Walt may be ambivalent about continuing his career4 in the wake of all the death he inadvertently caused—even refusing a Godfather-level offer Gus Fring couldn’t have expected him to refuse—but with the Cousins on their way, he may not be able to get out.
1 The Cousins are played, in fact, by a pair of brothers, only one of whom had any acting experience: Luis Moncada (the actor) and his brother Daniel (the rookie). The casting people loved Luis’s audition and asked if he had any relatives who looked like him. Though both Moncadas had screen presence to spare, Michelle MacLaren recalls that Daniel was so nervous in his acting debut that he barely spoke for most of the shoot. After the scene where the Cousins walk away from the exploding truck without flinching, she says, “Daniel looked at me and said the first sentence I had heard out of his mouth in three days: ‘A shoe flew over my head.’”
2 The Cousins come across very much like a silent pair of Anton Chigurhs from No Country for Old Men, as we watch them silently steal the farmer’s clothes, and then blow up the coyote truck because one poor bastard recognized what the skulls on their boots meant (and could therefore identify them later to law enforcement). Bryan Cranston films these scenes as unforgettably haunting, and leads us to understand instantly the dire threat these men pose to our protagonists.
3 That’s Jere Burns as the rehab counselor. At the time of the episode, he was best-known as a sitcom actor, though in more recent years he’s toggled back and forth between dramatic roles on shows like this and Justified and more explicitly comic stuff like Angie Tribeca. The monologue about how the counselor killed his daughter while high on cocaine was a dramatic moment, and a reminder that Walt and Jesse aren’t the only characters in this world to have inflicted pain, suffering, and death onto others.
4 Between the matches Walt likes to light and then toss, the teddy bear and other airplane debris, and now the barbecue full of burning drug money, it seems like there’s always something flaming landing in the White family pool, isn’t there? Walt’s guilt-ridden attempt to burn the money was one of his few moments of non-denial in the hour, but of course he changes his mind, because burning the money would mean everything he did was for nothing.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 2
“Caballo Sin Nombre”
Written by Peter Gould
Directed by Adam Bernstein
Seeing Red
“I can’t be the bad guy” —Walt
An episode later, and Walt still isn’t ready to take Jesse’s rehab revelation to heart. He’s in denial about how evil he’s become, how much he’s hurting the people he cares about, and how his actions will be received by the world around him. He’s oblivious to how the cop will respond when he gets out of the Aztek and begins ranting and raving about his civil rights. He’s oblivious to how much he’s hurting Skyler by letting her become the bad guy to Jr. in their separation, when, if anything, Skyler is doing him (and their children) a kindness by not telling the world that he’s a meth cook.1 He’s oblivious to the fact that the cartel might be angry with him, and to the presence of the Cousins sitting in his bedroom with an ax, and to the fact that his life is only spared because Saul’s buddy Mike has a direct line to Gus Fring. Walt begins and ends the episode with chemicals in his eyes (first the pepper spray, then the shampoo), but even cleaned up, he refuses to see his life very clearly.
We can, however, and “Caballo Sin Nombre”2 gives us a very vivid picture of how bad Skyler has it because she won’t tell the truth about Walt. Her motives aren’t entirely selfless; as Saul points out to Walt, the truth would have huge blowback for Skyler, too. But staying silent turns her son against her—he even ditches the Flynn nickname to go back to being called Walter Jr. in a show of solidarity with his pop. Even Hank seems ready to dismiss Walt’s mystery transgression as an affair and take Walt’s side in what looks, from his point of view, to be a disproportionate response from Skyler: Kick the cheating bastard out? Sure, but don’t keep him from his kids. Marie is more suspicious, but she has no evidence. And because Skyler’s out on an island, emotionally and financially, she finds herself forced to become the Saul Goodman to Ted Beneke’s Walt, showing him how to more effectively cook the books. She doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t seem to have a choice—which, interestingly, is the justification Walt used for getting into the meth business in the first place.
Jesse, as we know from the premiere, has embraced his own villainous side—not in any kind of cackling, over-the-top fashion, but in a much more compelling, disturbingly matter-of-fact way. He is what Walt has turned him into, and so he has no problem using Saul to hustle his parents into selling him back his aunt’s house at a rock-bottom price.3 Not only does this allow him to get revenge for how unfairly he feels they’ve treated him in the past, but it also lets him get back at two of the people who helped contribute to the death of Jane (and, by the transitive property, the people on the planes). If his parents don’t kick him out of aunt’s house, Jesse doesn’t move in next door to Jane, doesn’t drag her off the wagon, and so on. Aaron Paul’s had to play a lot of different versions of this character (clueless comic relief, tragic victim of Walt’s greed, etc.), and he’s frighteningly good as this empty, evil incarnation. What he does to his parents (and, unwittingly, to his kid brother, whom he does like) is heartless, but unlike his partner, Jesse has no illusions about who he is and what he’s doing. He’s cruel, but he’s not a hypocrite.
Neither, of course, is Saul Goodman. As Walt and Jesse’s consigliere (even if the business isn’t active at the moment), Saul has clearly moved up in the world. He’s dressing better, his comb-over isn’t as tacky, and he has a Bluetooth, status symbol for d-bags everywhere.4 But he’s still a low-rent lawyer at heart; his glee at getting one over on Mr. and Mrs. Pinkman’s high-class attorney is palpable. If Jesse’s merely resigned to being the bad guy, Saul relishes the role.
While Walt and Jesse are both preoccupied with getting back into their homes (Walt breaks in via the trap door he made while battling mold last season, while Jesse gets in via more legal means), the Cousins are planning their attack—with a big assist from Tuco’s Tio, whose mind remains sharp and focused even as his body betrays him. The scene in the nursing home where the Cousins realize they can use the Ouija board to glean information from Tio is simultaneously delightful, in how cleverly it works around Tio’s communication difficulties, and diabolical, because we know the old man knows who Walt really is. Tio was once a very bad man himself, it seems, and though he may not look it, his mind is still capable of devising ways to harm those who deserve it. And boy, does Walt deserve it.
1 Walt’s flinging of the pizza onto the garage roof after Skyler has rejected his latest reconciliation effort is one of the great first-take stunts in TV history. The show’s special effects expert had rigged up a device that would get the pizza onto the roof if need be, but Cranston got it up there unaided on the very first try. The downside is that the home’s real owners would spend years afterward dealing with Breaking Bad–loving tourists recreating the moment and then not bothering to clean up after themselves.
2 Spanish for “Horse with No Name,” which is the song Walt is singing along to when the cop pulls him over.
3 The real-life real estate issues with Jesse’s house finally resolved themselves by this point, as the new owners finished remodeling the place and agreed to let the production use it again. This meant Jesse could move back in, but the renovations had to be explained as something Mr. and Mrs. Pinkman had paid for in order to try to flip the house.
4 Oh, where have you gone, Ken Wins?
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 3
“I.F.T.”
Written by George Mastras
Directed by Michelle MacLaren
Welcome Home
“All that I’ve done, all the sacrifices that I have made for this family, all of that will be for nothing if you don’t accept what I’ve earned.” —Walt
“I.F.T.” is perhaps the least Walt-centric episode of the
series to date.1 Walt isn’t absent, but more often than not, it seems like characters are talking about him rather than interacting with him.
And most of what they’re saying about him is that they’re waiting for him to die.
“I.F.T.” lays out two possible outcomes for Walt: Either the cancer comes back soon and kills him (which Skyler takes as a given, and which makes her reluctant to rat him out to the cops while he’s alive), or else Gus Fring finishes his business with Walt and lets the Cousins—here revealed to be actual cousins of Tuco, and nephews of Tio, who turns out to be a former kingpin named Hector Salamanca—do to him what they did to Tortuga.
When you start with a premise like this show has, a dark ending is all but inevitable—and, based on what Walt has done to this point, well-deserved.
Even in an episode where Walt largely takes a backseat to Skyler, Jesse, Hank, and the cartel, you still get to see the damage he’s done to those around him. Once again, he completely checkmates Skyler and makes her the bad guy in their domestic drama. Jesse is similarly lonely and isolated due to Walt’s actions, and spends most of the hour doing nothing but calling in to Jane’s not-yet-deactivated voicemail, so he can hear her voice again. And when the phone company finally cuts the line—taking away the last vestige of the woman Jesse loved, and Walt killed—he heads into the desert in the RV to cook on his own, using all the lessons Walt taught him. And Tio is still raging over Tuco’s death. Even though Hank technically fired the killing shot, Tuco was in that situation because of Walt, and Tio is likely to seek revenge by causing all manner of pain and heartache for those associated with Walt. And, of course, Hank’s PTSD (which here lead him to savagely beat on a pair of tough guys in a biker bar) began not with Tortuga’s death but with him killing Tuco, which, again, only happened because Hank was looking for Walt.
“I.F.T.” is a great showcase for Anna Gunn. She does an incredible job of inhabiting Skyler’s panic and frustration at the cops’ refusal to kick Walt out, her resentment at how Walt has twisted Walter Jr. into sympathizing with him, her nervous anticipation as she prepares to seduce Beneke as payback to Walt (and, perhaps, as a chance to take some brief pleasure from the midst of this ongoing nightmare), and her matter-of-fact delivery of the three words she knows will destroy Walt’s hopes and dreams for their marriage. Walt has an amazing capacity for self-denial, but even he can’t ignore any more what his drug career has done to his family. Skyler has tried everything else, but the only things she knows will get through to him are her actions. And so it comes down to this simple atomic bomb of a phrase that’s abbreviated in this episode’s title:
“I fucked Ted.”
1 The only prior contender is “Peekaboo” (S2E6), which focuses mainly on Jesse’s day with Skank and Spooge, but even that episode had a prominent subplot featuring Walt and Gretchen.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 4
“Green Light”
Written by Sam Catlin
Directed by Scott Winant
An Effective Motivator
“Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to have someone watching your back.” —Mike
Breaking Bad walks a fine line between black comedy and straight drama, but as Walt’s heart has gotten darker, so has the show. Episodes leading up to “Green Light” have had their humorous moments (roof pizza!), and the very funny Bob Odenkirk has been promoted to regular cast status, but on the whole, the show feels more serious than before. That’s not to say it’s less interesting, because Cranston, Paul, and company play both tones equally well—only that the show often has its feet more firmly planted on the side of moody drama.
But with “Green Light,” the funny returns in greater doses. Saul moves to the forefront, Walt is more pathetic than monstrous for most of the hour,1 and the comedy duo of White–Pinkman is briefly reunited.
It’s no coincidence that the show took a darker turn after Jesse turned to heroin. This was not only because there’s not a lot that’s funny about that situation, but also because his drug use drove a wedge between him and Walt. So much of this show’s comedy, even in otherwise bleak episodes like “Grilled” (S2E2) or “4 Days Out” (S2E9), comes from seeing these two characters drive each other crazy as they try to solve their latest potentially fatal problem. But since Jane’s death, they’ve been at peace with each other, largely because neither was cooking meth at the time—and because Jesse has no idea what really happened the day Jane died. The professional friction between the two men was replaced by a surrogate father–son dynamic—as demonstrated by Walt telling Jesse, “You’re good at a lot of things, son,” while trying to talk him out of cooking.
But as soon as Jesse takes out that bag of Heisenberg’s trademark blue meth, all of Walt’s paternal instincts go out the window. Walt The Mentor is overtaken by Walt The Aggrieved Party: the man whose entire life can be blamed on others, whose myopic pride eventually poisons every part of his life. Walt should be proud that he ultimately turned out to be a good teacher to Jesse—that he has taken the idiotic Cap’n Cook and turned him into an effective cook and chemist. But then again, he has just blown up his teaching career by hitting on the principal—his own clumsy attempt to get back at Skyler for sleeping with Beneke, but also subconsciously a way to get out of a job he never wanted—and all he can see in that blue bag is that Jesse has stolen from him, in the same way that he believes Gretchen and Elliott made their fortune on his work. It makes Walt go ballistic—and provides us with a scene that is very, very funny.
Cranston’s comedy bona fides get a workout in this one, not only in arguing with Jesse, but in the scene outside Ted Beneke’s office (where he assures Skyler everything’s fine, even as he hunches over the potted plant he’s trying to hurl through Ted’s window), his lame brawl with Saul (with Mike picking up Walt like a father might pick up a child throwing a tantrum2), and his disastrous attempt to seduce Principal Molina.
But if Walt is a clown in this episode, he’s a sad one. He loses his marriage, loses his teaching job, alienates the closest thing he has to a friend in Jesse, and even fires his counsel and money launderer. He’s got nothing and no one, and Gus Fring doesn’t even seem to need to tell him about the Cousins to get him to resume cooking. Heisenberg is the only thing Walt has left—and the only man he wants to be.
Jesse, meanwhile, continues to embrace his inner villain, potentially ruining the life of that poor girl at the gas station (in another one of the show’s marvelous short story teasers) with his testimonial about the awesome splendor of crystal meth, all because he didn’t think to check his wallet before filling up the RV.3 Aaron Paul is a revelation as this dead-inside, unapologetically villainous Jesse—we knew he could act, but to be able to take the character to such a different place while still inhabiting Jesse is no small thing.
The gas station deal also puts Hank back on the scent of the blue meth and gives him an excuse to get out of his terrifying reassignment to El Paso. Hank struts through the episode acting just as self-sabotaging as Walt (and talking to Gomez in a similar manner to how Walt treats Jesse), because he’s been to the border (and south of it) and he can’t do it again. He just can’t admit it until he’s cornered by his boss. He doesn’t quite wreck his career the way Walt does, but he’s damaged any real chance he had of moving up the rungs.4 Even worse, Hank doesn’t realize that catching Heisenberg wouldn’t even do him any good, since putting cuffs on the brother-in-law you didn’t realize was the area’s most notorious supplier isn’t a great item for your résumé.
Walt’s got no one, Hank’s got no prospects, Jesse’s got no soul, and Skyler may as well don a scarlet letter at her job after Walt’s outburst. None of these characters are in a good place at the close of this episode, even if Breaking Bad rediscovered its sick funny bone while putting them there.
1 It’s a particularly nice touch that we only hear Walt and Skyler’s argument as Mike and Saul listen to the tape of it in Saul’s office. Had we watched it unfold in the White family kitchen, it would have
been as ugly as most of the Walt/Skyler interactions have been this season. Seen through the eyes of Saul and Mike, though, Walt becomes a clown with no impulse control.
2 Jonathan Banks is a great addition to the show as Mike, whose loyalty is here devoted to Gus first and to everyone else a distant second. His unflappable, completely professional demeanor stands in stark contrast to the excitable, bumbling amateurism of Walt, Jesse, and even Saul, who’s often only slightly more put-together than his two favorite clients.
3 A mark of how effective the teaser was: I was actually relieved when Hank went to the gas station, and it turned out the checkout girl gave the meth away after only sampling a little. On the other hand, it does somewhat let Jesse off the hook for what he’s done. If there’s one area the series has shied away from, it’s showing the effect of Walt and Jesse’s product on its users: Other than in “Peekaboo” (S2E6), the users of the blue meth are as abstract as the people on the plane.
4 A great little moment: Hank’s supervisor forces him to put aside the macho bluster and confess that he can’t go back to El Paso, but after a moment, Hank’s personality reboots and he tries to act like the confession never even happened.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 5
“Más”
Written by Moira Walley-Beckett
Directed by Johan Renck
Close But Getting Warmer
“I can’t tell what he wants. He won’t talk to me, he hardly even comes home. He works all day, all night, barely eats, barely speaks to me. It’s like something’s eating him away from inside. He’s just not the same. He’s not. Facing death, it changes a person. It has to, don’t you think?” —Marie
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