(no subject)

Rewatching all Lost was mostly a horrible slog. Rewatching Breaking Bad is a nonstop delight. We started with season 3 but immediately regretted it. With Lost, even on the rewatch, each episode felt like empty calories - what little value there was was projective, and of course the projective value turns out to be near nil since the deferred satisfactions don't arrive. Hard going once you know it. There was value to it once, it's true. But there can't be again, at least for me.

With Breaking Bad the disappointment of each episode ending, of having no time for more, is dwarfed by our gratitude for what we've been seeing. For being made full. It's great to be noticing new things, but everything that was great last time is there undiminished too, because none of it was mirage. All was load-bearing, and the load borne wasn't simplistic or late Lost's sixty-five tons of bullshit.

And how it improves as it goes is one of its impossible secrets - somehow you start to feel that's happening episode by episode, not just season by season or even cluster by cluster. And not as an average of each episode's scenes - it's just that each time a scene or character or situation that's been away for a bit recurs it's a better shot and written, more thought through version of itself.

Some of this has to be illusory - where critical mass, pun intended, is reached you start looking for new ways to love what you love. You work on its behalf. And you fucking love doing that.

Though while I'm one of the fierce finale-lovers I will say that there were stretches that didn't give the sense of being better versions of (whatever) than had appeared before. Victim of its own success, in that sense, though there's room to be grateful even there, since a send-off as beyond perfect as Ozymandias or beyond new as Granite State would have made withdrawal anguish, which I for one am still feeling acutely, even less bearable. Here's how acute it was: I'd been feeling restless and heart-achy a few weeks ago and couldn't figure out why. Then noticed it had been exactly one year since we'd watched the finale. I'm feeling withdrawal while watching and loving and responding with full fresh awe to each minute of season 5 again.

Another secret, maybe the secretest, seems to me to be knowing exactly what "grain" to aim for. TV shows' worst sin is not attending to, often because not knowing, the place any part has in the show as a whole - which matters because our brains look for such wholes. Obviously other shows, and certainly seasons, have had completed arcs, but since individual episodes have these, scenes within them do etc. there's a tendency to return to some Platonic set of norms and just inflect key moments and/or endings. The time-stamp's on pretty much everything in Breaking Bad. Maybe it has the writers' strike to thank for that, for throwing it off of season-sized arcs so early? Or the garden path aspect of the middle (Gus) third, where two motivations are presented for all of Walt's choices, forced and elective, such that our minds are taken off of his (d)evolution? Probably that progress itself is what keeps the show understanding how close to its ending to feel. Things will get as bad as they can and then - do another thing. And for some reason we do know how long doing another thing takes, even if Kennedy didn't. It takes one twenty-fifth as long. Forget this and we'll be annoyed at you forever - I'm looking at you, Ghost and A League of Their Own.

I think this is one of the reasons style is so important, too. We want artworks to look and feel distinct, not just conceptualize distinctly, so that they can more easily stand out as memories - the way memories do among other memories, in fact. Even within artworks we want that to be the case. A change in location, in pace, in the sorts of things one sees happening; all twinned with continuities, recurrences. That's all very basic, but when you understand it well enough you can do a lot of it at once, and simultaneously do it more subtly. Having it all seem natural while at the same time nudging every stray or confused thought of the appreciator back to where it should be. Intelligible nature, that nuttiest of paradoxes, or anyway hardest lightning to herd.

This may be mere serendipity too - steadily growing viewership leading to a higher budget for sets, sound editing, cameras, art directors etc., which change the ambience gradually enough that the changes seem organic, purposeful. And of course the writers and actors also are likely enough to know what they're doing better the longer they're at it. That's the silver lining to the relative chaos of the early days of any show, even Breaking Bad: the natural shift toward order and self-consciousness will feel like the movement toward mystery from out of the-mystery's-what-the-mystery-is of a good story. But eventually someone starts to suck, is how it mostly goes. That there was a sense of an oncoming ending, and not just a stopping that could be made to look like one, must have discouraged sucking as powerfully as positive attention incentivized new awesomeness.

This post has lost its own sense of where to end and has in general fallen into intolerability, so I'll wrap up. Three cheers for Breaking Bad!