Though Walt has proven himself to be more physically capable than we would have expected, his greatest weapon is his brain. So it feels right that he should ultimately confront not the unrelenting physicality of the Cousins, but the cold intelligence of Gus Fring. As good as the Moncada brothers were as Marco and Leonel, I would gladly trade them in for these little acting duels between Bryan Cranston and Giancarlo Esposito. In every encounter between the two men, each is usually saying much less with his words than he is with his eyes, his body language, and whichever words he’s choosing to leave unsaid. Hence Gus asking Walt, “Are you asking me if I ordered the murder of a child?” and Walt replying, “I would never ask you that.”
There’s a deep-seated prejudice in TV fandom against shows that make stories up as they go along (which can, in all honesty, probably be blamed on Lost). But throughout this season, Gilligan and company demonstrated again and again how thrilling and tightly plotted a year of TV can be when even its writers have no idea where it’s going until they get there.
1 In only a few appearances early in the season, and then a couple of brief scenes in this episode, David Costabile and the writers made Gale into a very distinctive character, which only exacerbates the horror of Jesse’s actions. Gale had a life. Sure, it was a life centered around kitchen gadgets and foreign-language sing-alongs, but he is a person and not just a plot device by the time Jesse shows up at his door with tears in his eyes.
2 At the time the episode aired, there was some confusion because of the way the camera moves around Jesse as the shot was being fired, which suggested that he was aiming wide and sparing Gale in the process. Chalk this up to one of the very few times that Gilligan or any other Breaking Bad director wasn’t in complete control of the story the camera was meant to tell.
3 One downside: We never get a payoff to the idea that Walter Jr. wanted to take his driving test in the Aztek, which was once again beat to hell—this time by the hit-and-run. I did laugh, though, at the sight of the cracked windshield as Walt drove to meet Gus. Some cosmic force just does not want that thing to stay intact, does it?
SEASON 4 / EPISODE 1
“Box Cutter”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Adam Bernstein
Trust Us
“Well? Get back to work.”—Gus
When a review describes a movie or TV show as “manipulative,” it’s almost always meant as a negative criticism. But most fiction manipulates the viewer on some level. It’s just a question of whether something was manipulative in an ineffective way—in that the story made you feel emotions it hadn’t earned or that it was trying to force you to experience emotions you didn’t feel—or manipulative in an effective way.
Breaking Bad is a manipulative show. Think about the reaction you had when Hank got the call that the Cousins would be approaching him within a minute, or when Walt stood and watched Jane choke to death in a manner he could have easily prevented, or when a tearful Jesse stood in Gale’s doorway at the end of season three and prepared to commit his first murder. Those are powerful responses that the creative team wanted you to have and worked very hard to ensure you’d have. But they’re also reactions the show earned through hard work, through narrative execution, and through having the patience to let us understand these characters well enough to believe in their actions.
“Box Cutter” is manipulative in the extreme—and magnificently so. The series built to this moment over the third season, and thus earns the right to linger on every last detail, even if doing so makes the audience hold its breath.
Just think about the many devices this episode employs to control our feelings.
It opens with Gale alive and well and working in the super lab, and (given the confusion over the camera angle used at the end of “Full Measure” [S3E13]) it would be easy to imagine that Gilligan changed his mind over the long hiatus and couldn’t bring himself to kill the guy (and, with him, the last shred of Jesse’s innocence). Instead, it’s another Breaking Bad flashback-as-short-story, as we get the origin of the super lab, as well as Gus’s reason for hiring Walt. The entire scene is laced with dread and dark foreshadowing, as Gale unwittingly digs his own grave by insisting that Gus needs to employ the man who makes the spectacular blue meth.
The rest of the story with Walt and Jesse and Gus is remarkably simple—so simple, in fact, that the episode can afford to take a few extended interludes with Skyler1 and Marie.2 But the ways in which the episode teases things out and makes us wait for those scenes in the super lab is fabulous. Jesse doesn’t speak at all for nearly forty minutes of the running time (and then only for a blackly comic callback to the botched attempt to dispose of Emilio’s body, way back in the series’ second episode). Though Gus speaks a bit in the flashback to much happier, more peaceful times, he says all of five words in the present-day scenes. We spend a long time simply watching Victor move confidently through the lab, showing the waiting men just how well he learned to work the equipment from observing Walt, Jesse, and Gale.
And in a move so brazen that it’s worthy of applause, the episode devotes nearly four minutes of screen time (albeit with Walt ranting through part of it) to watching Gus Fring get dressed and undressed twice with the care, patience, and precision we’ve come to expect from the Chicken Man. In fact, Gus is just as patient and precise the second time around, even as we’ve all been left, like Walt and Mike, slack-jawed and stunned by Gus’s swift and brutal murder of Victor.
That sort of purposefully drawn-out screen action can come across either as a manipulatively self-indulgent maneuver, or as a reflection of an acute understanding of exactly how all the narrative parts work and how the audience will respond to those parts. Suffice it to say, Breaking Bad is a show that knows what it’s doing, and is doing it exceedingly well.
Think about it: We know Walt can’t die in the season premiere; as great as Aaron Paul is, the show isn’t going to suddenly reconfigure itself around Jesse. And we’re pretty sure that Jesse will survive as well. In fact, the only character in that room not played by a series regular is Victor, and the rules of TV math say that if five people are placed in a potentially deadly situation and only one of them is a guest star, the guest star’s gonna get it. And yet it’s still a complete shock when Gus slits Victor’s throat with the eponymous box cutter.3
It helps, of course, to be working with a bunch of world-class actors in this scenario—to have Cranston and Paul and Giancarlo Esposito and Jonathan Banks be able to say so much when they’re not saying anything at all. Every reaction to Victor’s murder is intensely felt: Gus wants to be damn sure his audience doesn’t miss a moment of this, or the look of cold, remorseless power in his eyes. Seen-it-all Mike is horrified and shaken that his boss would throw away a trusted employee like Victor just to send a message to these two screw-ups (and also worried that Gus might one day be pulling a box cutter on him). Walt (who has already seen his world reshape itself every five minutes for the last few hours, with the balance of power constantly shifting back and forth from his side to Gus’s) becomes small and terrified, because he’s once again been reminded of just how much he underestimates the ruthlessness of his cohort in the drug world.
And Jesse? Jesse finally wakes up from the guilt-ridden stupor he’s been in since shooting Gale in the face. Gus wanted him to pay attention, and Jesse’s finally doing exactly that.
In season three, the writers seemed to be putting more and more of the dialogue and monologues into Paul’s capable hands, while leaning on Cranston’s ability to convey Walt’s emotions through silence. For this hour, the roles reverse. Jesse doesn’t talk at all until after Victor’s dead and Gus is gone, and it’s left to Walt to do virtually all the talking as he tries—unnecessarily, as it turns out—to wheedle his way out of this. Usually, Walt under stress turns into Heisenberg—becomes colder and tougher and more ruthless—but here he’s stuck as plain ol’ Walter White: bitter and full of false bravado that’s fooling no one, leas
t of all Walt himself. Even though we want Walt to survive this mess—less out of fondness for him than a desire to see his addictive story continue—and we understand that he’s fighting for his life here, it’s remarkable how the show is still able to reveal him as a petty clown in those moments.
Everything is settled, yet nothing is. Walt is convinced Gus will try to kill them again at the first opportunity, while Jesse believes it would be too difficult for Gus to find another capable chemist. Jesse seems remarkably steady as he consumes a large Denny’s meal, yet we saw him sitting in his car, borderline catatonic, after the shooting; going from one extreme to the other is not healthy or sustainable.
After the third season ended on such an incredible high note—and after AMC’s scheduling kept the series off the air for over a year (a longer hiatus than between the first two seasons)—it would have been easy for this episode to disappoint. Despite expectations and the long gap, the momentum resumes as if we’ve been experiencing this in real time, like Walt and Jesse, even though so much of the episode is about tormenting them (and us) with the long wait to see what Gus will do. What a fantastic hour.
1 Skyler’s trip to Walt’s condo doesn’t tell her anything, because it’s a cold, empty place devoid of any personal effects (other than the judgmental doll’s eye from the plane crash, currently rolling around a kitchen drawer), but it does show Skyler continuing to slowly break bad herself, by using little Holly as a prop to guilt the locksmith into letting her into a place where she legally doesn’t belong.
2 Marie now has to brace herself each time she re-enters her now very unpleasant home to face her unhappy patient of a husband, who seems more interested in collecting “minerals” (also known as rocks, to you or me or Marie) than his rehab.
3 Isn’t it amazing to see how differently an object can be perceived depending on who’s holding it? In Gale’s hand, the box cutter is another wonderful part of the giant toy store that is the super lab for him. From the opening scene, we unconsciously trust that this object is a harmless tool. The second Gus picks it up, though….
SEASON 4 / EPISODE 2
“Thirty-Eight Snub”
Written by George Mastras
Directed by Michelle MacLaren
Cold Blood
“Do yourself a favor and learn to take ‘yes’ for an answer.” —Mike
What do you do the day after your world stops making sense? What do you do the day after you’ve lost big? What do you do the day after you thought you were going to die but didn’t? What do you do the day after you’ve killed a man for the first time?
Five men entered the super lab in the season premiere. Four went out the front door, and one went out decomposing in a barrel alongside the chemical waste. And in “Thirty-Eight Snub,” the four survivors are all trying to move on from what they saw and what they did on that night.
For all we know, Gus is doing fine. But we can only guess, because in the wake of being badly outplayed by Walter White, Gus has removed himself from the board, realizing (probably much too late) that he’s better off not being in the same room with his unpredictable chemist.1
The other three, though, are clearly struggling. Mike sits in his favorite bar, drinking his coffee, trying to out-out the damn spot of Victor on his jacket. The man who usually has all the answers for the moment has none. He had thought himself invulnerable, the most essential component of Gus’s operation other than Gus himself. But if Gus would murder Mike’s number two and let Walter White live, then maybe Walt is right for thinking himself the only truly irreplaceable part of the machine. Yet for all his doubts, Mike understandably trusts Walt even less than he does Gus, and he lays a pretty rough beating on Walt for daring to suggest they conspire to kill the Chicken Man. Even when living with the fear Gus has inspired in him, Mike is nothing if not loyal.
Walt does what he’s done so often, and usually so well, ever since he made the decision to get into the drug game: He scrambles to find a way out of what seems to be an inescapable death trap. But even though Walt has successfully handled a gun before (“Run!”), he’s no Wild West gunslinger2 and he’s fooling himself if he thinks he can kill Gus alone. Moreover, though Walt has had success in physical confrontations in the past, they’ve tended to involve opponents who weren’t ready for him, and Mike and Gus will likely always be expecting him after all they’ve been through over these last few months.
Meanwhile, whatever brief jolt Jesse got from seeing Gus’s bloody demonstration has faded. Now all that’s left is the knowledge that he killed a man in cold blood, that he’s never escaping this life Walt pulled him so deeply into, and that he can’t deal with any of it. He killed Gale to keep Walt and himself alive, but now he feels his own life as a burden that can only be endured by blotting it out with drugs, loud music, and a nonstop party.3 He has some hope for Andrea, who returns to confront him about the cash he gave her out of guilt over her brother, but he has no hope for himself.
At this point, it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising how incredible Aaron Paul is, and yet he keeps finding new layers to Jesse, and new talents with which to show them. Like “Box Cutter” (S4E1), this is an episode in which Jesse rarely says a word, and yet Paul shows you just how badly Jesse needs to have people around him, how hard he’s trying to force all memory of Gale and Victor and Walt and the rest out of his mind. That final shot of Jesse sitting in front of the speaker, the red glow washing over him, his neck vibrating from the bass just because he needs to feel something, is haunting.4
Mike tells Walt that he won, and should accept his victory, but at least for this terrific, unsettling hour, all of the key players we see are feeling very much like losers.
1 Though the voice on the other end of the phone with Walt sounds a bit like Gus, it is in fact Tyrus (Ray Campbell), who has taken Victor’s place in the super lab operation, and is now weighing all the batches himself, thus making Jesse’s meth-skimming operation impossible from now on.
2 Lawson, the man he buys the pistol from, is played by Deadwood alum Jim Beaver, whose patient, unfussy performance made such an impression that the show had him back. Gilligan even kept using him (always alongside his spiritual kinsman Mike) on Better Call Saul.
3 Jesse and Hank want nothing to do with one another over past events, yet they might find out they have a lot in common when it comes to how they use elaborate distractions to deal with the PTSD of killing a man. If nothing else, Jesse’s party could have done well with some Schraderbräu.
4 Michelle MacLaren and Michael Slovis film all those party scenes in ways that let you experience the chaos much as Jesse is trying to. Speaking of unconventional camera shots: Not only do we get a Roomba-cam view of the party, but also a car wash–cam when Skyler goes to make her offer. It’s a shame the show never attempted an episode shot entirely from the point of view of the doll’s eye in Walt’s drawer, or maybe baby Holly as she sits patiently while Skyler runs one crazy errand after another.
SEASON 4 / EPISODE 3
“Open House”
Written by Sam Catlin
Directed by David Slade
One Slip-Up
“The devil is in the details.”—Skyler
“Thirty-Eight Snub” (S4E2) found most our characters stuck in a state of stasis, with Walt’s plan to assassinate Gus not working out, Skyler apparently losing her opportunity to buy the car wash, Hank still being a less-than-model patient, and on and on. With “Open House,” we see some characters finally start moving a bit. Skyler figures out how to make Bogdan an offer he can’t refuse—and not in a Luca Brasi way, because, as she firmly puts it, “We do not do that.” And Hank—whether out of boredom with his new lifestyle or a desire to get out of the house and away from Marie—picks up Gale’s notebook and almost immediately sees the connection between this murder victim and Heisenberg.
Yet Skyler and Hank’s moves are really about setting plots in motion for later episodes, whereas the two most fascinating characters in “Open House”
are both stuck in neutral: Marie and Jesse.
Marie, at this point in the show’s run, bears almost no resemblance to the narcissistic, intrusive kleptomaniac she was in its early days; it’s thus a surprising choice that this episode revisits her mental health problems. TV characters change and grow to fit both the needs of the story and also the actors playing them, but the kleptomania was (for better or for worse) the most memorable thing about Marie in the first season, so it’s not a storyline that should simply be forgotten. Considering how much emotional pressure from Hank and his situation Marie is under, if there were ever a time for her to fall back into bad old patterns, it would be now.
We know and understand why Marie doesn’t want to be in her own home, and now we see that she’s developed an elaborate coping mechanism: She goes to open houses, invents a series of elaborate, contradictory fantasy lives for herself (the individual details don’t matter, so long as each one isn’t the life she has now) and then takes a memento from each place to remember those brief moments where she wasn’t the wife to a bitter and emotionally caustic husband.
It’s a great showcase for Betsy Brandt, and yet the best scene of that story doesn’t feature her on camera at all. Rather, it lets Dean Norris do all the acting for both of them, with Hank’s manner changing abruptly from the indignant “Are you seriously doing this to me again?” to the more tender “Will you stop crying?” Norris’s face shows exactly what Hank has heard between those two sentences to make him change his expression, rendering the actual dialogue almost unnecessary.
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