Breaking Bad 101

by Alan Sepinwall

  Jesse ultimately kills the fly, Walt gets some sleep, and the batch gets made, but the contaminant never really goes away, as we see when yet another fly turns up on the smoke detector in Walt’s sterile model apartment.

  What’s left for this sorry pair? Jesse is still trapped back in time in his relationship with Jane, dwelling on any little memento of her (first the voicemail, now a cigarette butt with her lipstick stain on it), self-destructively skimming meth from the batch and getting indignant when Walt gently warns him about it. And Walt has nothing but his cash and his lab and his paranoia.

  Some fans will very loudly complain that “Fly” is a waste of time, or too silly for a series that had become so dark and thrilling by this point. For me and other viewers, this simple and inexpensive episode is a series high point. I love the explosions and the shoot-outs and the mind games, but all this show needs to achieve greatness and suspense are these two horribly flawed characters—and the two tremendous actors playing them.

  1 This is also the only episode of the series to only feature Cranston and Paul without their co-stars, though that was more about the design of the script than an attempt to save money. Anna Gunn and the others in the supporting cast were on full-season contracts, and thus were paid for this episode, though they didn’t appear in it.

  2 Aaron Paul was given a lot of opportunities to monologue this season, and there’s a reason for that: He’s great at it. Bryan Cranston’s best moments tend to come when Walt is silently reacting to something he’s just done, or that’s been done to him, but Paul’s gifts seem at their greatest when the show just steps back and lets the man talk. Doesn’t matter what the subject is—high school wood shop, a trapped opossum, his plan for revenge on Hank—it is always sensational.

  SEASON 3 / EPISODE 11

  “Abiquiu”

  Written by John Shiban & Thomas Schnauz

  Directed by Michelle MacLaren

  My Last Door

  “Do you really want to know?” —Walt

  After an episode that was all about our two leading men stuck in the super lab together, Breaking Bad expands its world again, showing the corrosive effect Walt and Jesse have on their surroundings in the past, present, and future.

  We open on a flashback to the brief golden period of Jesse’s relationship with Jane,1 which not only shows us how the lipstick-stained cigarette wound up in his ashtray, but reminds us of how much Jesse has lost, and of how much damage he and Walt did to her. It serves as a fitting prologue to his new relationship, which begins as a continuation of his evil plan to sell the blue meth to his twelve-step group. Jesse’s adrift, feeling like he’s on the outside of Walt’s dealings with Gus, unable to get Badger and Skinny Pete to be more competent than they really are.2 But Jesse’s scheme becomes something else when the woman he’s trying to sell to, Andrea (Emily Rios), turns out to have a young son, Brock (Ian Posada)—and a little brother, Tomás (Angelo Martinez), who—because it’s a small world that Walt and Jesse are working in—shot Combo.3

  Jesse is clearly undone by meeting an innocent boy like Brock, whose life could be destroyed by the product Jesse makes and sells—a feeling that’s only exacerbated when he meets that boy’s uncle, another kid whose own childhood was stolen by the gang culture that Jesse’s drug game supports. He’s in a precarious position, again sleeping with a recovering addict, again questioning the harm he causes (particularly—like we saw in “Peekaboo”—where children are concerned), and not particularly popular with boss-man Gus.

  Things are equally complicated for Walt. Skyler never filed the divorce papers for legal reasons, and having pushed Walt into paying for Hank’s rehab, she now decides it’s time to become part of his money-laundering operation.

  We can argue over Skyler’s behavior since she found out the truth about Walt, and about how much was her own choice versus how much she was forced into by the horrible situation Walt created. But if she had only moral high ground left, she cedes it here by joining Team Goodman and becoming an active co-conspirator. She can rationalize it all she wants by saying she’s thinking about Hank4—even by blaming Walt for Hank’s predicament—but now her rationalizations are just as bogus as Walt’s. You’re either in, or you’re out. She’s in now, even if her motives are more pure; unlike Walt, she really is doing this just to protect her family.

  Late in the episode, Gus invites Walt over for dinner to break bread as business partners and to offer Walt some advice on navigating the drug game that Gus himself has so clearly mastered—all the while showing Walt, by casually handing him a giant carving knife with the blade pointed directly at his own stomach, how little he thinks of him as a threat. Gus’s most important lesson: “Never make the same mistake twice.”

  To what is he referring? Walt’s decision to re-team with Jesse, a junkie and thief? Walt again partnering with Skyler, if only for business purposes? Or was Walt’s biggest mistake the one he talked about in the previous episode, and the one that his whole situation depends on: that he’s lived too long and shouldn’t be cooking meth anymore? It’s unlikely that Gus means the latter, given his interest in Walt’s continued production, but Walter White has left a trail of impressive, deadly mistakes over the last three years, and appears to have plenty of time left to repeat them.

  1 For you Breaking Bad continuity nerds, the scene takes place around the time of season two’s “Over” (S2E10), since Jesse blew off the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit to cook with Walt in the desert in the previous episode (“Four Days Out” [S2E9]); he and Jane were doing drugs together by the following episode (“Mandala” [S2E11]).

  2 I laughed a very long time at the notion that those two are actually following the steps rather than going along with Jesse’s plan. Of course, Badger did sell a ’teenth to Pete, so they don’t seem to be following all the steps quite right.

  3 Watch Aaron Paul in the scene where he realizes that Tomás killed Combo. This is a man whose sense of the universe has just been torn to shreds, and Paul plays the shock and confusion beautifully.

  4 Dean Norris shines in both of Hank’s big scenes, first showing Hank’s terror and pain as he attempts rehab, then his venom as he orders Marie to get the hospital bed out of his house. There was some of the old, pre-“One Minute” (S3E7) Hank Schrader in that, albeit an uglier version of him.

  SEASON 3 / EPISODE 12

  “Half Measures”

  Written by Sam Catlin & Peter Gould

  Directed by Adam Bernstein

  No More

  “The moral of the story is I chose a half measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again. No more half measures, Walter.” —Mike

  Midway through “Half Measures,” Walt insists to Jesse, “You are not a murderer. I am not, and you are not. It’s as simple as that.” Of course, nothing is ever that simple in the life of Walter White. Taking meth users out of the equation, as well as people like Combo and the airplane passengers who are dead because they came into Walt’s orbit, we know Walt killed Emilio and Krazy-8, was preparing to poison Tuco, and both caused and refused to prevent Jane’s death. In his mind, Walt can justify the first three as self-defense, and can wrap Jane’s complicity in her own death around the threat she posed to his lifestyle (if not to his actual life) to make it seem okay. Hell, he can likely rationalize the two murders he commits in the stunning end to “Half Measures”—one with the Aztek, one with a bullet to the head—as being in defense of Jesse. But there comes a point at which all the blood on your hands starts to become your own damn fault.

  We saw from the beginning of the series that the cancer diagnosis and the meth career that followed brought Walt back to life after a long period when he had given up. As Mr. White, chemistry teacher, he felt like an ineffectual joke. As Heisenberg, drug kingpin, he felt powerful and daring.

  Season three, though, has been largely about the taming of Heisenberg. We opened the season with Walt determined to retire after the airplane catastrophe gave him a clea
r message from the cosmos. He let Gus talk him into working in the super lab, but his part in the operation is that of an employee. Walt is not the master of his own fate, and he has a clear understanding that the Chicken Man is smarter and more powerful than he could possibly comprehend. He was unaware of the presence of the Cousins until after Hank killed one and crippled the other, and he only knew Mike had bugged his home because Saul played him the tape—he has become a piece on other people’s chess-boards. Skyler’s attempt to insert herself into the business in exchange for a key and a few family dinners a week has only made him feel more emasculated (because Walt always needs someone else to blame for the misery that comes from deep in his own core), and Mike’s entrance into Walt’s home—and the revelation that Mike really works for Gus, not for Saul—again seems to terrify Walt with the knowledge of his own insignificance within Gus’s world.

  Because of this fear of his own smallness, Walt rats out Jesse in hopes of keeping everyone else alive, and Gus1—who has developed a mentor’s attachment to Walt that’s every bit as self-destructive as Walt’s paternal feelings for Jesse—takes the exact kind of half measure that Mike warns Walt about in the spellbinding monologue that gives the episode its title. In turn, the dealers, ordered to stop working with children, murder Tomás as a solution, and when Walt hears about it on the news, he knows what this will mean for Jesse … and so Mr. White unleashes Heisenberg so he can feel powerful again.

  That final, haunting shot from below (a classical Hollywood angle, connoting power and stature) of Walt looking at Jesse and telling him simply, “Run,” marks the beginning of another stage in Walt’s transformation from high school teacher to master criminal. This action might create huge problems with Gus, but Gus still needs him and Walt knows it. He can tell himself he killed just to save Jesse—and, certainly, he cares about Jesse more than either of them will admit—but he’s been lost, miserable, and bored all season, and now he feels in command of his life for the first time since he met Gus Fring.

  Yet even though Walt’s actions at the end of “Half Measures” are among the most iconic of the show, this is very much Jesse’s hour.

  Like Walt, Jesse has been aimless all season. He came home ready to be “the bad guy.” But hustling his parents didn’t satisfy him; cooking meth on his own got him insulted by Walt and then savagely beaten by Hank; becoming an employee of Gus’s made him rich but frustrated; Badger and Skinny Pete were too stupid and innocent to play along with his Narcotics Anonymous scheme; and he came face-to-face with the collateral damage of his actions in the form of children. Getting slapped in the face with the knowledge of how Combo died, and the role that he and his employers play in the recruitment and corruption of kids like Tomás, finally seems to jolt Jesse out of his dead-inside phase. He decides to make a move, even if it’s a dangerous and self-destructive one, and is let down repeatedly when Walt first refuses to back his play, then betrays him to Gus. Jesse has been hurt many times in this series (and, of course, has done plenty of things to hurt others), but Aaron Paul has never shown him looking as betrayed as he does in that moment in the chicken trailer when he argues against using children to deal—and Walt says nothing to back him up.

  And now where does Jesse find himself? He has to fall off the wagon in order to get the nerve to shoot it out with the rival dealers, and while Walt saves his life and keeps Jesse’s hands clean, they have started a war of sorts with Gus. Jesse no longer seems comfortable with being the bad guy, but now he has no choice.

  For Walt’s part, he looked horrified when he killed Krazy-8 and when he let Jane die—horrified at what he’d done, and at what he was becoming. There was a sadness in his face at what he had lost, and at what he had caused his victims to lose. But when he puts a bullet in the head of the dealer, all we see in his eyes is anger at the partner whom he believes put him in this position. Early in the season, Walt told Saul, “I can’t be the bad guy.” In this last scene, the days for that kind of self-deception are gone. Walt has, in a way, accepted his villainy. Now it’s just a matter of acknowledging it.

  Run for Your Life

  The closing moment of “Half Measures” is one of the most famous in Breaking Bad history, but Bryan Cranston played it very differently from how Vince Gilligan and his team chose to edit it.

  “It’s interesting, because when I read that, I thought different things than when I saw it,” says Cranston. “The way I played it was he gets out of the car—it was all impulsive what he did, to save Jesse—and now it’s ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ and this one’s crawling around underneath looking for his gun, so I have to take the gun. I take the gun, I look at him, I look at Jesse, I’m thinking, ‘What to do? What to do?’ I look around for witnesses, there are no witnesses, I look back at him, he’s writhing in pain, and I think, ‘Oh shit. There’s only one thing I can do.’ And I look at Jesse, and he’s in shock, and now I have to get the courage to do it. I look, and think, ‘Jesus, just do it!’ And bam! And ‘Run.’

  “So there was a culmination of thought: witnesses, threat, this guy, ugh, ugh. It was a thought process. And they cut it together, and it was BAM! BAM! ‘Run.’ I saw that, and I went, ‘Holy shit.’ That’s an example of Vince’s trajectory not being on the same track as mine. I thought he was still in ‘Oh my God, oh my God, what did I just do,’ and Vince is thinking, ‘I’m taking control, he’s the threat, bang, kill him, tell my partner to get out of here.’ It was one of those moments where it pushes you back in the seat of your chair.”

  1 The scene in the trailer shows us a very different side of Gus, as opposed to the placid guy he is at Los Pollos Hermanos. Here, he is still calm but with a much sharper edge, making it clear that you do not want to cross him.

  SEASON 3 / EPISODE 13

  “Full Measure”

  Written and directed by Vince Gilligan

  Nowhere to Go

  “How long does he have?”—Gale

  “That is very much the question.”—Gus

  After the grand design of the airplane crash in season two, Vince Gilligan says he wanted to go into season three more or less winging it: “We actively try to paint ourselves into corners at the end of episodes—at the end of seasons, at the end of scenes, sometimes—and then we try to extricate ourselves from those corners.”

  Rarely have Walt and Jesse been painted into as tight a corner as the one they find themselves in at the start of “Full Measure.” The risks from the likes of Krazy-8 or Tuco may have been more immediate, but Gus is smarter and Mike more efficiently deadly than either of those two men, and the combination of skills from these new threats is almost oppressive in how much danger they represent to our protagonists.

  But the beautiful thing about Breaking Bad is that Walt is smarter, and far more nefarious, than even a man like Gus might recognize—or, for that matter, than we could understand. When Gus visits Gale’s apartment and starts laying the groundwork for murdering Walt without scaring off his replacement, I was terrified that Walt had no idea of the metaphorical sword hanging over his head. Instead, we learn in the visit to Lazer Base that Walt is already two steps ahead of both us and Gus—and, having accepted his status as a murderer in light of his actions at the end of “Half Measures” (S3E12), that he’s prepared to end Gale’s life to save his own.1

  The series has long walked a knife edge where many of Walt’s most despicable actions are also presented as triumphant moments of catharsis, managing to morally judge him even as it enjoys the jolt of adrenaline Heisenberg provides. Walt’s domestication for much of this season wasn’t by design, but a byproduct of how the Cousins’ story was unfolding. But Heisenberg stayed bottled up for so long that his in his re-emergence—including the return of the black hat when he faces off with Gus in the desert—he is more confident, dangerous, and remorseless than ever before. Moments like the shooting of the two dealers in “Half Measures,” or Walt barking out Gale’s address and a smug “Yeah” at Mike and his henchman Victor (Jeremiah Bitsui) in th
e laundromat here, are Breaking Bad at its most heart-pounding, even as Heisenberg bears less resemblance to the man we met in the pilot with each passing episode.

  And that’s the twisted genius of Breaking Bad. Gale’s not entirely innocent, but he’s as close as you’re going to find in the meth business, and Walt sends Jesse—who has, until now, evaded having to end another man’s life—to kill him, and it plays as both a glorious moment in the legend of Heisenberg and a grand tragedy for the two men on either side of that apartment door. Watching it the first time, I was so damn happy to see someone finally wipe that look of bland certainty off of Mike’s face that I briefly put aside the moral implications of what Jesse was being sent to do … and then Aaron Paul brilliantly brings all of the dark reality of this action to bear as he shows a red-eyed, trembling Jesse bracing himself to pull the trigger and kill Gale.2 Walt has, for now, bought some time with Gus—who, with the cartel coming at him again, needs a talented meth cook far more than he needs revenge—but at the cost of Gale’s life, and the last vestige of Jesse’s own innocence. And any detente will only last as long as it takes for Gus to find a new way around his chemistry problem.

  This episode makes for an intense, riveting finale to a season that belongs in the pantheon of all-time great years for a TV drama. “Full Measure” wisely drops all side stories3 like Skyler’s attempt to be Saul’s “new Danny” (aka front for the money-laundering), or Marie and Hank’s mental battle over his rehab; even the detour with Mike taking out the cartel hit men is there largely to show us why Gus might be feeling particularly desperate to keep his operation working. Instead, full focus is given to the stalemate between Walt and Gus, expressed through long, lingering scenes like the gorgeous summit in the desert between the two men, or Walt and Jesse arguing about options at the Lazer Base.