Diary of a Breaking Bad virgin – Season 2’s conclusion was such a downer

The end of Breaking Bad’s sophomore season had a distinctly different tone than the conclusion of its first, where Walter was aghast at the demonstration of the lethal, unhinged violence of a drug dealer who was going to distribute Walt and Jesse’s meth while netting the duo some big bucks.

This second season finale ended with Jesse thoroughly heartbroken and in rehab after being saved by Walt, who was also heartbroken as he watched Skyler drive away with their newborn baby Holly (whose birth he missed because of a drug deal), as Skyler told Walt she was no longer going to put up with his lies … lies he started telling in order to protect the family which was now falling apart.

I don’t know what was worse, watching Jesse self-destruct into a pathetic mess of a drug-induced haze of meth and heroin after the shooting death of one of his dealers — for which he felt responsible — or his grief about the fatal overdose of his girlfriend Jane which drove him into a horrific drug den, seemingly having given up on life. (I’m still anxiously waiting to find out how Jesse went from being a promising artist to a drug dealer/user. A similar heartbreak?)

Meanwhile, I was simultaneously happy and sad to see Skyler call Walt out on his duplicitous behavior, the second cell phone, the money for his cancer treatments, his strange and not very well explained absences. (He was getting really sloppy by the end of this season, especially when he left his cell phone on vibrate in the ceiling of his classroom.) I found myself wishing that Skyler had directed some of the energy she expended figuring out that Walt was lying, into saving the marriage.

I also wished Walt had done more to tend to his wife’s needs and concerns instead of tending to the dry rot in his house. I wished they’d both gone to counseling because to see this marriage — which had survived the challenging early days of raising a son with cerebral palsy — just go kaput, given that Walt dove into the drug business to get his family some quick money when after his death, is too damned depressing.

And now, just when it looked like the tunnel-visioned Walt was getting a reprieve of sorts on his imminent cancer death sentence, he was left standing alone, alone, in the driveway of his family’s home, the one he’d just been asked to vacate just as the debris from his his life in the drug business quite literally rained down from above, as two planes collided after Jesse’s dead girlfriend’s father wasn’t paying close enough attention while he was directing the pilots. Walt was likewise distracted — by his cancer, by his burgeoning drug business, by violence, by Jesse — that he didn’t see the damage he’d caused to his own marriage until it crashed.

Going into the third season, here are my questions:

— Will the new partnership Walt has struck with the fast food franchise owner turn out to be a good idea or, like most of his brainstorms that have nothing to do with chemistry, a bad one?

— Is Jesse really going to shake his drug addiction, given that drugs are plentiful?

— Will Skyler take up with Ted,the criminal bookkeeper? Has she fallen out of love with Walt and is there any hope for them?

— When will Walt quit teaching and when will we get the backstory about how Walt went from being a contributor to Nobel Prize-caliber research to teaching high school?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Aug 05, 2010 @ 14:00 EST5EDT