Agreed. I had to force myself to not watch 3, 4, 5 episodes at a time. From the first scene I was in.
Heck, I should expand on that a bit: I’m not trying to be elitist or anything. There’s a lot of stuff that I objectively know is good, but that I just don’t like: Brahms, jazz music, Jane Austen, Romantic poetry, black olives… the list goes on and on and on.
With BB, I know objectively that it’s good, *and *I happen to like it. However, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I myself, like Walt, am very much white, male, middle-class, middle-aged, in a midlife crisis, with a feeling that I’ve squandered my potential, a hell of a lot of pent-up primal rage and hurt pride, and some vaguely formulated revenge fantasies. As a result, I was hooked on the show like crack. If you’re not tuned into that particular channel, I can see why it’s not necessarily your cup of camomile tea with soy milk and stevia.
it was funny and good from day one.
There are a couple of scenes that will make you wish he was wearing them.
I like the show “okay”. I have been watching it pretty much everyday on Netflix for the past few weeks. But I can’t say I’m “hooked”. And it’s probably because I don’t identify at all with Walter White or his “struggles”. Even when he was dying of cancer, I couldn’t summon up much sympathy for him.
I actually thought the show took off too fast. [spoiler]One moment the guy doesn’t know anything about crystal meth, and then the next he’s whipping up the best shit in all the universe. They could have at least shown him getting instructions from the internet or something. But no. We’re supposed to believe he (and apparently he alone…even amongst other highly trained chemists) has the mad skillz to come up with an expert process on the very first try.
I think some people like Walter because here’s this nebbish nerdy guy sticking it to The Man. The underdog. But I see him as a recapitulation of a tired theme: the angry self-entitled middle-aged white guy showing everyone who’s the real man in charge. Sociopathic Latinos and harpy women be advised. I watch because I like stuff like Gus being blown the fuck up. But I don’t really care for Mr. White or his tighty whities or his mincing walk in those fugly shoes. I keep wishing in vain that he’d get shot already.[/spoiler]
It’s definitely a conceit of the show that Walter is a genius-level chemist. We see a plaque at one point indicating he helped out with research that led to a Nobel Prize. I guess I don’t know enough about chemistry geniuses to know whether one could, with minimal research, immediately improvise a way to manufacture incredibly pure crystal meth. But that didn’t ping my implausibility radar (as opposed to, say, the very memorable scene in Tuco’s office).
After watching the first two seasons of Star Trek TNG and DS9, no.
Well, that, to an extent, is Walt’s fantasy image of himself. But you have to bear in mind that it all backfires catastrophically for Walt in pretty much every way imaginable, with dire consequences for him and everyone he knows. Also, more importantly, anyone who follows Walt’s journey because they identify with his fantasy, consciously or subconsciously, are forced to look pretty far into some of the darker regions of their own souls. Walt is not a nice guy, after all, and he runs out of “tragic hero, doing it all for his family” excuses pretty darn quickly. Over the course of the show, he more or less becomes a total psychopathic egomaniac, and someone you’d want to get very far away from indeed, before he destroys your life.
Also, at least some of the sociopathic latinos (well, at least Gus) and harpy women (well, at least Skyler) have their own arcs and a substantial variation of shades added to their characters over the course of the show.
That scene, and the eBay birthday scene in the pilot, really turned me off the show for some reason; I just found them too discordant from the show’s overall mood, or something, I’m not sure I can explain, but they didn’t work at all for me. Eventually I hope to give the show another chance (I finished the first season and stopped).
Is there any reason to believe he didn’t do much research?
I’d give it another shot… I did the same thing, except I caught bits and pieces of it here and there for a few years and was at first turned off by what I assumed was a show about making meth… but it turned out to be far more in depth and plain addictive…
Then I kept hearing people online discussing it and started really watching from episode one. In fact, I couldn’t help myself, I started watching again just today the very first pilot… Great show, I hope something else as good comes along one day…
I think we’re supposed to be under the assumption the he learned the recipe from Jesse (Can’n Cook) and then transformed it into the blue, but IIRC it took them a couple of tries to get the purity up. If you remember Walt threw out the first few batches in the RV.
The Fly is kind of a polarizing episode. You’re certainly not alone in hating it, but a lot of people loved it.
Also, regarding the transformation the Walt goes through throughout the series…He pretty much explained it right here.
And finally, as I always say in these threads, if you’re watching the series, you really should listen to the podcasts that accompany each episode.
The blue appeared when they switched from pseudo based recipe to the methylamine recipe, iirc.
It was more then that, it also required the purity to be extremely high (well over 90%) as shown by what happened when Todd tried to cook on his on using Walt’s methlymine based recipe.
Yes, I meant that “the blue”, as a product, was a different recipe from where they started. He didnt transform the original synthesis but created a new (but obviously related) method.
Sorry, that’s what I was getting at as well. He took Jesse’s recipe and turned it into his. Just like I can take your recipe for Chocolate Bundt M&M cake and turn it into a flourless M&M Pot brownies with a little tweaking. (Ha, tweaking).
IOW. Mr Chemstry took the beginning product and the end product and found different precursors (because he didn’t want to use Sudafed) that would give him the same end product. He found that Methlymine would work if he changed out some other steps as well.
Looking at wiki methlymine is used to make ephedrine…so it stands to reason that it could be used to make meth in place of pseudoephedrine.
Also, as far as I know, maybe it’s well known in the chemistry world that methlymine is used for that. Maybe it gets mentioned in trade magazines that he reads. So he already has some knowledge of it and it’s not that he was reinventing the wheel.
I still think that only happened one time. Todd cooked on his own several times and we only heard about the color problem once. (Just as well because in the real world something that pure wouldn’t be blue.)
I thought it was more often. Lydia said they were dying poor grade meth blue to imitate the good stuff, which implies that it was going on for awhile.
It only happened once (at least that we heard of) and then he made some changes in his workforce. Walt had handful of tries as well before he got the blue as well.
Either way, since this thread is for people who haven’t seen the show we probably shouldn’t be discussing everything from literally the first episode right up to almost the end (in fact I just edited what I wrote above to remove a spoiler which I see I got very close to saying in a previous post as well.
I think I/we should probably drop this before we end up spoiling it for people that are just jumping in. Besides, I’m happy to admit that I don’t have every nuance of the show memorized so I may be hazy on some of the little details.
I’ve never, ever bought a box set before but the barrel one looked pretty cool and they mentioned it had all those extras…might have to pick it up…but I’m guessing it’s well over a hundred dollars.
ETA $225, yeah, not buying that. Netflix and the podcasts will do just fine for me.
No, Lydia said they aren’t buying the stuff that isn’t blue and Jack or Kenny said they could use food coloring. I don’t think they ever did that though.