breaking_bad nr i'm very late to this party, but any series where vince gilligan's goal was to transform bryan cranston's character from mr. chips into scarface is probably worth watching. 260615 ... raze when the show reached the end of its run, i watched the sixty-second and final episode without having seen any of the sixty-one that came before it. somewhere around the halfway point, with an angry macbook burning a hole in my boxer pants, i had two thoughts. one was, "i should go back and watch the whole thing from the beginning." and the other was, "this is as good a metaphor as i'm going to get for how warped my decision-making is. what person in their right mind willingly subjects themselves to the end of a thing without knowing how it begins?" i also still kind of can't believe hal from "malcolm in the middle" grew up to be walter white. talk about range. 260615 ... releaseofwarmth responding to raze but addressed to the room: I think there's something enticing about a spoil. Not just a teaser, a complete spoil. Even though I know it's a fundamentally wrong way to experience the artist's vision. Ironically one of the things that makes the "original" (first) Star_Wars trilogy work and become astronomically successful in the 70s is the fact that audiences started on part 4 and had the blanks filled in gradually. If we knew that Vader was Luke's father the whole time, the reveal in Empire doesn't work. By being forced into believing or deciphering huge chunks of the story that you didn't witness, it toys with your perspective and it tickles your sense of wonder (how did this get to be this, how did these people become this way, etc.) It can be a fun way to experience things. I watched Serenity without having seen Firefly, and I was much less emotionally damaged than most people. I got to experience Firefly after the fact and enjoy it and say "oh yeah this show is way better than that movie." But the OG fans of Firefly that were subjected to Serenity? They truly, truly suffered. I've enjoyed experiencing this New_Mexico downward spiral of a show and Sopranos and The_Wire and many other shows through YouTube rabbit holes, clips, compilations, maybe watch a few individual episodes. It's not such a bad way to go, getting the gist of it and saving a lot of time and potential emotional harrowing! But of course if the whole point for you is to put in the time and go through the harrowing, well. More power to ya. 260616 ... raze you've just made me think of mr. tomlinson, my grade nine history teacher. i don't think anyone else understood his warped sense of humour. but i loved that guy. one morning, with no explanation, he showed us the last ten minutes or so of "platoon". we weren't covering it in class. none of us had ever seen any part of the movie before. when it was over, he turned to us and said, "now, if you're ever at a dinner party and someone asks you if you know how 'platoon' ends, you can honestly say you do." 260616 ... ovenbird I watched this show in the early years after my son was born. I’m not sure why I subjected my fragile and fraying brain to something so intense. But there was a catharsis in it, somehow. I understood something of Walter White’s desperation to live, truly LIVE while he still had the chance. In those days of almost no sleep and near disintegration of the self I worried that I had never lived at all and would never, now, get the chance. I fantasized about running away to do the most insane things. Walter called to me. I didn’t want to walk his path but I wanted to find the extreme edge of vitality. I wanted to jump off something high so I could know the exhilaration of deciding I wanted to live after all. 260616 what's it to you? who go blather from