MULDER: A growth? SCULLY: A tumor. You're the only one I've called. MULDER: …But it's treatable? SCULLY: The truth is that the type and placement of the tumor makes it difficult—to the extreme. MULDER: I refuse to believe that. That's right—the guy who can believe in Bigfoot, black magic, and aliens point blank refuses to…
The comedy that had been cleverly laced within the first 3 episodes of season 1 returns in the finale, albeit with varying success, and the needle that had been pinned to 10 on the plausibility scale for the majority of this run tips to the other end on occasion as the crime drama draws to…
Walter (Bryan Cranston) lays down the law to Jesse (Aaron Paul). He’s the silent partner; Jesse’s the guy on the street. Just as he says there’ll be no more bloodshed, we get a glimpse of the future Walter, baldheaded, walking down a crowded street full of riffraff, carrying a small bag with blood stains. He…
Jesse (Aaron Paul) tries to get a job in sales at a realty company, but he finds his qualifications are only worthy of a human billboard. Angry and discouraged, he walks back to his car when the current dollar-bill clad sign spinner calls out to him. An old friend named Badger (Matt Jones) shares a…
The anticipation of just how much Walter (Bryan Cranston) planned to reveal to Skyler (Anna Gunn) at the end of episode 3 is alleviated at a family barbeque in “Cancer Man.” The family sits around the table, sharing stories and laughing as if all is well, until Walter’s reminiscing about how he and Skyler met…
The Breaking Bad pilot laced different types of humor into what essentially could have been a heartrending drama of a man, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), finding out he has a cancerous death sentence—if it weren’t for his unorthodox and decidedly criminal stab at providing for his family. Series creator Vince Gilligan didn’t stop with the…
This is a rewatch, so be prepared that spoilers will land with all the romance of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. An RV is ripping across the Arizona desert, driven by Walter Hartwell White (Bryan Cranston), who’s wearing nothing but his underwear, shoes, and a gasmask. Slumped forward on the dashboard, in the passenger…
While Twin Peaks is a web of contradictions—combining as it does comedy and horror, “high” art and “low” art, pathos and irony—its central contradiction really boils down to this: while it has the structure of a whodunit, it rejects the entire notion of a solution. Here’s what I mean. The whodunit, as a literary and…
Let us now praise Audrey Horne. When we were first introduced to the pretty high school senior played by Sherilyn Fenn, she seemed to be perfectly in sync with the weirdness of her town: disengaged, offbeat, self-contained. (Her first scene was killer. Bored in class, she responds to her name being called during roll by…
Here’s something that has become increasingly clear to me by the sixth episode of this show. No one on Twin Peaks is what they seem. In many ways, of course, I began watching the show with that idea. I expected duplicity and complication and revelation. But it’s only natural to seek out some foothold in…
