Breaking Bad’s been so great this season, and last night’s (bottle?) episode was pretty amazing: everything from Rian Johnson’s (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) direction to Cranston and Paul’s performances.

Vince Gilligan and each episode director are so good at keeping the stakes high in each and every installment of the show, and I’m unsure as to exactly why it succeeds where other shows have failed. Maybe it’s because it’s unafraid to physically and emotionally abuse their main characters, keeping the focus on them for prolonged periods during extremely harrowing situations (like in this season’s Sunset and last year’s Four Days Out), or perhaps there just haven’t been enough episodes produced for viewers to get used to whatever storytelling crutches the writers fall back on.