The White marriage comes to an end in “Más,” as Walt finally signs the divorce papers and moves out, apparently to go work in Gus Fring’s diabolical underground super lab.1 But before he leaves, we get to see that despite all their irreconcilable differences, Walt and Skyler share a capacity for denial and self-rationalization in common.
In Walt’s talk with Gus, and then in Skyler’s talk with her divorce lawyer, we see each of them adamantly denying what they’re so obviously feeling: Walt that he’s both jealous and offended that Jesse was able to duplicate the Heisenberg formula on his own, and Skyler that she would love to be able to justify keeping Walt’s drug money after all that his career as Heisenberg has emotionally cost her.
In the end, Gus effectively tunes his pitch toward Walt’s belief in himself as a good father, and Skyler in turn unwittingly gives Walt the final nudge out the door. Walter White will do many things out of spite—will, in fact, destroy his own life out of spite if he has to—and had Skyler remained cold to him and kept him from doing anything with Holly, perhaps he would have continued his squatting campaign. But Skyler’s quiet offer to let him comfort the crying baby2—and the implication that she’ll again allow him to be father to his children, if not husband to his wife—dovetails perfectly with Gus’s speech about redefining “family” as “children,” and gives him the peace of mind to leave the house and, presumably, go to work in the new lab.
Walt, of course, doesn’t realize that Gus is only giving him a temporary reprieve before the Cousins come calling—that his plan seems to involve taking those three months to let his own people learn the Heisenberg formula until they have no need of the man who invented it—nor does Skyler know that she’s tentatively letting Walt back into her life at a moment when his life is becoming more fraught than ever. All she knows is that she’s miserable, has no support system other than Ted Beneke, and would just like to ease the conflict a bit.
Just as Skyler goes from loving the feeling of Ted’s heated bathroom floor to becoming uncomfortable with it, Walt’s love of Gus’s lab seems to fade over time, as he begins to recognize just how dangerous the man he’s working for is. Walt goes into his meeting with Gus convinced that he’s outsmarted him, when in fact the only way to do that would have been to just hand Jesse his half of the money and walk away. Gus insults his vanity by suggesting Jesse’s meth is the equal of Walt’s, which not only persuades Walt to take the three-month contract, but also sever the partnership with Jesse3 in the bargain. To Gus, Jesse is an erratic wildcard best left discarded, but to us, he functions as Walt’s sounding board, and even as his conscience. Now Walt’s going it alone in a deal with a man who, while much more experienced in and simply better at this business, could never provide him with the moral compass Jesse tried to follow.
In the end, Walt has left two different marriages—the traditional one with Skyler, the professional one with Jesse—for this new one. In the old relationships, he was always the dominant personality, and the one who kept his partners in the dark. Now, he’s unequivocally in a subordinate position to Gus, who knows so much more about what’s happening than Walt does, including the fact that the Cousins are still lingering out there, waiting to bring that shiny axe down on him. It’s a trade Walt has accepted for now, but not one that seems promising in the slightest for him.
1 What a great contrast between Walt using the closet in the nursery as an office—with a tiny chair that sticks to his behind when he stands—and Walt being shown the wonders of the super lab. Walt’s a genius, but he’s an amateur. Gus Fring is no amateur.
2 Here is where having someone as talented and versatile as Bryan Cranston comes in especially handy. A lot of actors could play the monster that Walt actually is, and others could play the loving family man he believes himself to be, but very few could play both and make them seem like two sides of the same character. The look of complete vulnerability, sorrow, gratefulness, and love in Walt’s eyes as Skyler tells him to pick up Holly is worlds away from the man who will later be so cold and arrogant in muscling Jesse Pinkman out of the meth business, but Cranston sells them both.
3 We open with a hilarious flashback to what Jesse was up to in the pilot between when Walt gave him the money and when he turned up with the RV. Not only does it give Aaron Paul a chance to slip back into Jesse in a clueless but happier time, it temporarily brings Combo back to life, and shows how his actions inadvertently caused his own death. He agreed to become one of Jesse’s dealers, and had he not gotten Jesse the RV in the first place, the White/Pinkman partnership might never have flourished, and Combo wouldn’t have become high-profile enough to attract a hit from a rival crew.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 6
“Sunset”
Written and directed by John Shiban
The Learn’d Astronomer
“Please tell me you got something!” —Jesse
Walt spends much of the first half of “Sunset” in the company of Gale, his new assistant in the super lab, and a nail-biting chunk of the second half trapped in the RV with Jesse. And while Walt and Gale1 seem a perfect match on paper in nearly every way, it’s clear by the end of this gripping episode that for all their flaws and incompatibilities, Walt and Jesse are, much to both their chagrin, made for each other.
You might think that Walt’s attempt in “Mas” (S3E5) to ban Jesse from the meth business would keep the two of them apart for many episodes, but that line of reasoning would ignore two things: 1. Walt and Jesse’s tremendous capacity, both separately and together, for screwing up; and 2. The weird gravitational pull that the RV holds over their relationship.
Breaking Bad seems to find a higher gear whenever those two are in the RV together, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that their final time in that accursed but blessedly useful vehicle would be one of the most memorable. Season three, to this point, has pushed the series in ambitious new directions with the prominence of the cartel and Gus, but the climax to “Sunset” is very old-school Breaking Bad: Walt and Jesse, stuck in the RV together, finding a way to make a bad problem worse, Jesse relying on Walt’s great brain to find a way out of the mess.
From the minute Walt pulls onto Clovis’s lot and starts barking orders about destroying the RV, things seem destined to go pear-shaped, and they do. Where Walt, afraid that Hank might have tapped Jesse’s phone, hung up without explaining the situation, what he should have feared was the exact reaction Jesse had when Badger told him Walt was taking away the RV (Jesse’s entire business) to destroy it. And so Jesse leads Hank right to where Walt doesn’t want him to be, in a suite of scenes that feel oddly like a desert twist on Jaws: Hank as the shark circling the boat, looking for a way in to devour the lives of the men inside. Scenes like the one in which Hank exposes each bullet hole on the side of RV are marvelously intense and beautifully shot, as the beams of light flooding into the vehicle’s windows emphasize just how trapped our heroes are.
Walt ultimately remembers the three words that have saved his hash so many times before—“Better call Saul”—but the look of fury on Hank’s face in the hospital as he realizes that his targets tricked him into thinking his wife was in danger in order to distract him suggests that the hunt for Heisenberg has turned from an excuse to avoid El Paso into a deeply personal vendetta. But Hank is now the target of a vendetta himself, as Gus, having decided that the headache of a murdered DEA agent is less vexing than losing Walt’s genius recipe, directs the Cousins2 toward the man who actually put the fatal bullet in Tuco.
The era of Walt and Jesse cooking in the RV was essentially already over after the mechanical failure-induced panic of “4 Days Out” (S2E9), but the partnership was put on hold (both emotionally and literally) after Jane’s death and the plane crash. The vehicle’s destruction is less a marker of the end of an era than a painful reminder of how relatively simple things used to be for these two, how well they complemented each other, and how badly things tend to go when they’re not on the same page. Now they’re no longer work
ing together and their shared mobile “office” is no more, their emotional rift made physical by the demolition of the one thing they shared. Walt has been given a more stable and professional environment in which to work, but he appears to be in more danger than ever. Since he no longer has Jesse to watch his back, it looks like he’ll be facing it alone.
1 Gale is played by David Costabile, who already had antihero cable drama street cred from stints on The Wire and Damages. Gale initially comes across as a version of Walt without the endless capacity to feel aggrieved; much like Walt, he also doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would be in the criminal employ of a Gus Fring, and he can recite by heart the Walt Whitman poem (“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”) that our Walt enjoys so much.
2 The teaser with the Cousins hiding out on a local reservation, and murdering anyone unlucky enough to notice them, is one of the best examples to date of how the show treats those pre-credit sequences as short films. Sometimes, they’re comedies or musicals; this one’s a horror movie.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 7
“One Minute”
Written by Thomas Schnauz
Directed by Michelle MacLaren
Ruined. Turned to Shit. Dead.
“I need you to listen very carefully. Two men are coming to kill you…. They’re approaching your car. You have one minute.” —Anonymous
If you want to pick the moment when Breaking Bad fans went from discussing it as a great show to considering it a contender for Greatest of All Time, you should probably head straight to the parking lot shootout at the climax of “One Minute.” It is a masterpiece of suspense filmmaking, agonizing and thrilling in equal measure, as the Cousins (finally given names here: Leonel and Marco1) make their move on Hank, but not before an electronically distorted voice on the phone2 warns him one minute in advance. Coupled with a few other lucky breaks, the warning’s just barely enough to help him take out these two stone-cold killers, but he takes enough bullets himself that he’s left lying on the parking lot asphalt, bleeding out next to Marco’s corpse.
Because the previous episode ended with Gus encouraging the Cousins to murder Hank, the audience is primed to fear the attack at almost any moment, to jump whenever an elevator door opens or someone enters a room. But the phone call takes things to another level, putting the viewer and Hank in the same mindset, looking around every corner, jumping at shadows (and men with squeegees), waiting for the assassins to come. We wonder, as he himself does, if an unarmed Hank has any possible chance against these two unrelenting figures of death. Michelle MacLaren cruelly plays with the tempo of the thing, speeding up the action or slowing it down as needed to convey how dire Hank’s position is in his desperate fight against a far superior force. But Thomas Schnauz’s script plays fair by showing that Hank just barely wins through his sheer ingenuity and skill—first using his SUV, then Leonel’s dropped pistol, then the magic bullet that falls out of Marco’s pocket—to cripple one foe and blow the brains out of the other. That the script and the direction effortlessly work together to make this sequence seem both gripping and realistic is a mark of how technically confident the series has become at this point.
If the Cousins had come after Walt, or even Jesse, the outcome of their attack would hardly be in question—Walt’s not going to die in the middle of the series’ run, and Jesse probably isn’t either—but Hank is low enough in story priority that there’s every possibility he won’t come out of it alive. This makes the peril even more palpable, and his victory—though it comes at great physical cost—even more satisfying.
But here’s the thing: Even without those heart-pounding final moments, “One Minute” still would have been an extraordinary hour of television, particularly in the way it showcases the work of Aaron Paul and Dean Norris.
Hank’s beatdown of Jesse brings both men to a crossroads. Having lost his girlfriend, his partner, and now his source of income (the RV), Jesse finally tumbles over the abyss after Hank puts him in the hospital. Acting with half his face hidden by some convincing prosthetics, Paul shows us a Jesse who’s even colder and angrier than he was during the character’s “I’m the bad guy” phase earlier this season, giving a riveting monologue about all the ways he intends to punish Hank, concluding with the promise that “I will haunt his crusty ass forever until the day he sticks a gun up his mouth and pulls the trigger just to get me out of his head.”
Jesse’s words clearly affect Walt. When he chews out Gale for screwing up the temperature of the latest batch, it comes in part from his need to feel superior to others (as this tirade comes after Gale starts working two steps ahead of him), but also out of guilt over what happened to his previous lab assistant. Walt is a monster, but there’s enough humanity left in him to recognize the pain he’s caused, and the debts he owes, and so he manages to talk Gus into letting him fire Gale and bring Jesse into the super lab. And though Walt returns to Jesse’s hospital room to try to save his former brother-in-law, he patiently listens when Jesse (his disturbing calm replaced by raw, unbridled pain) enumerates all the ways his life has gotten worse since Mr. White came back into it, screaming, “I want nothing to do with you! Ever since I met you, everything I have ever cared about is gone. Ruined, turned to shit, dead, ever since I hooked up with the great Heisenberg. I have never been more alone. I have nothing! No one! All right? It’s all gone! Get it?”
These are words Walt has needed to hear for a long time now—to have someone he can’t ignore, due to present circumstances, explain how toxic he’s become to everyone around him. And it’s to Walt’s credit that he acknowledges the pain he’s caused by finally swallowing enough of his pride to tell Jesse his meth was as good as his mentor’s. Of course that was the only thing that could heal their rift. It was all Jesse wanted to hear when he showed the stuff to Walt outside the high school. It’s really all he’s wanted to hear from the guy since their partnership began, because Jesse (whose parents have cast him out) needs a surrogate father even more than Walt (who has a solid relationship with Walter Jr.) needs a surrogate son.
Another emotional gulf is bridged in this episode when, in the wake of putting Jesse in the hospital and his own career on life support, Hank finally lets himself open up to Marie. Because the episode plays on our fear of Hank running into the Cousins, we expect to see them lurking in the elevator with Hank and Marie. Instead, we get something even more shocking: husband and wife sobbing in each other’s arms (but completely composed by the time the doors open on the ground floor, because there are some things Hank Schrader will not show the world, no matter the circumstance). Even more surprising than that scene, though, is the one in which Hank, while getting ready for his hearing with OPR, talks openly with his wife about the symptoms of his PTSD, and about how much he’s been struggling since he killed Tuco. Like Walt, Hank has had chances to walk away from the Heisenberg situation before: to stay in El Paso, or to accept Saul’s patsy as the genuine article. And like Walt, he’s been stubborn in his refusal to do so—not out of pride, like Walt, but because his professional instincts are telling him something isn’t right. After going way over the line with Jesse, he begins questioning not only the case, but his manhood and worthiness to continue in this profession.
“I’m just not the man I thought I was,” he confesses to Marie. “I think I’m done as a cop.”
Instead, thanks to Gus Fring’s manipulations, he’s put in a situation where his manhood, and his skills as a DEA agent, are put to an impossible test, and he does far better than he has any right to. But it doesn’t feel like a victory, not only because the episode closes with him in such a dire condition, but because, if he survives, this seems almost certain to draw him back into the Heisenberg investigation just as he had finally been able to see past his usual macho bluster and realize that he’s better off doing almost anything else.
That’s part of what makes the parking lot sequence so extraordinary. As a technical piece of filmmaking alone, it’s a marvel, with one image after a
nother that would, by itself, make the sequence an all-timer: the ghostly shadows of the Cousins filtered through multiple windshields, the bullet falling out of Marco’s pocket as he reloads, Marco dragging the mirrored axe along the asphalt as he tries to draw out the length and pain of Hank’s demise. But this scene doesn’t just offer thrilling action with no emotional undercurrent; it also provides a powerful payoff to a character arc that’s been playing out across a season and a half of television. Hank somehow takes out two more members of the Salamanca family, but it’s the most pyrrhic of victories: either he bleeds to death next to Marco, or he’s drawn into this deadly business all over again on the very day he realized he no longer belonged there.
Those five minutes in the parking lot are incredible as a stand-alone scene of suspense and violence. But as part of the larger picture of Breaking Bad, and of Hank’s character, the sequence goes to another level, and takes the show right along with it.
One Minute = Many, Many Hours of Preparation
Though Vince Gilligan is the sole credited creator of Breaking Bad, his old college buddy and former X-Files colleague Thomas Schnauz inadvertently put the bug in Gilligan’s head in the first place, when he showed him an article about a man arrested for cooking meth and made a joke that they should give it a try if their writing careers fell apart. But Schnauz wouldn’t actually start writing for the series until the third season, and he lucked into one of its most iconic episodes as his first assignment.
At that time, scripts were assigned in order of seniority, so Schnauz knew he would be given the seventh episode. As the timetable for the Cousins’ showdown with Hank slid back and forth, he began to realize his episode was a likely place in the season for it.
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