The Prestige TV Podcast - The ‘Breaking Bad’ Episode That Got Us Hooked

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

Welcome to Hooked, a new Prestige TV Podcast series where we look at some of the most iconic TV shows ever and try to figure out which episode is going to hook you! On this episode, Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney hop in their RV and make the case for why “Cat’s in the Bag …” is the best place to start for those wanting to give ‘Breaking Bad’ another shot. (0:00) Intro (1:00) What is Hooked? (3:22) The cultural importance of ‘Breaking Bad’ (6:04) Their personal relationship to the AMC crime drama (14:27) The pilot (25:09) Walter White casting what-ifs (27:06) Why “Cat’s in the Bag …” is the perfect place to start the show (32:43) Who won the episode? (37:44) How it saved Jesse Pinkman (41:17) The best scene (57:48) **SPOILERS** Email us! [e-mail] Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of ‘The Prestige TV Podcast’ and so much more! Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producers: Kai Grady and Donnie Beacham Jr. Additional Production Support: Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and everyday low prices on 365 brand items. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. Save at Whole Foods Market. Welcome back to the Precise TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson. I'm Rob Mahoney. And we're here with a very special mini-series that we have cooked up.

Just out of the fondness of our heart for TV shows that we want to talk about, we're calling it hooked, as you might have seen on the podcast art for this episode. Rob Mahoney, do you care to explain to the fine folks at home what this mini-series is that we're doing. I would love to, Joe.

The premise is very simple. If you were trying to get a friend, a partner, anyone in your life to watch a show that you care about, what is the single episode of that show that you would show them? To get them hooked, TM. I would also say, I would add to that. I would yes and that. That is the basic premise of the show. I would add to that, you know, if you yourself have, if there's like a big show that you

missed out on and you tried to watch the pilot. You're like, this really isn't for me. I don't really get it. We're here with some suggestions over the next few weeks of what another episode to try might be to really get you hooked into a show. So you might be listening at home and saying, hey, man, isn't it best to watch the first episode of a new show to get hooked into the show? And some of the shows that we picked here are kind of infamously not all put together

when they drop their first episode. So that has been on our mind. And just sort of anecdotally, also, I personally have tried to get people that I know and love into certain shows and they've bumped up against some of these pilots. So we are going to talk about the pilot episodes of some of these shows as we go through and talk about them,

but also we want to highlight another episode that we really think is the hook for why this show is what it is. Anything else you want to say about the premise of this of this miniseries, Rob Mahoney? What a wonderful, really just false mechanism we have created to talk about some of the greatest shows to ever exist slash some personal passion projects of yours and mine. Again, like shows that we have tried to get people into and failed miserably in many cases.

But this is what we do, Joe. We've become podcasters who cannot be stopped so that we can smuggle our personal advocacy into our content. What a time. It's true. So some of these will be, a lot of these will be like sort of big, obvious billboard shows that everyone talks about, Golden Age of Television, etc., etc., but have for some reason or the other missed certain people over the years. And then some of them are ever so slightly more niche, but not much, much, not very niche at all, you know, shows that Rob and I want to advocate for. So over the next couple weeks, I will say, I don't want to announce all of the shows that we're covering, but I will say at least one of them is a very famous show, perhaps one of the best shows of all time, that neither Rob nor I have seen.

Look at that. So that's something to look forward to. If you know the lore, you know what I'm talking about. Today, however, we're talking about the AMC smash a little hit Breaking Bad. And for those who don't know, where were you, but that's okay. Breaking Bad AirD.M.C. for five season and 62 episodes from 2008 to 2013.

It was nominated for 58 Emmy Awards and won 16, including Outstanding Drama Series for its final two seasons. It also won two Peabody Awards, spawned a sequel series, Better Call Saul, which rules, and inspired a run on yellow boiler suits and goggles every Halloween, amongst other cultural impacts. And a follow-up movie, we should say as well.

Oh, oh. The content keeps pumping, Joe. Do we acknowledge? All right. Canonically, I think we have to, unfortunately. All right, fair enough. We're going to do most of this episode sort of in a, not spoiler-free, free, but a way that is welcome to people who might be listening to this who have never seen an episode of breaking

bat. We're going to talk about some premise concepts, some big picture stuff, but we will save the very deep spoiler content for the very end of our time. discussion. So just in case you were like, hey man, I never got into Breaking Bad. I tried the pilot. It didn't get me. What episode should I watch? You can still listen to most of this episode if you care to. I would say this whole conceit is really geared again towards those people. And I say this in part, Joe, as somebody who did watch the pilot of Breaking Bad and thought, I don't know that this is for me. And I bumped on it and left it for basically years until all of a sudden there was

so much like fervor around the series in real time as it was going into its final season. I was I guess I finally do have to catch up. I guess I have to break through that wall to be a part of this thing. Right. I am glad that I did in part because of the episode we're going to talk about today. Right. And you don't want to say, you know, for most of these episodes we're picking to, you know, as the hook episode, we're not looking deep into the series. Because it should be somewhat legible to people who haven't watched three seasons of a show.

You also never want to hear from someone, oh, just wait 17 episodes. That's when it gets good or something like that. Like who is the time in this day and age. Before we get into sort of what this show means to us personally, which is something we want to talk about in a second, I will just say, you know, logline, elevator pitch for what breaking bad is. Once again, if you were just habitating under a rock, I support you. In the desert, living in an RV somewhere.

Who knows where. In factually, yeah. This show follows a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher Walter White as a cancer diagnosis burst him deeper and deeper into a life of cooking meth and many other crimes. Many, many other crimes. Look, there's a lot of crime, I got to say. That's true. Rob Mahoney, what does Breaking Bad mean to you?

I think for me, it is like a really good distillation of a very specific kind of show, which is like so plot driven, but always from a place that feels like super honest to the characters involved. And so I never, like during my entire time watching Breaking Bad, accepting the pilot, I never felt cheated by shortcuts. It's an incredibly satisfying viewing experience. And so in that way, I think it gets thrust into the pantheon of all-time great shows because it really is like the best version of what this kind of show can be.

It's also, for me personally, and did you, you already talked about sort of how you caught up a couple seasons in. I also wasn't in on it from the beginning. I think I caught up, I want to say it was season three, which is when a lot of people caught up. Because I think the story of Breaking Bad, a couple things I want to mention personally is one of the very first shows I ever did a week-to-week podcast recap of. It was like the first one I ever did was justified, Breaking Bad, and then Game of Thrones, I think, in that order or some order thereof.

So I did do a show called The Ones Who Knock about the last couple seasons of Breaking Bad. Do you have any specific memory takes from the Ones Who Knock that you would like to pull a clip from now to insert into this episode? Like hot takes that I got off on a podcast. Literally any moment from that podcast that you remember. What was your experience in real time? I just remember late season, again, no major spoilers, but there is a train heist in the tail end of Breaking Bad,

and that was just a collision of a lot of things that I really care about all at once. Trains, heist, meth. Yeah. What else you got? What else could you possibly help? I don't know. But so the ones who knock was an important podcasting moment from me personally.

And then just as a cultural artifact of, you know, one of the last guests of the monoculture is, you know, everyone watching the end of Breaking Bad together. Not everyone, because, again, if you're listening to this podcast, perhaps you didn't. And then also the phenomenon of a show that was not a huge hit and then it hit Netflix and then it became a huge hit, which happened midway through the run of, Breaking Bad. And you can, you know, coming through some old interviews and articles and research for this episode of the podcast, it was fun to see that in real time, like Vince Gilligan giving an interview talking about season three, in advance season three, saying like, I'm not really

sure how many more seasons we're going to, like, right on the verge of this becoming this massive cultural phenomena. He's like, I don't know what AMC is going to be able to give us if we're going to get a season four, season five, you know, what's going to happen. So, um, I think that's really interesting to think about. And also just like this era of television, the Golden Age of Television, the season of the anti-hero, and how Walter White remains, you know, with love and respect to Dondraper, Tony Sopranos and the other folks that we may or may not be visiting this season on Unhooked. Like, my favorite version of this, I think chiefly because Vince Gilligan had such a clear arc for his character, even though, very famously, they did not have all of the plot planned out. They had the character arc planned out from the beginning,

and that, I think, just gives Breaking Bad such exhilarating surety in its run while they were also, and I'll get into this a little bit more when I talk about the episode that we think is the hook versus the pilot, the genius that the sort of energy that they created by constantly writing themselves into corners and then figuring out of get, how's Walt going to get out of this one? You know, like, that's been, that's been part of the thrust of the show.

It's been, and it's just like, becomes an incredibly visually dazzling show, is harrowing and psychologically upsetting, obviously, and then also incredibly funny and at times positively wacky. Totally. And so it's just got all these things working for it. It'll make you cry.

It'll make you laugh. It'll make you gasp. It's a great show. The fact that it can be all those things is so dazzling. And it's dazzling even this early. Even in season one, you can see all the pieces starting to kind of fall into place. But that you can have a full interrogation of that sort of anti-hero character. In addition to a full gallery of fascinating people in the world of Breaking Bad as it only kind of expands and expands and expands over time.

You know, you can have your pizza on the roof and eat it too, Joe. You know, you can have the full interrogation. You can have a show that fucking moves. Like, Breaking Bad does not stop. It never stands in place. It is incredibly propulsive. Like, it makes you feel like you're getting away with something watching. It makes you feel like you're heisting your own train, perhaps.

Oh, I love that. Okay, listen. Something we like to do on this show is come up with special email addresses for the shows we're covering. We're not going to do that for every episode of Hooked. We simply do not have the time nor the storage on our drives. However, you can always email us, PrestigeTV at Spotify.com, if you have some thoughts or feelings, if you disagree with us. Because actually, I think people are kind of divided on the Breaking Bad Pilot, which we're

going to talk about in a second. So I think there are probably plenty of people listening to this saying, what are you doing? The Breaking Bad Pilot is perfect. Why wouldn't it just be the pilot? We'll talk about that. One of those people we should say, the Emmy voters, who awarded it quite handsomely. Yeah, Brian Cranston's. First Emmy comes from this episode.

But, Rob Mahoney, if we were to come up with a Precestasy TV podcast-style email address for Breaking Bad, do you have any suggestions? I would like to do it, Joe, in the spirit of how we usually do, which is usually from the first couple episodes. I don't want to spoil with the email addresses. I don't want to tip our hand too far as to where things might go. And so I think there's some stuff even in the episode we're going to talk about today, which we should say. is going to be episode two of Breaking Bad,

cats in the bag. Yeah, we're like, don't watch the pilot. Go all the way to the very second episode. Not all of them will just be the second episode. But, like, in this case, both Rob and I agreed, it's the one with the bathtub and the goo. There's so much goo. There's so much goo.

We knew which one it was. We were like, it's the bathtub goo one. That's the one we want to talk about. I feel okay doing an episode two because I bounced in such a particular way from the pilot. Because I do think there's such a. barrier to entry from it. And we're going to get into all the reasons why this is the episode, maybe not the pilot, as kind of the presentation piece for Breaking Bad. Yeah. But as far as these email addresses go, Joe, how do you feel, I mean, Cabin Cook at gmail.com is right there for us,

you know? Just straight from Jesse Pinkman's fake MySpace page. My Shout, I think. The My Shout. How about Climb Down Out From My Ass at Gmail.com? How do you feel about that one? I actually really like that. That just reminds me of John Hans Nipple Rings for some reason. It really does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one that is more specifically later in the show, but evoked from this episode. Yeah, Science at gmail.com, or if you prefer magnets bitch at gm.com. I think those are right there for the taking for us in a theoretical alternate universe in which I like you was covering this week to week on a podcast.

But I got to say, you dropped the ball at the time, Joe. You weren't making fake email addresses. I think we did the ones who knocked at gmail. We did the ones who knock at gmail. That's just the name of the podcast slash, of course, the call sign. for the show effectively. What about bathtub goo at gmail.com? Honestly, bathtub goo very good.

Or Emilio is goo at gmail.com. Poor Emilio, you know. What did he do to deserve being gullified? Well, the world will never know. Okay. So we're going to talk about the pilot for a little bit, why we think it may not be, you know, the perfect showcase for what the best of Breaking Badd has to offer.

And then we will talk about season one episode two. So spoilers will come. We've already mentioned Bathtub Goo. Spoilers will be here through season one, episode two of Breaking Bad. But let's start with the pilot. I want to mention a couple things. You know, as is often the case, though AMC when it ordered this show from Vince Gilligan, the showrunner of Breaking Bad, it was a nine-episode order.

So it wasn't like, let's look at the pilot and then we'll see. They ordered all nine episodes. And we should say two was, originally written, I believe, Joe, for FX. For FX. We will definitely talk about that. And there's just kind of a decision that, like, this isn't quite the right fit, finds its home at AMC, the rest is history. Yeah, Showtime says, no, thank you. We have weeds. HBO passes, TNT passes. FX says yes. And then FX is like, no, we have to make dirt starring Courtney Cox instead. Yeah. And I believe I have heard from people at FX that this is like the one that got away, like, that they think about this.

show and like this should have been an FX show and there are ways in which there are ways in which I can see this is a showtime show like I really understand why that was sort of first on the list to shop and there are ways in which this is definitely an FX show but the pilot was written for FX like with FX in mind and Vince Gilligan has talked about this in interviews um that there are you know scenes that were cut out of the pilot once it moved from FX to AMC they felt like there was a different tone that they were going for. But the pilot tone, if it feels a little off from the rest of the show, it's because it was originally pitched for a different network.

So that's definitely part of it. And as is the case with many pilots, I would say almost all pilots, it was shot months before the rest of the season. So they shoot this in March of 2007, and then they don't go into production with the rest of the season until the end of August. They're working, if you listen to the commentary on the first episode, they're working with kind of a bare bones budget. There's an ambulance scene

where the ambulance is not driving anywhere. They just have grips on the outside shaking the ambulance. They don't have their sets built. The sets look similar, but the white household is just sort of like a freestanding set. Later, they'll have soundstages.

Later, they'll have more budget. Some of the key players are different. Like, you've got a cinematographer on this episode, the pilot episode, John Toll, who is, you know, a multiple Academy Award running cinematographer, but he never works on Breaking Bad again. And so, like, the house style is not quite there. It's a different art director. It's a different, like, set deck. You know, like, there's just a bunch of stuff sort of visually that is a little off kilter of where the show will end up.

What do you want to say sort of big picture about the pilot, Rob? It's so funky in that way, because the pilot, to me, does read as sort of an alternate universe version of Breaking Bad, whether it's at a different network, whether it's, again, where the tonality is just slightly different and like invoking weeds with the showtime comp, I think is so telling because it feels so, the pilot feels so much like weeds. It feels like they are, they are going for a goofier midlife crisis kind of show. And ultimately, like even the sound cues, like the music cues in the pilot are just much more like played for overt laughs in a way that Breaking Bad show that we know and love can be very funny, but not quite in that winking way. It's deployed so differently in terms of like

the comedy of Breaking Bad. And so the combination of the tone, and I would say overall, the fact that the pilot has to get the ball rolling on so many different things that you don't feel the movement that you will eventually feel

as the show kind of gets up to speed, that combination makes it feel like it's from a completely different place than whatever you may think of the rest of the show. And, you know, that's perhaps unfair to... That's the pilot's job, right, is to introduce you to your key players.

We need to get, you know, Walt gets his cancer diagnosis. We need to know a bit about his life at the car wash, life is a teacher, life at home, you know, how Hank treats him, all these other things need to be at play, and then we need to meet Jesse and all these other things. I will say the pilot's written and directed by Vince Gilligan,

and there is some of that trademark breaking bad visual flare in the first episode. You get a sort of like zoom out from the barrel of the gunshot, or you've got the camera inside of the dryer as they're drying the money. Those are very classic. The camera isn't where you think it is sort of like breaking bad moments. But overall, it just looks darker and not as slick and shiny as it will eventually look. They have a lot of the elements.

Again, it's just like something is a little bit off. Some of those visual cues are not fully evolved. yet in terms of what they'll eventually be on the show. I think the meth cooking montage, too, it feels like the primordial ooze of Breaking Bad in the pilot. You can absolutely see where the inspiration and the cues from a sequence like that will inform so much of the visual look of the show, so much of kind of the way the show is edited and cut together.

But at that point, it's all like a little shaggy, it's a little underbaked. It's like, it's not quite there yet. And that's good enough for a pilot in many cases. That's good enough to get the series picked up. and eventually takes off as you have time to kind of pull all those things together. And there's a lot of iconography from this first episode that will, you know,

maintain throughout the rest of the show. You've got the, you know, Walt turns 50 in the pilot, so you've got the veggie bacon in the form of the 50, which we will later see echoed in other bacon, you know, age arrangements. You've got the pants flying down, which we will see again, of course, in Osamandias, like, you know, the best episode of Breaking Bad, You've got, you know, the iconic Walt and His Tidy Whiteys.

Like, there's imagery that is indelible from this first episode. So, you know, and looking at some of the rankings of best episodes, breaking bad episodes of all time, including one from the rigor.com, they actually have the pilot often quite high. So a lot of people do really rate this episode quite high. Yes. It's got an interesting frame, you know, time jumpy sort of frame narrative around. it, how did we get here, a sort of element to it.

And, but I, I want to save sort of why I don't think it perfectly captures what we want breaking bad to be a bit more for when we talk about what episode two does get right. But I wanted to make sure that people aren't listening to this and feel like they're in an alternate dimension. Plenty of people rate this, the pilot very high. Yeah. It's not like a hated pilot episode of a TV show. I've just heard from a lot of people

that they think it's a little slow or that they, you know, they watched it and they didn't quite get it. All of season one is a little shaggy, you know, to a certain degree. And that's, you know, some of our favorite shows have shaggy first seasons. And this is something we lament all the time

when we talk about television. Now we talk about how quick something like Netflix is to cancel a show after, you know, a slightly shaky season one. We're like, oh my God, if they were quick, that quick on the trigger with shows like Breaking Bad or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a million other shows that we love, we never would have gotten these masterpiece later seasons that we that we got. So like we both support shows having time to get their legs underneath them.

So I'm not knocking them for the potential shortcomings of this pilot, you know. And Netflix's role in that, as you say, from going from the kind of streaming platform that breathes new life into something like Breaking Bad, launches it into a totally, different stratosphere. And they've kind of gotten out of that business, mostly because they are participating in that kind of original programming you're talking about and then canceling shows before they really get up to speed. But what, I mean, what was the last Breaking Bad type launchpad hit on Netflix? I think you comes to mind as far as like shows that. You and Riverdale are like the other ones that that hit like that. I mean, I don't want to push my own agenda, but I do think

that interview with a vampire got a boost after season one. hit Netflix and, you know, people are eagerly awaiting season two to hit Netflix. The Lestat chatter went up. You were just surfing the web, keeping tags on things? I just heard it in the air and the wind, perhaps, and people are excited about the vampire list. But I think it's interesting to think about

this is an FX pitch, and especially to think about what FX was at that time, because FX is one of my favorite, you know, homes for original programming, but it was like, I think, 2006, thereabouts when Vince Gillian was shopping this at FX. So they only have, on the drama front, on the one-hour front, the shield nip-tuck and rescue me.

That's it. Pretty early. We're pre-sons of anarchy, pre-justified, pre-damages, et cetera, et cetera. And so... Are we pre-Wilfred? Has Wilfred already happened yet? I don't think... I don't know.

I don't know. I'm stuck with Elijah on that one. But, like, thinking about the shield and rescue me specifically, like, thinking about Hank in particular sticks out in the pilot to me as like they haven't quite figured out this character yet. And thinking about that characterization of Hank

in a Vic Mackey, the Shield world, makes a lot of sense to me that that's sort of what they were pitching towards and then they adjusted his character recalibrated him to fit him and better into this world. Does that make sense in any way?

It definitely does. Again, I would have loved to see the FX version of the show, just as I as a contrast piece. I'm thrilled about the one we got. Yeah, yeah. There are so many germs of ideas here that would have been interesting to see spiral off in their own directions. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity. Or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

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Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Last thing I'll say, just like as a fun fact about sort of the budgetary restrictions on the pilot, there's a school bus scene and they did not have enough budget to fill the school bus. So co-executive producer Melissa Bernstein is like one of the students on the bus because they had to fill it. When the three fire trucks go by at the end of the episode, they did not have three fire trucks.

They had two fire trucks and a catering truck that they use like clever editing to make it look like three fire trucks. And yeah, I mentioned the ambulance thing. But in the commentary for the pilot, Kristen calls it, quote, poor man's problem. process to have people outside the abil is just shaking it. I also want to ask you on the casting front. Cranston was like someone that they really fought for. What do you make of the idea of this show starring either John Cusack or Matthew Broderick in the role of Walter White? I mean, for one, with Broderick, we've already seen the sort of suburban malaise thing that he would be playing here. Yeah. In particular, in a way that I don't think the comparison would bode well for anybody involved.

I mean, it's hard to argue against the idea that Cranston just. turned out to be the exact perfect fit. And I think part of that is even in those other guys who are great actors in their own ways, like Cusack has a darkness in him that comes out in some movies and can be quite effective. I don't know that the overall transformation would be as effective for someone like Cusack.

I feel like Cusack is better for a turn. He's better for a surprise, oh, I'm actually evil, or I've been evil the whole time, but maybe not a like slow degradation into the depths of the human soul. Yeah, I just can't imagine either those guys. Being the one who knocks?

Yeah, like the growl. Only Cranston of those three could do that growl in that way. The last thing I will hit you with is, the last couple things. This is the longest episode of Breaking Bad. And in fact, in subsequent viewings, airings, they edit it down to 45 minutes, which means they cut out the hand job. I think they had to, like, blur out the boobs. Like there's like just a bunch of stuff.

So like the version you see on Netflix is not necessarily the version. A lot of people watched as it aired subsequently on AMC. I did forget about the hand job for the record. The Skyler hand job while on her eBay listing waiting for the auction to end. It's very funny. It's really good stuff. Here's a quote from Vince Gilligan about directing this episode. I was scared and I didn't really know what I was doing.

He did get nominated for an Emmy. I do think he did a great job. But that's just sort of like where we were. All right. So that's enough about an episode of television we didn't pick. The episode that we picked, season one episode two, cast in the bag, written by Vince Gileon, directed by Adam Bernstein, first aired January 27th, 2008, aka the one where Walt and Jesse dissolve a body into goop in a bathtub that falls through the ceiling. And I should say, actually, the one where Jesse dissolves a body into goop.

Must be real about it. That falls through the ceiling. All right, Rob Mahoney, what makes this episode a good entry point for breakfast? Breaking Bad. I think Breaking Bad is basically all about problem solving and we're just getting into it, Joe. Like we're just like very, look, maybe not a relatable premise, but an

understandable one. These dudes have a dead body and they've got a live body. Will they be able to stomach the killing of the live body? And what the fuck do you do with the dead body? That's a problem. This is something that actually needs to be solved and you get a science teacher and a burnout to try to figure

it out. And like that is the crux of what makes Breaking Bad so good is watching these two guys, as you say, be written into corners by the staff who makes Breaking Bad. And then the writing staff has to write their way out, but in doing so, usually Walter Jesse has to come up with something ingenious, something crackpot, something that works or kind of works or doesn't work, or in this case, something that works, but ultimately mess it up trying to execute it. Does this episode make sense without the pilot?

Do you need a hook episode to make sense without the pilot? or is that not what we're proposing here? I don't think it's quite what we're proposing. Obviously, if you want to watch Breaking Bad and you are already hooked or you have decided for yourself that you will be hooked, even if the first episode doesn't grab you, you should obviously start from the beginning. The pilot has very important plot-related information

and character-related information, as they basically always do. If you just jump straight in with two, you would get the vibe of the show, you would get the energy of the show, you would get the core mechanics and relationships of the show. And that's what we're trying to sell you. It's like this is the one that will sell you on what Breaking Bad can be, not the full story of Breaking Bad.

The question, like, we wanted to ask ourselves some questions about, like, what's here and does it establish the real vibe of what the show is, thematically or visually, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, one question we wanted to ask yourself, is the setting and location typical or atypical of the larger series? and does that matter? And would you say, I mean, the main location for this episode is Jesse's house?

Yeah. And Jesse's house is not an iconic setting for Breaking Bad. We should say Jesse lives in multiple places over the course of the series. So we're not like, ah, let's spend time in that classic setting, Jesse's house. And obviously, Walt is sort of bopping around. Jesse goes to the store. Skyler's doing some, you know, rapacious Googling in the White House. household. So setting-wise, yeah, this is a question we have, sort of originates from a

future episode we want to talk about, where the question is, can a-hook episode be something that is, like, atypical of the show and yet somehow capture your attention, maybe more forcefully than something that is more typical? This is sort of a mixed bag, this particular episode, I would say, overall. Are enough of the main slash most important characters represented here, and does that matter? What do you want to say about that, Rob? On the setting, on first, Joe. I do think if you sort of zoom out a little bit, it's not the most iconic locations in the show, except maybe like the New Mexico desert. Like that part is pretty iconic for Breaking Bad, but random Albuquerque homes and the procuring of various supplies at like a hardware

store or somewhere like it, those are kind of iconic breaking bad things. Activities and in the case of the homes, like the generic nature of some of these like cookie cutter slash suburban homes where Jesse lives or Walt lives or any number of other characters live or in Jesse's case kind of bounces around over the course of the series. Like those are pretty frequent locations. And I think speaks to obviously the kind of pilot and the kind of first season you can make on that sort of shoestring budget you were talking about. But also breaking about overall, even though the budget clearly grows as the esteem for the show

grows is never the flashiest in terms of let me show you this place that's going to cost a lot of money. I think they use their money very economically. And one of the ways they do that is like, we're just going to be at this set that looks like a suburban house for a significant portion of this show. That's completely fair. On the character front, something that we talked about earlier when we talked about the pilot is the pilot checks off like every single character, right? You're meeting Marie, you're meeting Hank. Gommies there, like blah, blah, like as long as they're on the show at this point, they're in the pilot episode. There will be other big characters like Saul Goodman,

who gets his own spinoff that isn't introduced until later, Mike Erman Trout, et cetera, et cetera. But the pilot wants you to know everyone who, you know, is involved, Walt Jr., etc., etc. This is really drilling down on Skyler, Walt, and Jesse. Yes. And there's something interesting for all three of them to do inside of this episode.

Skyler has a mystery to get to the bottom of and a burnout to threaten. Jesse has a body to dissolve. And Walter has to learn how to roll a joint and also figure out if he can kill someone. Just the world's worst joints. The series of... Great tongue acting from Brian Granton.

The flickering of the tongue is elite for sure. The variety of terrible joints that he rolls wonderful work. Wonderful work by whoever was responsible for that, Cranston, or otherwise. We're calling this the honorary Bill Simmons who won the episode trophy, the optional episode MVP. It's a tight race for me, actually.

Certainly is. And it's down to Pinkman, and that is key for why this episode matters more than the pilot. We'll talk about that in a second. But also, Max Arsenaega, Jr. as Crazy 8,

is also in the running for me. Okay. Because he has very little time to make so much of an impression on us. And this, you know, we'll talk about other characters that were meant to be killed off and were not killed off. And that is something that is, like, key to understanding the alchemy of Breaking Bad. Crazy Eight is someone who was supposed to die in the pilot. Like, those two dudes, both Emilio who gets dissolved and Crazy Eight who gets you locked to, you know,

a pillar in a basement, were dead in that RV at the end of episode one. And then the network watched the pilot, and they were like, we love Crazy 8. We think it's so fun that Crazy Spell with a K. We think this guy is really, really fun.

Can you use him a bit more? And Vince, like, that guy's dead. And they're like, figure it out. And he did. And that's just like the first of many, many, many figure it out. And he did movements from Vince Gilligan. But that's why I'm, like,

tempted to give it to Crazy 8. someone who was so charismatic that even though he was definitely dead at the end of the pilot, they were like, bring him back. What do you think, Rob? This is that kind of show, though, where people show up characters, actors, whatever it may be, they pop for reasons that the creatives behind Breaking Bad didn't anticipate, Jesse Pinkman included, and then all of a sudden become part of the DNA. They end up overstaying whatever they thought they're welcome was going to be. I think part of the reason that's true is because the characterization of Breaking Bad is so brilliant

and so specific. And it's so often like a little counter to what you would expect these characters to be and these people to be. Crazy 8 is the drug dealer. He is the guy who waves the gun around. He is the guy who threatens Walt and Jesse.

It's also the dude who's like delicately picking the crust off his sandwich. This is my main bullet point. Picking the crust off his sandwich. Like this is. Yes. That's it. It's a perfect TV moment.

Yeah. Honestly, and it's like such a small thing. You know, look, Breaking Bad, I would say overall does a great job. of picking up basically every thread that they leave lying around at one point or another, like a stray gas mask is not left in the desert. You know, like everything will come back. The crusts are not really coming back.

This is just a thing that informs who this person is. And I guess in that way, it always comes back. Also, you know, on the, on the Skyler front, Skylar having something to do in this episode, I know you're not on TikTok, Rob, but I do know you look at Instagram Reels sometimes. Have you heard the viral audio from the show? episode. What is the viral audio from this episode? It is the most viral breaking bad audio. And it's Skyler saying, do not sell marijuana to my husband. And Jesse going, okay.

And it's used for videos where people are like, I was never doing that. I was never planning to do that. But it is like quite a popular. At least I get served it a lot, TikTok audio. And I was just like, oh yeah, that's from this episode. That's so fun. It lives on. It will live. live forever. Yeah. Like, the TikTok's well live breaking bad ultimately.

You know, that's what's going to go into the library of Congress. It's true. And depressing. What's your honorary Bill Zimmons who won

the episode trophy going to? I think it is Jesse Pinkman. Yeah. And it's for a couple of reasons. One, this is where you start to see, I think the recalibration of that character from the pilot going from full-on caricature

to just like a little more muted. A little more muted, a little sharper, like, obviously. Sharper intellectually necessarily. No. No. Still getting inside of and falling over in tubs inside of your local target or whatever. But here's the thing. We need that. Like we need that specific energy.

And frankly, like the version of this episode in which Walt tells Jesse to buy a bin and he buys a bin and he dissolves the body. Gross, but not that interesting. Right. Not a good episode of television per se. The fuck up is what makes the show go. And it's the tension between Walt and. Jesse and like they're vastly different perspectives. And the idea that no matter what's happening, if it's a science related thing, Walt is obviously going to have a level of expertise that's

so different. If it's something related to criminal enterprise, Walt has no idea what he's doing. Like he's so out of his depth. And I would say Jesse is to, you know, to varying extent as well, but is a little more plugged in. Right. And so they're each put in positions to mess up at various points in the show. And who is messing up based on whose advice or what miscommunication. Like, again, that is what the show is. And it doesn't start unless we start here. The next question we sort of pose for ourselves is what about the most, what's the most important relationship in this episode? It's Walt and Jesse. Yeah.

And that's the show. And this, I think, is where we can talk about a little bit more in depth, the fact that the plan initially was to kill off Jesse Pinkman at the end of season one of Breaking Bad. There's a couple stories about why that didn't happen. One of them has to do with this was originally ordered as a nine episode season. the writer's strike happened, it wound up being a seven-episode season so they didn't, you know, they ended the season a bit earlier than they expected.

So Jesse lives to tell the tale. But here's a quote from Vince Gilligan in a 2011 cast panel where he says, and I'm not going to do the accent, but Vince Gillian has the best voice and most charming accent of all time. The original plan was to kill him off,

but I have to say the writer strike, in a sense, didn't save him because I knew by episode too. We all did. All of us. Our wonderful directors and our wonderful producers, everybody knew this talent, how good you are, and a pleasure to work with. And it became pretty clear early on that it would be a huge colossal mistake to kill off Jesse. But the idea was, I didn't know how important Jesse was going to be. And so the idea that this performance and this episode cements

Aaron Paul's position as a key part of the show, not a wacky side character, but a key part. And something to know going forward is that, yeah, the iconic imagery of season one of Breaking Bad is

Walt in the Tidy Whiteys with the gun in the desert, but every other season, the key art is the two of them. It's Jesse and Walt, it becomes a two-hander. This is something we talk about all the time when we talk about a show

like justified, which becomes, was supposed to be the railing given show and becomes a two-hander because an actor was so irresistible and sort of takes over the other half of the show. So without this episode and without this key relationship between Jesse and Walt, without, without, what does Jesse say? He says, like, oh, hey, nerdy's old dude, I know, you want to cook some crystal? please, I'd ask my diaper wearing granny, but her wheelchair wouldn't fit in the RV. Just like the back and forth,

this unlikely pairing and their differing attitudes, which is something I want to talk about a little bit later on, but like, as you point out, they're both fuck-ups in their own way, but I think this episode so clearly highlights a key difference between them

that I think is so important for the dual arcs going forward. What else you want to say about? I mean, I'm assuming you think this is the most important relationship inside of this episode. Well, you know, with all due respect to the many other well-articulated relationships in the world of Breaking Bad, and there honestly are many. But there's really not a lot of competition here because Walt and Jesse are so magnetic towards each other. And what those characters bring out in one another, I mean, you're right to invoke, like, the Raylan Boyd comp. Like, there's just something about them as counterpoint forces that work so well.

And the story of Breaking Bad, in addition to being about meth and problem-solving and training. heist and many, many other things is really about the changing nature of that relationship over time. And the ways in which they establish a working relationship, the ways in which they compromise morally and otherwise, like, how they navigate each other

is really what drives so much of the story. And that's what makes it so rewarding to watch over its entire run. Anything else you want to say before we talk about a particular scene that we want to pull out to talk about in this episode? I mean, what are the parameters on scene? I think I might have

expanded our purview slightly. A good, like a house of our smuggle. Classic house of our smuggle. But in this case, they're kind of threaded together and of a piece. I think the scene that immediately jumps out to me from this episode

involves the goo, but is at the tail end of it. I think it is the sort of like bookend of Skyler showing up at Jesse's house to confront him going straight into Walt also returning to Jesse's house and realizing what has gone down with the bathtub. Because you

couldn't possibly leave, I'm Skyler White, yo, my husband is Walter White, yo, off the table here. I mean, how could you? Very formative for all of us, and especially for that character. But I think the combination

of all that stuff really encapsulates a lot of breaking bad. And some of it is like, we see Jesse lighten up watching the three stooges on his couch. And I think his scene with Skyler in particular, Jesse and Skyler, and that confrontation, is like pure comedy of errors,

pure farce in the way that breaking bad can be. Yeah, the camera's catching crazyate's body just beyond the car that Jesse's trying to block her view of, etc. Yeah. Like the visual gag of that is so great. And within it, the building tension of... Sorry, Emilio's body, sorry, go ahead.

Short-lived, you know, he's soon going to be dripping through the ceiling. But I'm glad that we get that moment, and we get this, like, again, a pressure release within the course of the episode as far as like having this like an interesting dynamic between two characters who haven't had a chance to interact yet

and at the same time you're building new tension because you're trying to obscure this body because you're trying to keep the secret from Skylar that becomes a driving part of a lot of the show in many different ways but having that contrasted so specifically with Walt then walking in the door and having everyone get all the information on the table

very quickly as far as like how far this has fucked up yeah it's hard to pick anything else I would say the bathtub scene is so iconic. Bath tub through the ceiling. You know, you and I both are like, what's the one with the goo in the bathtub? It's a moment where you're like, wow, this show is going to go here. Not that nothing crazy happens in the pilot, but gooey remains of a person don't slop through the ceiling in the pilot the way they do in the second episode. A scene so iconic that Mythbusters did an episode.

episode on it. About the acid? Mm-hmm. Wow. Vince Gilligan and Aaron Paul were on the episode. They brought them on and they were like testing the acid. They didn't quite test this acid, but they tested comparable acids. And basically they determined, you know, they tested it on tile.

They tested it on this. Basically, they determined it would not dissolve the bathtub that they took some scientific liberties here. What about the body? Would it dissolve the body? It did turn. So they come up with this combination of acid that they said had a secret sauce in it because they did not want to tell people how to dissolve bodies in a bathtub.

But it did turn pig remains into goo while not eating through the enamel of the bathtub. So they just proved what we see here. So science, yo, like, it didn't work out that way. But it did feel, I have to imagine this episode in particular, is cited in no fewer than $450,000. different serial killer sub-reads, as far as like, would this really work? I read a couple great Vince Gilligan interviews in prep for this.

One of my favorites is one that Alan Seppel, Alan Seppelan, who wrote a great book about Breaking Bad, but he did this interview with Vince Gilligan on the 10-year anniversary of Breaking Bad called Vince Gilligan on the toughest jams the Breaking Bad writers put Walter White into. So this whole concept we're talking about writing Walter into a corner and then how do we get him out of that corner? How do we explain this thing that we have, this premise we've set up and stuff like that? In this other interview, though, Vince Gilligan is talking about watercolor moments. And he says, one thing I like about our series, one thing we strive for is to create water cooler moments.

That's certainly not an expression we created. But the way we define a water cooler moment is it's a plot development or is it a scene in which people can gather around the water cooler at the office and discuss what the scene meant, not simply get them talking about it, but have them discuss it and argue over what the scene meant and what it proposed perhaps for the future. So he is kind of talking about more. Quandries, moral transgressions, the way in which we see characters cross certain lines. And can we justify that action or can we not? So he's talking a bit more in a complex sense. But like from a pure hook them into watching your show, if your coworker comes into the office and is like, yo, to quote Jesse Pinkman. To quote Skyler quoting Jesse Pinkin.

On freaking bad last night, they turned a guy into good. and then he slopped through the ceiling onto the floor below. Looking like a few watermelons, basically. That's a water cooler moment. That's that you have to watch this show. You don't have that moment in the pilot. You do have like some, you're like, I don't know, this guy's in his undies. And then he thinks about killing himself, but then he doesn't.

And then the cops are actually fire trucks. Like, there's stuff that happens, but it's not as clean and as pure as Emilio is goo. And now he's dripping from the seal. as what happens in this episode. You just never forget the experience of watching the goop fall through the ceiling. It is indelible in that way. And, like, there is no replicating something like that,

and there's no replacing the value that that has in a viewing experience. You can watch, as you're saying, like a really engaging, entertaining intellectual pilot, but you need the goop. Like, you need some of that. And there are other, again, we're not going to spoil them in case you're listening to this

and you haven't watched Beyond Episode 2 yet, but there are other moments like that from Breaking Bad where I can be like the moment where X happens. Go to. Yeah. Go to the Goonin. You know? And it's just sort of like it's exciting to think about.

Also, we should say on the like Aaron Paul proving the case for his existence, Pinkman talking to himself as he loads the body into the bathtub. I know you were like, episode one is a little sort of like wackier than episode. But this is like, it's really funny and really, really good. It's a very funny episode. Yeah. It's not that it's not funny. It's just that the type of humor is a little bit different.

Yeah, yeah. And it's very like, it's the fact that it is slapstick that is right next door to one of the most macab things you've ever seen is, is the secret body dissolving sauce acid that is, that is breaking bad. Yeah. I think that is ultimately it as far as the pilot version. versus this episode. It's like, the pilot is all sewing,

and this is all reaping. And these aren't final positions. Like, there's still more problems to solve. There's still a lot of goop to clean up. Yeah. But ultimately, like, you're seeing the progression of these ideas and the intensification of the stakes

and the circumstances that you just can't get out of a first episode that easily, unless everything is, like, really tightly coiled. I also think it's, like, if you watch the first episode, you know, I was reading some, like, Redditors talking about, as you know, I love a subreddit, talking about why they love the pilot episode.

I was sort of like, okay, what's the case for loving the pilot episode? And some of them are like, it's like its own self-contained movie. And I was like, yeah, I can kind of see that. And there's an arc there. It's like how Stella got our groove back. Like, Walt is like, you know, got his sexual mojo back. He's like beating up teenagers in stores that are making fun of his son. Like, he's winning.

He's having wins. That's what the pilot is. He's had this terrible, horrible, life-altering diagnosis. And then he just sort of like, upward trajectory, I'm going to do some shit. And yeah, some stuff is going to go wrong. But, like, I can cook the glass grade. Is it a grade? I don't know.

Glass grade meth. I can fuck my wife. I can beat up teenagers. I can do all this stuff. I'm a man again. Like, this is what. And then immediately this episode opens immediately after the sexual. explosions of the end of the finale of the pilot to walt collapsing and then it's just sort of like

collapse upon collapse upon collapse and that's what breaking bad is it's it's you don't end with waltz on a high note we're we're like we're winning and we're losing and we're winning and we're losing that's we're constantly doing it so you have to have the losses of this episode next to the wins of the pilot is how I feel that it so yeah um rob bony what's the most 2018 thing about this episode of television. So I have a little thing that is Trojan horse into a big thing. The little thing is

Skyler sitting in front of a computer saying what the hell is a milf. Yep. Man American Pie came out in 1999. But Skyler not seeing American Pie is perfectly plausible to me. And we should say she's learning about it via Jesse Pinkman's

MySpace page in which he expresses Sorry, my mistake. Expresses his general interest as like, you know, bodacious ervage or whatever. Yeah. There's some karate bonifides and then milfs, milfs, milfs, milfs. Yeah.

Jesse's My Shout page is definitely my most 2008 thing. His like pseudo-MySpace page is definitely my thing. I would also put, and I actually don't know if this is character based for Skyler or 2008 temperature of the country, Skylar being such a square about Walt smoking weed. is sort of on my list. I don't know if it's meant to tell me more about Skyler or just where we were as a country and our attitudes towards weed.

I don't know. What do you think? We've come a long way for sure. I mean, this kind of feeds into the larger idea, which is one of the most 2008 things about these episodes is like Skyler's whole deal and positioning within the world of the show. And we don't have to get into the whole thing, but she's perpendicular to the plot in a way that I don't know that they ever fully figured out what to do with her.

They go, I think they swung so hard for it here at the beginning and they didn't know what the ramifications of that would be. Yeah. And I think they could not backpedal their way out of Walter St. Crawl out of my ass. Seriously? They just can't come back from that. And her concern is that she's genuinely worried about him.

Yeah. And just like once like the answers to a couple of very simple questions, and that winds up as her sort of like getting in the way of the murder and the drug dealing. Yeah, which is what everyone wants, the fun of the show. The fun. Yes. As we know, the murdering and the drug dealing and the gooping. Skylar being positioned as the nag, you know, a role and how that plays out for the rest of the season.

And you asked me about my hot takes of the ones who knock. I was like, I feel like I just spent a lot of time defending Skylar White, honestly. very on brand for me. Her actual takes and perspectives make a lot of sense. Absolutely. Is it cool to be talking about the cleavage of high school girls

at our breakfast table? Is that a chill thing to do? You know what? I'm going to say no. I also think... Seems reasonable, Joe. Talking shit to some teens who are making fun of your son,

good. Standing on their legs, maybe not the thing to do. No. Tell your wife, if you have a serious diagnosis, maybe loop her into what's going on. I don't know.

Something I think about for you, Walter White. Yeah, Skyler, the way in which they, you know, because Vince Gildling could never dig himself out of the hole that he creates here for Skyler is why

Kim Wexler is such an interesting character on Better Call Saul. Like, that was his sort of like next at bat where he's like, I'm going to do this again, and I'm going to not fuck it up this time. I've learned some things, and I'm not going to fuck it up this time. And what could be more breaking bad than that?

You know, fucking up, realizing your mistake, getting out the mop, cleaning up the goo and trying again. Yeah. How does this episode, in sort of like the most spoiler-free way that we can, how do you feel like this episode sets up the rest of the series,

either thematically or anything else we haven't touched on yet? I feel like it's mostly thematic, although you can see some of the mechanisms that will eventually drive the show. starting to snap into place. Obviously, that's true from a relationship perspective from Walt and Jesse.

There's also some things just like the setting of the desert, for example, the remoteness of the world in which these characters are inhabiting. Like, breaking bad, colon, Miami doesn't work the same way. It was supposed to be Riverside, California, until they got a tax break to work in Albuquerque.

It certainly would not work the same way in Riverside, California. It wouldn't work the same way in Cincinnati or anywhere else. It's like having the plausible deniability, like ability to disappear into the desert, I think is what enables a lot of the criminal activity of the show in various ways at various points

depending on what they need. And so you're starting to see like, okay, this is a world in which you can get at an RV and drive off into the distance and accomplish some meaningful version of whatever it is you are aiming to accomplish. For me, and again, in a vague way, I think it's really interesting in episode two.

Jesse is certainly the fuck-up and certainly the criminal element. and certainly all this sort of stuff. But he does the thing that he says that he's going to do. He doesn't do it well. No. But he does, he had to dissolve a body and dissolve a body he did. Wow.

No half measures, Joe. That's wild. Walt shirks what he's supposed to do. And, you know, I think that that is an interesting when we're given the upstanding citizen that is, you know, season one episode. episode one, Walter White, and we're giving scrambling, mostly naked out of a woman's bedroom window, Jesse Pinkman. But where are, I don't know, how you would delineate between moral compass versus sort of like honor or, you know, something like that, follow through. I don't know what it is, but it's just something like doing the hard thing.

And Jesse does it. He fucks it up, but he does it. Yes. You know? And he's just like, when he's like, so did you do it? How did it go? And then he like hears Crazy 8 down in the face. Like, what the fuck?

I think that's a really interesting thing to have in season one episode two of this show. Yes. To see all of Walt's feeble efforts to go down and confront slash kill Crazy 8. Yeah. You know, when he finally decides on, I'm just going to smother this guy with a plastic bag. and the second he's met with any resistance can't do it. I think there's an argument that Walt and Jesse, these are not two people who have an incredible amount of self-awareness

as to who they actually are. But I would say at this point in the story in particular, Jesse is a lot closer than Walt is as far as really understanding the crux of who he is in the world, what he's capable of, and where his lines are as a person too. Anything else you want to say about either the pilot or episode two of Breaking Bad? I mean, pretty good show, it turns out. Oh, guess what?

It's a good show, and you should watch it. It's a good show. You should watch it. And if you've been resistant for whatever reason, genuinely, I think this is a great place to start. And if you ever need to dissolve anything. Yes. Why don't you go pick up the specific plastic tub that your disgraced chemistry teacher tells you don't use the bathtub? But then we wouldn't have a show.

Unless you Believe Mythbusters And then do whatever the hell you want You know? All right We're gonna just have an option To talk about some big time spoilers So if you're listening to this

And you're like, I've seen all of Breaking Bad Why are you being so delicate? So we're going to talk about that in a second But if you would prefer to jump off And go continue your watch Of Breaking Bad into episode 3 and beyond, go for it. Anything that you wanted to talk about

specifically that you held back Just in case You felt like it was too much For folks to hear at this point. I was reminded, and I think I just kind of forgotten this or lost touch with it over time, how many different shows are within this show, and how many different versions of Breaking Bad we ultimately get? And it's seeing the humbler beginnings of specifically the cooks, obviously,

and kind of like the inventory they're working with and locations they're working with. I mean, we are, the scale of this show also manages to accomplish something that I think basically every other show fucks up. Every other show trips on its face when it tries to get bigger, and bigger and bigger, specifically with criminal enterprise, right? The more you're bringing in other drug dealers, other warlords, like other competing forces, there's always some misstep. And I think, again, one of the miracles of Breaking Bad is like, there just aren't really

missteps in that kind of like big plotting way. I think they basically hit and deliver on all of those corners that they write themselves into, whether that requires a Gus or a Mike, whether that requires like more Salamanca involvement. Like they're, they just have answers. for everything in terms of the ultimately, like, the difficulty of scaling story. Right. And I don't know how they did it.

I don't know how they pulled that off. When you teased Gootoo, the Goon-in-ing. Yes. Was that in reference to the death of Gustavo Frang? It could be. Honestly, it was more of an ambiguity. It could be anything, really. The goo too is the friends we made along the way.

We return to the world of dissolving bodies. You know, when Jesse Plumman enters the fray, we're dissolving things left and right into tubs in later seasons. But yeah, I think those big moments, Gus Fring or the prison assassinations or, you know, Hank's death, casually or like, you know, there's just like a ton of moments where it's just like it's that shock value. And this is one more Vince Gilligan quote that. I want to read about the shock value thing, which I think relates, you know, the bathtub goo is a shock value moment. A head on a turtle is a shock value moment, right? And this is what if it's not, I'm worried about you.

If a human head on a turtle isn't making, I guess maybe a tortoise, I don't know what's going on. A tortuga, yeah, yeah, yeah. If that's not stopping you in your tracks, we need to have a conversation. And you can email us at prestige TV at Spotify.com. We are concerned about you. You can try bathtub guadima.com, but I don't think we'll get that. Okay, so this is what Ms. Gilligan says.

We never try to be shocking on our show, believe it or not. That will probably ring false to some people, but really it is true. We believe in showmanship. We try to keep things interesting and to keep storing the pot and to keep folks watching in all these old-fashioned and time-honored ways of showmanship, but we actually never really intend to be shocking, certainly not for the sake of shocking. We try to be honest in our storytelling and keep our characters honest and keep the plot moving, in ways that after the character's motivation

so you never insert a scene into the show that shocks people just for the sake of it. And I think that's true. And I think that again, if you think about the death of Gustavo or, you know, the rice and cigarette or any of the things that happen on this show or, you know, Jane's death, like all this sort of stuff,

like all of these shocking moments, they're all tied so closely to a character beat a character transgression. And so for this, for Jesse Pinkman to haul Emilio upstairs and hoist him into a bathtub and pour all this acid on him is to again show us Jesse's follow-through but also show us Jesse's just like complete

fuck-upiness and just sort of like and then we're left with into episode three how are they going to get out of this one now they don't just have a body they got a hole in the ceiling and a bunch of goo and crazy it's still alive in the basement you know like that's leading us into episode three. So that is classic, like, showmanship. How are they going to get out of this one? Again, I did want to nominate Crazy 8. Not that it matters, but like, he's gone very soon.

Sure. And so, you know, shine bright, if not for long, Crazy 8. But a memorable turn, though. It is, again, to the humor that's deployed in Breaking Pad, the slow reveal of like, here's some jugs of water, here's a sandwich on a plate, here's a bucket, here's the roll of toilet paper. Here's the hand sanitizer. Like the slow pushing of items across the basement floor. This show already knew what it was doing in so many different ways. It's so good. In a way that feels so jarring from the pilot. Like, it just already feels so much more confident in the kind of show it wants to be. And it never lets up on that. It's not a perfect show by any means, but I think it's about

as good as one that you can get of this particular type. And one of the most purely satisfying viewing experiences I've ever had in that way. Yeah. And I think the fact that it is just sort of like five short seasons, propulsive. I don't think we ever feel like we get mired down, like, oh, this is the bad season. Like, season one is the shaggiest season, but there isn't like, you know,

the Landry killed some guy season of this show or anything like that. Well, I mean, you do get the Landry's killing guys. But it works this time. Todd knows what he's doing. You know, and I would say like the, you know, the two-part season five release, which went on to give Netflix all kinds of bad ideas

about how they should split their seasons. But like, there are some like hits and misses inside of that final season for me, but like, the joyous experience of watching it all together. And you think about

Osamandias and Felina and Granite State and just like all, like, it's just incredible what they accomplish. And then I think Better Call Saul is even better. And we just got an announcement of a new Vince Gilligan show. You know, something that

you sent me with some exclamation marks via text that we hopefully can cover on this feed in the future. So it's good to be us. It's good to be Vince Gilligan fans. Anything else you want to say before we head out, Romeroonian? I would say just in addition to

all of the ways the show continues to expand its plot and its world and all those things, at this point in the story, we talked about kind of the moral positions of these characters and where they find themselves and what they're trying to talk themselves into being able to do. The fact that over time,

you can introduce, I don't know, like 15 to 20 other characters who are varying other shades of gray, but not those exact shades of gray. It's a great point. Some of them shades of purple. It's quite an achievement. It's quite an achievement of a show.

Not that Vince Gilligan needs my affirmation, but he's going to get it. Yeah, and I just think that this idea of transforming for Walter and just the incremental steps. Like, to have the network say, no, we want Crazy 8 around for a couple more episodes. And to have Walter then grapple with that job as part of his one foot in front of the other march towards monstrosity is, again, the strength of the show is knowing where they wanted to hit with Walt's, digging out how to calibrate that over the course of however many. episodes they were going to get. How much should we accelerate? How much should we decelerate?

And then in the meantime, this, again, I love to talk about the, the pliancy of television, the reactive nature of television, the discovery that is Jesse Pinkman. And, like, how in many ways, like, the show doesn't exist without, the show isn't what it is without Jesse, absolutely. But in many ways, for many people, because Heisenberg is such a monster at the end of the season, of the series, like, Jesse's the reason you, like, is, is Jesse going to be okay?

Is why we tune in? And again, this is like something we discover, I guess, in season one episode two, breaking bad. Is Jesse going to be okay? Yeah. Is a question we continue to ask. The answer is often, no, Joe, unfortunately.

Really not. Just imagining the visual of him being chained up like a dog cooking in the underground meth lab. It honestly, like, gives, like, since it shivered down my spine. Absolutely. Do you think, here's my question to you.

I know we are trying not to pick anything too late in the run, and we wouldn't pick this particular episode for many reasons, even though I personally love it. Could you pick fly for this exercise as a self-contained thing? You floated it as an option. I mean, I floated it for everything. I'm going to be honest with you. I love that episode.

Yeah, we both love that episode. And I think that, like, you know, we love the audacity of a true bottle episode. and maybe. I don't think we ever want to pick something that's going to disorient people too much is the question of this experiment. But yeah, if you have other alternatives,

I think episode four of season one is an interesting case because that's the episode where you really see Walter doing it for himself, you know, kind of for the first time in a meaningful way. I think the end of, you know, the end of this season, I think you could make a case for, but Fly as like a self-contained bottle episode is interesting. I think you need the emotional investment in the characters

in order to make that work. But if you have other suggestions, or if you're like, how dare you, the pilot of Breaking Bad is perfect. Prestigevia Spotify.com. For right now, we're going to keep it a mystery, what shows we're doing next. That might change as we sort of cement the,

the run going for it, but we don't want to over promise and under-deliver on certain episodes. So we're really excited. But we're really excited for the show that we have planned next for this series. It's one of our producer Kai's favorite shows. I think his favorite show, right? A shared favorite of ours. So that's all I'll tease. And hopefully it's that show is number two in the series.

We shall see. Rob Mahoney, anything else you want to say before we head out? It's been a delight, Joe. I love Breaking Bad. I love that we're back. I love that we're back doing some podcasts on the first TV. I missed you. I missed you.

I missed our listeners. I missed Kai Grady. So thank you to Kai Grady. Thank you to Justin Sales. And thank you to very special contributor to this episode. Mani. Shout out to Mani. A legend and icon.

We'll see you soon. Bye. Ryan Reynolds here from MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today.

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