Disc of the Week (6/5/12)

In this young era of serialized television, it can occasionally be frustrating to sit through multiple weeks of buildup without catharsis. This inevitably puts a whole lot pressure on the finale, and how you pay everything off can decide whether your season/series is seen as great or a disappointment. Breaking Bad’s fourth season, which comes out on DVD and Blu-ray today, is a perfect example of a season that maybe took a little too long moving the chess pieces about, but the ending is so perfectly and thrillingly executed that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. I suspect marathoning the season on DVD may actually be the best way to consume it. There’s something to be said for following a television series week-to-week, but shows like Breaking Bad are so heavily serialized that significant time between installments may actually hurt the series rather than help it.

Nonetheless, the fourth season if Breaking Bad is terrifically constructed in any medium. Instead of the eventful structure we saw in the just-about-perfect season three, the fourth season opted to tell an extended story that tested the relationship between Walt and Jesse and continued to flesh out one of the most memorable villains in recent television history: Gus Fring. Played by Giancarlo Esposito, Fring is the kind of villain that looms large over every second of the show. Whether or not he is even onscreen, there is always a feeling that he is one step ahead of everybody else.

This season is also occasionally sloppy—its biggest flaw is that you can occasionally feel the writers guiding things rather than the characters—but the final several episodes make up one of my favorite stretches the show has ever done. It is always fascinating to see these characters go to work, and even the weaker episodes in the season’s first half work much better in hindsight. This was a season where Vince Gilligan and company gambled by relying so heavily on the ending, and oh boy did they deliver. Breaking Bad continues to push its characters further and further down the hole with each passing year, and it’s hard to imagine them going much deeper than where Walter ends up at the end of the fourth season. In one devastating final shot, the show tells us all we need to know: the transformation of Walter White is just about complete.

The fifth and final season—well, the first eight episode part of the fifth and final season—will begin airing in July. So, y’all should catch up. Also, feel free to read my absurdly long and undoubtedly pretentious blog post I wrote about season four after it ended. (I have not re-read it, for fear of embarrassment. Let me know how it is.) For now, I simply sit in anticipation of what is to come.

Also, instead of posting a trailer for Breaking Bad, here is a video of the show’s cast bowling against Chris Hardwick and the other members of the Nerdist podcast. It is awesome: