You can't even get us a single barrel.
Who said anything about barrels?
I'm talking about an ocean of this stuff.
Hey, guys, it's Andrew again.
This week, we're diving into one of my personal favorites
Breaking Bad.
This episode of Breaking Bad hits like a freight train.
It's 48 minutes of rich character development,
complex storytelling, and nail-biting tension.
Much like a freight train, this episode
links together cars full of deceit, betrayal, intimidation,
desperation, greed, action, and tragedy,
and sends our characters on a one-way trip
down an irreversible track.
This is "Dead Freight," the fifth episode in the Breaking
Bad's final season.
Some argue that this episode is where
Breaking Bad jumps the shark and leaves plausibility behind,
stating that the train heist was just a little too unbelievable.
And they aren't necessarily wrong.
The train heist seems like an incredibly difficult task
for these characters, who have no experience with train
robberies to pull off.
However, while the episode centers
around this methylamine heist, it
has almost nothing to do with the train robbery.
This is an episode about moral and ethical quandaries,
and how our characters react to these quandaries
under extreme circumstances.
In fact, the actual train heist is less of a plot point
and more of an environmental element.
It's a storm that our characters have to weather
and survive no matter the cost.
And within that storm, we learn what our characters
are made of when we subject them to these extreme circumstances.
It is a masterclass on how appropriate pacing can
have major impact on the overall outcome of one single episode.
When the episode begins with a cold open on a dirt
bike cruising through the sand dunes of New Mexico,
we see that the operator of the vehicle is a child
and watch him pick up and capture a tarantula.
Something that the best episodes of Breaking Bad do very well
is show you something seemingly innocuous and almost quizzical
at the beginning of the episode.
We've seen it with the pink teddy
bear seen throughout season two, which we find out
was from the plane crash inadvertently caused
by Walter White.
By this point in the show.
We know that every scene and every frame in Breaking Bad
is completely intentional.
We get this image of a child riding a dirt bike
and collecting a giant spike, but we don't get the context.
It's mysterious, it's intriguing,
and it's subtle, so subtle that we almost
forget about it entirely as the episode progresses.
From the beginning of this episode,
we see that our main characters are all in dire straits.
Lydia's discovery of the tracking device
on a barrel of methylamine has pushed Mike, Jesse, and Walter
to an extreme point of desperation.
The episode starts out with really high stakes,
which is part of what makes it so perfect.
Literally everything is on the line
as Walter White manipulates his way into Hank's office
to plant monitoring devices.
This is also a really interesting scene in the sense
that, while Walter is telling Hank about his problems,
he's essentially telling the truth
but under false pretenses.
Every single thing that comes out
of Walter's mouth in this scene is true.
His tears are real.
He truly is mourning the loss of love in his marriage.
Granted it's his own fault, but he is mourning nonetheless.
Despite the level of honesty and emotional vulnerability
displayed by Walter in this scene,
he still uses it to deceive his brother-in-law
to further his own agenda.
This is empathetic sociopathy, and you'd think something
like that would be impossible to capture in a performance.
The next scene is in stark contrast to the previous one
and it's a good example of how the episode uses color
to play with our emotions.
The warm reds and earth tones of Hank's office
makes us feel safe and secure, as
if nobody can be harmed here.
As we transition to the basement of the warehouse,
that warmth and security disappears
and is replaced with cold blues and the bleak grayness
of concrete.
It looks heartless and empty.
We immediately connect visually to a sense of danger.
Someone could die here.
From the beginning of this scene we
understand that Lydia's life is on the line.
As viewers, we begin to scrutinize
every decision Lydia makes because we know that she
could die at any minute.
An audience that is scrutinizing a character's decision
on that level is an engaged audience.
We become even more engaged as our main characters struggle
with the first major moral quandary,
in whether or not to, in fact, shoot Lydia in the head.
The stakes are what grip us and put us on the edge of our seat,
but with the addition of a moral dilemma,
we are drawn in and placed in these characters' shoes
as they weigh out the pros and cons of ending someone's life.
In an act of self-preservation and desperation,
Lydia uses a window of opportunity
to clue Walter, Mike, and Jesse onto a gigantic tanker filled
with a massive amount of methylamine
headed towards them by train.
And by the time they make the decision to go through
with the heist, we've spent almost half the episode
getting to the primary objective.
Breaking Bad takes its time.
The show does not move on until we understand completely
what is on the line, how it affects our characters,
and what it means to succeed or fail at it.
Now that the show has done the heavy lifting of presenting
the extremely high stakes, we get
to see the elaborate setup of how
the heist is going to go down.
The writers do a great job at showing us
the pieces and how they work without beating us
over the head with foreshadowing.
It's not only a efficient and concise,
it also fills us with anticipation now
that we have an understanding of how
the heist is going to unfold.
The next scene is one of the most important scenes
in the entire series.
After banishing his son to go stay with Hank and Marie,
Walter and Skyler sit down for a little heart-to-heart.
In this conversation, Skyler makes something very clear
with the line of dialogue.
I'm not your wife.
I'm your hostage.
It's here where we realized that Walter White's marriage,
his family, the thing that has been driving
him the entirety of the series, has
reached the point of no return.
It's also in this moment where Walter White accepts
the fact that he has destroyed his own family.
There's only 15 minutes left and we still have a train to heist.
What makes this climax so great is
the way in which it is paced.
A satisfying climax is earned, and pacing
is the way to earn it.
Almost an entire minute of footage
is spent just showing the train in motion.
The music composition here helps at the tempo
as the chaos of the train's elaborate machinery speeds
over the heads of our main characters.
It's a symphony of tension as our hearts
are pounding to the beat of the drums.
A brief reprieve as the train halts and, boom, the heist
is on.
There's not even a whole lot going on here
as far as heists go.
It's just three guys pumping liquids
while Bill Burr distracts the crew.
So why is it so exciting?
All the elements of fantastic storytelling are present here.
The music is perfect for a sequence like this.
The sound of the whirring and the visual counter
of how many gallons of methylamine
also add to what makes this feel exciting.
Our characters are speaking with intensity.
The editing is on point and really highlights
how the heist is unfolding, cutting between sweating faces,
frantic movements, and the roar of the generator engine,
the filling of the hoses--
it all paints a very clear picture
of what exactly is happening.
There's even a bit of humor in the sequence with Bill
Burr in the way he keeps extending his con on the train
conductors.
Mike Ehrmantraut's narration via walkie talkie here also raises
the stakes, to the point of it almost being a little too
nail-on-the-head.
It all comes down to the very last second.
The music swells, Jesse lets the train pass over him,
Todd leaps to safety, and the group rejoices.
Yes, bitch!
Everything seems fine until--
yeah-- until that kid on the dirt bike
you forgot about shows up.
Without hesitation, Todd murders an innocent child and everyone
here is complicit.
Any shred of dignity these characters had
is gone in an instant.
It's a catastrophic tragedy that occurs in the last 60 seconds,
and the credits roll over the tarantula in the glass jar.
"Dead Freight" is an episode of Breaking
Bad that utilizes almost every facet of powerful storytelling
and weaves them together in a way that constantly bats
our emotions back and forth.
We feel sorry for Walt. We feel concern for his family.
We feel fear for Lydia.
We feel empathy for Skyler.
And we feel pain and anger over the tragic and senseless death
of a child.
There's also a heist involved.
By the time the episode is over, we really
feel like we've experienced something
exciting and terrible.
When we tell stories, we want to have these high stakes.
But it isn't enough to just create those stakes.
We need to earn the right to have them by establishing
peace and action.
When this is done poorly, it's at the very least
somewhat exciting.
But when it's done well, it takes us
from simply watching a show to actively experiencing one.
Well, that's it for today's video guys
let me know in the comments what other topics you'd like for me
to cover.
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any future Nerdstalgic content?
See you guys in the next video.
[DOWNTEMPO ELECTRONIC MUSIC]