I was late to the party with “Breaking Bad.”
And by that I mean that I ignored “Breaking Bad” for most of its first three seasons. I couldn’t take any show seriously that put the Dad from “Malcolm in The Middle” into a drama. The early “Breaking Bad” posters of Walter White in his tighty whiteys while holding a gun didn’t convince me that this was anything other than a show to avoid.
But like a rogue Pontiac Aztek, “Breaking Bad” still managed to sneak up on me and roll on through. Just over three years ago, I randomly turned on AMC just in time to see Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman stare in disbelief as a car ran down two drug dealers. And what came next was even more shocking.
At that point, I knew next to nothing about the characters or about the show itself. But I had to see what was next. I followed the show all the way through the fourth season before I finally started watching “Breaking Bad” from the beginning. The conclusion that I quickly came to was that this show was great from the start. I’ve seen every episode of this series and there are no bad episodes of “Breaking Bad.”
For the Best Episode Ever column, this presents a dilemma. How the hell am I supposed to pick the greatest episode of “Breaking Bad?” The quality is so consistently high on this series that you could make a strong argument that last Sunday’s episode was the best one ever. Or the episode before that, or the one before that… and so on.
While most shows go downhill in their final seasons, “Breaking Bad” has been putting out classic episodes left and right. For example, “Dead Freight” for its thrilling train heist and its knockout ending, “Say My Name” for the stunning exit of a long time character and Walt’s continuing descent into darkness or “Gliding Over All” for taking Walt’s monstrous actions to their logical conclusion. Just a few days ago, we saw a long awaited showdown in “Blood Money” that was easily among the best scenes in the entire series.
Narrowing down the best episodes doesn’t get any easier by starting at the beginning. The pilot episode was amazing. Season 2 was even better, with the brilliant Mariachi Band performance of “The Ballad of Heisenberg” at the beginning of “Negro y Azul” before the second season peaked in the final two episodes. The slow build towards catastrophe was there all season even before it blew up and landed in Walt’s backyard.
Season 3 is where “Breaking Bad” began reaching an even higher level with the bottle episode “Fly,” Hank’s battle for his life in “One Minute” and the season finale, in which Walter and Jesse (Aaron Paul) seal their partnership (and save their own lives) by murdering an innocent man. The fourth season was also uncommonly strong, as the final six episodes were all contenders to be the best in this column.
This was a maddening choice. Any of those episodes described above deserved this honor. But in the end, I came back to the beginning of my “Breaking Bad” fandom: the twelfth episode of season 3, “Half Measures.”
I made that choice because of what the events meant for the series as a whole, but also because “Half Measures” gave every major character in “Breaking Bad” a chance to shine. Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte) gets some bonding time with his dad, while Walt bargains with Skylar (Anna Gunn) to at least make the appearance that they’re still a family in order to support the fiction that she came up with to launder Walt’s drug money.
This is probably one of the reasons that Skylar is not well liked among fans of this series. Skylar was appropriately horrified by the truth about Walt’s drug manufacturing. But when it benefited her family, Skylar threw herself into Walt’s world by coming up with a scheme to launder the cash and she committed more than a few criminal acts herself. Granted, the new Walter aka Heisenberg would scare the crap out of any sane person. But when Skylar started retreating from Walt after joining his criminal enterprise, it made her seem like a huge hypocrite.
In a comedic subplot, Skylar’s sister, Marie (Betsy Brandt) bets her badly injured husband, Hank (Dean Norris) that she can make him get an erection if he agrees to leave the hospital and be treated at home. The stunned look on Hank’s face as he gets wheeled out of the hospital may be one of the funniest images of the entire series.
But the bulk of “Half Measures” belongs to Aaron Paul, as Jesse plans to deal with the two drug dealers (Mike Seal) and (Antonio Leyba) who orchestrated the murder of his friend, Combo (Rodney Rush) by using Tomas (Angelo Martinez) — the little brother of Jesse’s girlfriend, Andrea (Emily Rios) — as the triggerman.
