4.1 Box Cutter The opening scene of the season 4 premiere will have seen the Breaking Bad acolytes all over the world breathe a huge sigh of relief. The excruciating 14 month wait is finally over, and the Current Greatest Programme Ever™ is back on the small screen to entertain and exhilarate us for another 13 weeks. Any exultant exhalations will have been short-lived, however, because it’s doesn’t take long for Box Cutter to grab your windpipe and remind you of something you may have forgotten over the long hiatus. Breaking Bad is seriously intense. After this, we pick up immediately where we left off last season, where in a stunning last-minute gambit Walt managed to finagle his way out of certain doom at the hands of Gus by engineering the demise of Gale – the innocuous and likable chemist who Gus had been grooming as Walt’s replacement – at the hands of Jesse. In the process, he robbed his surrogate son of whatever shred of innocence he may have managed to hold on to. While Walt is being held hostage at the meth lab by Mike the Cleaner, Jesse staggers away from the scene of Gale’s murder, shocked. Soon, Jesse is captured by Gus’s goon Victor, and the four men sit in the lab, waiting nervously for Gus’s next move. And they wait. And wait. And wait. There’s one word to describe Box Cutter, and perhaps Breaking Bad as a whole: masterful. Everybody in involved in the show on a creative and technical level is in total command of their craft. Vince Gilligan’s writing is razor sharp, the cinematography is astounding, the direction is inventive and snappy (I particularly enjoyed the smash cut from blood being mopped up to a hungry diner scooping up ketchup with a French fry), and the actors are uniformly magnificent. All of this means that the show can pull off virtuosic long, wordless sequences where nothing is said, but everything is conveyed either through a thoughtful shot composition, or through the nuanced gestures and performances of Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Jonathan Banks. Breaking Bad’s method of storytelling is to show, not to tell, and it’s this ethos, along with the most talented cast and crew currently in television, that makes it so utterly compelling. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Box Cutter’s central scene, where Gus finally arrives at the lab to confront Walt and Jesse in possibly one of the tensest and most brilliant set pieces the show has ever done. This is the show that spent a whole episode wringing tension out of Walt’s attempts to catch a fly, remember. It is amazing how much menace it can extricate from the mundane: it’s one of the first TV shows where you could accurately apply the adjective ‘Hitchcockian’ (sit down whoever just mentioned Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which is admittedly pretty Hitchockian). Thanks to Giancarlo Esposito’s terrifyingly controlled performance and some clever writing, we’ve known for a long time that Gus is an extremely dangerous character, but we’ve never actually seen him personally get medieval in a way that tallies with his fearsome reputation. We knew Gus’s reprisal was going to be terrible, but Gilligan and co made us wait a long time for it, treating us to long, silent passages. This episode was all about re-establishing Gus in the eyes of the audience as a total monster, and to emphasise the deep, deep, ‘dos’, as Hank might put it, that Walt and Jesse are going to find themselves in this season, which it did with style. For all the excruciating nail-biting, however, it should be noted that Breaking Bad is still genuinely funny, with more than a few laugh out loud lines (“I’m bidding on a mineral,” “Boy, someone’s a chatty Cathy today!”), some great visual gags (the aforementioned ketchup cut, the possible Pulp Fiction shout out of Walt and Jesse frequenting a diner wearing naff, matching Kenny Rogers t-shirts after disposing of a body), and some amusing call-backs and fan service (“Does this stuff really work?” “Trust us.”) These reviews are going to become a bit boring if it’s just going to be me fawning every week, but it’s been so long since Gilligan and co have put a foot wrong that for now at least, it just looks like you’re all just going to have to put up with it. And…breathe. Follow Paul Martinovic on Twitter, or for more babble check out his blog.
