It's all plenty impressive to engineer a climactic plot twist with a fragment of a broken sandwich dish. It's something else to have that fragment channel the emotional burdens of a desperate, dying man.

By the way, the broken dish is not pictured in this first photo.  That's merely an image of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) cleaning up the acid-dissolved remains of a dead crystal meth dealer at the start of Sunday's episode, while the dealer's partner sat Kryptonite-locked to a pole in the basement below.

Yeah, AMC's "Breaking Bad" is a dark show. 

In fact, it's dark enough that even though it's played out in suburbia, it eschews the hip irony such a description usually implies. Nevertheless, far from being too dreary to watch, "Bad" is energizing in they way it continues to carve out intense rewards for the handful of viewers tuning in. (Actually, Sunday's episode drew a few hundred thousand viewers more than evening counterpart "The Wire" on HBO, but let's not split hairs here.  Most of the country is not watching.)

Following a week's hiatus to avoid competing with the Feb. 4 Super Bowl, "Bad" resumed its ingenious acceleration of good guy Walter's descent into a criminal and moral wasteland by having him hold someone captive. Then, after spending the better part of two episodes showing Walter become, ever so naturally, the victim of a kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome by sympathizing with his prisoner, "Bad" once again flipped the story on its ear, all in the form of that missing shard of broken plate that proved he couldn't cop out from the ugly reality of his situation.

So now, White Walter (calling him by his last name seems too impersonal at this point) is not only a meth dealer, he's a killer. And though he can choose to justify his actions by knowing that his prisoner would have killed him given the chance, we can gather that it's not going to be easy for Walter to sleep at night. Not to mention the fact that Walter's family has circled around the truth, all but forcing Walter to pop his small bubble of secrecy about his lung cancer and drug dalliances.

Throw in a cameo by the always welcome Jessica Hecht, and "Bad" emerges from under the radar as too good a package to ignore.

For viewers seeking out the best television on Sundays, the first stop is "The Wire." But is the same group of people already opening their TVs up to "Breaking Bad," or do "Wire" fans need to discover this show as well?

— Jon Weisman

Turning an old prisoner plot on its ear by making the guy you're rooting for the captor instead of the captive, the second episode of "Breaking Bad" didn't disappoint after a promising pilot.

The show is unafraid to get dark and gruesome — not for gratuitous purposes, but rather in service of a larger story examining our morals in challenging times. Good guys doing bad things and all that. Credit for this starts with showrunner Vince Gilligan, but Gilligan could not have done better in finding someone to anchor the show than Bryan Cranston, rocking the house in the role of chem teacher/meth maker/cancer sufferer Walter White. 

White is equal parts hero and weakling — it's as if we're catching him amid an aborted transformation, and it's kinda fascinating. His Odd Couple interplay with Jesse (Aaron Paul) crackles without seeming contrived.

There are still a couple of quirks with the show. Scenes in which White uses his chemistry knowledge in hardcore, real-life situations work much better than the scenes in White's classroom, where his attempts to make chemistry seem meaningful feel on the nose (and where signs of an impending collapse seem all too obvious).

Also, Walter's relationship with his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn, working awfully hard to seem interesting) is strained creatively. There have been some headscratching scenes between the two. Marriages can run hot and cold, but the hot and cold in the White marriage doesn't always seem connected — there needs to be more of a thruline that relates the mood swings. Nevertheless, we're only in the second episode, leaving plenty of time for this to be ironed out.

AMC producing two quality drama series feels a bit like the Pittsburgh Pirates making the NBA (that's not a typo, that's the joke) finals.  But with "Mad Men" and the less fantastic but still worthwhile "Breaking Bad," AMC continues to score big with its transformation.

— Jon Weisman