Breaking Bad Season 5 part 1
Bryan Crantson, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul
3 DVD
Sony Home Entertainment 2013
Season Five of Breaking Bad starts of slow and starts in the future. Reminiscent of Season Two and the pink teddy bear Season Five starts with Walt’s fifty second birthday. This is important because Season Five incorporates Walt’s fifty first birthday so we know that one year will pass by the end of Season Five.
“All Hail The King” is the subtitle to part one of Season Five of Breaking Bad. The subtitle brings to mind the expression: in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. For aficionados of Breaking Bad the one eyed motif, a.k.a. the pink teddy bear motif, is a recurring theme from the start of Season Two running all the way through to the eerie exit of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Espisito) from Hector Salamanca’s room just before he drops dead. As might be expected part one of Season Five poses a lot of questions and answer very few.
For those who haven’t quite sussed it out yet Season Five makes it perfectly clear that the worst enemy Walter White has is Walter White. The down hill slide that started with Walter first breaking bad to make crystal meth in Season One and saw him commit his first murder of “Krazy 8” after being involved in the drug trade for a matter of days continues unabated. The dark core of Breaking Bad is that Walter is an American Everyman. His response to his own impeding corporeal and financial demise at the hands of lung cancer is entrepreneurial and vicious. Walter White is the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit.
In Season Five Walter, the Walter who started this journey back in Season One, is gone and all that remains is Heisenberg. Heisenberg is strictly a businessman. There is one goal and only one goal – money. Just as Walter had no compunction about poisoning a child to manage Jesse and bring him back into Walter’s sphere of influence he now has no limits on who he will kill just because they are inconvenient. Heisenberg started out as a pseudonym to mask Walt’s identity. With the killing of Gus Fring, Heisenberg has become a complete being and a force to be reckoned with and mercurial enough that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can be figuratively applied to his personality.
Mostly the first half of Season Five leaves us with questions. Will Hank kill Walt? Will Walt kill Hank? Will Jesse finally run for it? Will Skyler have a breakdown? Will Walt junior figure out what his father does for a living? Will the cancer return?
The second half of Season Five will start on Sunday, August 11, 2013. There will be a lot of fans of the show tuning in to see what happens to all the characters. The only thing we know for certain is that there will be blood.
“Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we’re going to win.” – Kevin O’Leary