“I kept sending Michelle [MacLaren] emails,” he recalls, “for weeks and weeks: ‘I can’t promise, but I think we’re getting this great shootout!’ She was slated for episode seven, and I knew she would kill it. And she did.”
Memories of why the shootout happened, and why it happened at that point in the season, differ. Some members of the staff (including Schnauz himself) insist the Cousins were always meant to fall in a confrontation with Hank, and there were discussions of it taking place as early as the season’s second episode. Others agree with Gilligan (who admits his memory on the subject is shaky) in thinking that the Cousins were (like Tuco in season two) meant to last the entire year, before everyone on the writing staff realized they were the specific type of threat that Walt had no chance of surviving. Thus, they needed to be moved out of the way—early on, and by someone else.
Like all stories on the show, the shootout was a mix of collaboration by the whole staff and the work of the credited writer. Sam Catlin, for instance, pushed for the gun dealer to play more of a role in the final shootout, which led to Marco dropping the bullet that Hank used to kill him in the final script, while the idea of holding the camera above someone’s head as a bullet went through it had been pitched and discarded multiple times before Schnauz started working on the series.
“But I came up with all the details of Hank sneaking away and coming up behind Marco,” Schnauz recalls, “and the bystander getting shot and the gun needing to be reloaded. I acted it out for Vince in the writers’ room, and he gave some notes until it all made sense.”
“I read the script late at night,” says MacLaren, “and I finished it and I thought, ‘Ohmygod. This is unbelievable. This is an amazing script, I cannot believe I get to direct this.’ And then I thought, ‘Michelle, do not screw this up.’”
Because of the production schedule and the need for sunlight throughout, the whole sequence was filmed over two eight-hour days, when the equivalent in a feature film would probably take up at least a week of production. “It was just crazy, like a military operation,” says MacLaren. Getting the action choreography down in that time was a huge challenge, but just as important was capturing the tension of the eponymous minute before the Cousins arrive, so MacLaren was just outside the car calling out direction to Dean Norris: “I’m going, ‘Now this is happening, now that is happening,’ and that’s a really hard thing for him to do. He’s not acting off of anything but what I’m telling him.”
1 The episode not only gives them names, but also a bit of backstory, right before Hank kills one and cripples the other. The flashback to a middle-aged Tio at the height of his powers is chilling in its portrait of the culture those two grew up in. With Hector Salamanca as the dominant male in their lives, is it any wonder that they grew up to be these two unflappable killing machines? Note also that Leonel, the one who as a boy cries over Marco’s destruction of his toy, is the one who’s now hardcore enough to tell the other to finish the job rather than staying to help him after Hank crushes his legs with the car. Tio made him that way.
2 Whose voice is it? Though the warning is obviously coming from Gus (the only man who knows the Cousins plan to kill Hank, and someone with a vested interest in eliminating those two before they murder his chemist), episode writer Thomas Schnauz feels like it was Mike or someone else from the organization on the phone, because “Gus’s voice might be too recognizable, even through a filter.” The voice (listed in the script simply as “VOICE (FILTERED V.O.)”) wasn’t recorded by either Giancarlo Esposito or Jonathan Banks, since the show would have had to pay them their usual fee for an episode in which they otherwise didn’t appear. An early script draft actually included a scene featuring Gus, but Schnauz had to cut it because it would have put Esposito over his contracted number of appearances for the season.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 8
“I See You”
Written by Gennifer Hutchison
Directed by Colin Bucksey
Half the Man
“Don’t blame Walt. It’s not his fault.” —Skyler
After the intensity of the parking lot shootout in “One Minute” (S3E7), Breaking Bad cools things down for most of “I See You,” a quiet but still dramatic hour in which the characters spend a lot of time waiting. Jesse waits for Walt to get back to the super lab so they can begin cooking;1 Gus waits for the dominoes to resume falling in his plot to eliminate the Cousins and their cartel boss; and Walt, Skyler, Walter Jr., Marie, and a virtual army of local cops and DEA agents waits for news of Hank’s recovery in the aftermath of the shootout.
We were introduced to the Cousins in the season’s opening minutes,2 which implied they would be this year’s Big Bads. Instead, both are now dead—Marco killed by Hank’s magic bullet, Leonel by some kind of lethal injection administered by Mike the fixer3—and the master villain has instead turned out to be Gus. We knew Gus was much smarter than Walt or Jesse or Saul, but to be able to take out the Cousins and Juan from the cartel in one fell swoop? That’s Gus as Michael Corleone, settling all Family business, and Tio was absolutely right in his younger years to warn his colleagues against getting into business with “the Chicken Man.”4 By episode’s end, anyone who threatens Gus is dead, and Walt has been warned just how much Gus knows about him and how much power that knowledge gives him.
Hank, after his moment of triumph with the Cousins, is off-camera for most of the episode, and unconscious the few brief times we see him, but his absence dominates the proceedings. Everyone is worried for him. His boss feels guilty for having taken his gun away. Walt feels guilty because he realizes that, as Marie asserted in what she later writes off as an irrational lapse (for a moment, the episode’s title applies painfully to her and Walt), this is largely his fault. Even Walter Jr.—who’s gotten better fathering recently from Hank than from Walt—feels guilty for never cracking open the book his uncle gave him about the agents who caught Pablo Escobar.
It’s in that discussion of Killing Pablo—particularly the moment where Walter Jr. talks about how everyone has heard of Escobar but no one talks about the agents who brought him down—that the show begins to suggest that Hank will come out of the surgery okay, and soon be back on Heisenberg‘s trail. Regardless of whether Hank is ultimately successful in that pursuit, Breaking Bad wants to make clear that we’re meant to know the man chasing Walt almost as well as we know Walt himself.
Hank’s shooting, meanwhile, gives Walt entrée back into his family’s life. In the hospital, he’s still treated as Marie’s brother-in-law and Jr.’s father. Skyler even falls asleep on his shoulder at one point, and seems untroubled when she wakes up in that position. And when Marie unloads on him, Skyler surprisingly takes his side, not wanting to air out the family’s filthy laundry in such a public, DEA-adjacent setting. But, however tentatively comfortable Walt’s family situation may be right now, this is still the second episode in a row in which he has had to stand in a hospital room and be called out for all the misery he’s caused—and the second in a row where we see in his eyes acknowledgement that his accuser is correct.
And though Jesse provides some comic relief by putting the super lab’s equipment to uses it wasn’t designed for, the display Gus put on with Walt makes it clear that playtime is over. Walt and Jesse need to get cooking again, and fast. Gus may seem less dangerous on the surface than Krazy-8 or Tuco and his family, but he is smarter, has a wider reach, and here proves to be just as deadly. Walt appears to be a crucial piece of his plan to break free of the cartel, but we’ve seen what happens when people become inconveniences to Gustavo Fring, and Walt and Jesse won’t be able to wait much longer before getting serious about their role in his operation.
1 Gale gets unceremoniously banished from the super lab to justify Jesse’s return, and Walt again proves to be an inept, transparent liar in the excuses he gives, even before Jesse shows up to horrify both Gale and Walt with his innate Pinkman-ness. Great “My God, what have I done?” expression from Bryan Cranston in this
sequence.
2 In a scene that is eerily echoed here when Leonel, now a double-amputee, dives out of his hospital bed and begins crawling toward Walt, determined to finish the job that he and Marco started south of the border.
3 Though taking care of Leonel is part of his boss’s plan, Better Call Saul will reveal that Mike also has a personal reason to want the death of both of the Cousins.
4 When Tio refers to Gus as “the Chicken Man” in the flashback at the start of “One Minute,” he’s saying it with derision, but it’s not a bad super villain moniker at all: Citizens, beware … the Chicken Man is coming!
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 9
“Kafkaesque”
Written by Peter Gould & George Mastras
Directed by Michael Slovis
Learning from the Best
“What’s the point in being an outlaw when you got responsibilities?”—Jesse
Like The Wire, Breaking Bad has always had a very cold, clear view of the fact that while selling drugs is a crime, it’s also a business. And some of the show’s richest stories revolve around Walt and Jesse learning just how that business works.
This late in season three, they’re old hands at it, even if their circumstances have changed repeatedly. But there are still lessons for them—and us—to learn, and “Kafkaesque” is all about those lessons. We open with a glimpse of how Gus’s distribution network operates. Jesse crunches the numbers and realizes how much more Gus is making than they are for their hard work; Walt later uses that information, along with the revelation of Hank getting the “one minute” call warning him about the Cousins, to try to negotiate a raise from the Chicken Man. Saul gives Jesse a colorful lesson in money laundering with the help of some nail salon supplies, then tries to charge him a higher rate than Walt. Skyler uses Walt’s meth-cooking adventures as the spine of an elaborate but palatable lie about card counting that she tells to force Walt to pay for Hank’s expensive physical therapy. And Jesse realizes how to skim some meth out of the super lab production without being noticed, and that he has the perfect new market in his twelve-step group.
Not every lesson and negotiation goes perfectly. Walt doesn’t get an appreciably bigger cut of Gus’s profits; he just extends the deal with a small bump in the overall rate. Jesse walks away from Saul. And while Skyler secures the money for Hank—in a monologue that suggests she’s bought into every one of Walt’s rationalizations for his drug career—she makes it clear to Walt later that she’s still disgusted by him, and even more so now that she (correctly) assumes he had something to do with the attack on Hank.
The crucial scene in the episode comes early on, when Jesse confronts Walt with the profit disparity. Walt points out that they’re still making millions and asks, incredulous, “What world do you live in?”
“One where the dudes who are actually doing all the work ain’t getting fisted,” Jesse replies—which, like his conversation with Saul about paying taxes, misses the whole point.
In the world of legitimate business, the ones who actually do the work are always compensated far, far less than their bosses. And in this particular case, Walt and Jesse have gone from being small business owners (supplying all the labor, money, and materials while assuming all the risk) to working as employees of Gus’s large meth company. Gus paid for the super lab, supplies the distribution, pays off his dealers, assumes all liability; if a cop should ever happen to look inside one of those specially marked Los Pollos Hermanos buckets, it’s Gus who’s going down for it. But Jesse doesn’t want to view this as a business. He wants to be a criminal: all risk and money with no responsibility.
In a later scene, the twelve-step group leader asks Jesse to talk about what he might want to do with his life if money weren’t an issue, and Jesse tells the story of a beautiful box he made in his high school wood-shop class (yet another spellbinding monologue from Aaron Paul). He found enough sense of self-worth to keep messing with that box until it was perfect … and then he traded it for some weed. These twelve-step meetings have a way of making Jesse accept that he’s given over his entire life to drugs—whether using or selling—and so he does one of the most evil things he’s attempted yet: bringing Badger and Skinny Pete into the group so they can tempt recovering addicts with talk of the blue meth.
Jesse wants to be an outlaw, and Walt wants to be a businessman, but there’s a self-destructive streak in them both. Jesse seems to realize this won’t end well for him, but he doesn’t care because he wants to be able to go out on his own and just sling like the good ol’ days before Mr. White came back into his life. Walt confronts Gus—barely controlling his fear of this placid-looking but incredibly dangerous man—and gets some more money out of him, but then, on the drive home, plays chicken with oncoming traffic before running himself off the road at the last minute. Earlier in the series, there was a clear sense that cooking meth was making Walt feel alive for the first time in years, but as he’s (at least temporarily) beaten cancer and started amassing a fortune that his family can live off of long after he’s gone, he’s starting to recognize and fear the danger of it all. He’s beginning to understand that there’s a price to be paid for what’s happening, and that it’s likely to go beyond whatever he’s agreed to spend on Hank’s care.
SEASON 3 / EPISODE 10
“Fly”
Written by Sam Catlin & Moira Walley-Beckett
Directed by Rian Johnson
Contaminated
“No end in sight.” —Walt
Before we get into the single most divisive episode in the history of Breaking Bad, let’s talk again about bottle shows.
As discussed back in “4 Days Out” (S2E9), bottle shows are TV episodes designed to save money by filming almost entirely on pre-existing sets, with a bare minimum of guest stars. Think of all those Star Trek episodes where some alien virus or technological glitch confined the crew to the Enterprise for the hour; the term comes from the idea of ships in bottles, with everything contained right where production needs it to be so other episodes can be more expansive.
“4 Days Out” ultimately wound up being the opposite of a bottle show, costing more money than most episodes of season two because of how much was filmed on location in the desert during the “magic hour” around sunset. With “Fly,” all involved were determined to make sure the bottle stayed corked, building an episode that takes place almost entirely in the super lab, with no other speaking parts beyond Walt and Jesse,1 and no complicated effects other than creating the sound and occasional glimpse of the eponymous insect.
And it was through that attempt at minimalism and frugality that we got the Breaking Bad equivalent of the famous “Pine Barrens” episode of The Sopranos. Only this one was better.
Both “Pine Barrens” and “Fly” are black comedies about crooks out of their element (Paulie and Christopher lost in the woods; Walt and Jesse trying to play exterminator), but much as I love “Pine Barrens,” it stays in that minor key. “Fly” starts out as slapstick akin to Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner, and Walt’s fall off the railing is as broad a moment as this show has had. But as Jesse realizes the only way to control Walt’s obsession with the fly is to play along, it turns into something much darker, deeper, and more tense, until we get to that riveting scene where Jesse is standing atop the rickety ladder, with his only support coming from a Walt who’s barely conscious from sleeping pills, and Walt is talking about Jane, and we wonder … will this be the moment Walt finally fesses up about what he did?
We’ve seen Walt make damaging admissions under the influence of anesthesia before, and it seems improbable that the series would end without this particular ugly truth coming out. But what would Jesse do in this moment when there are no witnesses and Walt would be defenseless to help himself? Or would the shock of the news be so great that Jesse would lose his balance and break his neck, once again sparing Walt of the consequences of his actions?
What an incredible moment, and what an incredible scene lead
ing up to it, with Jesse telling the story of his aunt’s cancer,2 and that story (and the influence of the sleeping pills) in turn inspiring Walt to be reflective and to admit that he’s lived too long and hurt too many people. A fatal cancer diagnosis allowed him to justify becoming a meth lord. But instead of his dream of a quick payday that wouldn’t harm anyone except the users, it’s become a drawn-out bloodbath, one that’s driven away his wife—and will drive away his surrogate son if Jesse ever finds out the truth of what he did to Jane. Had Walt found a way to die that night before he left the house, things might have gone very differently. Jane wouldn’t have died—at least not that night, though Jesse fairly points out that the money from Gus probably would have led to an overdose within weeks—her father in turn wouldn’t have caused the plane crash, and Walt wouldn’t have been there for his surgery when he made the damning second cell phone admission to his wife.
Now where is he? Walt’s making more money than his family will be able to spend, but he works for a man so smart and ruthless that his death could come at any time without warning. His wife has once again made it clear that she hates and fears him. And every day he goes to work with a reminder of all the deaths he helped cause because he was so afraid Jane would tell Skyler a truth that she found out anyway.
He is empty and broken, and all he has left is this fancy underground lair, and even that’s been contaminated—not just by the fly (which becomes the latest tiny thing to draw Walt’s obsessive-compulsive attention, like the Band-Aid in the swimming pool, or the alleged rot under the house, or the uneven table leg at the hospital), but by his knowledge of all the danger that comes with the place.
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