Boxcutter

Matt Zoller Seitz reviews "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 1: "Boxcutter".

My view is Gus would not have killed Victor, despite Victor's many mistakes, unless Victor posed a deadly threat. Victor's ambitions must have become intolerable. We need backstory.

Walt and Jesse, with Mike and Saul's help, will end up as the Southwest's drug kingpins. They will do Gus in, and have to learn to manage an entire drug underworld they don't understand.

I'm worried about that Superlab. It is a dungeon. At some point, they and their families will have to make an escape into the sunlight, but where can they flee?:

If you'd watched the previous three seasons, you couldn't help thinking about Walt and Jesse's moral degeneration over time. They've gone from small-potatoes hustlers on the fringe to major players. It's impossible to make that trip without becoming desensitized to violence, and increasingly willing to rationalize the most horrific crimes.

...If Walt and Jesse are horrible human beings, then what does that make us, the loyal viewers? Complicit. They're our stand-ins. They are capable of almost anything, and there is almost nothing we won't watch them do. It's the line about how to cook a frog in a pan of water; the show's writers turned up the heat so gradually that it isn't until season two or three that you looked down at your arm and thought, "Hey, are those blisters?"

This is the aspect of "Breaking Bad" that elevates it into the pantheon of great crime stories, and the aspect of the series that improves on "The Sopranos," "Deadwood," "The Shield" and other popular, crime-driven cable shows. It's not dropping us into the middle of an unfamiliar world and asking us to empathize with characters whose moral compasses are (one would hope) horribly defective compared to most people's --- characters we could always choose to feel superior to, if things ever got too icky. Gilligan's series starts with an ordinary, law-abiding man, Walter White, deciding to become a criminal, then hooks him up with Jesse, a petty criminal, then slowly introduces us to other, harder sorts of criminals, all of whom have certain awful lessons to impart to Walter and Jesse. Then it gradually takes us deeper and deeper into a criminal world, starting from the outside and moving slowly in. We don't realize how deep inside we are until we realize we've spent the better part of an hour in an underground meth cooking facility watching two guys being threatened and a third being murdered, and it seems perfectly normal.