BREAKING BAD 5.07 - "SAY MY NAME"

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

We open this week, not with a stylized tone poem, but with a BB mainstay:  some gangsters meet in the desert to talk business and why they should/shouldn’t murder Walter White.  The outcome of this meeting is not really in question; not only is it beginning of the episode, but we have half a season to go and Declan is too new to the scene to pose a serious threat to any of the regulars.  Which is not to say that 10 episodes from now he won’t have Jesse cooking meth at gunpoint, necessitating the intervention of Walt and a little friend.

At first I felt like we’re supposed to view this as a triumphant exercise of our hero’s power, exactly the kind of scene that those who were frustrated with Walter’s backsliding from the badass Heisenberg persona for the majority of seasons 3 and 4 wanted.  These are the people who hate Skyler for being a wet blanket that prevents Walt from pursuing his kingpin destiny.   The thing that many of the Skyler/Carmela/Rita Morgan haters don’t seem to understand is how boring the kingpin business would get without the tension between it and the more grounded, domestic side of the character.  Heisenberg is ascendant throughout the scene, dominating Declan at each turn and forcing him to kiss the ring before he’s actually delivered anything.  But was it as exciting as any one of the similar meetings with Gus, where Walt had to carefully, gingerly lay out the arguments for keeping him and his partner alive?

Not to me, but I also found it hard to enjoy the scene on a power trip level because I thought Walt did a terrible job of selling himself.  He pumps up himself and his partner and product, which is fine, but he also spends a ton of time running down this crime boss in front of his underlings, which one should always be careful about.  He calls him to a tee-ball team to his Yankees, then launches directly into a second, superfluous metaphor about how the blue meth is classic coke.  “Would you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?” is his counter to the obvious question of why this crew shouldn’t leave him in the desert to die.  Fuck Yes I do, if I produce and distribute of RC Cola.

But anyway, this works, as it must, even after Walt makes the pointlessly humiliating demand that Declan name him as the boogieman of the Southwest meth trade.  This is good for the rest of the season, as my primary concern about the season so far is that after the premiere there was no pressing need for the characters to make any of the decisions they’ve been making outside of their own greed and pride.  Now that they have a quota to meet again to avoid the ire of dangerous people, there will be more pressure on them to rob the next proverbial train immediately (whereas if they weren’t ready in “Dead Freight”, they could’ve waited for next week’s train just as easily).  I know to some extent the characters bringing all of these problems on themselves is the point, but those external threats crank up the intensity which was always the most impressive thing about the show to me.

Anyway,  the opening scene is a rare case where I thought to myself “it’s a good thing you’re the protagonist of this TV show, Walt, because a real gangster would feel obligated to react violently to being talked down to so openly in front of his underlings, even if the deal being offered was a great one.” But he is, so we’re off to the episode proper with Mike ready to retire, which seeing as this is a crime story, was the equivalent of putting a black hood on his head. I tried to convince myself that he would make it out of the hour briefly, but then his lawyer had to go ahead and joke about how he was going to need a second deposit box for his granddaughter (you FOOL!!  Don’t you know anything about dramatic irony???), I started saying my goodbyes.

But before we get to that, let’s do a drive-by on the other characters we check in with this week.
Our one scene with Saul (and the writers really need to check with the FDA if they think that meets a growing audience’s daily Saul requirements) is brief but typically delightful.  Calling the other attorney a “clown”, worming his way out of making the bag hand off himself, his drawer full of burners, and of course a quick shot of that majestic inflatable Lady Liberty on his roof.  I cherish our time together, counselor.

Potentially ominous foreshadowing:  when Hank is serving the search warrant on Mike is watching a scene in The Big Heat where characters muse about what happens when a cop shoots himself.  Later, when leaving the faux-distraught Walt in his office, he mimes shooting himself in the head.  Man, I hope I’m reading too much into this.

Todd has really made it now.  He may not be Antoine Lavoisier, but he does get to take part in a stylized meth cooking montage, complete with a time-lapse exterior capper.  Congratulations, guy, that means you have officially made it in Breaking Bad terms.  You can now look forward to short, miserable stint as Mr. White’s lab assistant, most likely followed up by a horrible death at his hands.  Mazel tov?

Walt and Jesse’s argument about the latter leaving the business felt a little rote, but no matter how many times we’ve seen a variation on it the actors are still tearing into the material like the pros they are, and I liked that Walt explicitly appealed to the pride of being the best at something (even if that thing is horrible).  It’s been implicit to his motivation for a long time, and Jesse’s, who Mr. White is correct in pointing out that he doesn’t have much else going on or licit skills to fall back on.  But it’s not clear whether it will be enough to keep him on board this time.  Because his brief, awkward interaction with Skyler at the car wash indicates a growing understanding that their situations are more similar than he would’ve thought.  I’m betting we’ll be seeing those two work together more before the end.  Whether it will be to clean up a mess Walt has made or actively plotting against him remains to be seen.  Maybe the former leading into the latter?

I also like that after all of the largely abstract talk about the kids safety for the last 6 episodes, Skyler quickly points out, with only the vaguest understanding of the context, that Walt’s deal with the Phoenix crew is bringing a real threat closer to their door.  This is another reason I think it might have been better to introduce them and the deal earlier, so that crucial point of contention between them would not have seemed so hypothetical while they were having those arguments.
So…the ending.

First off, beautiful.  Just a gorgeously shot sequence in a wonderful location.  This was Breaking Bad by way of Barry Lyndon, and I would’ve been impressed even if I watched it on mute.  Second, a lot of people seem to have a problem with Mike letting Walt do the handoff, but I’m fine with it.  I think the argument against having Saul do it holds water, and Mike doesn’t want to risk dragging Jesse down with him, but he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if Walt gets himself caught and probably doesn’t mind the last chance to give him a piece of his mind.

Walt doesn’t wear his Heisenberg hat when meeting and shooting Mike, which I think is an important touch.  Because while on one level, this is him getting rid of the biggest thorn in his side in a way that he could easily get away with, but it actually comes across as a crumbling of his badass kingpin persona.  In his meeting with Declan, he is calm, still, purposeful.  When he scurries off screen to grab the gun and shoot Mike, he looks petulant, and mortified after he pulls the trigger.  Heisenberg would never apologize to the man he just shot, but it was actually Walter who pulled the trigger. Because Walter doesn’t like to be compared to Gus Fring, and he really, really hates being told to know his place.  This made me rethink the opening a bit, because if that is supposed to be Heisenberg at his most overweening, and the threads on the porkpie hat are going to be rapidly unraveling, it plays differently.  I still think it cuts off Declan’s credibility as a character at the knees, but at least the stupid aspects of Walt’s speech are knowingly unnecessary.

“I just realized Lydia has the names, I can get them from her.”  What a macabre punchline to the biggest character death the show has done so far (Gus was huge, but he was also squarely an antagonist in a way that rendered his death further within the bounds of convention).  What a strange show whose major character deaths even have punchlines.

RIP, Mike The Cleaner.  I have a feeling things will only get messier without you around. Particularly for your 9 guys and their families.

Estimated Profits: + $62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale Boetticher, Gustavo Fring, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, 14 year-old arachnophile Drew Sharp, Mike Ehrmantraut

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.  Mike’s lawyer is arrested, depriving his favorite banker of sweets.

Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – Walt meets Mike to hand off the bag and demand 9 names, with everything cranked up a notch by the pointed shot of the revolver in the bag that preceded it.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “You’re goddamn right I am.”

Best Lie – Hank promises his boss that he will not have Mike tailed anymore, but says nothing about tailing his lawyer.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15.  The kid has been absent from several episodes now, to no one I have encountered’s consternation.  People may loathe Skyler, but no one even cares about Flynn.

We Are Done, Professionally –  Mike officially retires, even dumping an arsenal that would make Nico Bellic jealous down a well.  Jesse tries to follow him, but we didn’t really think that would happen, did we?
It’s The Little Things – Cufflink Cam!  The giant goofy smile on Gomey’s face when he busts the lawyer.  The smash cut from Skyler walking away from the dinner table to Walt giving an even more historionic performance than before in Hank’s office.  “If you want me to read that, I’m going to need my glasses” – Mike could out-deadpan a slab of frozen beef.

BREAKING BAD 5.06 - "BUY OUT"

(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)


Our cold open this week is a spin on the “body disposal” sequence we’ve seen in many a crime movie/show over the years, including this one.  But rather than a graphic dismembering of the kid’s body, we get a somber, methodical dismantling of his dirtbike.

I’m not sure why exactly the went this unusual route, other than to give it some sort of new twist, but I imagine that part of it was knowing that they couldn’t craft anything as visceral as the gross-out bathtub scene from episodes 2/3 of the first season or the murder and disposal of Victor in “Box Cutter”.  It’s all for the best though, as it’s a beautifully shot, wonderfully moody scene, and while it would undoubtedly have been upsetting to see them handling the body of a dead child, just the sight of Walter setting out a barrel to receive his earthly remains was incredibly chilling, without showing anything that might draw the ire of the censors.  My only small complaint is that I’d rather have had it cut out right there, instead of tacking on the short bit of Jesse decking Todd for trying to be nonchalant about the whole thing.  I like when the cold opens are little conceptual pieces unto themselves, and that part felt  like it could’ve kicked things off after the opening titles.

Todd actually appears very little after the conclusion of last week’s episode seemed to thrust him directly to the center of the story.  But his dialogue is unwittingly pointed as he echoes justifications we’ve heard our guys use on their previous murders.  “It was him or us, and I chose us” was exactly what Walt said about Gale, and of course it was only 2 weeks ago where Skyler was yelling at Walt that murder is not something you shrug off as “shit happens.”  The guys do decide to keep Todd around, just for the sake of keeping a close eye on him, but then the whole operation promptly unravels in a way that makes it sort of moot.

I noticed a lot of people on the boards seem to be jumping to the conclusion that Todd is actually a complete psychopath who got off on killing the kid and kept the tarantula as a sort of trophy.  While we haven’t gotten much of a look at his interior life, I think that judgment is way off.  Because ultimately, this show is not about Todd.  It’s about Walt and Jesse, and having his act be a fundamentally pragmatic one reflects more strongly on them and their chosen business.  I look at the show, for all the depravity it depicts, as  strongly moralistic overall, and I don’t think its been coy about negatively judging Walt’s actions for quite some time.  I expect that to come into even sharper focus as things approach their end, and to have our guys suddenly playing off a serial killer obfuscates their moral culpability and removes some of the onus from them.  If the guys’ mistake was to bring Jeffrey Dahmer on an Ocean’s 11-style heist, isn’t that a rather weak-ass statement on their overall choices compared to saying they created a situation where an impressionable but sane individual would contemplate the viability of murdering a child?

The episode jumps around quite a bit, so much that I’m not sure how I would grade it, if these were that sort of reviews.  This was especially surprising to me as I thought the ending of the last episode was going to crystallize the overall seasonal arc.  But while it did lead in a way to the band breaking up, the whole process was relatively cordial and professional, even when Mike was cuffing Walt to a radiator.  The new head of the Phoenix organization could potentially be the sort of threat that Walt could address with an M-60, but for now all he’s trying to do is pay our guys $15 million.

While the episode jumps around a lot, it’s from strong scene to strong scene, so I liked it a whole lot despite feeling very much like a middle chapter rather than a self-contained story.  We got a little of Skyler and Marie, in a sad but darkly funny exchange that started with Marie obliviously explaining how frazzled taking care of a teenager can make you, followed by the long-delayed reunion between Jesse and Skyler, who I believe have not shared a scene since the second episode of the series.  The reunion is not so much joyous as excruciatingly awkward, with Skyler doing her best Lucille Bluth impression while she pounds wine and flaunts her lack of domestic effort.  It’s great stuff, wrapped around some classic Cranston-monologuing about his history with Grey Matter and how he has nothing left but regrets and vague imperial ambitions for his meth operation.

All of which vocalizes what has been clear for a long time now, which is that Walt is not concerned at all with providing for his family anymore.  Jesse even points out that the current offer on the table, which would allow for Walt to retire and safely bring his children home, is for over 7 times the amount he calculated he “needed” to leave for them before he quit.  But Walt views the $5 million as nothing, as “selling out” (though Jesse notes that protecting the integrity of a meth operation is an inherently silly conceit), because he’s still filled with bitterness over how he gave up on the company he started as a young man.  Those regrets are understandable at their core, but he takes them to ludicrous, delusional levels when he tells Jesse that he’s not in the meth business (which is a lie), or the money business (also known as just “business”), but the empire business (not an actual thing).

Ultimately, Jesse is so frustrated by Walt’s megalomania, and disturbed (in a goofily on-the-nose bit) by his nonchalant whistling while he works ten seconds after lamenting the death of the Sharp boy, that he decides to pull the ripcord even without his partner-in-crime/surrogate father.  This is an encouraging sign, as Jesse has spent the season so far on the sidelines, caught between two increasingly different father figures.  While the show has repeatedly reminded us that for all his kingpin swagger, Walt has failed to put away any meaningful cash reserves for his family, we have seen Mike repeatedly insist on providing for “his guys” in their time of need, to the point that he will hold his nose and partner up with a man he loathes to make sure they get what he has promised them.  Yes, there is a strong element of self-preservation to that decision, but he is eventually willing to pay them all off out of his share of the methylamine profits, and even when angered, he doesn’t present it as a pragmatic necessity, but simply states that “this is what you do.”  A man looks out for his own, rewards loyalty in kind, or at the very least, pays his debts.

Hopefully that’s the sort of man Jesse becomes, anyway, as it will be quietly devastating if after they’re gone we see that he has taken more after Mr. White’s psychological diet of preening and bullshit rationalizations than Mike’s quiet competence and steadfast providing for those in his familial or professional care.  He looked like he was stepping in that direction for most of the episode, but at the end he seems to have backslid to the point that he convinces Mike to once again refrain from firing the gun he’s holding to Walt’s head and listen to his pitch,  even though a few minutes earlier he was saying with complete accuracy and conviction that “the last thing I need to do is listen to you.”

We also get a little bit of Hank and a bit of Saul doing his typical, always fun, sleaze routine to round things out.  I hope Saul and his horrendously clashing salmon-shirt, green-tie, sky-blue Wayfarer ribbon (still rocking it!) ensembles are more involved in the future, as he provides a flavor that none of the other combinations of characters can duplicate.   And I’m optimistic that as Hank and the DEA clamp down harder on Mike, we’ll get just that.  This half-season may be a bit structurally awkward for the show, but I fully expect some fireworks in the last two episodes to leave us breathlessly awaiting the final stretch in 2013.

Estimated Profits: +$62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, 14 year-old arachnophile Drew Sharp

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.

Best Lie – Walt assures Jesse that in a year, year and a half, when they’re done cooking, there will be plenty of time for soul searching.  Of course, only one of them is likely to live longer than that under the best of circumstances.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt Macguyver’s an ersatz soddering iron out of an extension cord…

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – …so he can blowtorch his own arm halfway off and free himself from the radiator.  Watching his skin turn black was stomach-turning.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally –  The whole episode is built around Mike and Jesse attempting to untangle themselves from the Heisenpire.  Of course by the end Mike is holding a gun to Walt’s head, but no one really believes that he’ll use it and apparently we’re going to have another complicated scheme for them to work together on.

It’s The Little Things –  Skyler’s expression when Marie asks how great she must feel after “coming clean” about Ted.  “These are very green beans, Mrs. White.”  I’m pretty sure they gave Aaron Paul a chair with a lowered seat for that dinner scene so that he would look more childlike sitting between between the two big parental figures in the foreground (and yammering on about how the image the packaging on his frozen dinners masks a less appetizing truth, while the couple stares stonily across the table at each other) .  Walt carefully removing the watch he received from Jesse before roasting his wrist with the wires.  The brief, completely dead-eyed glance Mike gives Saul after he describes him as a senior citizen.  “I have never seen someone work so hard to not get 5 million dollars.”

BREAKING BAD 5.05 - "DEAD FREIGHT"

This week’s cold open is short and simple, as we are introduced to a kid taking the dirt bike out tarantula hunting, which is one of those activities that sounds absolutely filthy until you realize it’s literal.  This would be obtuse or confusing on another show, but I’ve been conditioned at this point to expect that all of BB’s seemingly arbitrary openings to pay off in a satisfying way (well, minus that one where the big reveal was that Hank threw Tuco’s grill away).  And since I had been “spoiled” to the extent that the episode would involve a train heist, I was fairly certain as to the context in which the kid would reappear, if not the outcome when he did.

The show proper begins with a miniature heist before we get to the big one, as Walt manipulates his way into Hank’s office to plant bugs.  Oh, and I totally forgot to mention last week that Hank was promoted to a desk job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the ABQ office.  On a plot level, this gives them a little more justification to keep him from being hot on the Heisenberg trail, something the show constantly struggles to do (so as not to shatter the basic set up) without making him just come off as dense.  But it also sets Hank up as another potential contrast for Walt’s new role as the boss, in addition to Mike and the ghost of Gustavo Fring.  I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that in the coming weeks, we’ll see Hank’s managerial technique, while imperfect, demonstrated to be superior to Walt’s.

This is all to set up the moody, noir-ish sequence where the gang kidnaps Lydia and forces her to call Hank at gunpoint.  Or pistol point, as Mike fastidiously corrects, noting that he is “expecting precision here.”  This is the Mike I like best; cold, methodical, dryly funny and implacable without being an invincible paramilitary force unto himself.  It might have more impact if Lydia were a better defined or more sympathetic character, as Laura Fraser’s jittery performance has not done a lot to make us concerned for her fate.  Plus, she explains the concept of Dark Territory to Jesse with nary a mention of Steven Seagal or Eric Bogasian, which…come on, lady.  Anyway, the upshot of all of it is that the guys decide to rob a train, “like Jesse James,” the second time this year the outlaw has been name-dropped, and Walt clearly fancies himself an legend of that variety.

But two things to keep in mind about Jesse James.  One, as much as he may have stolen from the rich and given to the poor (probably none), he also killed people who got in his way or witnessed his crimes.  That obviously came into play sooner rather than later.  But the other thing is that James was shot in the back by a young member of his gang who had previously idolized him (superbly dramatized in 2007’s forgotten masterpiece, which opens with a stunningly gorgeous train robbery sequence of its own).  If the name is mentioned one more time I’m officially putting my bottom dollar on Jesse being the one to pull the trigger on Walt in the end.

The heist itself is simple but clever enough to work, and makes for a fun, exciting sequence.  My one quibble on the practical side of things is why they didn’t have the hoses and compressor set up and just covered in dirt or something before the train arrived, but that’s a minor point.  There’s also Walter’s refusal to pull the guys off early (what is 900 gallons of methylamine really going to do for them that 750 won’t?), but I think that could be justified by needing to make sure the right amount of water gets in so that the scales don’t tip off the chemical company.  He doesn’t say anything about that to Mike though.  So I look at it as an extension of the subtext I’ve been reading all season, that Walt feels insufficiently challenged by the simple process of cooking meth in the post-Gus era, which leads him to antagonize people like Mike and Skyler more overtly, or to manipulate Jesse into breaking up with Andrea as much to see if he can as  because she represents a serious threat to his freedom.  This is just one more example of his pushing things further than necessary to provide himself extra excitement.

Then the kid shows up, and Todd does something great and terrible.  Terrible because, well, he murders a child.  Great because it turns what had been a high-spirited romp of a heist (though I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be getting another of those so soon after the premiere) into something with lasting weight and consequence, and managed to be shocking even though I thought we were heading there from the cold open.  Most importantly, it creates some conflicts for our main characters that have to be addressed immediately, and not just because Walt is bored or doesn’t feel like cooking less or slower.  Jesse doesn’t take kindly to hurting kids, nor, one surmises, does Mike, who is not a fan of Walter to begin with.  We knew this combination was unstable, but the reactions have begun and I can’t wait to see how they play out.

For the next three weeks anyway.  Then…arrgh.

Estimated Profits: +$72000 – at least $10000 in prep costs and compensation for the train job = $~$62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, a poor kid who went tarantula hunting in the wrong stretch of desert (the felony murder rules of New Mexico and Arizona would hold Walt and Jesse liable for first degree murder, although only Todd could get the death penalty)

Lesser Included Offenses - Grand theft, kidnapping, assault

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.  A young arachnophile is murdered to cover up the train job.

Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – The whole heist sequence is terrific, all leading up to that gutpunch at the end.  I expected it after the cold open, but my stomach just dropped out when the kid comes into focus.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Out burying bodies?”  “Robbing a train.”

Best Lie – Walt turning on the waterworks to drive Hank out of his office so he can plant the bugs again contains just enough truth to sell the deeper lie, and also really underscores just how good he’s gotten at deception in the past year.  I also let out an extremely childish giggle at the way it briefly looked like Hank caught him wanking as he hunched over and fiddled with the picture in his lap.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt schools Todd on the relative density of aqueous methylamine and how much they can dilute it without arousing much suspicion.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally – The guys are right on the verge of the murdering Lydia throughout the first 20 minutes, but decide to give her a pass even though she put out “a hit…like the mafia” on Mike.  It’s hard to imagine Walt, Mike, Jesse, and Todd all still working together next week

It’s The Little Things –  The way Lydia hisses “ASSHOLE” at Mike when the wiretap clears her of the GPS thing.  Mike telling Jesse “everyone is Meryl Streep with a gun to their head” in front of the last guy to hoodwink him at gunpoint.  The way the argument in Jesse’s house frames him as increasingly hemmed in by the bickering father figures on each side.  The shot of Heisenberg looking over the train tracks, complete with the proverbial black hat of a western villain.  The waves.

BREAKING BAD 5.04 - "51'

(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)

Adios, Pontiac Aztek.  You were one of television’s great punching bags for the last few years, and you will be missed.  I have to imagine your new owner will treat you kinder than the last one, though.  I’m even starting to suspect he may have been harboring some passive-aggression toward what you represented about the identity he presented to the world and the one that he embraces privately, and this may have led him to treat you more roughly than you deserved.

That guy is having a harder and harder time maintaining the facade identity, not because of any particular demand of the alter ego (which is still facing the occasional speed bump, but no threats of the existential variety), but because he has just lost the taste for it.  His decision to dump the Aztek and buy (sorry, lease) two muscle cars is prompted by the mechanic mentioning that he could put another 200,000 miles on it, leading him to the the obvious conclusion that even if the wagon did, he doesn’t have that many miles left in him.  And he doesn’t want to spend them pretending to be an ineffectual drip when he is clearly the baddest, smartest, swingingest dick west of the Rockies.  He’s even wearing the hat, the lynchpin of his Heisenberg “costume”, in front of Junior.  If he’s careless enough to also put it on in front of Hank, will it spark him to remember the description of Heisenberg as wearing a goatee and porkpie?

A question for another day, as Hank may think Walt’s spending is reckless, but he is distracted at the moment by even more erratic behavior on Skyler’s part. Her unsettling dip in the middle of Walt’s birthday dinner was also the cinematic highlight of director Rian Johnson’s return to the show after season 3’s “Fly”.  You don’t see a lot of feature film directors guest-shoot on TV, as series have a locked-in look and style that is going to constrain even the most visionary of auteurs.  Breaking Bad, though, has always had a lot of flair in its style, allowing for a good deal more technical flourishes than most shows, and also enough cultural/critical cache to attract a “name” like Johnson.  Incidentally, if you haven’t seen his Brick, it’s simply incredible, Brothers Bloom is a fun romp, and you should definitely see his upcoming Looper in theaters.  He’s one of the most interesting young directors working and those guys need all the support we can muster.

Anyway, we’re halfway through this sorta-season, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll be catching up to the flash forward opening before 2013 and the final batch of episodes.   I wasn’t really expecting us to, as Walt’s bearing suggested that even if things go off without a hitch, it’s not the sort of plan that would support 8 episodes worth of story in its aftermath.  But we’re still only halfway from pilot to the diner in story time, and the new big threat to the Heisenpire still has not begun to coalesce.

Well, the type of threat that requires an M-60 to address, anyway, because at the moment, Skyler is shaping up to be Heisenberg’s primary antagonist.  She doesn’t have much of a plan as yet, but I very much doubt that getting the kids out of the house and waiting out the clock is going to work well enough to remain her permanent plan of (in)action.  Walt seems to relish his chance to square off with her, flaunting his superior experience at spinning elaborate lies and rhetorically countering all of her moves as quickly as she can spitball them.  The man’s need to assert himself has so far outpaced all the concern for his family that was his ostensible motivation for starting down this path that if he’s not being sufficiently challenged by the criminals in his life, he’ll threaten to have his wife committed, gladly using the potential trauma to his kids to get one over on her.

The whole scene is as jaw-dropping and ugly as anything the show has produced, and makes this the strongest episode of the year so far.  It’s also a powerhouse for both actors, Gunn in particular. Reminding Walt that he was the one who explained to her that he was the danger, violently rejecting his attempts to make excuses for her role in things, and crowning things off with the devastating declaration that she is just counting the days until he croaks; if she produces another, better Emmy submission episode than this for the final season, she’ll be a mortal lock to win.

It also sets up a fascinating contrast between how the ticking clock affects both characters.  While his imminent demise is spurring Walt to act out in more and more reckless fashion, the same knowledge paralyzes Skyler with the thought that if she simply eschews any of the terrible options laid out in front of her, the Walt problem will eventually take care of itself.

This is not a show where problems take care of themselves, though.  And it is a show where taking control of your fate and becoming more assertive (despite being the requisite growth that 99% of fictional characters “need” to complete in their own dramas) can be a very, very negative thing.  Walt may be happier with his current persona than the milquetoast he was in the pilot, but there’s about 200 people listed in the sections below who would be much better off if he had remained a passive doormat until the cancer ate him away.  I’m almost as afraid of what Skyler will do when her hand is forced as I am to see what Walt does with the gun.

Estimated Profits: + $97000 – ~$25000 (new car leases) = +$72000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally – Mike is already trying to go back on his decision not to murder Lydia two episodes ago.  It appears that Walt came up with some idea for dealing with her that won’t cut off their methylamine supply, but we won’t see how that plays out til next week.

It’s The Little Things –  All of the big and small indicators that the current status quo cannot hold; Lydia’s mismatched shoes, the unraveling thread on the porkpie, the ticking clock on the watch (recalling the time bomb Mike characterized Walt as), the blood from the head shaving, the way the White house seems to get darker and darker in each successive scene.   The look on Hank’s face in the background when Marie wonders “You don’t hand-mash?”  The way the pool is lit up to look like a batch of the blue meth that Skyler is literally drowning in.  How Walt’s entry to the pool is obscured by her billowing dress, so his grabbing her is like the sudden appearance of a movie monster.

BREAKING BAD 5.03 - "HAZARD PAY"

(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)


This week’s cold open is very straightforward, with no major temporal or spacial shifts or impressionistic flourishes.  Instead, it shows us more of Mike takin’ care of business (and working overtime).  I liked it more than last week’s episode because he is more purposeful, snazzy in his suit, and clever in his posing as a paralegal so that attorney-client privilege blocks the cops from recording him.  It does, interestingly, end with him giving a surveillance camera a nice direct shot of his face.  Not that it will mean much to the APD, but if Hank or Gomez ever catches sight of it, they would be very interested to find out he’s falsifying his identity to access suspected fellow criminal conspirators.  Could be nothing, but it’s also the exact kind of little detail that this show likes to return to (remember Hank tracking down the Crystal Ship from an ATM camera?).

No movement on the Madrigal front this week, or sign of Lydia, but in the exchange we get extended sequences with Walt, Jesse, Saul and Mike all together, so whose going to complain?  And their new scheme is deliciously devious, setting up temporary shop in tented houses under the guise of exterminators.  Also Badger!  Skinny Pete!  Landry!  Even with no Hank, it was a great episode for the men of Breaking Bad.  Less so for the women, although we did get our first Betsy Brandt sighting of the year and Skyler finally edged her way north of 5 lines.  Skyler’s storyline is obviously building toward something big, though, so it’s not a big deal that she hasn’t got much screentime yet.  And both women make the most of their short scenes.

My biggest reservation with this season has been the low stakes for Walt and Jesse, and “Hazard Pay” is still without the pressure-cooker intensity that has marked even the least eventful episodes of the first 4 seasons.  On the business side of things, Walt comes up with a new scheme and the guys pull it off without any hitches or the horrifying twists that marked even the most basic tasks in years past.  And on the domestic end, there’s a moment where it seems like Marie is going to demand answers, but Walt has gotten so adept at telling just enough truth to divert suspicion and paint Skyler as the villain that he’s convinced her he’s the wronged husband practically before he’s exhaled.

But Walt is such a bastard in this episode that that’s not even the worst of it.  And it’s not even the scene where Walt subtly plants doubts in Jesse’s mind about Andrea, as tremendous as it is.  The way he couches it in compliments, and compliments that have some core of truth to them, is evil genius, and I love how Jesse is sort of instinctually afraid the second Walt brings up honesty vis a vis the business, quickly assuring him that Andrea doesn’t know anything.  But no, Walt’s most douchebaggy moment in my opinion is the amused little smirk he gives upon finding a copy of Leaves of Grass, the book that he talked about with Gale back in S3.  He’s so far beyond feeling remorse for the gentle soul he had murdered that he looks back on it as nothing but an amusing anecdote.

Anyway, the lack of intensity is much less noticeable in this episode than the last because it’s just so much fun to watch the boys get back to business, scheming and cooking up a storm.  Adding Saul to the mix always makes things 88% better (I checked the figures), but it’s also just that we got more with our main characters and they are on the fast track back to trouble even if they aren’t there yet.
And it’s not just me feeling restless with how easy Walt has it these days.  He seems to be a little antsy without any imminent threats to his life and freedom, and to be, if not consciously then unnecessarily, courting new enemies.  He’s practically giddy at the prospect of butting heads with Mike, smugly telling Saul “he handles the business, I handle him” 5 seconds after agreeing to stay completely out of the distribution side of the business, and seeming to end the episode pondering if it would be too gauche to start plotting the murder of a guy within a week of becoming partners with him.  And there’s also the Brock/Jesse situation that he decides to meddle in despite his appearing to be completely in the clear.  Sure, having another wife who might know something sensitive is potentially a problem for him, but they’ve barely got this thing going and he’s a terminal case; none of this will be Walt’s problem a year down the line no matter what.  Hardly seems worth kicking sleeping dogs over.

But Walt is kicking dogs and poking nests all over the place.  He seems so desperate for a challenge that he’s actually developing a rivalry with the ghost of Gustavo Fring, in an impressively self-defeating move.  Mike, in his typically blunt fashion, explains that “Just because you shot Jesse James, don’t make you Jesse James.”  Walt disagrees, though.  In his mind, shooting Jesse James proves he’s better than Jesse James.  But of course he’s not, so what does that make him?  Is he the slasher villain that the show frames him as when he stalks around his own house?  One of the three stooges he watches with Jesse?  Scarface?

The last one seems to be the most pertinent, as it has always been the logline of the show.  And the scene of the Walters watching Scarface was not exactly subtle in what it portends, coupled with the flash forward to the machine gun in the trunk.  Walt has risen meteorically through the Southwest drug trade, but he is dissatisfied with just sitting on top.  And he seems dead set on turning everyone in his criminal and familial circles against him before long.

“Everyone dies in this movie, don’t they?”  That they do.  Now would be the time to start being very afraid for the fictional denizens of Albuquerque.

Estimated Profits: -$40,000 + $13700 = + $97000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “He handles the business.  I handle him.”

Best Lie – Definitely Walt “accidentally” spilling the Beneke beans to Marie.  Credit to Chud boards genius Syd for calling it a few hours prior to airing.  Betsy Brandt’s wide-eyed, slow motion reaction is also a highlight.  It’s chilling how good Walt has gotten at telling just enough truth to sell his lies.  His talk with Jesse wouldn’t be half as effective if there wasn’t a good deal of honest affection woven into the manipulation.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 14

It’s The Little Things –  The entire cooking montage is wonderful, particularly the Christmas-y look (augmented by the music) of the aluminum shavings being shaken into the vat and the beautiful shot of the smoke being sucked into the ventilation tube.  Jesse burning himself while sneaking a fresh tortilla off the factory line.  Saul still trying to find an illicit use for the Lazer Tag arena.  The little guitar lick Badger punctuates his one line to the music store salesman with.  The patter of Scarface’s little friend (the second time in the episode Walt watches someone on TV firing a machine gun) transitioning into the sound of the bill counters.

BREAKING BAD 5.02 - "MADRIGAL"

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)


One of the strangest cold opens we’ve ever had this week, with a long prelude to an unknown executive, presumably played by Bill Nighy’s non-union German equivalent, committing some form of electric hara-kiri as the police close in on Los Pollos Hermanos international connections.  I don’t know what exactly we’re supposed to take away from this, and in fact I have a suspicion that it was written solely to get a guy to say “Cajun Kick-Ass” in a heavy Teutonic accent.

From there we have one more bit of clean up, as Walt has to help Jesse find the ricin cigarette (even though it’s not actually the real one).  While it was overshadowed by the flash-forward opening, last week’s premiere was essentially a clean-up episode, dealing with the loose ends from Gus’s murder.  This one is the opposite, something we don’t normally get with this show, an episode that is devoted almost exclusively to setting up the major storyline of the season involving Madrigal Electromotive.  This results in a clunkier experience than we are accustomed to with BB, which is usually so great at spinning one crises organically out of the solution to the previous one.  But with last season ending with the decapitations of the biggest meth operations north and south of the border means that we need to drop in some major new characters basically out of the blue, so we get an odd episode that feels more like a backdoor pilot for a BB spin-off, or in today’s vernacular, a collection of webisodes with a couple scenes of our main characters grafted on.

Those main players are typically great in their short scenes, particularly Aaron Paul in his Roomba-induced breakdown.  But Colonel Saltstache actually gets more dramatic material than Sklyer, Saul, Walter Jr. and Marie (who doesn’t appear at all) together.  It’s not a terrible hour of television or anything, it’s just odd that with the end firmly in sight, things have never felt less urgent.  Walt and Jesse are on the inevitable path back to cooking, but there’s a leisurely feel to the proceedings.  They make an important step of getting Mike on board and acquiring their methylamine, but not through any really zealous pursuit of those ends; by the end of the episode they have just sort of fallen into their laps, which is where we knew they had to end up when the episode started.

Rather, most of the episode is the Mike Show, which is great for Jonathan Banks fans (and I know many of you get super hard for the old bulldog), but as I said, feels a little off-task when taking into account that we have a time gap the size of the first 4 seasons to fill in with only a single season to to do it.  Contributing to this feeling is that although he meets with Walt and Jesse and Hank, the conclusions of those meetings are foregone.  We know from the non-stop promo spots featuring the time bomb comment that Mike is going to turn down their offer, just as we know that he won’t be able to avoid their orbit once they get to cooking again.  And as much fun as it is to watch Hank in his element and Banks mine new depths of deadpan in his responses, did anyone really think that former-cop Mike was going to crack under the pressure of a single interrogation?  Not really, which makes his biggest scenes the ones focusing on newcomer Lydia.

Lydia has potential as a character, but it’s mostly tied to her as a reflection of Walt, to whom she is completely disconnected throughout this episode.  Her frayed nerves are reminiscent of Walt’s early criminal stages; when Mike explains to her that “in the real world, we don’t kill 11 people as some sort of prophylactic measure,” it’s exactly the type  of impatient corrective he might have directed at our hero a few seasons ago, while her plea to have her body found so that her daughter doesn’t grow up thinking she was abandoned is the type of thing Walt would have done in earlier days, when he was more concerned about the family “missing you after you’re gone” than that they respect/fear him while he’s still there.

Which is fine for a certain type of reflection, but it’s hard to get too wrapped up in this character who didn’t exist last week fretting over a list of names of people we don’t know (I know we’ve met Chau and Dennis the laundry manager before, but come on) who might pose a hypothetical threat to her.  It is in some ways necessary to get through this stuff quickly, as these Madrigal folks have to fill the enormous shoes of Gus Fring and we don’t have a ton of time to do it, but it’s makes for an episode that is a long way from the shocking, white-knuckle, emotionally devastating ride that BB is at its best.

Get back to cooking, boys.  This episode was mostly just ketchup, and I know you are capable of much more inspired, Franch-y concoctions.

Estimated Profits: -$40,000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.

Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – Mike approaches a door with a gun pressed against the peephole, then gets the drop on his ambusher and quietly interrogates him with Chau’s demapped head separating them in the frame.

Best Lie – Gotta admire Walt’s commitment when he helps Jesse search his house for the cigarette for hours before gently pointing him toward the Roomba.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 14

We Are Done, Professionally – Mike rejects Walt and Jesse’s offer of partnership, astutely noting that Walt is time bomb waiting to go off.

It’s The Little Things –  Mike deadpanning that Hank’s accusations have him “very stirred up”.  The more realistic cracking sound of Mike’s silenced pistol as opposed to the traditional high-pitched squeak.  Jesse named the RV “The Crystal Ship”. Mike asking the hitman if he’s ready, but not waiting to hear his final plea.

BREAKING BAD 5.01 - "LIVE FREE OR DIE"

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

No one does cold opens like Breaking Bad.  Not The Shield.  Not Lost.  Not Buffy.  Not The Wire.  Those all did them well, don’t get me wrong.  But we never know what we’re going to get from the opening of a BB episode.  It could be a flashback.  It could be a flashforward, either to the episode’s climax or the end of the season.  It could be a brief, impressionistic image foreshadowing something indeterminately awful.  It could be a video for a Spanish-language drug ballad.  Often times it’s more like a conceptual teaser trailer for what is to come than the actual beginning of a story.  But it’s pretty much guaranteed to be striking and ominous and to have me muttering “oooohshit…” when the smoke and periodic table and western guitar music comes up.

The opening of “Live Free Or Die” certainly lives up to this tradition.  Much like season 2, we are catching a glimpse of a grim future, but we have a lot more concrete facts to go on than when we were just seeing charred stuffed animals floating in a pool.  We are roughly one year from the “present day”, based on Walt’s 50th birthday being in the pilot (where one of our first scenes had Skyler presenting him with his veggie bacon arranged in a “50” shape) and him talking about having been doing this for a year at the end of last season.  We see that he has grown a full beard and head of hair, suggesting that it’s been some time since he was riding high as Heisenberg.  This assumption is bolstered by the fact that he seems to have actually driven in from New Hampshire; his car has plates sporting the state’s famous motto, and he doesn’t seem to be reaching for a story when he responds that it takes 30 hours driving with no stops.

And less tangibly, but significantly, observe Cranston’s body language.  He looks worn down, resigned, but not sickly to the point of being physically infirm.  Walt carries himself completely differently after embracing the Heisenberg persona than he did in the first season, but this is a completely new bearing for our man.  I’d like to watch it again to try to articulate exactly what he was doing, but I don’t have a DVR, so suffice to say that I was left with the impression that whatever failure or defeat has knocked Walt from the saddle he’s riding in throughout the episode proper, it occurred a good while before the Denny’s scene.

My guess at this point?  When the cartel and/or DEA heat comes bearing down on the Heisenpire over the next 8-16 episodes, Walt decides to call up that vacuum cleaner salesman that Saul turned him on to.  He converts the Whites (or what’s left of them…) to the Lamberts and sets them up with a new life in sunny NH.  With the clock on his cancer running out, Walt decides to come back to the ABQ to help Jesse out of one last jam and check out in proper Scarface fashion.  Furthermore, I believe this plan will go off exactly as planned, with no collateral damage, and Walt and Jesse will ride off into the sunset as noble outlaws, because I’ve been watching this show carefully for several years and have a pretty good bead on its M.O. at this point.

Okay, 1000 words or so in, maybe time to move past the opening credits.  I’ll move through this quicker, as brevity is the soul of wit (or so some old British pervert says), and this is actually a fairly mellow episode of BB, despite including the boys’ biggest caper yet.  By BB standards, it’s a light-hearted romp, with absolutely no intentional harm to the well-being of innocents.  Which is not to say it is not incredibly destructive, dangerous, and damaging to the well-being of the entirety of Albuquerque, but we grade on a curve these days.

Point being, the stakes, while ostensibly life and death for our leads, never feel as tense as something like the Winnebago scene in “Sunset” or even Hank interrogating Jesse in “Bit By A Dead Bee”.  Part of that comes from knowing that it’s the season premiere and the guys will definitely be getting at least a temporary reprieve, but mostly I think it comes down to Walt’s cocky attitude.  “Box Cutter” was a season premiere too, but Cranston’s palpable desperation in the superlab sold that as a legitimately harrowing experience.  But with where the character is at now, it doesn’t make sense for Walt to be a ball of frayed nerves even while carrying out an electro-magnetic assault on a police station that I fully expect to reenact beat-for-beat as a mission in Grand Theft Auto V.

Which brings us to the most distinctive aspect of this premiere, that for the first time we’re starting the season with Walter in triumph.  The arc of previous years has always had Walt slowly embracing the badass Heisenberg persona, but then the next season has to quickly humble him so he can go through a similar transformation over the next 12 episodes.  Heisenberg makes his first appearance in “Crazy Handful of Nuthin”, but the following episode makes it clear that his chemistry sneak attack has not given him the upper hand in dealing with Tuco.  In season 2, he enjoys his time as a drug lord, has his “stay out of my territory” moment and becomes a millionaire, but in the end his minions are dispersed, his partner is catatonic, his wife takes his children away from him and his pool is befouled by Insta-Karma Brand’s patented Accusatory Stuffed Animal Eyeballs (give me a drowned opossum any day of the week).  He spends several episodes in season 3 denying that he’s a criminal and refusing to cook, but of course by the end he’s capping dealers in the head and out-maneuvering Mike and Victor.  Then Gus quickly brings the hammer down and Walt spends the majority of 4 impotently rattling the bars of the cage the Chicken Man has constructed.

This year looks to be very different.  Rather than immediately knocking Walt down a  peg so he can spend the year transitioning from a reactive role to a more assertive one, we have him in Heisenberg mode from the get-go, with the cold open to suggest that we will be seeing an opposite trajectory.  It seems that we will be going from a premiere with Walt as a crime boss smugly in control of his little empire to a finale where he is a beaten down, desperate shell.  Conjecture?  Sure, but again, the way he carries himself and looks at that machine gun does not look to me like a guy slotting one piece into some brilliant master plan. It looks like a guy who has already checked out.

Also starting off the season in the catbird seat?  Hank, who barely appears, but does look more mobile than we last saw him.  Which is fitting, since it was clear all along that at least a portion of his difficult recovery was psychosomatic.  I’m very interested in where they take Hank in the home stretch, as his character is the one whose handling I’ve most been impressed with over the years.  I didn’t find space in the previous season reviews to mention how brilliantly the show has positioned Hank, so let’s do that now.

Hank’s an incredibly difficult character to handle properly in concept, as his story potential seems major but limited.  It ratchets up the tension to have him be the one chasing Heisenberg, but if he ever actually figures out the truth then the entire show comes crashing down.  But the longer he can’t figure it out, the more he loses potency as a threat and becomes Wile E. Coyote.  How is it that we still view him as a credible lawman after 5 years of failing to see what’s right under his nose?
A few ways.  For starters, he’s come out on top of the two biggest shootouts in the show’s run, taking out 2 of the biggest 3 threats to ever come at our heroes in the process.  It doesn’t hurt our ability to take him seriously to see that when it’s time to showdown, the man can handle himself.  But mainly, the show has been great at finding ways for him to be good at his job without actually accomplishing his primary goal.

It does this by making the rest of the DEA much more credulous about all the smokescreens the meth-makers have thrown up, so that he has spent most of the series running his investigation all on his own.  His having to drag his colleagues kicking and screaming along for the blue meth ride makes his constantly coming up just a little short much less damning of his capabilities.  Basically, the show won’t ever let him win, but it always allows him to be right.  Most excitingly for this year, we’ve reached a point where the DEA has no choice but to recognize that this Cassandra in their midst has been proven completely correct about every “wild hunch” they have dismissed over the previous year.  He didn’t buy that the guy they sent to jail as Heisenberg in S2 was the real deal, and he was right.  Excuse or no, he was right about the blue coming back to ABQ in S3, and while his assault on Jesse created a legal clusterfuck for the department, the fact that the Marie misdirection occurred at all strongly suggests that he is involved in some fairly high-level dirt.  And of course, Gustavo has been posthumously outed as the biggest meth dealer west of the Rockies.  I have a hard time seeing Gomey or Colonel Saltstache poo-pooing any of Hank’s hunches this year.  It just remains to be seen what that will be now that the laptop is trashed.

Is it Sunday yet?  Is it?  Now?  What about now?  Huh?  Man.


….Now?

Estimated Profits: $400,000 ahead. But Walt says he doesn’t have any cash for a magnet?  Of course, he’s probably lying, because he’s a lying liar what lies at midnight and also before and after.  But he may have been hit harder by S4’s expenses than I estimated.  Let’s say $200,000 ahead.

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons

Lesser Included Offenses - Possession of illegal firearms, breaking and entering (police station), obstruction of justice (normally I don’t list stuff like evidence tampering, but in this case they screwed up all kinds of cases that don’t have anything to do with them)

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed (I’m actually suprised how sad I was to see it go, since it’s not like it hosted a ton of good times or anything). On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle - “We’re done, when I say we’re done.”

Best Lie –  Mike impersonating a US Postal inspector while talking to the cops.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – The boys improvise a giant magnet device to wreck up the evidence room from outside.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 13 (“Pilot”, “Cat’s In The Bag”, “Gray Matter”, “Crazy Handful of Nothin”, “Down”, “Negro y Azul”, “Over” x2,  “ABQ”, “No Mas”, “Green Light”, “Cornered”, “Salud”)

We Are Done, Professionally – Both Mike and Saul attempt to extricate themselves from dealing with Walt.  Both fail to do so.

It’s The Little Things –  Walt and Horace Shapiro, Landfill Attorney* assuming that Jesse has a cock ring. Mike named his favorite Mexican chicken Wendell (for some reason, this is funnier than if he had given them Hispanic names).   “Yeah, bitch! MAGNETS!!!”

*I’m sure that the character has an actual name.  Just as I am sure that name will never appear in this blog.