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I am t in danger ...I am the danger. With those words, Breaking Bad's Walter White solidified himself as TV's greatest antihero. Wanna Cook? explores the most critically lauded series on television with analyses of the individual episodes and ongoing storylines. From details like stark settings, intricate camerawork, and jarring music to the larger themes, including the roles of violence, place, self-change, legal ethics, and fan reactions, this companion book is perfect for those diehards who have watched the Emmy Award - winning series multiple times as well as for new viewers. Wanna Cook? elucidates without spoiling, and illuminates without nit-picking. A must have for any fan's collection. Excerpt. (c) Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Wanna Cook's Episode Guide 1.01 Pilot/Breaking Bad Original air date: January 20, 2008 Written and directed by: Vince GilliganI prefer to see [chemistry] as the study of change ...that's all of life, right? It's the constant, it's the cycle. It's solution - dissolution, just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay, then - transformation! It is fascinating, really.- Walter White We meet Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Walt's family. Walt is poleaxed by some tragic news. With thing to lose, Walt decides to try to make one big score, and damn the consequences. For that, however, he needs the help of Jesse Pinkman, a former student of Walt's turned loser meth cook and drug dealer. From the moment you see those khakis float down out of a perfectly blue desert sky, you kw that you're watching a show like thing else on television. The hard beauty and stillness of the American Southwest is shattered by a wildly careening RV driven by a pasty white guy with a developing paunch wearing only a gas mask and tighty-whities. What the hell? Like all pilots, this one is primarily exposition, but unlike most, the exposition is beautifully handled as the simple background of Walter's life. The use of a long flashback as the body of the episode works well, in small part due to Bryan Cranston's brilliant performance in the opening, which gives us a Walter White so obviously, desperately out of his element that we immediately wonder how this guy wound up pantsless in the desert and apparently determined to commit suicide-by-cop. After the opening credits, the audience is taken on an intimate tour of Walt's life. Again, Cranston sells it perfectly. The viewer is presented with a middle-aged man facing the back half of his life from the perspective of an early brilliance and promise that has somehow imploded into a barely-making-ends-meet existence as a high school chemistry teacher. He has to work a lousy second job to support his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son and still can't afford to buy a hot water heater. Executive producer and series creator Vince Gilligan, along with the cast and crew (Gilligan & Co.), take the audience through this day in the life of Walt, and it's just one little humiliation after ather. The only time Walt's eyes sparkle in the first half of the episode is when he is giving his introductory lecture to his chemistry class. Here Walt transcends his lower-middle-class life in an almost poetic outpouring of passion for this incredible science. Of course, even that brief joy is crushed by the arrogant insolence of the archetypal high school jackass who stays just far eugh inside the line that Walt can't do a damn thing about him. So this is Walt and his life, as sad sack as you can get, with real prospects of improvement, a brother-in-law who thinks he's a wuss, and a wife who doesn't even pay attention during birthday sex. Until everything changes. The sociologist and crimilogist Lonnie Athens would likely classify Walt's cancer diagsis as the beginning of a dramatic self change, brought on by something so traumatic that a person's self - the very thoughts, ideas, and ways of understanding and interacting withProduct Identifiers
PublisherMyrmidon Books Ltd
ISBN-10190580296x
ISBN-139781905802968
eBay Product ID (ePID)195291370
Additional Product Features
Place of PublicationNewcastle
FormatPaperback
LanguageEnglish
Author(s)K. Dale Koontz, Ensley F. Guffey
Date of Publication13/05/2014
SubjectFilm, TV & Radio
Content Note20 Illustrations
ImprintMyrmidon Books Ltd
Country of PublicationUnited Kingdom
Author BiographyEnsley F. Guffey is a historian of American popular culture, and he has published scholarly essays on Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, and Marvel's The Avengers. K. Dale Koontz is the author of Faith and Choice in the Works of Joss Whedon (McFarland, 2008) and teaches courses in areas as diverse as communications, film, theatre, and the law.
