One of the uneasiest aspects of the series’s first season was the idea that Walt had cancer, that his actions were somewhat forgivable because his ultimate motives (providing for his family after his death from the disease) were so good. We’re not just voyeurs we’re voyeurs actively working at cross-purposes against the show’s purported heroes.īut that’s what Breaking Bad does so well, and it had to trick us to get to this point. Once that camera jiggles the first time, it moves and shifts even more, as the cop nearly loses control of the potential deal, then regains it with his flat-out lie about what’s in the constitution (which relies on his assumption that Badger is an idiot-Walt wouldn’t have fallen for it). At first, this just seems like it might be an arty attempt to do a scene already loaded with tension in one take in one shot, but just when you’re starting to think, “C’mon, let’s get moving already,” the camera JIGGLES, just a little bit, and that’s when you start to realize-before the cop even tricks Badger-that what we’re seeing isn’t the omniscient point of view of the audience, but, rather, the omniscient (as far as this park bench is concerned) point of view of the Albuquerque police department. The entire encounter is shot in a long shot from across the street, cars zipping by between the camera and the actors. What’s surprisingly elegant about the way McDonough shoots this scene (in a way that suggests Gould initially scripted it that way as well) is just how he lets you in on the fact that Qualls IS playing an undercover cop. When Badger falls for it and sells the buyer some meth, we’ve already figured out what we always suspected-that the buyer was a cop all along-and we’re unsurprised to see Badger taken down (indeed, by the very vans he said would be his downfall in the first place). The buyer feeds him the old line about how if you ask a cop if he’s a cop he legally has to say yes (“It’s in the constitution!” “The constitution of America?”). ![]() Badger lays out exactly why he suspects the man is an undercover cop (right down to two vans parked inconspicuously on the street that he believes to contain police surveillance equipment), then puts the potential buyer through a long series of tests designed to prove that he’s not a cop. He’s approached by a man played by DJ Qualls, who asks him if he’s got any meth for sale. Jones) sitting on a park bench emblazoned with an ad for the titular Saul. “Better Call Saul,” written by Peter Gould and directed by Terry McDonough, opens inauspiciously enough, with Badger (Matt L. ![]() We’re at a precipice, and the RV is pointed downhill. ![]() Hell, the SHOW has been building to this. The episode even manages to make famed comedian Bob Odenkirk seem like a part of its universe with a character who is both the sort of joke-y character he plays well and a necessary piece of the puzzle of Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) burgeoning criminal empire. In so many ways, it’s a minor encapsulation of so many of the show’s major themes (from the idea that you can’t be just a little bit of a criminal to the thought that resisting temptation is so very, very hard), but it’s also a surprisingly fast-paced episode of the notoriously slow-moving series. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it would be nauseatingly hilarious in one shot and then cut to another that would load on the unbearable tension. ![]() “Better Call Saul” is the kind of episode that made me get interested in television in the first place.
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