You ever spend two days patting yourself on the back for something an old timer can fix in thirty seconds? My foreman watched me fight a control joint for an hour before he took the trowel, flipped it sideways, and said "you're pressing like it owes you money." I still check my expansions twice now, mostly cause I'm scared he'll make me redo it with a level and a stopwatch.

I read somewhere that the writers of Breaking Bad actually planned the cold opens to link back to later episodes on purpose. Once I heard that, I went back and checked a few, and yeah, they’re not random at all. It’s kinda wild how much setup they pack into those first two minutes before the credits even roll. I used to treat cold opens as skippable too, mostly because I watched shows on streaming where they felt like a delay before the real episode. But now I treat them like part of the main story, because they basically are. Honestly, missing them is like reading a book but skipping the first page of every chapter.