Spoiler alerts below for Breaking Bad (read no further if you don't know 
how it ends).

On Mon, 23 Dec 2013 00:23:27 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> I've given up going to the movies and watching them on TV.
> I've just watched a play about Kenneth Williams. A very troubled man,
> indeed. There were no goodies nor baddies and it was a difficult watch.
> Seeing how hard and sad life was for one of my childhood heroes.

Theater itself probably does have more complexity in its storytelling, 
that's for sure.

>> I really liked the remade Battlestar Galactica for this reason - I
>> mean, the clarity in the start between the "good" and "bad" guys was
>> clear, but as the programme progressed, you saw that it wasn't really
>> as clear cut.
>>
>> Breaking Bad was similar, in that there really weren't /any/ good guys
>> at all - all the characters were flawed to some extent.
>>
>>
> It got good reviews but I knew that he would die in the end. Even in
> American book, so my wife tells me. The character that does something
> bad has got to pay for it.

Watching the story, I wasn't so sure - Walt didn't really *pay* for his 
crimes, in the end, his death was a bit more of an easy way out.  It 
wasn't a "fair" punishment, and it wasn't clear how they were going to 
wrap it up.  Having it be an accident as a result of his own hubris had 
kind of a poetic justice to it, but it was far from the punishment he 
deserved.

>> But writers and producers seem less willing these days to write stories
>> that have such ambiguity in them.  Well, let's face it - these days,
>> we're lucky to get anything that's actually a well thought-out story.
>> It's more likely to be some "reality TV" garbage that's cheap to
>> produce and makes shedloads of money from advertisers.
> 
> That seems to be the way of most things now-a-days.

Yeah, sadly.

>> Heck, the "Sci Fi"
>> channel (now sickeningly called "SyFy") is mostly *Wrestling* shows. 
>> WTF?
>>
> Noy you know how we feel when we hear SF called Sci Fi. And while I am
> on the subject. It is MATHS not math. ;-)

Depends on whether we're talking about the subject as a singular object 
or not. ;)

Jim

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