There’s very little left to say and not much time to say it in. In that case the showrunners would want to minimalize. The opening scene is of Skyler sans make-up facing her persecutors. She’s in a ‘fugue state’ of her own, desolate, beyond grief; she’s naked and without a socially acceptable mask. If Walt is gone and there’s only 'Heisenberg now, then Skyler too is absent as a result of the destruction of her family, but she doesn’t have another persona to assume. I wanted to applaude Anna for that bit of acting. It wasn’t the projection of an emotion, but something much more subtle – it’s absence. That’s very difficult for an actor to do.
I was in the redwoods of northern CA last month and experienced something increasingly rare while outdoors – absolute silence. Until another hiker walked up the path, there wasn’t so much as the sound of an insect. In ‘Granite Slate’, the characters are totally disconnected from society, isolated by silence each in their own way. Walt is self-imprisoned in a cabin cell in the New Hampshire woods. Skyler, as the wife of a nationally publicized and hunted meth manufacturer and suspected murderer, is still in her community and hasn’t got a friend in the world, not one except the one who’s paid to be her friend and counselor, her attorney – her ‘Saul’. I have to imagine life in high school (did you notice that Junior is sitting in the back of the classroom, where the kids that don’t want to be noticed sit?) is a daily torment for ‘Flynn’. Kids can be cruel and relentless, even when torturing a kid on crutches. I’m half expecting to see a scene in the final episode, where we watch Flynn head down the druggy path trying to escape what his life has become (as though being a teenager by itself wasn’t hard enough), probably a hit of the blue meth. This show has never lacked for irony. If Skyler is sent to prison, Holly’s future is with Aunt Marie, so in the end Marie ends up with Skyler’s kids after all. We’ve all formed some sort of opinion about what kind of mother Marie would be. Hope Holly is fond of the color purple.
And of course, we know what circle of Dante’s inferno Jesse is in. I think social isolation and loneliness have been continuous underlying themes in this series. We never see them connected or networked into their communities, they’re without a support system except for each other, and when their lives explode apart from each other, they have no one and nothing to fall back on. Even Walt’s barrel of legal tender has been rendered worthless. This is usually the point in the story where I’d expect ‘The Church’ to step up, some de-gooding member of the clergy. Odd that opportunistic institution has been excluded from this story.
Anyway, ChickieD, that’s my thought processes on the episode, which I saw last night after purchasing it from iTunes.
