TVSquad

(S02E01) Three hundred and sixty-four days after the first season finale, the second season of Breaking Bad finally began last night (Damn you, writers strike!). While we only got seven episodes last year, the show still made a huge impact on the television landscape, primarily by being just amazingly produced and acted. The action and tone pick up here as if we've never been away, and despite a year since new episodes, it feels like only last week that we first saw Tuco go ballistic and viciously beat his own man.

Of course, if it had been last week then I doubt we'd have rewound the scene and replayed it in its entirety. Still, it was a nice reminder of just how crazy and unpredictable Tuco is. And it was the problem of Tuco that pretty much drove the entirety of the main plot tonight. It says something as to how perfectly disturbed Raymond Cruz portrays Tuco that despite being in the episode only during two sequences, his presence hovered over every moment.

(S01E05) This episode served as a bridge in our larger story to the next chapter of both Jesse and Walt's lives. In the previous installment, Walt withdrew from the sordid world of drug trafficking and focused on his family, revealing his cancer and looking at the varying options available to him. Meanwhile, his erstwhile partner Jesse had a bad drug reaction and sought refuge in the home of his parents, which didn't turn out as well as he had hoped. Here they both continued their efforts to move on with their lives, to varying degrees of failure.