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Episode 3: Open House

The first thing you notice in this episode is that Walt is still using Gale’s coffee maker at the lab.  No problem, Gale’s dead so his coffee maker is up for grabs, right?  Walt notices the new cameras and is not happy, but you had to expect something like that.

Skyler finally gets Walt to let her in at his place and is freaked out by his face.  she wants to know if he’s in danger.  It’s clear she still cares about him, but it’s not obvious whether she cares about him personally or just cares about the money he can now provide.  Walt is clearly milking it.  Otherwise, when she askes if he is in danger, he would just say “no” and leave it at that.  But he doesn’t, and Skyler leaps to the conclusion that he is about to be killed and wants to go to the police.  Walt dissuades her by telling a portion of the truth: “I didn’t fight back because he’s a much older man.”  Yeah, right.  He concludes with this interesting tidbit:

“I think in the end it may have been a good thing because we were able to clear the air, and there’s mutual respect.”

It’s not clear whether Walt really believes this, but if he does, he’s an idiot. Read the rest of this entry →

Episode 1, Box Cutter (cont.)

Hydrofluoric acid plays a big role in this series. It’s the go-to means of disposing of bodies whenever there’s an inconvenient one lying around. And yet the show never mentions how exactly one acquires gallon jugs of the stuff. I’m pretty sure you can’t just pick it up at Home Depot. Anyway, that’s how Victor is disposed of, and the lab is cleaned up by Walt and Jesse, with some assistance by Mike, whose face is, as usual, a study in abstract expressionism.

As I’ve said before, it’s the details that make this series what it is, and here’s another one: transitions between scenes. The end of the lab cleanup shows pools of blood being swabbed up, which cuts directly to pools of ketchup being swabbed up by french fries at the beginning of the next scene. It makes you a little sick, but it’s cool.  Another detail: The bullet that killed Gale went right through his head and into the tea kettle in the kitchen.  Weird. Read the rest of this entry →