Memory is a strange thing.

I have mentioned before the the way I can watch a film or read a book and only towards the end I would realise I had seen the film or read the book.  I suppose a lot of it is down to the blandness of my choice of subjects, or the fact that a lot of the plots are similar so it’s easy to get confused.

A couple of years ago we watched Breaking Bad.  It was a series we thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish and we both agreed that it was worth a second spin at some stage in the future, so it has been lying around since.

A week or two ago Herself was getting utterly pissed off with the crap she had been watching on television.  She was sick of Judge Judy presiding over America’s finest and maintained that all the films on offer were a) subtitled, b) about “high school kids”, c) involved some comic hero or other, d) were some crappy American comedy or e) were just plain shite.  She suggested we rerun Breaking Bad.

I was happy with that and dusted off the old bits and bytes and fired it up.  There was a little trepidation as this was one series I knew for a fact that I had seen before, and therefore would remember everything.

I didn’t.

From the very outset the episodes surprised me.  I didn’t remember any of them.  Herself was the same and kept muttering “Jayzus but I don’t remember that bit” at regular intervals.  Now I remembered all the individual characters and the general plot but the actual events they played out seemed to be completely different.  There were a couple of scenes that I did particularly remember from the first viewing and it  came as a bit of a relief when we reached them.

We came to the final episode the other night and that seemed to be that.  There was a lingering memory though about a scene involving an automated machine gun.  We hadn’t seen that scene to I put it down to either an invention in my head or a part of a different film.  But then on further investigation I discovered that there was an episode that wasn’t in my collection.  I eventually found a copy yesterday and we played it last night.  And there was the missing bit about the machine gun!  How the fuck did I know the plot of that final scene if I hadn’t seen it before?  And if I had seen it before then surely it would have been part of my collection?

I’m baffled.

I can’t wait to watch it all again in another couple of years though.