Breaking Bad 101

by Alan Sepinwall

  As for Jesse, not only has he not made any progress in getting over Gale’s murder, but he actually seems to be devolving—as is the party at his house, which has gone from bacchanal to an outer circle of Hell. He can numb himself briefly with go-kart racing, or by making his party “guests” go even more feral after he makes it rain with cash. But you can see in the desperate pleading in his eyes when he asks Walt to join him and in the primal screams when he’s behind the wheel of the go-kart just how delicate his grip on it all has become.

  Skyler gets a victory over Bogdan because she happens to share her husband’s stubborn streak—and can also exploit his when it suits her purposes, as indicated by her marvelous trick of telling Walt that Bogdan insulted him in order to incite his pride and get him on board with the plan. But as impressive as her victory was, the most notable Skyler scenes involved her once again grappling with the reality of this business to which she’s becoming an accomplice.

  We’re so used to seeing Walt’s drug lord life through his eyes or Jesse’s that it’s not a shock that he would still have a shiner courtesy of Mike’s beatdown in “Thirty-Eight Snub” (S4E2). But to Skyler, this is an understandably terrifying development, as is Saul’s casual suggestion of inflicting violence on Bogdan. Obviously, some of this is willful ignorance—Skyler doesn’t know about the people Walt has killed, wouldn’t want to know, and is purposefully focusing on the money laundering rather on the real consequences of Heisenberg’s product and lifestyle—but for a few moments in this hour, we get what feels like a very different perspective on the violence we’ve come to take for granted.

  As an audience, we haven’t been running in place—the show changes too much, too frequently, for that to happen—but perhaps some of our attitudes about Walt’s work have stalled. We’ve accepted by now that this is the business that he has chosen, and that these are the risks. But Skyler hasn’t been on this journey with us. It’s all new and raw to her. And seeing it through her eyes may just force us to be less complacent about how we view the dire ramifications of Walt’s actions.

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 4

  “Bullet Points”

  Written by Moira Walley-Beckett

  Directed by Colin Bucksey

  Finger Prints

  “Oh, God. How did everything get so screwed up?”—Walt

  “Bullet Points” is an oddly structured, but never uninteresting, episode of Breaking Bad. We get our usual self-contained teaser sequence, this time with a chilly Mike taking out a pair of Gus’s rivals who are attacking the latest shipment, but after that, things get a bit … different.

  There’s an extremely long segment about Skyler prepping herself and Walt for unleashing their gambling lie on the rest of the family, then a comparably long sequence at Hank and Marie’s house in which they tell the lie and Walt discovers that Hank is investigating the late Gale. Just when it seems like this might be the first episode of the series to not feature Aaron Paul, Jesse turns up around the midway point, and the episode suddenly becomes all about him. Even when he’s not on-screen, he’s all anybody can talk about.

  What ties all these vignettes together, though, is the larger sense that everything is spiraling out.

  Every character is here attempting damage control. Despite the clever chess moves he played against the cartel last season, Gus is not invulnerable, and his operation still leans heavily on Mike to keep functioning. Skyler is fumbling around, desperately playing catch-up to the criminal life we’ve watched Walt live for three seasons while trying to take control of a situation that’s been out of her grip for most of that time. Walt is so busy attempting to move forward by ignoring his horrible past deeds that he’s thunderstruck to see Gale singing karaoke on Hank’s TV. He attempts to deal with his mess, and his own guilt, by apologizing to his family, but the apology he gives to Skyler during their rehearsal is bogus (the one he gives later on to Walter Jr. is real, even if it’s not about the thing Walter Jr. thinks it’s about). Jesse has managed to find a way to take his mind off what he’s done and who he’s become, but only so long as someone like Mr. White doesn’t come and force him to think about it. But while Walt and Mike both realize that Jesse has become a liability, Mike is the only one who chooses to do something about it.

  Skyler’s moral prospects look worse and worse the more she gets tied up in the family business, but she’s also working blind, racing to find out information that the audience already knows. Walt kept this deep, horrible secret from her, and has backed her into a corner with few options: She either has to take his drug money or go broke. Yes, Skyler is controlling, but so is her husband, and she’s only had a few months (in show time) to absorb all that he’s been up to. It’s a damned uncomfortable position to be in, and it’s understandable that she’d try to grab the reins of her life, even while it’s stampeding in the wrong direction. Does she go way over-the-top in preparing for the dinnertime confession to Hank and Walter Jr.? Absolutely. But has Walt sweated ridiculous details in the past? All. The. Time. It’s what he does. It’s what the show is about. Skyler’s just trying to keep up by cramming three seasons’ worth of on-the-job criminal training into the span of a few episodes.

  And though she may come off as overbearing, it’s clear that Walt requires a moral compass. Jesse is consumed by what he did to Gale, but Walt—as is his wont—has pushed it to the back of his mind. He only gets upset when he’s confronted head-on with reminders of his deeds, like when he watches Gale singing “Major Tom (Coming Home),” as if his victim has been beamed directly straight out of the afterlife to haunt him. Skyler reining Walt in and re-centering him is exactly what he needs.

  But the person thinking most clearly in this episode, and with the least amount of self-deception, is Jesse. Yes, he’s high much of the time, and has turned his aunt’s house into a hell-pit, but he has no delusions about what he’s doing. Though he was introduced to us as the obliviously comical Cap’n Cook, Jesse has long since turned out to be the show’s most reasonable and self-aware character. He knows that the only way he can get through the day is to overload his senses in order to block out the memory of shooting Gale. When Walt panics about fingerprints, Jesse immediately understands why he shouldn’t be worried, just as he takes one look at the blindfold Mike and Tyrus put on the thief and recognizes that they’re not going to kill him. Jesse doesn’t take the sheer pleasure in outsmarting people that Walt does—his ego has never been that large—but here he does repeatedly prove that he’s much smarter than Walt has ever given him credit for.

  Regardless of how he’s treated Jesse in the past, Walt knows he simply can’t continue on like this—for mental health reasons and for logistical ones. But he can’t get through to Jesse, because Jesse’s not afraid of his former chemistry teacher, and no doubt blames him for what his life has become. Instead, Mike steps in, showing he at least has the gravitas and muscle to safely intervene by putting Jesse in a car headed toward a destination and solution unknown.

  Earlier in the episode, Saul suggests a potential end to Walt’s problems by telling him he knows a guy who could help the White family disappear into anonymity in another part of the country. That (unfortunately) doesn’t appear to be what Mike has in mind for young Mr. Pinkman, but at this stage of the game, the best thing that could happen to Jesse—and Walt, and Skyler, and nearly everyone on this show—would be to begin a new life somewhere as far away as possible from the legend of Heisenberg.

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 5

  “Shotgun”

  Written by Thomas Schnauz

  Directed by Michelle MacLaren

  This Genius

  “You’re not the guy. You’re not capable of being the guy. I had a guy, and now I don’t. You’re not the guy! —Mike

  Why did Walter White walk away from the company he had helped build, and that could have made him millions? Pride.

  Why did Walt continue cooking meth even after Gretchen and Elliott offered to pay for his treatment and anything else he might ne
ed? Pride.

  Why did Walt go back to cooking even after the experimental cancer treatment worked? Pride.

  Why does Walt put Hank back on the trail of Heisenberg when Gale made such an easy fall guy? Pride.

  Breaking Bad has shown us time and time again that it’s Walter White’s staggering levels of pride and self-regard that have led to so much death, pain, and heartache. And the closing scenes of “Shotgun”—where Walt talks Hank into abandoning his theory that the late Gale1 was Heisenberg—suggest that his pride will once again be his undoing.

  Yet the bulk of the episode is about Gus and Mike exploiting not Walt’s pride, but Jesse’s, partly in order to refocus him on his work, and partly to turn him into an ally in their ongoing struggle against Mr. White.

  As far as Jesse’s plot goes, “Shotgun” is actually a very simple episode (albeit another gorgeous one, taking greater-than-usual pleasure in the beauty of the desert landscapes). Breaking Bad is a process-oriented show, and this story is all process. Jesse rides around with Mike for a day and gets an idea of how the dead drops work, but all of it is just a build-up for the little play that Gus and Mike stage for Jesse’s benefit at the final pick-up spot. A good con requires preparation, and Gus—like Walter White (and Vince Gilligan, for that matter)—is a patient man. He knows that Jesse needs some sense of purpose to shake him out of the nihilism that has taken over his life. He’s also aware of how the Walt/Jesse partnership works: that even though they’re protective of each other, Walt treats Jesse like garbage. Jesse lets him because Walt is all he has, and he’s hoping against hope that his surrogate father will eventually see him how he wants to be seen and approve of him, even if, as in “One Minute” (S3E7), it’s just for a moment. So in a single, well-executed play, Gus gets Jesse to start taking pride in his job at the same time that he “earns” the approval of the men who employ him. Given how frequently Walt’s actions toward Jesse oscillate between standoffishness and active bullying—except on those rare occasions when he has no choice but to be kind—it’s not hard to envision a scenario where Jesse is no longer his ally, leaving Walt to face Gus alone.

  The simplicity and grace of Gus’s moves here typify his calculating intelligence. This is why you don’t mess with the Chicken Man.

  On the other hand, Gus may now have another problem to deal with, all because Walt is drunk and miserable and too insanely proud let a dead man get credit for his work.

  Though Jesse travels many miles over the course of this day, Walt has by far the longer emotional journey. We open up with him frantically driving to Los Pollos Hermanos, convinced that either Gus is about to die or he is, and making phone calls to Saul and Skyler. But Gus isn’t there, and Mike reassures him about Jesse while simultaneously keeping Walter off balance by not telling him exactly what’s happening, forcing Walt to muddle through the cook on his own. But through sheer dumb luck and misunderstanding, suddenly the message Walt left to Skyler as a possible farewell gets interpreted as a mark of vulnerability and affection from her estranged husband. They fall into bed together, and the next thing you know, Skyler’s making plans for him to move back in.

  This is supposedly all Walt has wanted since Skyler kicked him out of the house at the end of season two. And yet it doesn’t seem to be what he wants anymore.

  Is it Walt’s pride again? Is he childishly angry that Skyler is the one taking charge and making the decisions, forcing him to give in to her moves rather than the other way around? Though Walt’s pride is obviously at work at the Schrader dinner table, the situation with Skyler seems to be more complicated. Walt is arrogant and self-deceptive much of the time, and the events of these last few episodes have made him realize just how much of his life is now out of his control. He’s in a dark emotional place; he’s working for a man who intends to kill him at the first opportunity, and he feels less comfortable than ever slipping back into his old life,2 bantering with Skyler and Walter Jr., being part of jovial dinner conversation with Hank and Marie. He needs all the wine he can get at that dinner party, but he also needs to have it alone in the kitchen. This hasn’t felt like his life for a very long time, and these are no longer his people. It’s all too much for Walt to handle; the combination of his nerves, the booze,3 and hearing Hank describe Gale the assistant cook as a genius five-star chef and as a man who wasted his intellect on meth when he could have been improving the world leads Walt to blurt out that Gale isn’t the man Hank has been looking for.

  Hank was ready to cash out. He’d found closure, was done looking for his white whale. But now he’s on the trail again with a sense of purpose that has clearly improved his relationship with Marie. And once again, Walt has put the people around him back into harm’s way. All because of his idiotic hubris.

  1 At one point, Hank describes Gale as “like Scarface had sex with Mr. Rogers,” which is an amusing twist on Gilligan’s mission statement for the series about taking Mr. Chips and slowly turning him into Scarface.

  2 It doesn’t help that Walter Jr. is drinking out of a Beneke mug—a reminder that certain deeds committed by both Mr. and Mrs. White can never be forgotten—as they discuss the idea of Walt moving back home.

  3 Walt is clearly something of a lightweight, and only feels comfortable telling the truth while under the influence: Recall how close he came to confessing about Jane when Jesse slipped him a mickey in “Fly” (S3E10) or his admission of having a second cell phone while under anesthesia in “ABQ” (S2E13).

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 6

  “Cornered”

  Written by Gennifer Hutchison

  Directed by Michael Slovis

  Another Coin Flip

  “This whole thing, all of this—it’s all about me!”—Walt

  Walt is right here, and he’s wrong.

  Breaking Bad began as more or less a one-man show. Walt was given so much more screen time and was so much more strongly defined than any other character—and Bryan Cranston’s dramatic performance was so revelatory after all his years in sitcoms—that it was hard to pay attention to anyone else. Jesse was depicted as a hotheaded loser, Skyler as emasculating and distant, Hank as a clown, Marie as a kleptomaniac.

  That’s not the case anymore. The writing for and the performances by the ensemble have only deepened as the series has gone on. Jesse is by now the most sympathetic character and has been for several seasons.

  But this is still the story of Walter White becoming Heisenberg. And though the ensemble is so good and the characterization is so rich, the others remain beholden to the consequences of Walt’s transformation.

  And “Cornered”—the strongest season four episode yet—is all about how the two biggest supporting players feel when confronted with that fact.

  We know that Walt’s drunken outburst at the end of “Shotgun” (S4E5) is going to generate problems between Walt and Hank, but the show subverts our expectations by removing Hank from this hour, and showing that the more immediate fallout comes from Skyler. In the standout scene of an episode filled with fantastic sequences, Skyler expresses fear for Walt’s safety in a way that’s entirely sympathetic and understandable from her perspective, and that’s unbearably patronizing from Walt’s. So of course Walt can’t help himself any more than he could at Hank’s dinner table. He can’t stand to be thought of as anything less than the ruthless master criminal he believes himself to be, and so he gives Skyler her first real look at Heisenberg, telling his wife, “You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in: I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No! I am the one who knocks!”

  “I am the one who knocks!” instantly entered the pantheon of criminal declarative statements, up there with the likes of “I’ll be back,” “My name is my name!” and “Say hello to my little friend!” Yet Cranston intentionally plays it a little more forcefully than he could, to show that Walt is trying too hard to make his wife truly comprehend the threat he can pose to others.r />
  But we have a distance from the scene that Skyler does not, and we quickly see that Walt’s performance had its desired effect on its intended audience. Up until this moment, Skyler’s understanding of Walt the drug dealer has assumed that he takes those half measures that Mike warned us about. Because she’s felt trapped by circumstance, she’s comforted herself by thinking that Walt is just a small player in this game—that he’s the hapless person she knew and married, incapable of defending himself against genuine criminals. But Walt’s speech disabuses her of that notion. He forces her to see who and what he really is. This is her final disillusionment, and her immediate reaction is an understandable one: She grabs the baby and she runs, driving more than two hundred miles to the Four Corners Monument to flip a coin about her future. It seems like a grand gesture—and no doubt Skyler feels the need to do something big after that horrifying moment of truth back at the house—but it’s more of a tragic one. The coin lands in Colorado, so she flips it again, and when it lands in Colorado a second time, she moves it back into New Mexico. She’s already decided that she’ll go back to Walt—even if it’s with her full emotional armor up now, to never again risk a backslide like the one she permitted in the previous episode—but if she can’t lie to herself about Walt anymore, she has to at least lie to herself that she tried to leave her decision to the fates.

  Jesse has his own moment to doubt Walt’s suitability as a partner when the two clash outside of the laundromat. Their argument illustrates just how wickedly ingenious Gus’s plan to use Mike to drive a wedge between the two is: Jesse so needs a reason to feel good about himself that even if Walt figures out that the whole outing with Mike was a setup—which Walt almost instantly does—Jesse won’t want to believe it. Because of Walt’s treatment of Jesse, Walt ends up pushing Jesse further away the more he tries to argue his case. Though Walt is undeniably smart and often right in arguments, he has a gift for condescension even when he is correct. His insistence that this whole situation is all about him, while almost certainly true, is such an arrogant statement, and so dismissive of Jesse, that it can’t help but increase Jesse’s loyalty to Mike and Gus. As with the confrontation at Jesse’s house two episodes ago, Walt here demonstrates again how little sense he has of which of Jesse’s buttons he can and can’t push. And as with every other circumstance in Walt’s life, his megalomaniacal pride pushes away the people who love him the most.