Writing on Writing, Blindness, Pop Culture, Science, Meaning, and Story
Hey everyone!
As mentioned in this post, there will now be a “live chat” post for each new episode. Feel free to post thoughts before, during and after the episode here. This will be a place for all the discussion on the new episode before the review post goes up.
Have at it!
The episode post for “To’hajiilee” is now up!
~Chrys
This is another installment of a rough draft of a memoir chapter that covers fourth grade. This one’s a little dark.
To start this piece from the beginning, click here.
As winter deepened, Mom’s bad moods got worse. I didn’t want to come home from school. Every time I walked inside the front door on days that Randy and I didn’t have Centerstream, there was something in the way the low winter sun fell through the big wide living-room window and onto the wall across the room, across from the front door. Something about the way the light fell on that off-white wall that I saw as soon as I opened the door made me feel sick to my stomach, like it reminded me of something bad I couldn’t quite remember. It made me feel haunted.
I felt so unsettled as I ate my afternoon snack each day, then went upstairs to play Barbies murder mysteries and write my little “books.” I was amassing a collection by then, a handful of stories that were about twenty pages each handwritten. I wasn’t really happy with any of them; I always felt they couldn’t quite capture the darkness of my soul. So I kept writing more.
Continue reading “Dark Winter Chill – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 7”
Let’s do the sad news first.
Yesterday tickets went onsale for the Breaking Bad series finale event at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and I couldn’t get tickets. I had two browsers going, but it just went from “not onsale yet” to “none available” with one click of the refresh button. I’m having a hard time shaking how bummed I felt after that. I’ve actually been keeping track of details about the event since the first whispers about it came out in February, and during this summer when more info was coming out, I always kept a page on my phone open to a google search for updates.
I imagined watching the finale under the stars in a cemetery (I mean can you get any cooler than that?) with a good friend in LA I haven’t seen in years, maybe meeting up with some of the AMC forum folks I’ve been chatting and discussing episodes with for all this time. It all sounded so magical. And when I found out there would be a Q&A with the cast and writers, it couldn’t get any better. I could picture it all, then coming home to write all about it here. It would be the perfect icing to writing about the final episode. Continue reading “A Bummer, A New Feature, An Opportunity and Quick Updates (all Breaking Bad Related)”
“Whatever you think’s supposed to happen, the exact reverse opposite of that is gonna happen.”
We finally meet Marie’s therapist, Dave.
And Jesse finally gets some lasagna sans scabs. Marie says she’ll heat some up.
This was a tough episode. It’s funny, in my big Predictions post, when I updated after “Confessions,” I was going to write (and at this point I’m not even sure I didn’t) that I had a feeling that “Rabid Dog” might be a bit of a low point, but that everything after (and I’m especially looking forward to “Ozymandias”) is just going to rock. And I’ve seen a lot of complaints already about “Rabid Dog”–and people are upset for a whole variety of reasons–and for me as a viewer, as a fan, it made me uncomfortable. It’s not a fun wild ride like some. It’s unsettling. I couldn’t sleep at all afterward. But after watching it a second time, I see it differently. I appreciated so many things about this hour of television. It’s a bitter wine, but good nonetheless
In a way, that title should’ve been plural. I look at the main characters who were featured in this episode–Walt, Skyler, Hank, Marie, Jesse and Saul–and almost all of them could be described as a rabid dog about something. In a twist, the only one who wasn’t rabid was Walt. That was a surprise.
To start this piece from the beginning, click here.
Early that winter, I went on my first overnight Girl Scout camping trip. My mom was working more at the newspaper, so for once, she wasn’t one of the troop leaders. We arrived at a big cabin called Hammond House. The walls were the color of wood and little cots lined the walls. The cabin was a long rectangle. One of the girls had recently learned the “Light as a Feather” game and we played it incessantly. One girl would lie in the middle and we would all surround her, purring two fingers from each hand under her. The person at the head gave a fake eulogy and then we all intoned, “Dead as a doornail, stiff as a board, light as a feather” over and over slowly lifting the scout in the middle up off the floor and up, up, over our heads. There were a lot of us, girls and girls and girls lifting, and it felt magic. We even did it on our troop leaders. I only got to be in the middle once.
Continue reading “Light as a Feather – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 6”
“Eat me.” Jesse’s first words.
This was my favorite episode so far this summer. Holy shit. So much to discuss. But first:
I gotta do it. I TOLD YOU SO in last week’s predictions that Jesse would find out about Brock and the poisoning. Yeah bitch!
So, are we getting ourselves into a Chekhov’s Disappearer situation now? That’s the second time that someone on the show has tried to use Saul’s last resort and the second time it hasn’t worked out. Walt was going to do it back in 411 “Crawl Space” but then he went to the crawl space to get the money and Skyler had given it to Ted for his IRS fiasco.
Now Jesse gets even closer to using this “out.” Saul tells Jesse, “This is it. Once I make the call, no take-backs.” Saul makes the call and asks for “a new dust filter for a Hoover Max Extract Pressure Pro Model 60,” Jesse’s at the pickup site, it’s all good to go…and then he just wants to smoke a little pot and the whole plan goes up in smoke. (Much more on that coming up.) So a second attempt to use the disappearer is thwarted. Will the third time be the charm? Will Walt (and family?) end up using the guy later on? Is that how Walt ends up in New Hampshire? Will this “gun” ever go off?
To start this piece from the beginning, click here.
“What on Earth were you doing?” Mrs. Domaracki asked when she caught me slithering out under a bathroom stall door. She ushered me out into the hallway.
“I was just, well the lock was stuck, so I—“
“I saw you climbing over the stalls,” she said.
“Fifth graders were doing it too!” I blurted.
She looked around swirling her head dramatically. “I don’t see any fifth graders.”
“Not now. They were here earlier. They told me to.”
She put one hand on her hip. “Who? What are their names?”
“I don’t know, fifth graders.”
Continue reading “Caught in the Act – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 5”
The question that was on everyone’s mind was answered in this episode. Yes, Saul is in fact still wearing the ribbon from the Wayfarer 515 plane crash.
And the question people didn’t even know they had was also answered. Yes, Saul’s office has a back door.
Seriously though. Lines in the sand.
This episode was all about laying out the loyalties. Everyone has chosen a side now. The only exception, the wild card, is Jesse. Jesse didn’t say a single word in the entire episode. We will have to wait and see if he starts talking once Hank enters the room. I have some theories about that, but predictions come at the end of the post. For now, Jesse’s just a money-tossing, depressed, guilty, scared Wild Card, the loyalest character whose loyalties are undetermined as yet.
Skyler chooses Walt. Walt actually assumes she wouldn’t. He knows on some level, more than he seemed to in the first half of Season Five, what a mess he’s made of his marriage. During last summer’s episodes, I was not on Team Walt at all, and I wouldn’t say that I’m on his side now, but a few things made me come around to his way of seeing things in this episode, made me feel for him, and in one instance, made me actually proud of him.
To start this piece from the beginning, click here.
I started asking to go to the bathroom way too often in Mrs. Domaracki’s class, especially when she was about to check homework and I hadn’t done it. It wasn’t a good plan—she always checked mine when I got back—but it delayed things a bit. I got a good sense of when she was as about to check, raised my had and then wandered slowly to the girls bathroom with its pale green walls and three stalls with low walls. I sat on the toilet and read a chapter in a book or thought up what I wanted to write in my next “book “ about secret passages and baby-sitters. Or I did math problems or recited in my mind facts about the Solar System until I couldn’t anymore because it had been more than five minutes and I had to scurry back to class.
Continue reading “Bathroom Jungle Gym – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 4”
“I gotta say, I don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now.”
Oh. My. God. Breaking Bad is back!!!
And holy shit, in that flashforward teaser, the White house has seen some better days. I think it’s safe to say that this scene is supposed to follow directly after the flashforward we saw last summer, where Walt, coughing and taking meds and making a 52 with his bacon, buys an M60 in a Denny’s bathroom. Not exactly a sign that times are dandy for Walter White. Next stop is his trashed house to retrieve the ricin and drive off for whatever mission or “last stand” he’s about to make. But of course, Future Walt must of course first survey the damage done to his house and the yellow “Heisenberg” painted on the wall. And scare or shock the living crap out of his neighbor, Carol.
Such a great teaser. Gives us a little continuation, a little more story, but asks more questions than it answers. Why is the house in this state of disarray? Has it become public that Walter White is Heisenberg? Did the whole family leave in a hurry together? Are the others alive? Who’s the ricin (and the M60) for? Why is Carol so startled by Walt that she drops her grocery bag (which of course contains oranges)? Will Walt survive his mission?
I wonder if there will be anymore flashforwards (my guess is no) before we catch up to this point in the story, (I’m making an educated assumption) in episode 515. It’ll be awhile before all these questions are answered. Plenty of time to guess, theorize and speculate in the meantime.
Until then, back to the present with Hank on the pot.
Chrys Buckley 