who besides noting the weird hole in the hallway of the house, are there to kick back and relax.  He of course, joins them in smoking some of the Walter White produced meth, and in a creepy hallucination filled haze, flees his house and ends up at his parents’ home.  His parents are hesitant to let him stay with them for awhile, and are paranoid enough to try to limit his time with his younger brother Jacob.  You get the impression Jesse wasn’t too far off from being Jacob at his age before drugs took over his life; both are smart individuals, but Jesse is the one who’s went down a bad path.  Jesse has had a tough childhood (by some fault his, and by some, his parents inability to intervene), so it comes with some surprise when he sees the love that Jacob gets and feels resentful about it, Jacob tells him how much they care for him.

As such, it comes with some surprise that Jesse gets booted out for having a joint in his room, a joint that was actually Jacob’s.  Instead of proclaiming his innocence, knowing his little brother will get his parents’ disdain and disappointment, takes the hit.  He destroys the joint in front of Jacob almost as a warning to not end up like him.  Jesse is a flawed kid (as most people hitting their 20’s would be), but he does something in taking the fall for Jacob that shows that he cares enough to not see that happen to his brother.  It’s a nice reminder that for all the dim decisions Jesse has made in the episodes previously, he has a good enough heart to care, and unfortunately, to injure easily.

Walt, on the other end of this episode, is still in a bit of shock from the Crazy-8 killing.  Jesse gives Walt’s end to him (which is a decent amount of money), and in a rather awkward way, tries to talk to his former teacher/partner.  Walt shoots that down, and considering his mental state, is probably not desperate to confess to anybody about what happened between them.  He did as teased by the previous episode’s finale, did confess to Skyler something important: his cancer.  This conversation is brought up to Hank and Marie during a barbeque at Walt’s house, and immediately, they and Skyler start pushing Walt to get some consultation on what to do.  Walt is not feeling comfortable with any of that, and considering how much just one of these consultations eats through his ill gotten gains, means his spoils will go dry quickly.

Then there’s the question if Walt even wants to survive at all, with this haunted look on him whenever he sees a cop car nearby, almost taunting him with the death of Crazy-8 by his hands.  Of course, there is no punishment for what Walt has done, except internally.  And his dead man walking routine is certainly not making things easier at the White household, with a pregnant Skyler an emotional trainwreck, and Walt Jr. being sullen.  Both however, are angry at Walt for avoiding chemotherapy, but blame it on him being stubborn.  Actually, it is that and being a bit fatalistic.

Look at how the last scene of the episode came about: earlier, Walt gets cut off to a parking space at the bank by a sport-car driving jerk, who for the purposes of this article, we’ll call KEN WINS (yep, its his license plate).  So, at the end, when Walt is driving by his lonesome and spots Ken’s car at a gas station, gets even by rigging the car to start burning.  He’s lucky no one really spots him doing this (even Ken, who’s too busy yaking into his Bluetooth headphone), but it’s a moment of satisfaction for Walt, albeit a fleeting one.  He has taken some kind of action, for better or for worse (in a further analysis, likely for worse), but whether it leads to him trying to fight to keep living is a question yet to be answered here.

As I said, this episode was really a chance to learn more about Walt and Jesse, and really serve as down time before the season picked up.  Its odd to note a small thing about both Walt and Jesse that this episode starts to point out something in the fabric of the series: both of them really have a strained relationship with their parents.  Jesse and his parents’ relationship gets nasty as the series progressed, and Walt barely mentions (let alone, us as an audience witness)anything about his parents at all.  Of course, both of them have witnessed loved ones die (as we discover throughout the series) at an early age, and its affected them in different ways.     When Junior complains to his dad to stop complaining if he doesn’t want to go on, you see Walt react in a way that makes you think he may just go through with his cancer therapy, if only because he sees something of himself in Junior’s statement.  He can roll over and die, or fight and keep going, which watching the whole of the series, is a tragic decision that has yet to reveal itself.

And now, some episode notes:                  

--Guys still want to get “tuggies” by Shania Twain?  OK, I can see that.

--As revealed in the opening DEA briefing, yep, Crazy-8 was a snitch.  And Walter White’s crystal was found.  And so was the school’s missing gas mask.  Oh boy.

--Nice little reveal of Jesse’s unflattering sketch of Walt being on the back of his Walter White created high school chemistry test.  By the way, he got an “F’ on that.

--Nice nod to the Tampico baby crib.

--Who didn’t get a slight grin when Walt set that asshole Ken’s car on fire?

--“Icebreaker?  Isn’t that the name of a breath mint?”

--“Nah, I think the house is settling.”

--“Then why don’t you just fucking die already?”

Finally, some series notes:

--Skinny Pete and Combo appear for the first time.  Oh, Combo, you are missed.

--The first time Walt starts using the nooks and crannies of the house to hide money.  Of course, using the air vent may not have been such a good plan.

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars 

Spartacus: Vengeance season review / Episode 1: “Fugitivus”

WARNING: There are spoilers to be found.

The makers of Starz’ Spartacus show have had a rocky two years getting to what is ultimately the second season, subtitled Vengeance.  Right around the end of season one (Blood and Sand), its lead Andy Whitfield was diagnosed non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma and in order to allow him to recover, a short prequel series Gods of the Arena was released in the absence.  As many reading this know, Whitfield sadly passed away before filming begun on Vengeance, but was around long enough to pass the role onto Liam McIntyre.  Its hard to replace the lead on any show, but Spartacus had a bigger problem: it had a lead character that couldn’t really be dead at this point in the series’ run, and having another actor replace someone else who filled the loinclothed slave-turned-rebel leader’s shoes is a dicey proposition at best.  Watching the first episode “Fugitivus” allayed a lot of those concerns very quickly, almost being a non-issue by the episode’s striking end.

When we meet up with Spartacus and his gang of escaped slaves, it’s been weeks since the house of Batiatus fell, and Roman noble Seppius (Tom Hobbs) has been sending mercenaries out to hunt them down, and as evidenced by the stylish opening, end up getting cut to ribbons.  Spartacus is in that ambush, and decides to use one of the bodies to send a message to now Praetor Claudius Glaber (Craig Parker), the man who put him and his now dead wife into slavery.  It’s only Glaber’s name he scrawls on the dead man, but the message is pretty clear: come and get me.  His Roman superiors are none too happy with his handling of Spartacus, and order him back to Capua to kill this rebellion.  This is not something he wants to do, with his scheming wife Ilithyia (Viva Bianca) now pregnant and someone who definitely doesn’t want to go back there, and with his political status in jeopardy, has no choice but to go.

Spartacus and his band aren’t exactly doing well themselves, living in the underground sewers of Capua, and barely getting by on the food found, mainly by the Gaul ex-slaves who follow Crixus (Manu Bennett).  The group is forced to make a pretty big decision when news of Glaber coming with a legion of soldiers hits: stay and fight or leave to the mountains to grow their army.  Both Spartacus and Crixus have a big debate over what to do, with both men on different agendas: Spartacus to kill Glaber, and Crixus to find his love Naevia.  Considering the two very rarely see eye to eye, there is a real issue at stake here: kill the rebellion by killing Glaber or kill the rebellion hunting a slave who may already be gone.

Its not that Spartacus is completely hellbent and blind to the needs of the group he’s the de facto leader of, as he does spends time contemplating with his new girl Mira (Katrina Law) and helping his the widow of his friend Varro, Aurelia, get out of Roman territory with her son.  He’s aware that he could lose control of his forces without Crixus, so he volunteers himself to help find a lead on Naevia’s whereabouts.  This leads to the big centerpiece of the episode, a whorehouse (filled to the brim with more than your share of pay cable nudity) escapade that turns all kinds of bloody, but pays off with a start to finding Naevia.  Of course, Spartacus won’t leave until Glaber’s dead, which leads him to go off to kill Glaber on his own.

Its surprising to see the very contained last season expand with many different factions in play.  In the case of Seppius, its proving himself and handling his sister Seppia (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), in a relationship that just tows the line at being incest-y.  For Glaber, its to improve his standing by destroying Spartacus, and for the time being, set up shop in the former house of Batiatus.  Its here that another big reveal is made: Batiatus’ wife Lucretia (Lucy Lawless) survived her stabbing from last season (unfortunately, her love child with Crixus didn’t), and despite Ilithyia wanting her dead, she’s kept alive as an example against Spartacus’ uprising.  How she managed to stay alive and hidden these many weeks is a bit of a stretch (and for a house we last left with dozens of bodies, it’s body-less now, so people at least went through the place and still didn’t find Lucretia), but with Lawless’ performance of someone who may be completely gone (or not), it’s a welcome one to see that Glaber’s house will have its own kind of internal strife.

Glaber makes a public speech, which would be a perfect opportunity to strike for Spartacus, but that goes south when its discovered Aurelia has been captured, marked with the sign of “fugitive” (on her head), and it turns into a rescue when Crixus and some men arrive to retrieve Spartacus and Aurelia.  Glaber escapes, Aurelia dies in transit, and Spartacus finally agrees to head to the mountains to build his forces to fight Glaber.  As tempting and as shocking it would be to take Glaber out of the picture, its good to see a big goal laid out for the season for Spartacus to accomplish.  And with the next move to free Naevia from whatever nobleman has her, that resolution won’t come for awhile.

 If anything in the absence between seasons, the show has improved in its opening episodes.  The first episode of Blood and Sand was too much style over substance, but if anything the opening episodes of Spartacus’ seasons since have been solid starts for the series.  For a show that is known for many gladiatorial fights, its kind of humorous to see that the one here is brief, and for the spectators watching it, seems boring.  The show has to stretch out, and its attempt to snap loose of its Gladiator-esque roots appears to be working so far.  If anything can be leveled as to something missing, is several characters throughout appear briefly (such as the in-hiding former Doctore of Batiatus, Oenomaus, played by Peter Mensah, but does so in a pretty badass fight scene) or not at all (the back-stabbing Ashur).  But, we got a whole season (and another one due to an early renewal) to see how all of this comes into play.  But if this episode is any indication, its going to get extra bloody in Capua before its over.

--For the future, I’ll be reviewing the season and post on future episodes around the following Sunday (give or take).  This got done a bit early due to Starz posting the episode to view online early to build up for this week’s premiere.  And like this post, there will be spoilers to the episode, so don’t complain.

   

--Maybe its just me, but I think I agree with Aurelia here with her forbidding with her last breath Spartacus to find her son, even if she was beaten, marked, and bleeding to death.  That guy leaves dead bodies behind like people leave used tissues.

--Almost forgot to mention Agron, the still alive brother of the gladiator brothers from Blood and Sand is still alive, and quite blood hungry.

--I love that just for a moment, there’s the possibility that Lucretia is a figment of Ilthyia’s stressed out mind.  It calls to mind Battlestar Galactica for a second, another show Lawless has graced.

--Speaking of Lucretia, who stitched up her gut wound?  Hmmm...

--If you’re not a fan of speed-ramping, the opening scene will likely piss you off.

--John Hannah’s appearance on the show as Batiatus is missed, or maybe I just miss him screaming, “Jupiter’s cock!”.  Yeah, that’s probably it.

--That tiered whorehouse fight is awesome.  I did say that, right? 

--“Agron, I believe he’s dead.”

--“It seems Naevia is not here to attend to you.”

--“You are not dead.  You still draw breath.”  And then comes out the intestines.

--“I am not Doctore.  Not anymore.”

--“You had me at ‘whores’.”

--"Place ear to chest, and you will find it absent sound."

--“We will face the hordes of Rome again, and the gods shall weep for their suffering.”

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars              

Justified Season 3 Review / Episode 2: “Cut Ties”

As I mentioned in the post of last week’s season premiere, Justified’s opening salvo is a lot of setup.  What I may have not been clear about is despite that, there’s usually a pretty interesting one-episode plot to take us through, despite the long running storylines going on in this show’s universe.  In this case, a good amount of focus in this episode is on Art (Nick Searcy), and what kind of lawman he really is.  We know he’s not too happy to have Raylan Givens in his squad, with his way of ending most of his cases in bullets and blood.  And with the Winona stealing money subplot from last season further tarnishing the view of his subordinate, its interesting to see some parallels starting to pop up between both men.

During the opening teaser, Art talks to Bill Nichols, an overseer of the Witness Protection Program and almost describes his having Raylan as penance for his past transgressions (which start to become a bit clearer is this episode).  Art and Nichols are old school lawmen who are a bit past the myth of them being lawman cowboys, and just content to deal with the now.  In Nichols case, he later on gets shot and killed by a hitman, Mr. Poe, in WitSec who wants to sell info on protected witnesses to get back into the Boston mob, and Art’s office is put on protecting the witnesses and finding Nichols’ killer.  Into this, also comes help in the Assistant Director of the Marshals, Goodall (played by Carla Gugino, who breathed life into another Elmore Leonard TV adaptation, Karen Sisco), who has some tawdry history with Raylan.

While Raylan and Goodall seek out who might have wanted Nichols’ information stolen (which is not really a huge part of the episode), the majority of the plot is with Art as he inadvertently interviews Mr. Poe about who was the triggerman.  Thanks to some subtle noticing of clues, and not so subtle noticing of Mr. Poe’s GPS navigator, takes Poe captive, and under the possibility the people under Nichols’ watch are compromised, goes to work on him in some pretty rough ways.  Art pegs Poe as a sniveling weasel, and puts the fear of God into him about revealing who he sold the information to (“If you don’t tell me, I’ll take your gun and fire some bullets into the wall, and then I’ll take my gun and shoot some bullets into your face.”), but what makes that threat even more terrifying is that you believe for a second Art would do that.  He seems to be a straight shooter, but that scene gives more perspective on how he can deal with the troubles caused by a man liked Raylan Givens.

Of course, it turns out one of the protected witness, one under protection of Rachel (Erica Tazel), is about to be hit, and both parties of Art and Raylan/Goodall get there in time to help Rachel stop the hitmen.  While this plot doesn’t really play into Quarles’ big plans for Harlan (at least that can be seen, and is absent from this episode altogether), it does lay down some groundwork for some future conflict down the road.  There’s some spark/tension between Goodall and Raylan that hints to the fact they had a fling while Raylan was divorced from Winona, and with the reveal of Art’s darker nature (something not really visible in the last Art-centric episode, “Blaze of Glory” from season 2), there’s some great things mined out of this.  Of course, that’s all just another piece of the episode…            

The other thing comes from Boyd’s plan to get to Dickie in prison getting shafted by Raylan, who gets the assault charges dropped and a release for Boyd by the next day.  This speeds up Boyd’s plan radically by him getting himself put in solitary next to Dickie, and then bribing a guard to get into Dickie’s cell.  What you think will be a brutal act of vengeance turns out to be Boyd forcing Dickie to reveal where the missing money from Dickie’s mom Mags Bennett has been hidden.  It’s a strange twist that, while keeps Dickie in the land of the living (and Jeremy Davies in the land of Justified), seems a bit strange when he has the opportunity to get payback for Ava’s shooting.  Nevertheless, Dickie being all bluster and no fury, gives up that he doesn’t have the money, but knows who’s holding it.

And that brings us to the last reveal of the episode, in the man whose supposedly holding Mags’ money, the drug boss Elston Limehouse (another well known actor from Boomtown, Mykelti Williamson), who's another heavy in the crime world of Harlan County.  His introduction is creepy enough, in an old slaughterhouse, dealing with a failing subordinate of his by offering to square things with him by either promising never to betray his trust again, or get his hand burned by lye.  As Limehouse quietly lays out the options and consequences of what he’s offering, you see an interesting bad guy being added to the show who shares many of the down-home punishment that Mags dished out last season, but also seems a real imposing threat towards Boyd should they eventually meet.  Whether all these different adversaries is a thing of quantity over quality seems unlikely seeing how the show has juggled its villains so far, but its still a bit early to tell if its one or the other.  Either way, there is some great set up in this episode for some more blood to be spilled in Harlan.   

--Here we go: despite the rumors (and the fact that using Karen Sisco in this show brings up a rights problem) Goodall is NOT Karen Sisco, even though both are played by Gugino, and both are badass women.  That’s enough for me. 

--Did Tyler Durden steal that initiation tactic from Limehouse?   

--Poe’s played by Frank John Hughes, another noticeable character actor from shows like Brotherhood and 24, among many others.

--A piece of information that you may have missed during this packed episode: the Marshals are aware Arnett has not so much disappeared as he was killed in his office.  Chalk up that to an almost convincing clean-up.

--Not much Winona, and even less of Ava in this episode.

--“And if you still don’t (tell me), then I’m gonna get mean.”

--“Well, Raylan, I’m a man whose sleeping with his brother’s widow and murderess, so I can only offer so much advice.”

--“We used to have a saying, ‘You have the right to remain silent, as long as you can stand the pain.’”

--“Now can I assume from your face that you’re choosing door number two?”

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Justified Season 3 Review / Episode 1: “The Gunfighter”

When you think about it, its been a shitty couple months for Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) leading up to season 3 of Justified.  He gets shipped out of Miami back to his home state of Kentucky as punishment for gunning down a triggerman, has to contend with his old friend Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), his ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea), and numerous illicit family ties.  And where does that all end up?  Well, a confrontation with Boyd’s father Bo (who ends up dead), another with a crime boss from Miami (that is at least a stalemate), Winona shacking up with him and getting pregnant (not to mention getting in trouble with his boss Art for protecting her in an illegal act), not to mention a feud between his family and the criminal Bennett clan that ended with many Bennetts dead and one of the few family members Raylan actually respected dead.  And ALL of that comes before him being shot accidentally in the gut.

And the recovery from that shooting is where we come back to the world of Justified’s Harlan County, where its been three weeks since, and Raylan’s still not quite himself.  He can’t shoot like he used to, he’s spending his time at the marshal’s office doing office work, and he spends his time debating moving out of his hotel room into a house for him and Winona’s soon-to-be family.  And considering how tumultuous the last two seasons have been, I’m sure there’s a part of him that enjoys the fact he’s not having to be involved in shootouts.  Of course, that respite gets crushed by the events that occur through this episode.

The main thrust of the episode is Dixie Mafia man Emmitt Arnett’s plan to get out of a land deal gone bad by paying his bosses off, namely by having his henchman Flecther Nix robbing and killing clients on the low.  This leaves Arnett with two problems, among them his partner Wynn Duffy (another supporting player in the Justified universe) and the representative of his bosses, a Detroit fixer named Robert Quarles (whose name isn’t even uttered in the episode, but is in the press notes, so its mentioned here if just to be less confusing), played by Neal McDonough.  Wynn isn’t happy Nix is in play like this (also because he’s a federal fugitive, which would get the Marshals attention, and also because, well, Nix is a grade-a sociopath), and Quarles seems to want Arnett to pay up, although we discover that’s not the real reason for being in Harlan.  If Mags Bennett and her kin were the big antagonists of last season, this season seems to be about a multitude of adversaries grasping for power in the vacuum of the Bennetts’ downfall.

Among the other adversaries in play, there’s Boyd Crowder, whose building up a criminal empire from the Bennetts’ remnants.  That appears to take a slight detour when talking to Raylan early on about getting Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies) out of custody to deal with him (Dickie did injure his current sleeping buddy Ava), and Raylan flat out says no (“You want me to hand a man over to kill him like a pig I borrowed from you?”).  This scuffle ends with Boyd and Raylan fighting in the Marshal’s office, and Boyd getting shipped off to prison, which we discover is part of his plan, because among his cellmates is Dickie.  Where this will go is anyone’s guess, but revenge for Ava doesn’t seem like the big reason for this self-incarceration yet.

While Boyd is in prison, Ava (still recovering from her injuries) is his voice outside, and considering she has to corral Raylan’s crotchety father Arlo and ill-tempered right man Devil, that’s a lot of work.  The stripping of the Bennetts’ weed factories have gone bad, and probably with no help of Devil feeling like he was the swinging dick of the Crowder organization, and not Ava, who has been told by Boyd to destroy the remaining weed since the failed sale.  Ava is a matriarchal person in a patriarchal criminal society, although after Ava knocks Devil out with a frying pan to the face for disobeying her (and by proxy, Boyd’s order), that balance of power seems to be shifting in an interesting place for her this season.

The Arnett storyline takes a surprising turn when due to Quarles’ manipulation, the Marshals learn about a meeting with Arnett and Nix, which turns out to be a wild goose chase.  Of course, this is all to put Arnett out of play (and subsequently killed by Quarles), get Quarles set up in Harlan as a big player in this season’s events, and sends Nix out to deal with Raylan.  Of course, following the theme of Raylan being off his groove, did not see the file fellow marshal Tim (Jacob Pitts) about Nix, which is probably why he didn’t notice Nix in an elevator ride earlier in the episode, but is aware of him when Nix shows up in Raylan’s room.  The main catch of Nix is to play a game to reach for a gun in the middle of a table to eve the odds, even though Nix fixes those odds in his favor (his nickname is “Icepick” for a reason).  The first time we see it in the robbery, it’s a pretty shocking scene, but going into the scene, there’s still the tension of an off Raylan facing a man like this, while Winona is forced to watch.  How Raylan escapes getting killed by Nix is rather simple, yet surprisingly slick since it doesn’t require him being fast enough to pick up a gun.  I almost think the episode should have been entitled “How Raylan Got His Groove Back”.

If anything about this season opener seems off, its that there’s a lot of elements at play that aren’t clashing with each other yet, unlike the last season’s opening salvo.  It’s like a game of connect the dots but there’s no clear path how one will affect the other.  You have Raylan in a period of transition, Boyd building up control of crime in Harlan, and forces outside looking to take control, and really, “The Gunfighter” is a lot of setup within the Arnett plot of the episode.  But it’s a promising setup, and considering all of the things in play (and by next week’s teaser, yet to be revealed players), it’s a good start for a season of Justified.

--Nix is played by Quinn (Desmond Harrington) from Dexter, and is one creepy dude here.  He even kills the pizza delivery guy.  Rough.

--A good amount of Boomtown (one of EP Graham Yost’s previous shows, and worth tracking down on DVD, IMHO) regulars are popping up this season, like McDonough and (slight spoiler) Mykelti WIlliamson as another player in the criminal world of Kentucky.  Justified has been a great home for some great character actors over the last two seasons, and this season looks no different.

--Considering the tension between Art and Raylan late last season, its kind of nice to see both men are still able to talk comfortably with each other.

--I will suggest the name “Felix Givens” isn’t the best name choice for Raylan and Winona’s child.

--The nitwitted Dewey Crowe is also in the prison with Dickie and Boyd.  This can’t be good.

--RIP Arnett.  He popped up enough in the show to make his death seem worth mentioning.

--“I assume you know why I’m not gonna pay for that pizza.”

--“Boyd, I’ve been to Mexico, and I don’t think you’d like it.”

--“Of course I had to do that.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.”

--“Do you know who I am now?”

--“Sorry about your tablecloth.”

--“Nice hat.”

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars     

Breaking Bad Revisited / Season 1, Episode 3: “And The Bag’s In The River”

Something tells me when Walter White started this insane scheme to cook meth to get enough to support his family after he died from the cancer that was ravaging him, the one thing he didn’t think would happen was he would have to kill someone.  He already did that in the pilot with the mustard gassing of Emilio, although that he could likely pass off as self-defense.  Emilio’s cousin, Crazy-8 did survive the gassing though, and now is hooked to a pole by a bike lock across his neck, with Walt being the chosen one to put him out of his misery.  Walt has been dodging this since the previous episode (and Jesse’s shitty handling of Emilio’s “chemical disincorporation”/ ending up as sludge on the floor of Jesse’s house did get a slight respite from that job), and that’s where the majority of “And The Bag’s In The River” leaves us with.

After mopping up and flushing Emilio’s remains (a gnarly job if there ever was one), Jesse decides to smoke some crystal to take the edge off (after all, his place now has a hole burned through it). Walt continues to tend to Crazy-8 by cleaning his piss bucket, who flat out says he knows who Walt is, thanks inadvertently to Jesse wanting to keep breathing during the events of the pilot.  Walt confronts Jesse, which leads to Jesse leaving the house, saying he won’t come back until Walt does what he’s been putting off: getting rid of the man in the basement.  It is Walter’s mess, and he has to clean it up, but that means physically killing Crazy-8, and that’s not something Walt wants to do.

Like I said, the majority of this episode is Walt finding ways to avoid what he knows he’ll have to do.  And the longer he waits, the longer it seems to be eating away at his life.  Skyler admits over the phone she discovered he left the car wash job weeks ago, and plus her encounter with Jesse and Walt’s odd behavior last episode, don’t make the White home a good place to be heading home to right now.  And that long night is where we spend the rest of the episode, alone in a house with a chained up drug dealer who Walt needs to deal with.

In the meanwhile, Skyler is still rattled by Walt’s odd behavior of late, so much so she tries to talk to Marie (although she fails to hide that she’s talking about Walt) about her concerns.  But, Marie reads this as not about Walt, but about Walt, Jr. falling into the wrong crowd.  This leads to Hank taking Junior on a “scared straight” drive (and talking to a meth addict hooker who afterwards, goes up to the hotel room Jesse is laying low in!), which is awkward to say the least.  Marie is not an innocent herself when it comes to doing bad things, especially when she slyly steals a pair of fancy shoes (and way too easily for it to be just the first time she’s done it), but even she doesn’t have to do what Walt is having to face doing. 

Walt is a rational man, but unfortunately to a fault, and even his reasoning isn’t working in his favor here.  He puts together a “do or don’t kill him” list, which comes down in the “do” part as “killing is wrong”, it’s against my religious upbringing”, and a multitude of excuses that gets less cohesive as it goes.  The “don’t” part is one point and pretty clear: “if you don’t, he will kill you and your family”.  And its that need to be convinced not to kill him that leads to the centerpiece of the episode: an entire act where Walt tries to bond with Crazy-8.

After collapsing briefly in front of Crazy-8 while giving him a sandwich, Walter later returns to talk to him, and through this conversation, learn a lot about Crazy-8, among other things, that Crazy-8 obviously isn’t his real name.  It’s Domingo, and he’s the son of a family owned local superstore business, who in the need to prove himself, went into the drug trade with his cousin Emilio.  Both men seem to bond, but as Domingo admits he can’t guarantee Walt will suffer his wrath if he’s let go.  It’s a reveal that shows despite both men’s reveals about themselves, it doesn’t change what will probably end up happening.

When I mentioned Walt’s reasoning, that part of him leads to his discovery of a missing piece of plate from his collapse earlier, almost to his anger.  He needed to be convinced he should let Domingo go, and now he has proof that it will end with Walt dead.  This all culminates with Walt having to choke Domingo to death with the pole and bike lock, and revealing that Domingo was planning to kill Walt with the broken plate piece (even stabbing Walt in the leg with it during the struggle).  It’s a brutal and messy scene as could be expected for such a thing, and surprising moreso for not letting Walt off the hook for what he has to do.  Its pretty early in the series’ run, and to let its main character be involved in such an act that early showed some serious stones for not wimping out at the last minute.

The next day when Jesse returns to his house, he discovers the RV cleaned thoroughly, the basement empty save one bike lock, and Walt and Crazy-8/Domingo gone.  That the episode (let alone the series to this point) has never explained what happened after Crazy-8’s death is a creepy footnote for the series going forward.  Did Walt dissolve Crazy-8 too and spend all night cleaning up?  I keep thinking of that really good Sopranos episode where Tony and Christopher spend half of it disposing of one person, and realize how opposite this resolution of this episode of Breaking Bad is, but still as effective.  We know Walt did something in the time between the murder and when we see him parked on that highway overpass, but it seems unimportant as the result: Walt is shaken by it.  So much so that Walt returns home and says he needs to tell Skyler something important.  Of course, we fans know what that is, but that uncertainty of that climax is enough to propel us out of the Crazy-8/Emilio encounter and into uncertain territory going into the rest of the season.

                  

And now, some notes for newbies:

--Besides this and the last two episodes being written by series creator Vince Gilligan, the last two episodes are directed by Adam Bernstein, a regular director for the show and a veteran director on many TV shows.

--The titles of the last two eps combined are a quote from the classic Sweet Smell of Success, all about another cutthroat industry: the media.  Although I doubt Burt Lancaster has ever dissolved bodies before, even with his acid tongue. 

--Wonderful clean-up / slash Walt flashback to open the episode.

--Strange that Jesse remembers something as specific as Walt once teaching about carbon dioxide by making grape soda in one of his classes.

--Quite comical and pathetic how both Walt and Jesse fight over a bag of meth that isn’t even a part of the actual argument.

--“There’s got to be more to a human being than that.”

--“My arches happen to be extremely arch-y.”

--“Coin flip is sacred.”

--“Shit, I left my root beer.”

--“You people used to be conquistadors, for Christ’s sake.”

--“There’s something I have to tell you.”

--“He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go”.  Yes, Domingo probably would.

--Oh yeah, apparently Hank had a snitch in Crazy-8’s organization.  Well, better he explain that next episode…

Now for some spoilery-series wide notes for you vets:

--First discovery of Marie’s, ahem, problem.

 

--Wendy the meth hooker appears for the first time.  Great, now I got that song from that montage in season 3 stuck in my head.

--First appearance of Gretchen, albeit at this point, we don’t know from the flashback who she is, but do know both her and Walt know each other very well.

--Clean RV.  Might be the only time on this show that happens.

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

Breaking Bad Revisited / Season 1, Episode 2: “The Cat’s In The Bag”

The thing about doing these Revisited posts is there’s a bizarre sense of melancholia in them.  Things were simpler back then; Walt, Jesse, and pretty much everyone in their radar wasn’t injured by the mayhem caused over four seasons; and for the most part, Walt wasn’t a calculated killer.  Of course the problem with the melancholia is not that my thoughts are, “You remember when things were simpler?” but more along the lines of, “You remember when Walt and Jesse had to dissolve a body and keep someone else locked up with a bike chain?”  Simpler times.

After this episode’s brief opening to remind us, yes Walt had dirty sex with his wife at the end of the pilot, we cut back half a day earlier when he was in a RV with two, excuse me, one dead body and one person who didn’t quite die.  After a brief pow-wow (and prevention of said not quite dead Krazy-8’s escape from the RV) the next day, the two of them figure out that Krazy-8 needs to be killed, while his cousin Emilio has to be put through “chemical disincorporation”, i.e., dissolved in acid.  Jesse gets saddled with the “chemical disincorporation” part of the plan, while Walt has to kill Krazy-8.  As the episode keeps going, both reach severe obstacles to those goals.

Walt has killed another man before, let alone someone he failed in mustard gassing, and is now strapped to a bike chain and a pole in Jesse’s basement.  A lot of his time in this episode is trying to figure his way out of killing Krazy-8, even positing reasoning with him as a business man (Jesse: “Hey, if we let you go, you promise not to kill us and our entire families?”). His plan for the time being is to toss the chained up drug dealer some water, a sandwich, toilet paper, a bucket, and some hand soap.  Its a short-term solution for a long-term problem, one not made better by the fact he spends the rest of his time trying to roll and light a joint (a rather funny piece of physical humor in itself).  He could deal with cooking meth in an RV in the New Mexico desert, but murder (somewhat cold-blooded, somewhat self-defensive) is another thing entirely.  Like I said earlier on, simpler times.

Jesse’s goal gets messy (literally) due to Walt’s sloppy handling of things with Krazy-8 and everything else.  Certainly it doesn’t help that Jesse isn’t too hot on melting a man down to gunk, but even more so when he foregoes the plastic bins Walt suggests for the hydrochloric acid, and starts melting him down in a bathtub.  This leads to probably one of the nastiest scenes TV has ever put into view, when Walt discovers Jesse’s blunder too late, only to witness the floor above fall out along with the meaty red remains of Emilio into the hallway.  Despite it being as stomach churning as it is, its also a surprisingly hilarious moment, if only because the comedy of errors that had preceded it was bound to end in a horrible way, but I doubt many viewers predicted it would be splattered all over Jesse’s floorboard.

And keep in mind, this does not even include a growingly suspicious Skyler, who was already curious about her husband’s trip through her back door (to coin a phrase), and after reverse dialing a call Walt had with an “AT&T Rep” who was Jesse, confronts him about the matter (during a sonogram appointment, no less) gets shot down quietly by a still toked over Walt, who claims he bought pot from Jesse (A funny line from Walt later on when asked why he said that: “It seemed better than saying I was cooking meth and that I killed a man.”).  Things don’t get made any better by her visiting Jesse’s home while in the middle of moving Emilio’s body out of the RV, and threatening to sick her DEA agent brother in law Hank on him if he sold pot to her husband again.  She just misses the fact there’s a wrapped up dead body next to her by about ten feet, probably because of her awkward handling with Jesse (“I’m Skyler White, yo.  My husband is Walter White, yo.”).  There’s a lot of big misses of disaster in this episode, but that Skyler is aware of Jesse and Walt meeting up, is one issue that isn’t going away easily.

“The Cat’s In the Bag” does a hard thing for second episodes to do, which is not just be a recap of the pilot episode’s themes and story, but still continue the story naturally.  Instead of wrapping the pilot episode’s events up into a bow and moving on, it’s clear the creative team of the show wants to milk the possibilities of this duo’s handling of what happens afterwards.  By the end of the episode, Skyler knows something’s wrong with Walt, Walt still has to deal with Krazy-8, Emilio is now oozed over Jesse’s floor, and that doesn’t include the gas mask they left behind in the desert, now discovered by kids.  And to believe, THIS was all simpler times in the Breaking Bad universe.

And now, some non-show spoilery notes:     

--No Hank and Marie in this episode, and strangely, not missed in this case.

--Lots of naked Bryan Cranston in this episode, and surprisingly, less scary than with tightie-whities.

--Love how unconcerned the Native-American bulldozer worker seems about the plight of the men and their RV. 

--Funny note about Krazy-8: he was supposed to die in the pilot, but was kept alive for this string of episodes, even though surviving a mustard gassing seems not that pleasant of a death to escape.

--The Krazy-8 escape slash running into a tree was so darkly funny.

--Love reading his myspace, ahem, I mean mySHOUT page and his bio page, like education: J.P. Wynne High School, Devry University systems management…The STREETS, YO!

--Oh man, melted Emilio is gonna be hard to get out of the floorboards, let alone fix the hole the floor above them.   

--“Oh shit.”

--“Yo, yo, yo, 1,  4, 8, 3, to the 3, to the 6, to the 9, representing the ABQ.  What up, beeyotch?”

--“Is this going to be on the murder?”

--“The hell is a MILF?”

--“What, you don’t like the crust?”

-“I don’t suppose you could buy two bins?”

--“Hey man, we flipped a coin.  We flipped a coin!”

--“So right now, what I need is for you to climb down out of my ass.  Can you do that?  Will you do that for me, honey?  Will you please, just this once, get off my ass?”

--“Oh, thank you for this opportunity.  I always dreamt of, you know, melting bodies.”

--“Well, hydrochloric acid won’t eat through plastic.  It will, however, burn through metal, rock, glass, ceramic.  So there’s that.”

And to finish, some spoilers for the rest of the series:

--Good to see Walt and Jesse finally got the body dissolving thing down after this blunder.

--Sigh, I still miss the RV.

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

Breaking Bad Revisited / Season 1, Episode 1: “Breaking Bad”

WARNING: Some minor spoilers, albeit vague ones for the series so far.  You were warned.

“Best-case scenario, with chemo, I’ll live maybe another couple of years.  It’s just, you’ve got mustard on your (coat)…”

When realizing how far the character of Walter White has gone in the four seasons since, that minor bit of dialogue from Breaking Bad’s incredible pilot episode explains a lot about the character.  On one hand, it’s a darkly humorous moment in an otherwise grim prognosis for the show’s main character, and on the other, explains the way Walter White deflects certain realities from his view.  As the series would progress, those realities would grow from the handling of a medical diagnosis to murder on a (as of now) massive scale.  But here, none of the four seasons of mayhem and disaster have occurred yet, but in retrospect, probably was inevitable.

The whole structure of this opening episode (written and directed by series creator and X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan) works its way backwards to explain how school chemistry teacher Walter White ended up in the New Mexico desert, with three unconscious bodies in a motor home full of drug making gear, and of course, minus his pants.  The image of a man clad in white underpants and a gas mask driving through the desert is bizarre enough, but when you start seeing how he ended up there, you realize how unusual it really is.  Walter White starts out this story seeming like a normal human being: family man, teacher, and an oddly milquetoast life.  Of course, he’s almost a supporting player at his own surprise birthday party, his sex life involves handjobs while his wife Skyler negotiates eBay bids, and working at a car wash on the side, where his students mock him.  It’s at his car wash job that he falls ill and gets diagnosed with cancer, but in what would later seem to be a thing Walter White does well, hide this information from his family.  That’s when Walter utters that quote above, and deals with it like most grown adults would: get pissed and leave his car wash job, sullenly sit by his pool, and thanks to a ride along with his brother-in-law Hank, finds a perfect partner in former student/“Cap’n Cook” meth maker Jesse Pinkman to help him cook enough meth to support his family before he dies.  Perfectly normal.

What the episode shows is how seemingly inept Walter White is at the business end of meth making, but how brilliant he is at chemistry (enough to attempt a mustard gas escape, at least).  He’s also very persistent in what his goals are, enough to extort Jesse’s help with his meth making and even cashing out his life savings to get an RV to do the work.  He’s obsessive with his craft, stripping down to not ruin his regular clothes while cooking, wanting to make quality product as opposed to Jesse’s idea of putting in chili pepper as a gimmick, but he has no clue how to handle drug dealers like Krazy-8 and his cousin Emilio.  That being said, Jesse is no better with the cousins either, leading them to Walt’s RV meth lab in the desert.  Both Walt and Jesse are not the brightest bulbs in a criminal world that seems to be filled with more professional men than them.

As mild-mannered Walt appears in the early stages of the pilot (excluding the teaser of him running around the desert with a gun and no pants), there are enough hints as to how much crap is seeping to the surface.  Look at his reaction to the teenagers mocking Walt Jr. at the clothes shop.  While leaving the shop only to return and intimidate the boys seems like the reaction of a man who’s staring at death’s door, now in retrospect it’s the signs of Walt’s biggest issue: marginalization.  He needs to feel in control of things, needs to protect his family, and needs to feel superior.  The cancer didn’t so much create the man we see in later seasons, but unleashed the demon slumbering within.

With Jesse, his ambitions are like most men are in their early 20’s: make money, get laid, and getting wasted.  Its almost sad watching Jesse after four seasons of watching his life going completely to shit to see someone in the pilot who seemed to be better off before meeting Walter White.  He’s coerced into to helping Walt with his meth making scheme, but slowly and surely starts learning how to be better at making meth because of Walt.  Like many great teachers, he’s slowly learning his craft, but doing so with a lot of pain attached.

The pilot also introduces Hank and Marie, Walt’s in-laws, although their contribution this early in the series is to remind the viewers how close trouble could be, especially when your brother inadvertently introduced you to your new business partner.  The supporting cast is fleshed out enough in these early episodes, but like many shows finding their footing, their growth will take some time.  What stands out about the pilot is how uncertain things are left by the end: there’s a RV with two (not quite) dead bodies full of chemical equipment in the desert, Walt celebrates by having sex with his wife, and we’re not sure how one lead into the other.  But for fans, we all know there’s more to what happened in that desert.

Not many pilots set up an interesting universe like Breaking Bad does, if only because the majority of pilots deal with setting up boundaries within a recognizable genre, like cop shows and science-fiction.  Where the Breaking Bad pilot succeeds is in that off kilter feel of what’s happening, and what could happen.  We’re not in familiar territory like a big city along the lines of New York or L.A., but in New Mexico, an already foreign place to many viewers.  It also helps the visuals for the pilot were done by ace cinematographer John Toll (Braveheart, The Thin Red Line), which set the tone for the look of the series quite well.

If anything can be taken from this opener is that things don’t go the way we think they will.  Walt and Jesse’s plan to work with the cousins goes bad, Walt’s plan to get killed by what he thinks is the cops backfires, and he still has to deal with the fact that Skyler (let alone anyone else in his immediate family) has not clued into his activities yet.  By the time the first episode ends, you’re not sure where any of this is going, but do know its not to a good place.  How true that thought is.

Some notes for the fans:

--Aw, I miss the RV.          

--I’m no expert on meth and meth users, but do users really prefer their crystal flavored with chili pepper? 

--Funny watching the versions on AMC compared to the ones available on DVD, with a lot more bleeped out profanities and less topless women in the former.

--Hey, it’s Walter White, with hair!  And with a job!  Man, those were the days.

--“I said “fuck you”, and your eyebrows!”

--“’Sage’?  Do you work at the fucking Pottery Barn?”

--“At this rate, in 50 or 60 years, you’ll be rich.”

--“Do I look like a skater?”

--“’Cow house’?”  “Yeah, where the cows live.”

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL review

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL

Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg

Directed by: Brad Bird

Running time: 132 mins.

Rated PG-13 for violence and brief language

I’m sure the prospect of another Mission: Impossible movie was far from many filmgoers minds.  The series was one that never truly consistent in terms of directors (Brian de Palma to John Woo to J.J. Abrams) and for a team based movie, always seemed to fall back on its star Tom Cruise to do the heavy lifting.  While worthwhile criticisms, Mission: Impossible 3 certainly made a good attempt to be as team-oriented as the show it originated from, and even poked fun at its Tom Crusie’s Ethan Hunt and his propensity to get involved in insane acts of daring-do.  A lot of this can be attributed to the creative team behind it: director J.J Abrams and his camp of talent, who cut their teeth with daring TV and ensemble pieces like Alias and Lost.

While Abrams stayed away from the director’s chair for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, he remained as a producer, leaving the director’s chair to an unusual choice: Brad Bird.  Bird was known more for his animation work on the early years of The Simpsons, to great animated films like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, but not for live-action big budget action fare.  It’s a different muscle to work on an animated film for several years than with actors on location for several months.  But, whatever trepidations about such a choice turned out to be moot, as this fourth installment in the series is easily the best so far.

The movie starts off with a bang with an IMF operation gone awry, leading to another IMF job to break out Ethan Hunt from a Russian jail (why he’s there in the first place is a story that gets doled out slowly throughout the film).  While that goes off with a few hitches, he finds out the reason for his breakout involves the hunt for a target known only as Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist) and that he may be close to getting his hands on launch codes for Russian nuclear missiles in order to kick start Armageddon.  The IMF go on another mission to discover Cobalt’s identity by breaking into the Kremiln, which goes horribly wrong, leading to an international incident and leaving the entire IMF disavowed.  Ethan and his team, made up tough girl Jane Carter (Paula Patton), gadget expert Benji (Simon Pegg, one of the only holdouts from the last film), and field analyst with a secret Brandt (Jeremy Renner), are set up with a cache of materials with one goal: find Cobalt and stop him, while at the same time, avoid being captured by the numerous forces who want the remaining IMF members stopped.

It’s a pretty simple setup and on some level, a pretty slim plot, but its handled in such an expert manner you don’t notice the seams until after the film is over.  The film is constantly moving from set piece to another, leaving little down time or low ebbs in the storytelling.  Going from Russia, to a walk outside the world’s tallest building, to India for the gripping climax, the film does a pretty delicate balancing act of keeping its story moving while also keeping its heroes and their plights interesting to watch.  One of the plot elements that was wisely carried over from the previous installment was the team’s bad luck of having something go wrong, leaving them to improvise a way out.  Take the centerpiece action scene at Burj Khalifa tower for example: what seems like a simple double-bluff during an money exchange for the weapons codes turns into Ethan dangling 130 stories outside the hotel, swinging from one end to the other (and a good amount of it is real, a rarity in a CGI world and gut wrencher for audiences afraid of heights).  It’s a sequence that gets incredibly complex, but still easy to follow, culminating in a foot (and eventually car) chase through a peasoup thick sandstorm.

If anything, Bird has brought to this movie is a great sense of visual humor and storytelling that explains more than the dialogue heavy scenes do.  The opening break out at the Russian prison gets laughs because of the interplay between Benji and the escaping Ethan, which is done without either person able to speak to one another.  Little sight gags, like a paper replicator and a malfunctioning gadget that reappears later, add a lot of humor to some tension riddled scenes.  Even the gadgets are never completely explained, but enough is shown of them that you can piece together what they do and what happens when they don’t work.  There’s a visual coherence to the action that is paramount to the film’s success, especially in the film’s climax, involving stopping a nuclear missile, a fight in a telecom station, and a brutal showdown in a multi-level car park.  Its hard not to get sucked in to the stakes raised and paid off in these big sequences.

The only negatives that can be argued in this movie is that the villain Cobalt is pretty paper-thin as a worthwhile opponent.  Its not so much the actor as it is the role written, a character whose motivations are pretty ludicrous and so base that they are barely clear, making Cobalt probably the weakest villain the series has ever had.  Even Brandt’s big secret about his past is kind of underwhelming, even more so when you see how it plays into Ethan’s backstory in the film.  Plus, for a movie about agents who are forced to go underground and under the radar, they seem to get around pretty easily from location to location.  Its hard to fault the performers for any flaws in the story, with every one bringing their a-game to this movie, and even with the brief appearances of Josh Holloway (Lost) as a IMF agent, Tom Wilkinson as Ethan’s boss, and some cameos from characters from the previous films which I will not spoil, its more the script that falls short than they do.

Despite those minor complaints, Ghost Protocol is a pretty taut action movie, with some great setpieces and some pretty funny moments.  The odd choice of Brad Bird as director paid off in one of the best action movies of this year, and a welcome jolt to a winter that seemed to be lacking in enjoyable movies.  Where the series could go (or if it will go further, with or without Cruise) is anyone’s guess, but the idea of another movie with the IMF has never seemed to be this welcome in a very long time.

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars