Breaking Bad Season 6
Episode 11
Ozymandias

Again, to be as redundant as I possibly can about anything, every shot counts in BB.  There is nothing unnoticed, nothing left to chance, and nothing wasted in this show.  It’s as near a perfect vision and a perfect 10 as anything I’ve ever seen in cinema.

This week’s examples?  

Detail #1: Ok, I’ll start with the near end of the show.  The chess game?  The White King is in the corner, and in a defensive move takes his allowed one-square move behind a pawn.  However, on noticing the details here carefully, I see that the King is not actually threatened by anything on the board.  So maybe there is no threat, but he’s moving, in any case.  The King can move one square without being threatened.

Well, the whole story is in this shot.  It’s obvious that the King has a plan, and is still carrying it out, despite the turn of events.  It’s often an endgame kind of thing, for the King to see what’s coming and move ahead of time.

Detail #2: The dog at the end.  That was most certainly a trained dog made by the trainer to walk across the highway behind the leaving car.  There is the skinny dog, head down, whisking through the frame, trotting as it were, all by himself, and out there, obviously ownerless, alone.  Then the credits come up.  Speaking of trainers, who exactly is doing the baby training in this show?  Fantastic responses, in the fire truck, on the changing table asking for “mama”.  Wow, is this baby intelligent? Incredible moments.  So there you go, a child, and an animal, 2 things that they say are hard to work with in show business.  Right.  Not for this crew.

Detail #3: The absolutely tortured and unrecognizable face of Jesse, red, satanic almost, taking up the entire right side of the screen as Todd appears in the background.  Torture never looked quite like this.

For me, the star of this show this week is Anna Gunn as Skyler.  Her performance, especially in the street, and then on the phone with Walt, is incredible.  Her terse tone about Holly, her set jaw, we’ve never seen her like this to my knowledge.  RJ Mitte’s work on this one is appropriately strained as well.  

The twists they just keep coming.

And one more thing, when people ask, “How come the good guys never get shot in TV shows?”, you can just tell them, “Well, you haven’t seen Breaking Bad.”