2.11: "Mandala" - Wheel of Life or Vicious Circle?

The episode opens with Combo dying in the first scene and closes with a baby finding its way to life. "Mandala" is a mosaic made of  circles and cycles.

       Many thanks to Kelley Dixon's podcasts on AMC website. She is one of the editors on this show, and together with her co-host, executive producer Vince Gilligan, they holds recorded discussions about every single episode with other crew members. I find the interviews absolutely enlightening. They cover everything from explaining the story-line nuances to giving a pretty good pisture of how the whole TV show industry works.

       The podcast to Episode 11 also explains the title "Mandala." After listening to it and watching the episode again, I couldn't believe I didn't get these things right away:

• First frame - the wheel of Tomás's bike, definitely not a messenger of life:}

• Jane's vicious circle is way too obvious to analyze but Skylar now runs in an interesting figure 8 between her two men who pursue their criminal activities for selfless reasons.

       What I did get right away, though, was the music playing to Jesse's first randez vous with heroin. Unlike other shoot up scenes in drug movies, where the score is usually dark and depressive, Jesse is dancing with the drug on a cloud of a Frank-Sinatraesque classic. It is shocking and disturbing and perfect.