Of the two, it’s really Adam that’s breaking badder than his father, whose instinct to protect his son doesn’t initially extend to covering up a crime. It’s only later, after willing himself back to the Volvo and taking some puffs from the inhaler, does he look around and see that there are no apparent witnesses to this act of manslaughter. He uses the victim’s cell phone to call 911 but doesn’t have the breath to get the words out. After the accident, his first instinct isn’t to find that damned inhaler and save himself, but to stumble his way over to Rocco and try to help him. The sequence that follows is the strongest in the episode, because Adam’s actions introduce a lot of ambiguity. For now, all we need to know is that Adam’s asthma kicked in at an inopportune time and he ran over Rocco while reaching for his inhaler. But the episode is smart to leave the audience in the dark about Rocco’s family, because that would cloud all the decision-making that happens before the big reveal. The identity of the family is the episode’s biggest switcheroo, because it upends Michael’s plans to do the right thing at a crucial moment. The circumstances of her death are a mystery tabled for another time: A group of young men from the neighborhood are not happy to see Adam around, and their threatening demeanor starts to send him into his fateful panic.Īdam is on a collision course with Rocco, who we know only as a teenager from a wealthy family who’s testing out the vintage motorcycle he’s been given as a birthday present. Both are mourning her in their own ways: Michael stops to take a breather at the graveyard and Adam lays out the picture and the flowers in front of a convenience store in the lower 9th ward. Meanwhile, Adam grabs Chekhov’s inhaler and heads out in a Volvo station wagon with a few cut flowers from the front of his house and a picture of his late mother. Michael goes on an early-morning jog through New Orleans, covering so much territory that it’s a relief to learn later on that he’s training for a marathon. The first half neatly juxtaposes how Michael and Adam’s days unfold without immediately making it clear that they’re father and son. This first episode is constantly implying the question, “What would you do?” and having us measure just how far the Desiatos have come up short. As Michael, his essential decency is strongly emphasized in the beginning, as is that of his son Adam (Hunter Doohan), whose hit-and-run incident isn’t without some desperate attempt to take responsibility. Call it Breaking Bad But Understandable Given the Circumstances. The moral calculations of Your Honor are quite different, at least in this promising first episode, which carefully lays out his decision-making in a bid for our sympathies. In other words, to say that Walter White went down a slippery slope is to deny his active intent he wore swim trunks and dove head first down that slippery slope. What he actually wanted - and what he finally admitted to his wife in their very last scene together- was to be Heisenberg, the fearsome drug kingpin he risked everything to become. Walter only ostensibly wanted to help his family by leaving stacks of drug money behind before succumbing to a terminal cancer diagnosis. But there’s an important distinction between Michael Desiato, his New Orleans judge in Your Honor, and Walter White, the science teacher turned meth maestro in Breaking Bad.
A lot of comparisons have already been made between Your Honor and Breaking Bad, given Bryan Cranston’s performance here as an upstanding public servant who crosses the line into criminality and presumably continues to improvise a path to total damnation.