Box Office Report: 'Breaking Dawn Part 2' Falls Shy of 'Twilight' Record

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WINNER OF THE WEEK: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Okay, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln didn't exactly take an ax to the massive grosses of Twiilght: Breaking Dawn Part 2, but it still took a bigger-than-expected bite out of the weekend box office. After last weekend's impressive limited-release debut, the biopic expanded wide and raked in an estimated $21.0 million, good for third place. Not too shabby, considering that the Daniel Day-Lewis movie had pundits predicting a gross as low as $11 million. But his much-buzzed-about performance drew grown-up audiences who might otherwise have poked their heads into Breaking Dawn Part 2 or Skyfall.

 Skyfall, by the way, did lose 53 percent of last week's business, but falling to an estimated $41.5 million in its second weekend was still good enough for second place. The latest James Bond film has grossed $161.3 million in 10 days. Wreck-It Ralph continued to have the kiddie audience to itself, coming in fourth with an estimated $18.3 million, for a three weekend-total of $121.5 million. In fifth place, Flight lost altitude, dropping 42 percent from last week to an estimated $8.6 million, for a total to date of $61.3 million that will stall well shy of $100 million by the end of its run.

LOSERS OF THE WEEK: Team Edward and Team Jacob. Granted, it's hard to call a movie a loser that opened with an estimated $141.3 million. Still the fifth and final Twilight had been expected to be the biggest, when actually, it sucked up just a bit less in ticket sales than the second installment, New Moon (which opened with $142.8 million in 2009). Experts had expected it to bite off at least $150 million, so the actual take is a mild disappointment. Still, word-of-mouth is strong, and the movie does have some adult appeal, so it's not entirely dependent on the teen girl audience that made up the bulk of the opening-weekend crowd.  So despite an opening that didn't soar over the fence, there's no reason to think Breaking Dawn Part 2 won't end up in the same ballpark as the rest of the vampire franchise.

WATCH YOUR BACK, BELLA: Like The Twilight Saga's Kristen Stewart, who'll be astonishing audiences next month by playing a very un-Bella-like sexual libertine in On the Road, rising starlets Jennifer Lawrence and Keira Knightley seem to feel just as comfortable stretching in indie and art-house films as they do working in mainstream blockbusters. This weekend, both unveiled Oscar-baiting performances in The Silver Linings Playbook and Anna Karenina, respectively. Lawrence may be as big a draw in Playbook as co-stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, and not because anyone expects her to remind them of The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen. Frequent Pirates of the Caribbean heroine Knightley always manages to breathe passionate, fiery life into highbrow literature when she works with director Joe Wright, who also directed her in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Both Playbook and Anna Karenina showed signs of living up to their art-house hype with this weekend's strong openings on just 16 screens each. Playbook earned an estimated $458,000, or about $29,000 per screen, while Anna Karenina scored an estimated $315,000, or about  $20,000 per screen. (Those numbers are nearly two or three times what the impressive Lincoln made per screen this weekend.) Such figures suggest that both Lawrence and Knightley will do very well when their movies open wide – and that the two actresses will continue to be able to balance their careers between art and commerce.

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Chemical Brothers: 'Breaking Bad' Stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul of 'Breaking Bad' on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Walter White is staring at me. He doesn't like what he sees. It's just before midnight, and we're facing off in the dusty shadows of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, parking lot, between rows of white trailers. "You chicken?" he asks, freshly razored scalp gleaming under a distant streetlight. "You a scaredy-cat?" He's not even Walter now – he's his alter ego, meth kingpin Heisenberg, and in his pitiless blue eyes, I'm everything weak and human and in the way: I might as well be Jesse Pinkman, yo.

The moment passes, and he smiles under his sinister goatee. His eyes defrost. The spell breaks. He's just Bryan Cranston, an avuncular 56-year-old actor at the end of another 13-hvaour day of playing what he calls "the role of my life," the one that's won him three Emmys and counting. He emerged a couple of minutes ago from one of the production trailers, where he changed from Walter's unstylish khakis, button-down and Clark Wallabee shoes into his own slim-fit dark jeans, leather high-top PF Flyers sneakers and polo shirt.

We're heading to a bar about a mile away, and he's trying to goad me into taking a helmetless ride on the back of his Quadrophenia-ready silver Vespa scooter – and in the process, giving me a taste of Walter White's persuasive powers. "It's started to rub off on me," he says, in his calming, actorly baritone. "You know, it's great to see how much you can intimidate just by lowering your voice and giving a stare. And it's like, mostly people back off."

Breaking Bad is, at its core, a story of transformation – unlike nearly every character in the history of television, Walter White is changing beyond recognition over the show's 62 episodes. It's less a character arc than a plunge down a moral elevator shaft. As show creator Vince Gilligan routinely puts it, Walt is going from Mr. Chips to Scarface – from a meek, defeated high school chemistry teacher to a vicious criminal: Last season, he went so far as to poison a child. "Bryan can pull off anything," says Aaron Paul, who plays White's unlikely partner, the wounded-eyed hip-hop-damaged slacker Jesse Pinkman (the show is also an extended, bizarre buddy-movie riff). "I mean, he does so many horrible things and yet the fans are still like, 'Yeah, Walt! Fucking poison that kid! You're dying of cancer. I understand!'"

Adds Gilligan, "You can have a main character like Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper, someone who does questionable things, but since they are the protagonist you can't help but see the world of the show more or less through their eyes. Sometimes I liken it almost to a Stockholm syndrome, where you as the viewer start to see things as they do, which is a danger when you're talking about a guy as warped as Walter White."

After Cranston accepted the role, he started asking people if there was a prior example of such a radical TV-character change – and one friend came up with the only known example: "Fonzie started out as a badass," says Cranston. "And he became, like, 'Hey, Mrs. C.' So this is the reverse Fonzie."

With its endless paranoia, Breaking Bad is like the frantic final minutes of Goodfellas stretched over six seasons of television. It's a desert fever dream about a doomed America – though few nightmares have such clockworklike plot construction. Its tone is distinctly less naturalistic and its situations less plausible than other greatest-show-ever contenders (The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire). "We're obsessed with coming up with moments that people won't soon forget," says Gilligan, who spent seven years as a writer for The X-Files. "And sometimes they border on the operatic or perhaps on the hyperreal, if not surreal. It's all about showmanship."

He's referring, presumably, to the image of Walt's nemesis Gus Fring calmly adjusting his tie with half of his face blown off, or a purple, one-eyed stuffed animal diving into Walt's swimming pool from a crashed plane, or a decapitated head strapped to a tortoise and rigged with explosives. It's the show's pulpy DNA – and Gilligan's twisted sense of humor – that makes Breaking Bad so much deranged fun. "The two shows share something," says X-Files creator Chris Carter, who had Gilligan write some of that show's funniest and weirdest episodes. "They both start with outrageous concepts: an FBI agent chasing aliens and a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a meth dealer? Both outrageous." The meth is out there.

In any case, if Walter White – or even his closest nonfictional analog – wants you to get on a scooter without a helmet, you just do it. We chug along, and everything we pass feels like it could be on the show, probably because much of it is: We cruise Ron Peterson Firearms, Ace Cash Express, De Anza Motor Lodge (where Walter found out about the birth of his daughter) and Octopus Carwash (Walter and his wife, Skyler, bought a nearby franchise – given a different name on the show – to launder their drug money). Cranston takes a deep breath as we approach a traffic light. The blazing sun is long gone, and the air is cool and clean. "It's a beautiful night," he says. The light turns green, and Cranston, who spent two years of the Seventies on an Easy Rider-style motorcycle trip, hits the gas. "What could go wrong?" he says, chuckling, as the pavement speeds by at an alarming rate.

Before this trip, Gilligan had offered some safety tips for Albuquerque, though he failed to account for this particular scenario: "Put your sunscreen on. You'll get the hell burnt out of you there, and if you haven't been out in high altitude in a while, you'll wake up at night and gasp. Any time someone offers you a bottle of water, drink it. There's no worse headache in the world than a dehydrated headache." He paused, and looked at me seriously: "You could die out there!" Then he laughed for a long time.

Cranston steers his Vespa safely to an Irish pub named O'Niell's, where we're meeting Aaron Paul for drinks. Paul wrapped for the season tonight, and he's ready to celebrate – later, we're headed to the casino. "Bryan's being a pussy and won't come," says Paul, 32, who is wearing jeans and a green T-shirt with the word RENTAL on it (it's from a line that reproduces shirts worn by rock stars – in this case, Frank Zappa). "You can quote me on that." Despite a 24-year age difference, Paul and Cranston are genuinely close – they're even planning a double date with Cranston's wife and Paul's fiancee to see Sigur Rós in L.A. in August.

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'Breaking Bad' Recap: Breaking Down

Bryan Cranston as Walter White, Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman and Jonathan Banks as Mike in 'Breaking Bad.'

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so the saying goes. Breaking Bad seems determined to prove the inverse: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results.

Which is ironic: After all, doing the same thing over and over with the same results is the basis of you're-goddamn-right-I'm-Heisenberg's venture into "the empire business." Given the right formula, the right ingredients and the right working conditions, Walt will produce a superior product every single time. That's correct, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go any farther than the four walls of a makeshift meth lab.

Written and directed by Thomas Schnauz, "Say My Name" saw the tried and true methods of Walt and his confederates fail where they'd succeeded in the past, time and time again. Walt pulled a fast one on Jesse during their tense desert negotiation with Declan over the methylamine, convinced he could persuade the kid to stay on board and take his money later on with the usual combination of ego-stroking, empathy bullshitting ("I am just as upset as you are") and emotional Achilles-heel-slashing. It's worked a dozen times before, right? Not this time. To Walt's disbelief – and he hasn't looked as ridiculous as he did in that moment of disbelief, standing in his bright orange coveralls and garden-gnome workboots, yelling at an empty room, since his tighty-whitey days – Jesse has a limit, and he's reached it. No carrot can persuade him, no stick can coerce him. Man, what a cathartic moment, to see Jesse leave the money and run.

Diminishing returns are a recurring problem, or problem-to-be, for Walt throughout the episode. He does his umpteenth tough-guy bluster routine to face down a dangerous druglord in a gorgeously golden desert, and indeed appears to do better than he did in similar past run-ins with Tuco or Gus, but his master plan has a Jesse-sized hole in it. He goes through the desperate house husband routine in Hank's office again and retrieves the bug he'd planted effortlessly, but only catches wind of Mike's impending arrest through sheer dumb luck. Skyler, of course, reached her Jesse point with Walt a few episodes ago, and now doesn't even bother to say a word when she departs from his grotesque simulacrum of the daily dinner routine. I wonder if Mike's death will be the Jesse point for Walt's remaining "YEAH WALT'S A BADASS WOOO" fans in the audience, too.

And the less said about apprentice-hungry Walt taking Todd under his wing as a new Jesse, the better. The old Walt surely would have been able to see that you run, not walk, away from a guy who views taking detailed notes, refusing payment until his skill set has been mastered and murdering a child as functionally interchangeable aspects of Doing a Job Well Done. But Walt has a routine, and if Tarantula Todd is what it takes to keep that routine going, so be it. The sickly green lighting of that sequence says all you need to know about what a poisonous idea this is.

Mike's lawyer/bagman Dan Wachsberger had a routine that had worked time and time again, too, right up until it didn't. Not even the bank employee's readily apparent, suspension-of-belief-defying lack of enthusiasm for Dan's gift of cake pops – seriously, I don't care if the DEA has just told you they're about to arrest a guy you've been friendly with forever, cake pops are delicious – tipped him off that something was wrong.

And you know, it's kind of tough to blame old Dan, who seems like no one's idea of a criminal mastermind. The blame must ultimately be pinned on Mike for leaving the undotted "i" of Dan's involvement with every Fring associate except him out there for a pattern-detecting brain like Hank's to pick up on. (The audio as Hank focuses on Mike's photos during the teleconference, blotting out all other external input, should be familiar to anyone who experiences attention deficit disorder as an almost superhuman ability to lock in on one thing and one thing only.)

Last week I found Mike's series of unfortunate decisions regarding Walt difficult to swallow. Now I wonder if Mike isn't simply too exhausted to be the flawless Mr. Fix-It he once was. Physically exhausted, yes, in the case of last week's episode, during which he pulled an all-nighter prior to his half-assed incarceration attempt with Walt; and perhaps in general, given that he is, as the marvelously grinning Gomie put it this week, a sad old man.

But it's the "sad" that's the kicker. Mike's just done, mentally and emotionally, and you can see it on his face. Chalk that up to Jonathan Banks's simply marvelous performance this season, particularly the two times when he was at the park with his granddaughter and realized the cops were there with him. His face cracked but didn't fall apart, his eyes watered but never quite teared up and overflowed, as if his years staying one step ahead of both the law and other criminals burned out his ability to have a good emotional breakdown. In this light, his hugely stupid decision to allow Walt to deliver his gun-laden go-bag instead of Jesse is the product of a mind running too hot for too long. He died as perhaps he'd prefer to have lived, sitting down, looking out at a lazy river, his last request just for some peace and quiet.

My concern is that what's true within the show is true of the show itself. Perhaps it's the necessarily brusque pacing of an eight-episode mini-season, but while it is of course completely goddamn rotten to see Mike go, I can't say that it stunned me, with surprise or with emotional power, the way the death scenes for Tuco, Jane, the Cousins, Gus or the boy on his bike did. This is a road we've been down, and this time around the signage was ample and clear, from this ep's position as the penultimate one in the penultimate season (a guaranteed spot for fireworks in today's prestige-drama era) to Mike's emergence with Skyler as the protagonists pitted against Walt's antagonist figure this year. That's a two-men-enter, one-man-leaves situation if ever there was one, and no matter how well the show misdirected during the scene itself – I absolutely thought Mike was getting out of there, with all the chances Walt had to pull a gun on him but didn't – it's tough to make the inevitable shocking.

Then again, maybe the show isn't trying to do the same thing it used to do over again. Maybe that air of exhausted inevitability is the only way a story like Walt's can end.

Last episode: The Aftermath Doesn't Add Up

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'Breaking Bad' Star Bryan Cranston to Direct Episode of 'The Office'

Bryan Cranston as Walter White in 'Breaking Bad.'

When he's not cooking meth as Walter White on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston likes directing sitcoms: the menacing star of AMC's hit show steps behind the camera to direct an epsiode of The Office this season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Cranston will direct an episode called "Work Bus" that's scheduled to air October 18th. He's previously taken the reins on installments of Modern Family and Malcolm in the Middle (on which he played the father), as well as Breaking Bad.

Office co-star Rainn Wilson let word slip on Twitter yesterday when he posted a photo of himself posing with Cranston and wrote, "Free meth for 'The Office!' (look who's directing)." Cranston has won three Emmys for his work on Breaking Bad and is currently nominated for Best Actor in a Drama.

The Office returns September 20th on NBC.

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'Breaking Bad' Recap: The Aftermath Doesn't Add Up

Bryan Cranston as Walter White speaks to Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman in 'Breaking Bad.'

So much for picking up where we left off.

Last week's Breaking Bad was so breathless, its final moments so shocking, that the desire to put the world on pause until 10 p.m. the following Sunday and start up again from the very next second was almost physical. Instead, the show presented us with a fait accompli. No desert, no train track, no immediate follow-up. No last-ditch effort to save the young eyewitness's life. No arguments over how to cover up the evidence. No screaming by Jesse, no rationalizations by Walt, no retaliatory execution of the murderous Todd by Mike.

Nope, "Buyout" (directed by Colin Bucksey from a Gennifer Hutchison script) begins with a wordless sequence in which the gang, Todd included, methodically dismantle and dissolve the kid's dirtbike – and then, implicitly, the kid. Sure, Jesse gets a lick in, and Todd gets a chance to plead his case, but the key decisions were all already made: Even in Todd's case, Jesse has no desire to kill someone if it can be avoided in any way, and even in the case of a dead child, Walt is willing to whistle past any grave on his way to an empire. It's a gutsy move to deliver a moment that shocking, then immediately remove us from that moment and show us how little has changed because of it. (Todd still hangs on to his telltale tarantula and everything, the dunce.) That kind of confidence in the audience's willingness to accept the unexpected is, well, what you expect from Breaking Bad. Other elements of this episode . . . weren't.

Last week's episode came in for some criticism over the plausibility of Walt and company's great train robbery, criticism I find misguided. After all, it's hardly the first, or even the most, outlandish scheme these characters have concocted. Gus Fring's pool party at Don Eladio's house, Walt's "fugue state" alibi, the magnet raid, and the entire chain of events that led from Walt spotting the Lily of the Valley plant in his backyard to Tio Salamanca's nursing-home suicide bombing all required the same uncanny combination of skill, timing, foresight and massive amounts of luck to pull off as the methylamine routine. It's easy, and I'd say correct, not to nitpick the details as long as the result is compelling drama in which everyone involved acts in character and within the bounds of recognizable, reasonable human behavior.

That's where "Buyout" stumbles. Do you buy that a pro like Mike, after confirming his suspicions that Walt might try to pull a fast one and then babysitting the guy all night, gun at the ready, would turn around and go "Hey, look at the time, I gotta go take care of something, sit tight"? Or that the extent of his precautions upon leaving a man he believes to be both a genius and a ticking time bomb alone with the key to his entire future would be cuffing the guy to the radiator? The shakiness of this storyline even had me questioning – well, OK, shouting "oh COME ON" at the screen – Mike's decision not to pull the trigger at the end of the episode. It took a while for me to reflect that if Mike wanted his methylamine, his money, the continued loyalty of his guys and the future security of his granddaughter, he had no other choice. Aside from that, though, Mike's uncharacteristically careless behavior was the first time in a long time I've felt like the writers of Breaking Bad made something happen because they needed it to, not because it needed to.

I had a similar problem with Walt's Gray Matter speech, or as we'd call it in the superhero comics business, "The Secret Origin of Walter White." It's perfectly plausible that Walt's failure to get in on the ground floor with the multi-billion-dollar corporation he co-founded is the Big Mistake he's been trying to correct by proxy with his meth operation all along, particularly if he feels the circumstances of his departure from the partnership were unjust, since he obviously loves feeling wronged. (Although from the sound of his final conversation with Gretchen a few seasons back, Walt left both her and the company, not the other way around.)

But making this an explicit motivation five seasons in, while Walt is in full supervillain mode and ranting about being in "the empire business," feels tidy in a way that life itself rarely does. It's a bit like the old origin for Lex Luthor, in which he becomes Superman's arch-nemesis because he thinks the hero blew away his hair while saving him from a laboratory fire. (Which, don't get me wrong, is the best possible origin for Lex Luthor, but not for Walter White.) I preferred when the Gray Matter situation was part of a stew of resentments and failures that made Walt into what he is, rather than a "Want to know how I got these scars?" speech.

Actually, the best thing about the Joker's origin story from The Dark Knight was that there were two of them, directly contradicting each other, with an implied plethora in reserve. It gave lie to the entire notion that you can pinpoint a person's development to a single formative moment. I'm not saying such moments can't happen, that single decisions or events can't radically reorder your life – just that getting from point A to point B is rarely a single straight line. Even now, when Walt's life has been peppered with points of no return (the decision to cook meth, the killing of Krazy-8 and Jane and Gale, the crawlspace crackup, poisoning Brock and killing Gus), it's both inadvisable and impossible to point to just one and say "Well, that explains it," but that's what the positioning of this speech under these circumstances tries to do.

Still, so much of the pleasure of Breaking Bad is found in isolated moments of power in its cast's performances that it's hard to come away from this episode thinking it's a total loss. Mike sitting on the park bench, watching his granddaughter, being watched by the DEA, no doubt thinking of the child whose body he destroyed the night before, his craggy face and wet eyes conveying an army of conflicting emotions that combine to form a Voltron of weariness. Skyler finding out that Walt ratted out her infidelity to Marie, a smile of pure "You've got to be shitting me" dark humor flitting across her face before she takes the opportunity it provides her to avoid confessing her true crimes, then later throwing it in Walt's face in front of his adoring apprentice. Jesse juxtaposed with Todd as they stand around smoking, two handsome young criminals, one completely gutted, the other feeling nothing more severe then "Jeez, I guess I should say something." Jesse juxtaposed with Skyler as they eat a joyless dinner, a person who suspects that something has really gone wrong with Mr. White but still puts on a brave face and a person who knows it for a certainty and can no longer be bothered to pretend otherwise. Mike and Jesse's tense standoff with Declan, quietly haggling over 666 gallons of methyalmine – the precursor of the beast. And Walt himself, resplendently malignant in a living room with lighting from the Gordon Willis Collection, slumped self-pityingly in his upholstered throne, muttering "This business is all I have left now," never understanding that this business is why this business is all he has left now.

Last episode: Trainwreck

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'Breaking Bad' Nets 2.9 Million Viewers for Season Five Premiere

Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman and Bryan Cranston as Walter White in 'Breaking Bad'

Breaking Bad drew 2.9 million viewers for the premiere of its fifth and final season last night, making it the most-watched episode in the show's run, the Hollywood Reporter reveals.

The numbers increased by 14 percent from last summer's fourth season debut, while the show as a whole saw a significant 34 percent season-over-season gain among adults 18-49, with 1.9 million watching last night.

During the show's panel at Comic-Con International in San Diego last weekend, stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul – dressed in yellow hazmat suits that were perfect for, say, cooking meth – promised that this season will be the show's darkest yet. 

"This entire season is just creepy, unsettling," said Paul, who plays meth dealer Jesse Pinkman.

Be sure to check out our recap of last night's intense premiere as well as our interview with show creator Vince Gilligan, who delves into the episode as well as the fate of Cranston's character, the protagonist Walter White.

"There are an awful lot of loose ends when you are forging a meth kingdom," said Gilligan. "There are so many I's to dot and T's to cross when you're on your meteoric rise to becoming Scarface. And a lot of paperwork that needs to get done, you know? The paperwork is endless."

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'Breaking Bad' Recap: A Magnetic Personality

They used a big magnet to solve a big problem on a little laptop, yeah. But  in the words of Walter White, there were bigger fish to fry on "Live Free or Die," Breaking Bad's fifth and (technically) final season premiere.

Comic capers are usually prime midseason material for this show. How will Walt account for his multi-day disappearance after Tuco Salamanca kidnaps him? How can Walt and Jesse keep Hank from finding them inside the meth-lab RV? How can Walt get out of bugging Gus' car on Hank's behalf in the Los Pollos Hermanos parking lot? The resulting hijinx are agonizingly tense and darkly hilarious, but rarely the stuff of a season premiere's high emotional stakes – they were nothing compared to the cancer diagnosis and deal-gone-bad of the pilot, or getting in deep with Tuco in Season Two, or the aftermath of the plane crash and the separation from Skyler in Season Three, or finding out whether Gus would kill them for killing Gale in Season Four. So an episode that prominently features False Kramer and whose magnet-based plot often seemed just seconds away from Jesse quoting the Insane Clown Posse seems like an unusual, and maybe even disappointing, choice.

Video: Bryan Cranston on Ending 'Breaking Bad'

But Walt's MacGyver-meets-Magneto routine was just a MacGuffin, a ruse necessary to hide the episode's true task: quietly but firmly yanking the rug out from under Mr. White's newfound badassery.

For pretty much all of the men-behaving-badly prestige TV dramas, competence is kryptonite. Sure, the point of the Sopranos, Mad Men and so on is to depict the perils of a life lived amorally. But as long as Tony can whack assholes and fuck strippers at will, as long as Don Draper looks great in a suit and can sell ice to Eskimos in a pitch meeting, a goodly portion of the audience will seize on the power of being able to get exactly what you want when you want it and ignore the rest. It's a competence fantasy.

From the first episode forward, Breaking Bad had gone farther than its peers in refusing to give its antihero his moments of hypercompetent rad-dude-itude. He doesn't even get to establish a status quo in which he's basically doing a good job, like Don or Tony; his meth operation is a cascading series of lethal catastrophes from episode one. When Walt has gone alpha-male on us, it's usually been petty (blowing up some loudmouth's sports car), dopey (bragging to Hank about how the real mastermind behind blue meth is still out there) or creepy ("I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS").

Walter White's 10 Lowest Lows on 'Breaking Bad'

But at the end of Season Four, Walter White blew up the most powerful criminal in North America. That wasn't a bark-worse-than-his-bite moment, like spooking some methhead at the Home Depot: that was legitimately hypercompetent! How can showrunner/writer Vince Gilligan, director Michael Slovis and their crew continue to tell Walt's story without transforming him into a boringly awesome action-movie villain? How can the show proceed without becoming something other than what it was?

"Live Free or Die" solved the problem in three ways. First, in tried and true Breaking Bad fashion, it gave us a glimpse of a mysterious, fucked-up future. Walt's operating under a fake name with a car and ID from New Hampshire (the location of the breakup with his grad-school girlfriend Gretchen that shut him out of the company he co-founded, if I recall correctly – Google does nothing for me here). He's haggard, dirty, even gaunt. (Fuckin' Cranston – how does he work?) Both his hair and his cancer-cough are back, and he's popping pills. He shows a rare glimpse of kindly old Mr. White when he briefly enthuses about a science museum with a Denny's waitress. And he's buying a machine gun from his gun dealer, Lawson (the great Jim "Ellsworth" Beaver). "It's never leaving town," he assures the dealer, who is apparently a real upstanding citizen who doesn't want it falling into Mexican hands.  The implication, of course, is that Walt won't leave town either – not alive, anyway. "I won," he told Skyler at the end of Season Four, but his victory is short-lived. Or as Mike might put it, "You know, I can foresee a lot of possible outcomes to this thing, and not a single one of them involves 'Miller Time.'" No amount of PMA will keep Walt from his appointment with that M60.

Second, it may have planted the seed for that eventual downfall, in the form of the Cayman Islands bank account number unearthed from the photo of Gus and his slain business (and more?) partner during Walt, Jesse and Mike's magnet raid on the evidence room. Fring's resources, and his connections to people more powerful even than he was, have often been mentioned but never remotely explained. There's the German business conglomerate responsible for his lab equipment. There's… whoever he knew or whatever he did in Chile that got all records of him wiped out before his emigration to Mexico, and which prevented the cartel from killing him alongside his partner. The Chicken Man may have been the eye in the pyramid, but there are potentially a ton of bricks between him and the foundation of the operation, and they're all poised to come crashing down on Walt. The show cleverly faked us out by making it seem that leaving the truck behind – first by possibly getting stuck on that curb, then by tipping over when Walt turned the magnet up to 11 – would be their undoing, only for Walt to insist the truck, and their getaway, were both clean. I love it when I get a chance to write the phrase "little did he know," you know?

Most fundamentally, "Live Free or Die" cut the Walter White competence fantasy off at the knees by showing us the Walter White sociopath reality. Simply put: What a fucking creep this guy is. Lest we forget that his grand triumph over Gus involved poisoning an innocent child, the episode reminds us twice: first when Walt tosses his poisonous Lily of the Valley plant away with all the other evidence, second when Saul Goodman complains about how Walt involved him and his goon Huell in the operation. "Too sleazy for Saul Goodman" is never someplace you want your life to be.

Then there's his cock-of-the-walk confidence about the magnet raid. Questioned about everything that could have gone wrong by an increasingly stupefied Mike – who, before he heard about Walt's hit on Gus out in his desert hospital, was literally watching his chickens come home to roost – Walt replies, with someone-please-break-this-guy's-nose-again arrogance, that everything went fine "because I say so." You can't enjoy someone's success when they're being such a dick about it.

Finally – and literally so, since it was the last line of the episode – "I forgive you." That line from Walt to Skyler, who'd just gotten back from visiting the former lover whom she'd inadvertently turned into a character from a cringe-comedy version of Hellraiser to keep their low-level criminality from exposing Walt's high-level version, blew my sympathy for Walt apart like Tio Salamanca ringing his bell. Walt is always the selfless hero, always the wronged party, no longer able to admit wrongdoing or honestly evaluate the consequences of his increasingly abhorrent actions to the people he loves and purports to protect. This is the cost of the competence fantasy.

We see some of this rub off on Skyler herself, with her chilling reply to poor, sad-eyed Ted Beneke's promise not to tell on her. Her ice-cold response of "Good" helped offset a sense that we'd been there, done that with her interaction with Walt this episode. That "I'm scared of you" exchange they had felt like a retread of her great "Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family" line from last season, not to mention how firmly established here fear of Walt was by her Shelley-Duvall-walking-in-on-the-dogman-blowing-the-tuxedo-guy reaction to Walt's cackling in the crawlspace shortly thereafter.

As always with Breaking Bad premieres, hints of the future come hard and fast. Obviously those include the opening sequence and Gus's hidden account. Given the games BB has played in the past, I wonder if there's something more to the "52" Walt makes out of his bacon (LOL Breaking Bad and breakfast) than simply his age. The score from composer Dave Porter, which over the seasons has shifted from Southwestern rattlesnake slither to eerie industrial-music buzz, added big bell-like tones – an ominously funereal shift. And with his cane and his limp and his total vindication, Hank is even more of an Ahab figure, relentlessly chasing his White whale in a sea of Blue.

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'Breaking Bad' Creator Vince Gilligan: 'Walter White Is Scarface'

Season Five of Breaking Bad starts with about as foreboding a scene as we have witnessed on the famously bleak show: Walt on his 52nd birthday, buying a machine gun in the bathroom of a Denny's for some unknown reckoning. To help us feed our Breaking Bad jones, we got showrunner Vince Gilligan to break down the first episode and share some insights into the mind behind America's favorite meth cook.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that opening in a Denny's – you've never flashed forward this far into the future, have you?
You are absolutely correct. As we get into Season Five, not quite a year has progressed in chronological time on the show. So flashing forward yet another year, or a little more than another year, is definitely something new for us.

Video: Bryan Cranston on Ending 'Breaking Bad'

It's an ominous-looking future . . .
It is definitely a glimpse at a very real future. One that is going to remain shrouded in mystery for a while. I don't want to say exactly how long. But don't hold your breath because it may be a while before you get too many explanations for what you're seeing. But all will be answered before Breaking Bad is said and done.

Well, it seems like there's a reckoning that is coming . . .
It sure looks that way [laughs]. You go to the trouble of buying an M60 machine gun in a Denny's bathroom, you probably have a pretty pressing and severe use for it at hand.

Walter White's 10 Lowest Lows on 'Breaking Bad'

Taking it back to the present in Breaking Bad time, it felt like last season Walt had tied up so many loose ends – but of course we found out that you can never tie up all the loose ends.
Exactly. There are an awful lot of loose ends when you are forging a meth kingdom. There are so many I's to dot and T's to cross when you're on your meteoric rise to becoming Scarface. And a lot of paperwork that needs to get done, you know? The paperwork is endless.

It feels like Walt and Skyler's relationship has really shifted into an awful new gear . . .
Yes. It very much looks like Skyler is in hell these days. You know, Walt always talks a good game about doing what he does for his family and in the early days of Breaking Bad, that was very much the case, but now, it seems to me Skyler is the member of that particular team who really is worried for the family. To that end, is she making the right choices? Maybe not. But she definitely has her heart in the right place when it comes to her family's welfare. And these days she's just scared out of her mind.

And the source of her terror is Walt.
She's come to realize in this first episode of Season Five that the man she married is not at all that she thought he was. This is a truly scary individual. He said back in the middle of Season Four, 'I am the danger,' and now she believes it more than ever. This is a man capable of blowing up a nursing home in order to kill one guy. This is a scary person indeed, and she shares a bed with him. What does she do about this? Should she call the police? Should she tell her brother-in-law, Hank? Perhaps. Probably, in fact. But so far she doesn't seem capable of doing that. The last image of this episode is all of that in a nutshell.

When Walt says, 'I forgive you' to her, it is one of his most chilling lines yet.
Exactly. It's an interesting line because on the one hand, it seems out of touch with reality for him to think that he is being magnanimous about forgiving her when he's in fact, the monster, the cancer, if you will, that's destroying her and her family. But it's also very manipulative on his part.

How so?
It's this feeling of, 'I'm going to be magnanimous here. I'm the bigger person. And we're going to pick right up where we left off and things are going to be good and it will be that way, because I decree it. I will it. I'm the king.' That's where Walt's head is at and, unfortunately for Skyler, she is – very much against her will –along for the ride.

We've watched Walt go from being a good man doing bad things, to almost a straight-up bad guy. Is there any of that good man still left in him?
It's an excellent question. I think the answer is up to the individual viewer. We're watching a character in a constant state of flux, a constant state of transformation. In every individual episode, Walter's a little further along the continuum between good guy and bad guy. And because our audience is not monolithic, and every viewer has his or her own interpretation, with every episode, I like to picture viewers losing sympathy for Walt. With every episode yet another viewer or two is saying, 'You know, I'm not with this guy anymore. I'm watching him, but I'm not sympathizing.' This is a guy moving along a continuum toward ultimately becoming Scarface, and it seems in episode 501 he's already Scarface.

Walt's that far along?
Man, he's already there. Maybe he's still got a little further to go. But then the question is, if you delve in to some very dark territory– if you lose big chunks of your soul, is there ever any getting it back? Is there anything you can do to at least partially redeem yourself? So this guy is definitely on a journey into darkness and the question remains, how much darker can it go? And, also, is there any light, ultimately, however faint and flickering, at the end of this particular tunnel?

You certainly made him more physically intimidating – now suddenly he's intimidating Saul in a very physical way . . .
I have to give all credit to Bryan Cranston for that. It's all Bryan's skill and artistry as an actor. Back when Walter White needed to be doughy and meek and mild mannered and essentially ineffectual, Bryan pulled that off. Now, I believe we're 47 episodes in, he is indeed intimidating as hell! Bryan Cranston, who's one of the sweetest guys alive but, man, when he puts it on, when he puts on that Heisenberg face, you'd cross the street to avoid him. Bryan does it in some magical, seemingly effortless way. It's like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. It's like watching someone who is at the top of their game. It looks effortless. You watch Jordan play basketball and you say, 'Man I could do that.' No you couldn't! Not in a million years!

Where did you get the brilliant idea  for the destruction of the evidence room with the giant magnet?
Honestly, I can't remember. It came up in the writer's room. I have six excellent writers and we have been together for a very long time now. We sit in a room all day together, hours on end, and just tell each other stories. We plot these episodes out scene by scene. First of all you have to say to yourself, where do we start season five? And then you say, gosh, do we have any loose ends left over from Season Four? Well, yeah, we got a ton of them. Which one do we want to start with? Well, how about we start with a very pressing law enforcement problem of Gus Fring's laptop. We kept seeing him on it all of last season. Whatever happened to it? Then you just build it organically, brick by brick. You go through the process of, how do you get rid of a laptop that's in police custody? Of course you say well, what if they get it before the cops get it? That would be the best thing for them, right? But then if you're being hard on yourself and being honest, you say, what's the worst thing for the characters? Because the worst thing for the characters is often the best thing for the drama.

That's been consistent in Breaking Bad . . .
[Laughs] Oh, good, I'm glad. We hold ourselves to a very high standard in the writer's room and very often we say, why can't they just get the damn laptop out before the cops show up?  But then we say, no, we got to make it tough on our guys. Walt has got to persevere against overwhelming odds and he's got to do it often and consistently. 'Alright, so, this laptop is locked away in a giant facility like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the walls are two feet thick and it's guarded by cops 24 hours a day, how are they going to get it out of there?' And then the process in the writers room truly does, in that moment, mirror the process in the scene where you pace around the room and bang your head against the wall until you come up with the idea of the magnet.

It feels like Gus Fring's ghost haunts the first episode . . .
Good. We knew that the end of last season marked the end of an era. Gus Fring was, in many ways, the, scariest, most compelling, most complex bad guy we were likely ever going to see on Breaking Bad. And, in the early going of Season Five, we were pacing around very nervously trying to figure out how to top Gus Fring? How do we top the amazing Giancarlo Esposito and we came, you know, very quickly we came upon the inescapable conclusion that we weren't going to be able to do that. Then we thought, if we can't have a bad guy who's as good or better than Gus Fring, then what are we doing? And we came to the realization that we already have a bad guy as formidable and interesting and complex, maybe even more so, ultimately, than Fring was and that's our protagonist. Who in our world was ever capable of out-Fring-ing Fring? Walter White. That's indeed the thrust of Season Five. Walt is now the king. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Of course we know from the very opening scene of season five that Walt's left town at some point and his reign was short . . .
[Laughs] That is true! That was giving away something but anyone who's watched this show for any length of time knows that Walt is probably not going to ride off into the sunset. It's just not that kind of story. The question is, will the show end guns blazing? Will it go out with a bang? What exactly is going happen with these characters? Who's going to remain standing when it's all said and done? Who isn't when the dust clears? But I think it's not giving away much to say that it's going to be very tricky to find a completely happy ending for this particular story.

Mad Men is coming off a terrific season. I wonder how competitive you are with other show runners. Do you think, ''I got to top that?'
Oh, absolutely. First of all, that season of Mad Men was great. Really enjoyable. On the one hand you say to yourself, 'Well, we're apples and oranges, Mad Men and Breaking Bad couldn't be much more different.' But, on the other hand, you look at all the Emmys those guys win, and you find yourself  thinking, 'Man, I want to win some Emmys too!' You have a good-natured feeling of, 'What can we do to top them?' It almost feels like, I'm going to compose a sonnet that's way better than this symphony that this other guy wrote. Well, one is poetry and the other is orchestral music. They are just so different. Having said that, a little healthy feeling of competition never hurt anybody. I feel that way towards so many other great shows, too. I look around and see a Game of Thrones or The Good Wife or Homeland and realize this is such a wonderful time to be working in television. Show runners these days have competitive streak with one another but, at the same time, you feel this glow of pride and you feel this sort camaraderie and you think man, this is a good time to be in this line of work.

Do you know why TV is having such a golden age?
You could do a whole piece about that. I think the answer is multi-fold, but back in the Seventies, when Hollywood was a source of storytelling for adults, you could have movies like Five Easy Pieces that would never in a million years get made by a major studio. You could no more get that made now than you could send a rocket to Jupiter tomorrow. That kind of storytelling was abandoned by Hollywood, because Hollywood's economic model is just different now. It's a model in which only big tentpole sequels and cartoon movies get made, and yet there's a huge appetite for stories about adults. And, because that appetite exists and it keeps going unslaked – if that's the right way to put it – by Hollywood, it had to migrate elsewhere and it migrated to television.

Cranston hinted in an interview recently at a Breaking Bad movie. Any truth to that?
[Laughs] I've learned a long time ago to never say never, but it is definitely not, in any way shape or form, on my personal radar. We've been given this wonderful opportunity to know exactly when we're going to end and to be able to work toward it. You don't want to be George Foreman and keep coming out of retirement. I'm going to tell every goddamn last bit of story I can possibly get in there with these next 16 episodes. I want it to end with the last 10 seconds of picture on the very last episode and I want– My fervent dream is for this show to end and for people to say, 'Oh my God, that was what I hoped for and I'm going to miss it – now, what's on next?'

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'Breaking Bad' Cast Drops Hints About Darkest Season Yet at Comic-Con

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston from 'Breaking Bad' speak at a Comic-con panel in San Diego.

The cast of Breaking Bad offered some tidbits about the show’s fifth season during a Comic-Con International panel in San Diego on Friday night. While exact details remained elusive, one thing was clear: The season, which premieres on Sunday night, is the show’s darkest yet."This season is about winning; and what it means to stay on top," said executive producer Vince Gilligan. 

"This entire season is just creepy. Unsettling," added Aaron Paul, who plays meth dealer Jesse Pinkman.

The hour-long panel, moderated by TV Guide’s Michael Schneider, marked the first time Breaking Bad has made an appearance at Comic-Con. The panelists included Gilligan and seven of the show’s actors, including Bryan Cranston, who stars as chemistry teacher-turned-meth maker Walter White.

Some devoted fans had apparently shown up early – really early – to get a good seat. "I’m scared to leave this line up. I don’t want to miss breaking bad IN 5 HOURS. What is another 5 hours without peeing?" tweeted a user named @elizabutt.

Despite the show’s intensity, the panelists were clearly having a good time. Hitfix noted that Cranston and Paul came onstage dressed in yellow hazmat suits. Actor Dean Norris – who plays White’s DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank Schrader – was dressed in an outfit that made him look like Xena.

At one point, the cast started eating some of Walter White’s famous blue meth, reported TV Guide. Later, asked if his character had any redeeming qualities, Cranston said, "He makes damn good meth."

The fifth season is the show’s last, with 16 episodes set to air in two blocks of eight before it wraps up in 2013. In that time, Cranston’s character reaches new lows: Gilligan said Walt does something during the season that made Gilligan lose all sympathy for the character, though he wouldn’t specify what.

"He’s found a new power and it’s his ego," Cranston said, according to the show's Twitter feed.

The new season adds two new characters into the mix. Jesse Plemons of Friday Night Lights plays a guy named Todd, and Scottish actress Laura Fraser plays Lydia, a former associate of meth kingpin Gus Fring, who died at the end of the fourth season. Pinkman’s drug runner buddies Badger and Skinny Pete also make a return.

The show also brings in Madrigal, a German company that was bankrolling Gus’ operation. Gilligan said to expect more German subtitles on the show, noting that the second episode partially takes place in Hanover, Germany.

During the question-and-answer session, a fan asked if the season will include any "bottle episodes," low-budget productions designed to save on costs. Gilligan said the season’s fifth episode is actually the "polar opposite" of a bottle episode. It was also the first one of the series that was filmed outside of Albuquerque – all the way in Santa Fe, an hour’s drive away.

Asked what he plans to do after Breaking Bad, Gilligan said he’d love to do TV or movies. "In a very greedy sense, I hope that this is not the highlight of my career," he said.

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Off the Cuff: Bryan Cranston Previews the Final Season of 'Breaking Bad'

Off the Cuff: Bryan Cranston Previews the Final Season of 'Breaking Bad''Walter White has expanded beyond the cavity of his chest, so he's bursting out of his skin with pride,' the series' star tells Peter Travers $(document).ready(function() { $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .email-content').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.email').hide(); } ); $('.socialActionsTop .pageActions .print-page').hover( function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').show(); }, function() { $('.socialActionsTop .bubble.print').hide(); } ); }); By

In the first part of the latest "Off the Cuff with Peter Travers," Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston breaks down the final season of the hit AMC show, why it's split in two and his feelings on the series' end.

"They came to the number 16 [episodes] because Vince Gilligan, the creator of the show, thought, 'That seems about right,' to be able to have the time to wrap it up and to end on his own merit, in his own way," says Cranston. "But then AMC wanted to split that up and actually, Vince wanted to split that up too, so that he had time to focus on the first eight [episodes] in season five and be able to go through it and have time to edit, have time to put that away and do the final mix and do it all, and then take a couple weeks off for a break, and then assembling the writers again in August."

"I would rather end this show in a respectful way and hopefully end it before its time," adds Cranston. "You don't want that asterisk next to the title of your series saying, 'Breaking Bad, six good seasons, three kind of mediocre ones and one clearly crappy one – and season eleven was like, 'ugh.''"

But the final season looks to be quite dark. "Walter White has expanded beyond the cavity of his chest, so he's bursting out of his skin with pride," says Cranston. "Although pride goeth before the fall."

The first half of the final season of Breaking Bad premieres on July 15th on AMC.

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'Breaking Bad' Final Season Split in Two

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul in 'Breaking Bad'

The final season of Breaking Bad will air in two eight-episode chunks, Entertainment Weekly reports. "We’re splitting it," says series star Bryan Cranston, who was interviewed from the set of the show's fifth season premiere in New Mexico. "We're going to shoot the first eight, then take a four-month production break, then the rest will air next year."

AMC has not formally announced this plan, though a representative for Sony Pictures TV has confirmed that this is "one scenario" being considered by the network. According to actors on the set, Breaking Bad is scheduled to return to the air in July. If the final season is indeed split into two sections, the second half may be held until the following summer.

Other major cable dramas have had their final seasons extended and split into two halves. The sixth season of The Sopranos began with a 12-episode run in the spring of 2006 and wrapped up with nine more episodes the following year. There was a three-month break in the middle of Sex and the City's final season, splitting the run between 2003 and 2004.

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