Breaking Bad doesn’t always traffic in symbolism, but this is a pretty clear and unapologetic instance of it. Skip steps—whether in corpse disposal or cable drama storytelling—and things get worse than if you move slowly and carefully through each one.
It’s also dark and nasty stuff, and if the pilot—with its Malcolm in the Middle alum for a leading man and its seemingly ludicrous premise (a second cousin to the more overtly comedic Weeds)—had left any doubt over whether this was meant to be a comedy or not, “Cat’s in the Bag …” should have chased those away forever. It’s certainly not humorless, as Aaron Paul gets to mine nervous laughter out of Jesse’s understandably disgusted response to the task Mr. White has assigned him, and as he has to endure a judgmental lecture from Skyler White (who has come to believe he’s her husband’s pot dealer). But on the whole, this is so heavy—and so very much not the kind of devil-may-care adventure either Walt or the audience might have thought they were signing on for—that it deftly establishes a tonal and emotional baseline for what to expect going forward.
Late in the episode, Walt slips away from the bloody business at Jesse’s place to accompany Skyler to an ultrasound for their unborn baby, which is identified as a girl. Skyler jokes about how Walt will react to having a sixteen-year-old daughter, and a shadow falls across Walt’s face as he realizes he won’t be around nearly long enough to witness that. He likely won’t even be there to watch her walk for the first time, let alone go to school, start dating, or any of the other steps on the path from baby to woman. It’s agonizing for him to consider.
That the episode can present that spare and powerful moment in the same scene where Walt and Skyler will soon be arguing about Walt’s alleged marijuana use (a lie he tells her to explain why he’s interacting with Jesse Pinkman again), and in the same episode that features a running gag about Jesse’s obnoxious outgoing message (“WHAT UP, BEEYOTCH!”), as well as the gruesome image of Emilio’s liquefied remains crashing through the ceiling of Jesse’s living room—without any of it feeling like stylistic whiplash—is pretty remarkable. And it’s made possible by the decision to slow things down so we can appreciate every tiny beat of the story to its fullest.
In-Between Moments
Vince Gilligan on why Breaking Bad moves so slowly, and spends so much time on small details of the story like how Walt and Jesse go about disposing of Emilio’s body:
“To me, that is the story. To me, this is the story about the in-between moments. I think we’ve all seen the big moments in any crime story. You can’t top a movie like The Godfather. So what can I do as a filmmaker? At least I can show the stuff that nobody else bothers to show. The in-between moments really are the story in Breaking Bad: the moments of metamorphosis, of a guy transforming from a good, law-abiding citizen to a drug kingpin. It is the story of metamorphosis, and metamorphosis in real life is slow. It’s the way stalactites grow: You stare at it and there’s nothing, but you come back a hundred years later, and there’s growth.
“We’ve all seen so many TV shows and movies over our lifetimes where the murder is kind of a given, and the aftermath is clean and pain-free and skipped over, and it’s on to the next plot point. There’s plenty of movies that follow that pattern that I love, but I, as a viewer, have found my mind wandering, and I find myself thinking as I’m watching a crime movie, ‘How would you go about killing someone?’ The mechanics of it, or the minutiae of it, are oddly interesting to a layperson, to a non-criminal, as is the minutiae of just about any interesting job.
“Those kind of scenes are fun to write, because I think we idly wonder, from time to time, ‘If I had to commit the perfect crime, how would I pull it off?’ Talking through it, A to B to C, step-by-step, is interesting to me personally, and I figured it might be interesting to an audience.”
1 Breaking Bad’s decision to address all of the complications of getting rid of an inconvenient body is among the show’s most imitated. It’s now such a rite of passage for a certain flavor of drama to devote its second episode to corpse disposal that even a show featuring Bryan Cranston’s daughter Taylor Dearden (MTV’s college vigilante drama Sweet/Vicious) has tried it.
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 3
“… And the Bag’s in the River”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Adam Bernstein
Missing Elements
“This line of work doesn’t suit you.”—Krazy-8
The title of this episode and the prior one form a complete phrase (about ways to permanently dispose of an unwanted animal, no less), just as the two hours tell a complete story about Walt and Jesse dealing with the ugly physical and moral consequences of their encounter in the desert with Emilio and Krazy-8.
Where “Cat’s in the Bag …” (S1E2) focused primarily on the logistics of disposing of Emilio’s corpse, here the emphasis is on a much more difficult task. Walt must kill Krazy-8 not in self-defense in the heat of the moment, but while the man sits helplessly in Jesse’s basement, chained to a column with a bicycle lock. We’re reminded of the matter of Emilio’s liquefied, disgusting remains early on; intercut with a flashback of a young Walter White and a lovestruck colleague1 trying to identify all the elements that make up a human being, Emilio’s dissolved body parts act as a subtle punch line to a sick joke that young Walt doesn’t even realize he’s telling.2 In the end, young Walt’s colleague suggests the missing element is the soul—something the older Walt would have a hard time identifying in himself after he chokes the life out of another human being.
“… And the Bag’s in the River” does an impressive job transforming Krazy-8 from the cartoonish heavy Walt was prepared to kill in the pilot into a complicated and intelligent person willing to work every angle to talk himself out of a death sentence. This, of course, is how it has to be in order for his fate to have the power that it does, and for the show to get both comic and dramatic mileage out of Walt’s struggle to decide along the way. On the former, Walt’s pro/con list about murder (starting with “Murder is Wrong” on the con side) is as priceless—and as telling about how new he is to this world of violence—as him washing the money in the pilot. And on the latter, there’s the long scene where Krazy-8 (né Domingo) tells Walt about his family’s furniture company, making Walt realize he bought Walter Jr.’s crib there once upon a time. This is a human being, not a snarling gangster caricature. While Krazy-8 ultimately makes Walt’s choice for him by hoarding the broken plate shard to use as a weapon, it’s nearly as painful for us to watch Walt choke the life out of him—while sobbing, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”—as it must be for Walt to do it.
It’s not just Krazy-8 who opens up to Walt, but Walt who tells him something no other person in his life knows—specifically, that he has cancer. Walt spends much of the hour coughing up a lung, giving physical manifestation to the ugliness brewing inside him. Once the awful deed is done, he finally—inspired in part by the conversation with Krazy-8, in part because Skyler has begun to get wise to his absences3—decides to tell his wife something big. It could be the cancer. It could be the meth and murder. It could be all of the above. But everything trapped inside of Walter White is fighting to get out—and lives are being damaged, or destroyed, in the process.
1 This is Gretchen Schwartz, played by Jessica Hecht, who will have much more to do in this season’s “Gray Matter” (S1E5).
2 The opening shot of Emilio’s blood and guts being cleaned off Jesse’s floor is an early example of what will become a Breaking Bad visual signature: The camera pushes straight through the fourth wall (or, in this case, the floor) between the characters and the audience—visually making us complicit in the act of disposing of this body.
3 Hank also gets roped into some White family drama, as Marie misinterprets Skyler’s questions about marijuana to mean that Walter Jr. has started getting high, which in turn forces an uncomfortable Hank to give his nephew a scared straight lecture. More eye-opening, in terms of Walt’s in-laws: Marie walks
out of a store wearing a new pair of shoes she hasn’t paid for.
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 4
“Cancer Man”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Jim McKay
Apply Yourself!
“Then why don’t you just fucking die already? Just give up and die.”—Walter Jr.
Having spent the two previous episodes cleaning up the mess they created upon going into business together, Walt and Jesse spend most of “Cancer Man”1 dealing with other messes: in this case, the wreckage of their family lives.
Though the two partners appear together only briefly near the end of this episode, their stories parallel one another’s throughout, marking the start of Breaking Bad’s pivot from being solely Walt’s story (where Jesse was originally designed to be someone who dies after introducing Walt into the drug world) to being a two-hander about the teacher and his former student bringing out the best—and worst—in each other.
The hour finds both men returning to the bosom of family, with very mixed results. As Walt attempts to manage the reactions of Skyler and company to the news of his cancer (which is the thing he confessed to her at the end of “… And the Bag’s in the River” (S1E3), rather than the meth cooking and/or the murders), a spooked Jesse tries fleeing the drug world2 to go back to the safety of his childhood home, where his parents understandably have little reason to trust him. Along the way, we get backstory on both sets of relationships—how Walt used crossword puzzles to get Skyler’s attention, the many ups and downs between Jesse, his parents, and his much younger brother Jake—while also seeing how mismatched both men are with their loved ones. Walt’s family wants him to fight the cancer, no matter what, but he insists on looking at it like the pragmatic scientist he is and points out the huge financial cost of a treatment that’s unlikely to work. Jesse wants his parents and Jake to take him back in like it’s old times, but he seems to forget that the old times often involved him screwing up and bringing great humiliation to his family.
Once again, the show’s greatest power comes in the small details, like the barely contained fury and feeling of emasculation on Walt’s face when Hank offers to take care of his wife and kids after he’s gone, or Jesse browsing through his youthful drawings and coming across a comical sketch of Mr. White (along with a note telling Jesse to apply himself more—the same dynamic the two have today). Marie, previously established as a bit of a flake (and a petty thief), here rises to the challenge of Walt’s condition, roping in all her friends in the medical field (where she works as a radiology tech) to get Walt an appointment with Dr. Delcavoli (David House).
But where Walt’s insistence on appearing selfless comes across to Skyler and Walter Jr. as the height of selfishness, Jesse actually is acting selflessly by refusing to rat out Jake for the stray joint—and he permanently destroys his relationship with his parents in the process.3
Of course, Jesse has done far worse things recently than what he’s wrongly accused of here, and taking the fall for Jake shows that he understands that. Jesse is more self-aware than Walt, and while he might long for his parents, he also realizes they’re better off without him.
This same knowledge may be part of what’s motivating Walt. Treat the cancer, and he has to continue living in the ruins of a life he doesn’t particularly enjoy, and now with added financial burdens. Go out quickly—possibly leaving a meth-fueled nest egg behind—and everyone is freed of the burden of pretending he wants to be there.
Walt’s vigilante move at the end of the episode—using some elementary science knowledge to blow up the car of “Ken Wins” (as his license plate calls him), a Bluetooth douchebag (Kyle Bornheimer) who has repeatedly offended him every time they crossed paths—is (like his takedown of the teen bully in the pilot) a fantasy of middle-age wish fulfillment. It’s also a disturbing example of who and what he’s becoming. Ken Wins’s crimes were not really worth blowing up his car (or the potential danger doing so caused to those around it), but Walt’s physical transformation makes it clear how much pleasure the act of vandalism gives him, particularly against a smug, well-dressed representative of a world that’s been denied to him. He’s only in that gas station parking lot because of another coughing fit caused by his cancer, this one troublingly accompanied by blood. But once he gets a chance to impose his will on the universe, the coughing goes away, his posture improves, and he looks every bit like the badass criminal Hank was describing in the opening scene4 (which, in the moment, was comically contrasted with the image of Walt brushing his teeth, looking nothing like Albuquerque’s new kingpin).
It may be an exciting development for us as viewers, but this is Walt getting worse, not better.
Saving Jessie Pinkman
Strange but true: Jesse wasn’t supposed to survive the first season of Breaking Bad, a plan that Vince Gilligan quickly dropped once he saw what Bryan Cranston’s young co-star was doing.
“Fairly early on in the process of shooting the season,” Gilligan says, “I did jettison that idea, because Aaron Paul was such a star.”
“He was supposed to die somewhere in the fourth or fifth episode, I think,” recalls Cranston. “It’s a credit to Vince and the writers to be able to let the pendulum swing in a different direction. And that’s what good, good writers do. They will have a basic broad stroke idea of where they’re going, but not finalize anything. It’s like trying to decide what you’re going to wear next week. He saw something, saw the dynamic between Jesse and Walt, the oil-and-water mix, a great opportunity for humor and a lot of things. And Aaron Paul’s mastery of all that was great.”
Paul only learned about his alter ego’s brush with mortality after the fact.
“Vince was having lunch with the other writers,” Paul says, “and they brought me over and said, ‘You know, we were going to kill Jesse off in the first season.’ And I still haven’t read the next episode yet! And I go, ‘Yeah, what does that mean?’ Vince says, ‘Well, that’s not going to happen anymore.’ … I guess once he shot the pilot that changed his mind. He wanted to keep Jesse around. Thank God.”
1 The episode’s title is a wink to Vince Gilligan’s X-Files days, since “Cancer Man” was one of several nicknames given to that series’ chief villain.
2 Meet Jesse’s drug buddies Combo and Skinny Pete, played by, respectively, Rodney Rush and Charles Baker. Initially in the script, they were referred to as “Chubby Stoner” and “Skinny Stoner,” but Rush and Baker made enough of an impression that they were not only asked back, but given names.
3 This is Jake’s (Benjamin Petry) first and only appearance on the series, but there was clearly more to unpack in the relationship between the brothers: Jake envies the attention their parents shower on Jesse (even if it’s all negative), and he appears unconcerned that his joint has seemingly cut Jesse out of the family for good.
4 The DEA briefing also reveals that Krazy-8 was the one snitching for Hank and Gomez (and would likely have turned Walt in to them, as a bloodless way to eliminate yet another rival, had he left Jesse’s basement alive).
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 5
“Gray Matter”
Written by Patty Lin
Directed by Tricia Brock
The Point of No Return
“Wanna cook?”—Walter White
No matter how inclined you are to forgive Walter White his sins—even at this incredibly early stage of Breaking Bad—“Gray Matter” is a point of no return sort of episode.
It was one thing to justify his choice to cook meth as the act of a desperate man who believed himself to have no other options, and to excuse everything that followed as the unexpected fallout of that one terrible decision. But this reasoning fails in “Gray Matter,” when Walt is offered a Get Out of Crime Free card and declines it because he’s too damn proud.
The certificate commemorating Walt’s work on a Nobel Prize-winning study in the pilot suggested a more glorious past than that of your average high school chemistry teacher, and the
flashback in “… And the Bag’s in the River” (S1E4) showed us how close Walt and Gretchen once were. Here, we get the full, mortifying picture of the road not taken, as Walt and Skyler attend the birthday party of his ex-partner Elliott Schwartz (Adam Godley), who has become fabulously wealthy thanks to the company he founded with Walt and Gretchen, and who is now the one married to Walt’s ex. This would be a bitter pill to swallow for anyone with even a normal level of self-regard; for Walter White, the only possible response is to spit the thing out and tell the world where to stick it.
Skyler’s not comfortable around Walt’s old colleagues and their wealth (amplified by the fact that her pregnancy forces her to wear a ridiculous prom dress to the party), but she sees in them Walt’s salvation. If the cost is the only thing keeping Walt from getting treatment, why not ask the friends who made a fortune from Walt’s work to cover the expense?
Perhaps if Elliott had remembered how fanatically prideful his old partner was, he could have made a more successful attempt at the charade. Walt does, after all, seem intrigued by the idea of getting out of the classroom and going back to Gray Matter, even if he’d be working beneath the people who were once his peers. But the second Elliott mentions health insurance, it’s all over; we don’t even need to hear Walt’s verbal response to this offer, because the ugly look on his face makes it clear he views Elliott’s gesture as a degrading act of pity.
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