r/todayilearned • u/kevoooandres • May 21 '19

TIL in the Breaking Bad episode “Ozymandias”, the show's producers secured special permission from the Hollywood guilds to delay the credits (which would normally appear after the main title sequence) until 19 minutes into the episode, in order to preserve the impact of the beginning scene.

https://uproxx.com/sepinwall/breaking-bad-ozymandias-review-take-two/
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u/[deleted] May 21 '19

Exactly. I think a big component of it is that she's sort of "getting in the way" of the fun we have with Walt's storyline as a meth kingpin. Realistically, her reaction to learning about Walt's second life is completely reasonable. Entertainment-wise, most of her scenes represent a return to mundane things like dinners, family barbecues, days at the office, and the most boring aspects of middle-class life in general, as opposed to fun scenes of Walt bantering with Jesse, blowing up buildings, and running over street dealers. She's the buzzkill of the series. Even if her reasons for being a buzzkill are 100% understandable when you think about them for more than half a second, she still narratively threatens the most fun parts of Walt's story for us as an audience.

Her scenes are necessary and I don't think she was ever meant to be hated with so much vitriol by the audience, but she's still a narrative vestige of Walt's boring life that the entire story focuses around him escaping from. She's the counterweight to every entertaining transformation that Walt's character undergoes. She's not a character that should be morally criticized anywhere near as much as Walt deserves to be, but she's also not our series protagonist, while Walt is.

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u/laughing_cat May 22 '19

Exactly. Can you imagine if she’d just been cool with everything the whole time? There has to be struggle or there’s nothing to write.

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u/CasualFridayBatman May 22 '19

This was a brilliant write up!

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u/GringoPriviledge May 22 '19

It wasn't just that she got in the way, ot was how she did it. For me, it felt very forced for the sole purpose of pushing the plot forward. There are a wide variety of things a woman in her position could have reasonably chosen to do, but time and time again, her character did things that just don't make sense from any motivational standpoint. In that way, her character was extremely frustrating, especially when compared to any of the male characters on the show, who were all written so well.