It's one of my favorite TV shows, probably my favorite if I had to pick. Lately I've just been watching scenes on Youtube, but one scene struck out to me as a clever thing the writers did. So the part where Skylar is explaining how they've had money coming is becuase Walters been gambling, is a gambling addict and is shockingly good at it because of his intelligence making him good at counting cards and whatnot. If you piece together earlier scenes and look between the lines it's clear that this story is a lie, that actually he's been making his money by cooking and selling meth.
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On your season 5 writing ham fisted, in hindsight I feel like better call saul was also the writers trying to shove their views even further. Sort of like how the Wachowski homo brothers made the 4th movie reboot in an attempt to "reclaim the redpill" and other cases where writers inadvertently write something based and then get ticked off about it.
Well with Better Call Saul, it was like they wanted to write the anti-Skyler White in an attempt to show "we're feminists". Also they put in flashback scenes to try and recontextualize Saul Goodman and Walter White respectively. I see scenes from Breaking Bad revolving around both characters and you frequently see comments saying something like "I thought this was cool at the time, but it seems pathetic knowing what we know from BCS" as an example of a sort of comment. We all liked Saul Goodman. Again BB was competency "porn" and Saul Goodman was part of that.
We have in BCS Mike straight up tell Kim Wexler that he thinks she's made of tougher stuff than Saul Goodman. Saul Goodman, the guy who the writers previously described as a survivor, like a cockroach who'd somehow find the way to be the only one to survive a nuclear armegeddon; this lawyer lady is being told she's made of tougher stuff. And how do they do the convincing of that? By making her so stoic she essentially doesn't resemble any woman I've ever seen in real life. Her stoicism would be noteworthy in a man, and essentially never seen in a woman. So their way of getting around things is making her like a statue in terms of showing emotion.
Likewise with the ending. We waited all those seasons to finally see Saul Goodman set up shop and get to work, and they just time jump and skip over all that, and then he gives himself a worse prison sentence to make Kim like him again and prove his brother wrong. If they wanted to do a redemption thing, Nacho's redemption was the way to do it. That felt earned. The last season of BCS felt like they had no idea what to do in my opinion and how to have a satisfying conclusion to his character. I really don't think his character needed a conclusion at all. If it were merely a prequel showing him getting up and establishing this golden age of him operating as Saul Goodman, that would have been a satisfying show. But they wanted to recontextualize Breaking Bad, including by making Gustavo Fring explicitly gay. Sure, he seemed a little gay with that one flashback scene in BB, but they went ahead and just plopped a scene out of no where with Gustavo flirting with a man. Why? To score some woke points? You almost single handedly pumped out two almost completely shows that were devoid of gay crap which is unheard of in the modern day and you couldn't resist.
You've hit on what went wrong with Breaking Bad in the writer's room: woke shit. Gilligan I think is just like 80s empowerment woke, but he's got the usual Hollywood types all around him.
Gilligan wanted to tell a story of a hero that becomes the villain. They had Walter say he was doing it to provide for his family, and had evil Gus say a man provides, because to them that's just what toxic men say, it's never true, and nobody believes it. It makes him an egotistic liar to even say it. In their mind a strong man that provides for his family, both monetarily and spiritually, is a terrible thing.
So they think they're making Walt look bad, but the male audience at least said 'hell yeah a man provides' and he looks like a hero. Season 4 Walt is a fucking badass.
Season 5 comes around, they have to wrap it up, and they're like why is nothing we do making people hate Walter?! Maybe if he's literally Hitler they'll hate him.
I love Breaking Bad, but it's flawed in some big ways. I don't even rewatch season 5 at all.