In the case of The Breaking Bad Audience v. Walter White—or, perhaps, The Breaking Bad Audience v. The Fans of Walter White—no scene in the series’ history incites more debate or rancor than Walt’s role in the death of Jane in the harrowing climax of “Phoenix.”
The defense will argue that Jane made her own bed by getting Jesse hooked on heroin, falling off the wagon herself, and threatening Walt’s freedom to ensure that Jesse got his half of the Gus Fring money. And they’ll insist that Walt declining to intercede when she begins choking on her own vomit isn’t the same thing as him poisoning Emilio or strangling Krazy-8.
The prosecution will counter that Walt has repeatedly been guilty of events that introduced Jane to Jesse, and that drove Jesse from casual user of his own product to hardcore drug fiend. They’ll then point out that Jane, experienced junkie that she is, knew what position she could safely sleep in while high, and that she only wound up asphyxiating because Walt kept jostling the bed in his attempt to wake up Jesse. All of which makes Walt’s role in Jane’s death not that of a passive, if horrified and self-loathing, bystander, but the active agent. Jesse and Jane each make their own bad decisions along the way, but it’s ultimately Walter White’s fault, and his pained tears watching her die are—while a stunning bit of acting from Bryan Cranston—perhaps the most loathsome symbol yet of Walt’s inability to move beyond his own desires and interests. He feels great shame at not interceding in the death of this young woman, but he’s still letting it happen—and not even because she’s an immediate threat to him anymore. Paying Jesse his cut defuses that bomb for the moment, but Walt knows that Jane might, one day, become a problem for him—likely the day all the Fring money has been spent and shot up her and Jesse’s arms—and that hypothetical is enough for him to stand back, let her choke, and feel nauseatingly sorry for himself.1
Of course, Jane poses one hell of a problem to Walt earlier in “Phoenix,” not only for introducing Jesse to heroin, but for blackmailing Walt into paying Jesse his cut. Walt’s reluctance to hand over Jesse’s share is a way of protecting a partner who at the moment can’t help himself, since the bulk of that $480,000 will be spent on drugs, perhaps killing Jesse in the process. Near the end of the episode, he shares a drink with Jane’s father Donald (John de Lancie2), neither man realizing who the other is—nor the tragedy Walt is about to bring upon Donald—as they ponder the difficulty of caring for addicts, whether Donald’s daughter or the man Walt describes as his “nephew,” before agreeing that you simply can’t give up on family.
But however much Walt has grown to care for Jesse—in many ways feeling closer to him during this period than to his own sweet and innocent son—his refusal to pay Jesse, and then his trip to the house under cover of darkness, is always a way for Walt to protect himself. Walt doesn’t want to see the kid dead, but he also doesn’t want to deal with losing his partner in crime or inviting anyone to examine the life of Jesse Pinkman too closely. And having Jane around feels increasingly like a threat to him—in part because she can’t begin to fathom how dangerous Walt himself is. (If she had, she wouldn’t have gone at him so fiercely from the jump.3) She doesn’t know what he did to Emilio and Krazy-8, or the damage he did to Tuco and his crew, so she doesn’t hold back in threatening to destroy his entire life.
Sweet Jane
What was running through Bryan Cranston’s mind as he played the scene where Walt watches Jane choke to death without interceding?
“Two different things,” he says. “Walt’s thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ Immediate kneejerk reaction is, ‘Someone’s choking, save them.’ Split-second later is, ‘Wait, this is the woman who was going to extort money out of you, ruin everything—you go to jail, your family gets nothing. And this is the same woman who hooked Jesse on heroin; eventually, she’s going to get him killed with that. Fuck it! It’s better that she dies! But she’s a human being, she’s a little girl! She’s a person!’ I’m as close to her as I am to you, and I have to do something. It’s almost like the angel and the devil on the shoulder, telling you what to do. And it forced Walt into inaction. And his omission spoke volumes, when it’s like, ‘It’s probably better that I don’t do anything.’
“What happened to Bryan on one take, I looked at her, and I just see a little innocent. Krysten Ritter is such a fine actor, and she was totally into it off-screen for me, and any actor appreciates that. I was able to conjure up all kinds of feelings because of it. In one take, I saw my own daughter dying in front of me, and that choked me up. That’s the worst thing for a parent.”
Walt cries a few times in this episode: first when he listens on the baby monitor to Skyler singing “Mockingbird” to Holly and contemplates all he could lose thanks to Jane, and again at the end as he watches this young woman die because she had the terrible misfortune to get mixed up with Jesse Pinkman and Walter White. The first round of tears might evoke sympathy—even though Walt has committed unspeakable crimes to build up the cash reserve he so proudly shows his baby daughter—but the second round indicates only Walt’s self-pity.
In his mind, Walt is still the hero of his own story, making hard but necessary decisions to protect his family. From our viewpoint, that story is getting harder and harder to believe, especially since “Phoenix” gives us another stinging reminder of just how unnecessary this has all been, with a subplot about Flynn setting up a donation website to help subsidize his dad’s expensive cancer surgery. When Walt barks at Skyler that “it’s charity,” the disgust in his voice makes painfully clear that Walt’s pride is responsible for all of this pain and destruction. And because of that pride, a lot of people are already dead—with more, presumably, on the way.
By this point in the series, some fans were so firmly in Walt’s corner that nothing could dissuade them from supporting and defending his every word and deed. For them, Jane’s death was just one more unfortunate sacrifice at the altar of Heisenberg, and one in which they could easily blame the victim for her complicity in her own death.
For many others, though, Walt leaning away from his chance to intercede and feeling sorry for himself was the most damning piece of evidence yet that we were watching a show where the main character was actually the villain.
1 Breaking Bad wouldn’t have existed without the antihero success of The Sopranos, and it’s hard to look at Jane’s death without thinking of the famous scene from late in The Sopranos’ run where (spoiler) Tony smothers Christopher—another unreliable junkie who doesn’t pose a threat in the moment, but who seems certain to eventually cause a problem—at a convenient opportunity.
2 Best known as the omnipotent alien Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
3 It’s a strong farewell performance from Krysten Ritter, and a goodbye to a character the writers had dubbed “Yoko” for her attempts to break up this particular band.
SEASON 2 / EPISODE 13
“ABQ”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Adam Bernstein
Karma
“If I tell you the truth, will you stay? Stay, and I will tell you everything.”—Walt
“Whatever it is, I’m afraid to know.”—Skyler
“Seven Thirty-Seven”
“Down”
“Over”
“ABQ”
Those are the titles of the four episodes that feature the black-and-white glimpses of the carnage in and around the White family pool. Taken together, they solve the mystery of what we’ve been seeing throughout the season, by spelling out the FAA alert about the plane crash over Albuquerque.1 It wasn’t the cartel, or even Gus Fring trying to remove an unstable element from the local drug business. The body bags in Walt’s driveway didn’t contain Skyler or Flynn or Hank, but airplane passengers, one of whom may have owned the pink teddy bear. Outside of the puzzle with the episode titles, this act of God comes as a complete surprise, since there were no clues within the season itself to suggest a tragedy of such magnitude.
But as the finale makes c
lear, if it’s an act of God, it’s the act of a vengeful God who wants to deliver, as Vince Gilligan puts it, “a cosmic indictment of Walt’s life choices of late.” Walt has brought this on himself, not just in karmic terms, but in setting in motion the chain of events that leads to this crash. Walt recruited Jesse as his partner, which led to Jesse losing his aunt’s house, which led to him moving in next door to Jane. Walt is the one who pressured Jesse to expand their operation, which led to Combo’s death, which led to Jesse luring Jane off the wagon, and in turn to Jane introducing Jesse to heroin. Walt is the one who, in trying to shake Jesse awake, caused Jane to roll over onto her back before she began to vomit, and he’s the one who declined to save her life when given the opportunity, which in turn led to Jane’s father being too consumed by grief to properly do his job as an air-traffic controller … which led to those two planes colliding above Walt’s backyard.
This is on Walt’s bald head2—every last bit of it—and so it feels just for fiery judgment to be literally rained down upon that head.
Walt will likely never truly comprehend how the sum of his actions caused this particular catastrophe, but after the events of this finale—after Jesse beats himself up for a death that Walt knows is really his own fault, after Skyler confronts him about all she’s learned (and all she doesn’t want to learn) about his double life and orders him out of their house and out of his family’s life—you have to think that even Walter White, the king of denial, would be able to recognize some of the pain he’s unleashed on the world.
You can see a hint of that recognition earlier in “ABQ,” in a wonderfully squirmy scene in which the TV news crew comes to film a feature on Flynn and SaveWalterWhite.com. Walt already hates all of this: the attention, as well as the realization that these reports will lead to actual donations from strangers. He can’t abide the idea of his hard-earned profit being chalked up to charity, as opposed to the actual money-laundering operation Saul set up to subtly funnel the drug money. But as Flynn begins to extol his father’s virtues in the kind of hero-worship language every dad hopes to hear from his kids—“He’s just decent, and he always does the right thing, and that’s how he teaches me to be”—you can see how much it pains Walt. In that moment, he at least has the clarity to recognize that he’s not decent, that he’s doing a whole lot of wrong things, and that throughout this season (notably during the tequila incident in “Over”), he’s been teaching Flynn all sorts of bad ways to be.
Enter Mike Ehrmantraut
Add Jonathan Banks’s performance as Saul’s fixer Mike to Breaking Bad’s list of happy accidents. His scenes in “ABQ” were all meant to feature Saul, but Bob Odenkirk had a pre-existing commitment to the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (where he had a recurring role as Marshall’s boss), so they hired Banks—a veteran character actor whose CBS drama Wiseguy prefigured modern cable series like Breaking Bad with its commitment to serialization and letting each villain stick around a while—to play a Saul proxy, sent to help Jesse in the aftermath of Jane’s death.
“Bob Odenkirk had a conflict,” Banks recalls. “He was supposed to be the one who was going to clean up the girlfriend’s death, and he had a conflict, so they had to bring in someone else—a cleaner. And they liked what I did. I went in there, I’d never seen the show, and I thought, ‘I’ll go in here, I’ll guest star, and I’ll be gone.’ It didn’t turn out that way.”
But even before he was asked back, he could tell he was involved in something special.
“I just remember walking out that day,” he says, “and I said to my wife, ‘You know, I just worked with this kid [Aaron Paul]. I think he’s really good.’”
As excellent as Bryan Cranston is in that scene, Anna Gunn and Aaron Paul match him in their respective showcase moments, both of which have a lot to do with volume. Paul plays Jesse as rocketing through stages of grief: big and loud and anguished at the drug flop-house (the first time Walt has come into such direct contact with the users of his product), and then quiet and empty and haunting at the expensive rehab facility. Gunn gets the excellent scene where Skyler confronts Walt, and shows that the quieter Skyler is, the scarier and more focused her anger becomes.
No one would look at that cliffhanger and worry that Walt is in danger of being killed by falling debris—Breaking Bad isn’t going to transform midway through its run into a buddy cop show about a DEA agent who bottles his own beer3 and the sidekick who reluctantly puts up with his racist barbs—but his actions have brought death and destruction to both loved ones and absolute strangers. This is the greatest tragedy caused by Heisenberg yet, but is surely not the last one.
1 In hindsight, Vince Gilligan and his writers didn’t work too hard to cover their tracks on this clue—even on first viewing, the words “Seven Thirty-Seven” evoked an airplane flight number more than they did the amount of cash Walt wanted to leave to Skyler and the kids. But fans at the time tied themselves into pretzel knots trying to figure out how the charred teddy bear and the bodies could all come courtesy of the Mexican cartel tracking down Heisenberg and expressing their displeasure over his actions. This plot would have been a far more impressive and terrifying version of Walt’s “Stay out of my territory” warning from “Over” (S2E10).
2 Walt’s look changed significantly when he shaved his head back in “Crazy Handful of Nothin’” (S1E6), and it does again here when—after the first notable time jump since the series began—we see that he has grown a Vandyke in the aftermath of his surgery. Now he’s starting to look as much like a super villain as he acts.
3 Hank has proven to be much smarter than he seemed at the start of the series, but he still has drug dealers right under both nostrils: not only is his brother-in-law Heisenberg, but Gus Fring, who pays a visit to the DEA field office to help organize a fun run, is Walt’s distributor. Gus, too, is much smarter (and closer) than Walt knows, keeping tabs on both local law enforcement and his new business partner at the same time.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 1
“No Más”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Bryan Cranston
A Prayer to Santa Muerte
“People move on. They just move on. And we will move on. We will get past this. Because that is what human beings do. We survive. We survive, and we overcome.” —Walt
Season two opened on a bit of macabre imagery (the eyeball floating in the pool) that it took us the whole season to fully understand. Season three’s premiere begins with another arresting image, though this time its meaning is apparent within minutes.
We head south of the border again to see an old Mexican man crawling desperately through the dirt. Is he injured? Dying of thirst? And why on earth won’t anyone in this small village stop to help him, or even notice him? But then the camera angle changes, and we see that the old man is just one of many people crawling. They’re soon joined by two dangerous-looking men in shiny suits with skulls on their boots, who without comment get down on their bellies and inch their way toward a shrine in the desert, where they say a prayer and pin up a totem: a rough pencil sketch of the man the cartel knows as Heisenberg, and who we know as Walter White.
The introduction of these two strong, silent killers—referred to in scripts only as “the Cousins”1—instantly casts a pall over everything happening to Walt up in Albuquerque. The cartel may not have been responsible for the carnage promised by the teddy bear teasers, but it turns out their vengeance was only delayed.
Walt, of course, knows nothing of the Cousins.2 Instead, he, Jesse, and Skyler are all grappling with the events from the end of last season: Jane’s death, the plane crash it ultimately caused, and Skyler’s astute decision to banish Walt from her life.
One hundred and sixty-seven people died in that crash, to be added to the butcher’s bill after Jane, Combo, Spooge, Tuco, Krazy-8 and Emilio—and all the victims of the blue meth we never see. So many dead, so much pain caused, nearly all of it traced back to Walt’s decision to enter the drug trade …
and Walt still doesn’t get it. He stands in front of that school assembly (in a scene that’s just unbearable to get through, for all the right reasons) and recites statistics of much deadlier plane crashes, making everyone there feel horrible just to alleviate his own guilt: Yes, I killed all these people, but it could have been worse! As if that wasn’t bad enough, he tells Jesse—the boyfriend of the woman whom he killed—to blame the government for the crash.
When he’s not lying to others, he’s lying to himself. A riveting scene where Skyler confronts Walt about the drug-dealing—in that uncomfortably meticulous Breaking Bad way—dances between comedy and tragedy because of how she keeps underestimating the depth of the situation, though Walt ultimately has no choice but to finally lay everything out for her. Perhaps worst of all, he assumes his honest confession will finally start to repair things between them, when in fact it’s only made things worse.
Jesse gets it. He comes out of rehab3 having convinced himself that he’s the bad guy: that Jane would still be alive if she’d never crossed his path, and that the planes, in turn, wouldn’t have crashed. And if he can’t forgive himself, he can at least take the rehab counselor’s advice to be “good enough to be okay with who and what you are.” But Jesse can do this because he’s never had Walt’s capacity for self-deception, nor the obsessive pride that keeps Walt from opening up emotionally to others. Walt is the one who’s truly to blame for nearly every sin Jesse is consumed with guilt over, yet Walt could never have had the conversation that Jesse has with the counselor, nor could he have ever accepted the man’s advice. Walt’s only method of coping is to deny and power through—to think of himself as surviving and overcoming, no matter the emotional cost to those around him. He’s the real bad guy, but can’t admit that, so it sadly falls to Jesse to assume his partner’s role for him.
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