Whew! That last post on Holmes and Homeland was really long. I warned you, though. You can't say I didn't warn you. Anyway, whatever the case, I feel the length was justified by the subtlety of the concept. Plus, that disclaimer. If you still read even with that disclaimer, my hat's off to you and I hope I justified the time spent and I have a perfect in-built excuse if you didn't (still, sorry).
Whatever the case, now that I've got the concept down, I'd like to talk about the ending of Breaking Bad Season 4. Why? Well, because it's (as artificial intelligence would put it) a positive example of drama and mystery working together seamlessly, whereas Homeland is a negative example. In terms of learning, we'd be hard-pressed to get the full lesson without at least a few positive and a few negative examples. If my thesis is (in an oversimplified way): "Mystery and drama can clash favorably or unfavorably" then Breaking Bad S4 and Homeland S1 are great examples of both halves of this equation. In fact, a casual rewatch of S4E11 ("Crawl Space") was what inspired the whole sorry enterprise of this and the previous post.
I don't think that first post is any sort of prerequisite for what follows. What's more: This is about half as long as the first Holmes piece, so still pretty darn long, but much more manageable. Anyway, let's get to it...
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SPOILER LINE START (FIRST SPOILER: THERE ISN'T A "SPOILER LINE END". PLEASE STOP READING THIS POST IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN SEASON 4 OF BREAKING BAD. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT.)
Anyway, now that that's out of the way, let's talk about Breaking Bad, Season 4.
In case you need a refresher, there are three episodes at the end of that season. In "Crawl Space" Walt is pushed to his limit - Hank is closing in on the laundry/superlab, Jesse refuses to see Walt, and Gus fires Walt and threatens his family. Gus will retaliate if Walt tries to see Jesse or if Walt interferes with Gus handling the problem of Hank. "I will kill your infant daughter," Gus says memorably. Meanwhile, Walt's deus ex machina, his relocate-his-family-at-a-moment's-notice man, is taken under his nose by Skyler, as she unwittingly uses Walt's liquid reserves of cash in the crawl space to pay off Ted and his IRS problem, not knowing she may have caused the family's ruin. When Walt goes home to find the money and can't find nearly enough to pay off the disappearer, Walt realizes that his family's hopes are slim and goes into the famous "INSANE LAUGHING" scene. Worse, Walt's last request to Saul Goodman was that Saul call the DEA about a hit on Hank. So naturally, now everyone in Walt's family, including Hank and Marie, is in mortal danger.
The next episode starts with Walt refusing to go with his family to Hank's house into protective custody. And then the mystery begins. Immediately Hank sends Gomez to the laundry/superlab and Gus tells Jesse the DEA appearance was Walt's doing and that Walt is a threat that therefore needs to be eliminated. Jesse still refuses. Later, Jesse is summoned to Saul and, the next day, Brock (Jesse's girlfriend's son) is sick with apparent ricin poisoning. Jesse immediately suspects Walt, and, goes to Walt's house intending to get a confession and/or kill Walt. Walt convinces Jesse that Gus's history of child murdering demonstrates that Brock's poisoning was a brilliant gambit by Gus to turn Jesse against Walt. But was it Gus? This is the mystery that hangs like a shadow over the last two episodes of the fourth season.
Who poisoned Brock? Was it a random incident, was it Gus, or was it Walt? For dramatic purposes, in terms of the chessboard of intrigue and motivations and placement? The brilliance of the writing is that it doesn't altogether matter. Oh, it does and it doesn't.
See, whether Walt poisoned a child certainly speaks volumes about his character, certainly speaks volumes to his capability and his audacious mendacity. It's also another step up in sheer evil by Walt - if Walt indeed poisoned Brock, then, for the first time, he's not only killing people that are direct threats or direct threats to those he loves... he's destroying totally innocent people's lives like pawns on a chessboard. At one point in the episode, Walt sends a neighbor woman to his house in order to "check whether Junior left the stove on". In reality, Walt is drawing out the murderous surveillance by Gus around his house. And, what's more, Walt is willing to use Gus's own perceived brilliance against him, betting his life on being able to convince Jesse that Gus is an impossibly brilliant mastermind (which, well, he is), while simultaneously outwitting Gus the whole time.
And if Walt didn't do it, well... that puts Gus' own chess skills onto an unprecedented pedestal. The guy that pits the cartel against the DEA, the guy that keeps alive and kills precisely whom he wants, the guy that has built up a positive relationship and alibi with nearly every other character just in case the police come knocking? The guy that singlehandedly knocked off the cartels? Gus has turned Jesse against his closest ally and hatched a wicked long-game that - even by the Robot Devil's standards - is "ridiculously circuitous".
But what really fascinates me is that, despite how complicated the chessboard is and who is playing what games with whom.... The central mystery does not affect the drama that unfolds even a little, (as long as no one figures it out at least). All that matters is whether Jesse trusts Walt or Gus more, given all the available evidence. In the end Jesse sides with Walt, but every other "chess piece" proceeds identically. The police have to investigate Jesse's ricin claims, Saul has to lay low, Walt has to kill Gus, Gus has to kill Walt. Hector Salamanca still has animosity towards Walt, Jesse, and especially Gus. Jesse still knows about Hector, still knows about the criminal mastermind of Gus. Hank still has a hunch about that laundry. And so on. Whether Walt is a legendary criminal mastermind or whether Gus is, they still have Moriarty's threads all over all the other characters
And yes, just like S1 of "Homeland" that I'd derided, it's a matter of narrative convenience that Walt wins and was the mastermind all along. But the writers created a narrative that perfectly married mystery and drama - where the grand suspense and tragic implications of whatever resolution Brock's poisoning would have hung large over the proceedings. But despite this shadow of the mystery, when it was finally revealed to the audience that Walt had done it? It was almost incidental to everything else that occurred. There was a sort of original sin in Brock's poisoning, and, whoever caused it, that original sin set all the action in motion. And that's all that matters for the plot.
It's worth noting that when Walt's Bryan Cranston and Jesse's Aaron Paul shot the "ADMIT WHAT YOU DID" scene where Walt turns Jesse.... They told Cranston to play that scene like Walt was innocent (Cranston didn't know at that point). And so there wasn't a trace of doubt on his laughing face, just the powerful cackle of certain ruin. And in the end, you watched these episodes and had all that emotional investment of the characters, and you had the uncertainty of what would happen (even though you could probably guess Walt would survive). But you also had this shuddering mystery whose possible answer licked its tongue over the plot, never quite affecting anyone, never quite altering anyone's actions or thoughts... but sort of... poisoning the moral fabric of how we saw these characters little by little. Walt sends a neighbor perhaps to die just so that he can guarantee his own survival. Gus indeed poisons a child to make a point in seasons past. Gus and Walt are by the end implicated as being part of the same disturbing, bankrupt moral fabric of naked self-interest. Gus "had to go" as Jesse puts it, even when he finds out Gus was innocent. Because even though Gus didn't, Gus would have done the same thing. Walt, who was actually guilty, is suddenly not just guilty but totally unremorseful. Those sad eyes as he allowed Jane to choke are suddenly hubristic and brilliant as they reach to poison Brock, and what humanity remains of Walt is forever tainted.
Drama allows us to set a grand stage filled with characters and clear intentions and obvious, on-the-level gambits. We might not know how it turns out, but we know how it was set up. The characters themselves and the audience may be shaded by ignorance, but we are all inherently shaded by ignorance. Mystery is a device that demystifies this shade in a sense. Instead of an intangible fog of ignorance, a definite mystery allows us to hang a definite shade ourselves, a single proposition on which lives or nations may hinge, a shade that hangs over the stage and no one but the writers is sure where the light that is shaded nor the where shade itself is coming from. And when the writers deem it so, we're allowed to remove that shade, and we're forced to see the stage in a different light and it is the truth.
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