Noiseless Chatter Archive

When I reviewed “Blood Money,” I had concerns about pacing, and what felt, at times, like sloppy story-telling. It was an episode designed to get Walt and Hank into that garage, so that we could open there the next week and the fireworks could really go off, but watching it on its own merits, without its promise followed up for another week, it left me cold. Last week I reviewed “Granite State,” and all of the same things applied there as well. We had to gloss over a lot and stitch together the fractured storylines. We had to move Walt all the way out to New Hampshire…just so it could end with him coming back. But like “Blood Money,” “Granite State” paid off. It was worth it. Absolutely all of it was worth it. I don’t care how clumsy the re-introduction of the Grey Matter stuff was last week, because its payoff was one of the most graceful scenes Breaking Bad has ever done…a victorious exercise in gorgeous tension. Gretchen and Elliot joking and reminiscing and flic...

Well, “Felina” is just around the corner, and I don’t have much time to write another before that, so if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a scary looking (but nothing-to-worry-about) link to Conan O’Brien’s Breaking Bad -themed episode. It aired, I believe, this past Monday, and I just got to see it. http://delishows.com/conan-season-3-episode-140-the-cast-of-breaking-bad-los-cuates-de-sinaloa.html He has the entire principal cast on the show, along with Vince Gilligan and Skinny Pete sitting in with the band, and while I don’t think there’s much revealed that obsessive fans won’t already know, seeing the entire cast together with Conan is just delightful. So much so that you probably wouldn’t regret also watching another hour-long interview filmed a bit earlier… Anyway it’s a fun watch, and probably worth enjoying now, before “Felina” fucking kills every last one of us.

While not officially referred to as one, “Granite State” is the first half of a two-part series finale. It has to be, because as a stand-alone episode it doesn’t really accomplish much. That’s not to say that nothing happens, but it is to draw the distinction between “movement” and “accomplishment.” “Granite State” consists almost entirely of the former, and that’s okay. It may well mean that the latter comes next week. There sure is a heck of a lot left to resolve, though, and that’s what worries me. Speaking of movement, I’m already ahead of myself, so I’ll double back a bit. The reason I say this episode doesn’t work quite as well as a standalone is that we’re in a new place. Or, rather, a hell of a lot of new places. Walt’s new identity, Marie’s life without Hank, Junior’s knowledge of his father’s doings, Skyler’s dealings with the police and the Nazis, Jesse’s slavery…everything’s new. This is certainly the Breaking Bad we’ve been following for five seasons,...

Click to make graph bigger. You didn’t need me to tell you that. I told you anyway. Every so often I’ll log into Google Analytics. There’s nothing for me to do there except laugh at some incoming search terms, say to myself, “I should compile them all into a very funny article!” and then spend hours upon hours not doing that. But the last time I checked, I saw a pretty big spike in visits. I usually hover around 100 per day. Sometimes more, sometimes certainly less. But it’s a nice number and I’m happy with it. I saw the spike was almost 500 though, and wasn’t sure what to make of that. I reached out to a friend of mine (who sometimes can be spotted in the comments, like a cybersasquatch) and asked if she could help me figure out what caused the spike. I thought maybe somebody posted a link on Reddit or some such thing, which would account for a whole host of new faces that saw what they came to see and then moved along. And we never did identify any specific cul...

So! Did you all know that I like the show Breaking Bad ? Well, I like other things too! And I’ve been writing about them. Not here of course. That would be silly . So I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things that I wrote for other sites. Both of which I quite like and I kind of wish they were here instead but OH WELL. The big one is The Dangerous Allure of Self-Publishing: 5 Real Lessons from a Fictional Character . It’s a piece for the excellent Emily Suess, and though her blog goes through periods of inactivity (I’m absolutely one to judge…) it’s worth bookmarking. She posts some great stuff. Anyway, this is a piece about self-publishing…filtered through the “Business Secrets of the Pharaohs” episode of Peep Show . Why that episode? Because it reminded me so much of my own stupidity in the past with self-publishing that I couldn’t help but write this up. Seriously. Self-publishing is garbage. Don’t do it. Read the piece. It’s pretty much as ...

Years ago, around the time the Watchmen movie came out, I was speaking with a friend of mine. He said he didn’t like how obviously the film framed Ozymandias as a villain; in my friend’s opinion, the graphic novel left that much open for interpretation. Yes, the character was indeed responsible for the loss of many lives. But ultimately, my friend argued, it was worth it. He did it for the right reasons, and there was a substantial net benefit to the carnage. There was , at least arguably, a justifiable ends to the means. And throughout season five of Breaking Bad — both halves — I’ve seen people defending Walter for the same reason. Of course we can criticize his methods…but isn’t he doing these things for the right reason? After “Ozymandias,” I think somebody would have to work pretty hard to defend any aspect of Walter White’s character. This was comic book Ozymandias sliding into silver screen Ozymandias*, right before our eyes. We might have been able to make t...

Almost a year ago I did one of these posts, identifying the references in Conan O’Brien’s brief (but beautiful) Star Wars by Wes Anderson sketch. And now, since I’ll only ever write things about Breaking Bad again, I thought I’d do the same thing for this long, not-quite-as-good (but-still-pretty-darned-good) parody of Jimmy Fallon’s. As before, watch the above first, because I’m going to make it my business to take all the surprise out of this, write about the jokes until they’re not funny anymore, and basically turn an act of comedy into a text that must be studied until you hate it. Also, as before, I’m sure I missed things…so point them out in the comments below and I’ll add them to the list, give you a credit, and send you a Noiseless Chatter gift basket for playing. Are you ready? Here we go… The sketch opens with a nice parody of a scene in the pilot episode of Breaking Bad . (It’s called “Pilot” officially, but the DVDs list it as “Breaking Bad.”) Jimmy, ...

One of the things I loved about the British version of The Office was its willingness to admit that however realistic it would have liked to appear — and however “actually real” it was within the show’s own universe — every episode was, necessarily, a fabrication. It’s all summed up in a great speech by Tim, in which he invites the camera crew to come back in a few years and check on him then. An ending isn’t an ending unless you choose to see it that way. The cameras stop rolling, the credits come up…but these people still go on with their lives. That was Tim’s point. Maybe it looks tragic now, but come back later and things might look great. Sure enough, the cameras came back later and things looked great…but that wasn’t an ending either. An “ending” is just a dividing line. A boundary. It’s a structural necessity because nothing can go on forever. We can drop it at a moment of triumph, or we can drop it at a moment of sadness. But whatever we do, wherever w...

As much as I want to like “Rabid Dog,” there’s a structural problem I have with it, a serious one, and I’m finding it difficult to move past that. See, Breaking Bad has always, until this point at least, been written and edited to suit an hour-long time slot. With commercial breaks factored in that gives us around 45 minutes per episode, and by and large the show has worked very well to make the most of its time. But, for whatever reason, Vince Gilligan and his team decided this late in the game that “Rabid Dog” would be only 11 minutes long. And that’s a problem. By short-changing us on a full episode this close to the end, Breaking Bad has cheated its audience. And while “Rabid Dog” does a lot of things right, it’s difficult to… …hold on. Wait. I just checked and the episode was indeed about as long as any other. My apologies. It only felt like it was 11 minutes long, and seemed so convincingly short that I actually said the word “No…!” when the credits faded in...