TV is the New Reading

‘Bad,’ ‘Medium’ leave scorched earth in their wake

A couple series left the airwaves in a serious lurch this week. I believe both are on hiatus but it’s hard to know what to make of … well …

First and foremost, “Medium”s season-five finale was incredibly sad. Allison’s visions of a bleak future post her husband and daughters’ execution were heartbreaking and drew some of Patricia Arquette’s best work in this series. Fearing for her family’s safety from a drug cartel investigation gone pear-shaped, Allison skips out of life-saving surgery because the Universe has one more message to send to her.

The investigator and the cartel kingpin are working together.

Not that the Universe could’ve just shown her that earlier so she could have the surgery. No, the Universe needed her to get this final vision – the one she needed so as to save her family – once the brain tumor that was killing her gave her a stroke and put her in a coma.

So Allison’s final vision put a murderous criminal conspiracy away for life. I get that. What I’m not clear about is once she had it, once she passed that information on, she could’ve had the surgery. Instead, it feels like her boss, District Attorney Devalos, kept her around for dramatic effect, the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chestnut “Flee! All is discovered!” etc. It made for a fine scene, but honestly, anyone could’ve hidden in the shadows, jumped out after the investigator’s text message and shouted “j’accuse!”

Either way, there’s no shortage to the dramatic effect of Allison Dubois, the Medium herself, lying in a post-surgical coma and the screen going black as her heart monitor beeps like the clock in “24.”

Breaking Bad

Speaking of trying to save one’s family …

I’ve been a fan of John de Lancie ~~since he was Eugene Bradford on “Days of our Lives”~~ since he was “Q” on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Oh, OK, yes, for a summer in the mid-80s I watched soap operas. Sue me.

John De Lancie has an exquisite handle on darkness. As “Q,” the omnipotent being from the Trekverse, he was there from the pilot episode at Farpoint Station to the "All Good Things" series finale to patronize and condescend to the entire human race – and he was always so comfortably better than everyone else.

In other guest spots I’ve seen him in, he finds excellent voices for the roles he inhabits – just smarmy enough, just dark enough, always funny enough, just pitch perfect all the way through.

So when they pulled him in to be Jesse Pinkman’s landlord Don Margolis on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” I thought “What a waste!” I mean, yeah, he’s John de Lancie, he can play Jesse’s girlfriend’s dad, but honestly, what kind of overkill is this? It’s like using a Hattori Hanzo sword to cut up lunchmeat. Of course he can do it, but so could anyone else. When I first saw him I thought it was a cameo, a walk-on guest star they didn’t even promote especially well.

And then he came back, and had an excellent scene with Krysten Ritter as his daugther and Jesse’s girlfriend Jane Margolis. Don confronted her about her heroin addiction when he found her zoned out in Jesse’s apartment, and tried to take her to rehab. Krysten had an excellent scene herself begging him to give her a day, just one day, that’s all, to get the newspapers and mail stopped, to get her houseplants seen to and to put things in order so everything wouldn’t be a huge mess when she came back.

He relented. He knew she was in a bad way but he couldn’t be cruel. And between that confrontation and her inevitable death by dramatic overdose, Jane did a couple of things to seal her fate.

For one thing, she called chemistry teacher, cancer survivor and meth dealer Walter White at home and talked to his wife, and extorted Walter to hand over the $450,000 he owed Jesse from their latest sale, which White was holding on to, he said, so Jesse wouldn’t splurge and OD on something.

Walt brought the money. Jane got very excited. They were rich! They were going to travel the world! They would finally be free! And they were going to get clean first – not because anyone told them to, but because they should! And as they approached the herion in the bedroom to toss it out … they decided to do one last fix.

Here is where it gets very dark, and how small choices have huge consequences.

Walt returns to Jesse’s to try to talk him out of taking the money. He tries to wake him up and in the process, Jane, who’d been sleeping on her side, rolls over onto her back. As Walt is leaving, she gets sick and begins choking on her own vomit. Walt moves to help her, and then considers this is the Lady McBeth who blackmailed him – true, specifically and for only what he owed Jesse, but it stands. So Walt observes her convulse and then go still, and then he leaves.

When Don discovers his daughter has died he goes numb. You can just see it. De Lancie’s performance was perfect, but it doesn’t end there.

Within a few weeks of getting Jesse to rehab and himself getting an all-clear following his most recent cancer surgery, Walt thinks everything is going pretty well, but his wife does not. Before his surgery he opened an old wound on a second cellphone his wife, Skyler, had deep suspicions about, but she wasn’t going to leave him until he could get by on his own. So when the doc gave the all-clear, out the door she went, taking their newborn daughter Holly with her. She would fly out for a couple days’ vacation while Walt packed out of the house and looked after their teenage son Walt Jr. and they’d finalize the divorce when she got back. She didn’t even want an explanation.

So, in one of those “all the gin joints in all the world” things that so often happens, Don returns to work as well. As an air traffic controller. Whether through rage or numbness or just can’t care anymore, he causes a couple of planes on his radar to crash. And because karma is sometimes an absolute bitca, Walt’s daughter’s toy bear lands 10 feet from him in his swimming pool.

Some choice Walt made lost Don his daughter, some choice Don made seems to have lost Walt his. And his wife as well – his family, the people in his life he was most concerned about saving, about looking after, when he decided to cook meth in the first place.

It’s possible this was someone else’s stuffed bear, or that Skyler and Holly’s luggage was on a different plane. But there’s another image in the second season finale of “Breaking Bad” that hasn’t been explained and that’s this one: As the charred pink bear is being fished out of the swimming pool by the National Transportation Safety Board investigators in the back of the house, there are two bodies lying covered in the street in the front of the house.

Who those bodies are, I have no doubt, will have a significant impact on the third season, and if I’m being honest here, it cannot come soon enough. Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, the whole group has done such amazing work all the way through this series and … well, I can only imagine in the aftermath of this collision that we’ll be seeing more of John De Lancie as well.

The Goode Family

From the sublime to the ridiculous, Mike Judge must be losing his damn mind.

I loved his MTV animated video critique “Beavis and Butthead” when I was in college. I loved the spinoff from his character “Daria” shortly thereafter. I enjoy “Office Space,” “King of the Hill” his input into the “South Park” movie and really he’s done a lot of perfectly good and more than reasonably funny shows.

There’s a downside with Mike Judge. He has about eight or so characters: the stoner, the alpha jock, the vegan maxi-zum-dweebie, slow Southern gentlemen, apopletic principal types, the big bull lesbian grrl and the gruff old duffer and so on – really broadly drawn characters I’ve seen over and over in all his shows.

So out trots “The Goode Family” on ABC and they’re such stereotypically fluffy-headed crunchy granola types who are so respectful to other cultures and influences and the rights of all living things to stomp all over them and ask themselves “What Would Al Gore Do?” they’re actually offensive.

And in a time when we as a nation really do need to be reducing, reusing and recycling and actively exploring green living this show taking that message to such grossout extremes as it does just trivializes it and marginalizes the effort with a strawhorse spokesman like flaky liberal and academe Gerald Goode taking outdoor showers (over the objections of his neighbors) in collected rainwater. Even if this weren’t impossibly ridiculous in a home with teenagers, there are these new inventions the Romans came up with called “pipes” where you can get the rainwater into the house if you insisted on that level of purity – and giving his not-convincingly vegan dog a soy sillybone (which just boosts his bloodlust until he’s eaten dozens of neighborhood pets and countless squirrels).

None of these characters is especially well and frankly I’m not prepared to give this show any opportunity whatsoever to redeem itself. I feel like I’ve seen it and seen it, and I don’t need to see it again – especially not if it’s going to be as bad as this.

“Medium” is expected to return for a sixth season this fall Fridays on CBS, “Breaking Bad” can’t return to the airwaves fast enough – probably in the early part of the new year on AMC – and “The Goode Family” is the mouthful of tofu you find at 8:30/7:30c Fridays on ABC.

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