Breaking Bad 101

by Alan Sepinwall

  Making your way in the world of this show alone is very, very tough. Even Gus hasn’t really pulled it off; where would his organization be without Mike? Despite the partnerships each has relied upon in the past, Gus, Walt, and Hank all seem alone at the moment, and very vulnerable. Gus ultimately outperformed the men who brought him low beside Don Eladio’s pool, but no man stays at the top of the food chain forever. Not Eladio, and perhaps not Gus—or Walter White, for that matter.

  1 Learning about Max’s evident talent, and about Gus and Max’s friendship, explains an awful lot about why Gus is so fascinated with chemistry, and why he would be willing to take on the unreliable Walter White solely on the strength of Gale’s word. He’s doing what he’s doing to make money, and to get revenge on the cartel, but the super lab and the chemistry scholarship (among other things) also serve to pay tribute to his fallen friend.

  2 Two seasons after Mark Margolis first played Hector Salamanca, the show brings in its second notable Scarface alum: Steven Bauer as Don Eladio.

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 9

  “Bug”

  Written by Moira Walley-Beckett & Thomas Schnauz

  Directed by Terry McDonough

  Dead Men Walking

  “Then get the fuck out of here and never come back.” —Jesse

  The title of “Bug” suggests some kind of spiritual sequel to “Fly” (S3E10), which aired at roughly the same point in season three and was, like this episode, co-written by Moira Walley-Beckett. But this isn’t another of the series’ patented Walt-and-Jesse two-handers. The two spend most of this episode apart, intersecting briefly on occasion (outside the laundromat, and then when Mike and Jesse bring the corpse to the super lab), but only interacting significantly in the final scene—a scene so ugly, so emotionally and physically violent, that it’s hard to picture the series ever following it with another hour where Walt and Jesse hang out, have misadventures, and occasionally enjoy each other’s company.

  Ultimately, what “Bug” is far more reminiscent of than “Fly” is “Down” (S2E4), which also climaxed with a Walt/Jesse brawl that left the two lying on the floor next to each other, gasping for air. Both men, and their relationship, were young and innocent enough then to render at least part of that scene comedic. Even when Walt actually wanted Jesse to hurt him, the fight wound up being a useful bit of catharsis for both. But this scene? This is several seasons’ worth of resentment and misunderstanding oozing out all at once and turning into pure kinetic force. Though both of these men have killed and witnessed a tremendous amount of death by this point in the show, they actually desperately, desperately need each other—now more than ever. But because neither trusts the other—fairly on Jesse’s part (you know how badly Walt would have reacted if Jesse had told him the truth to begin with) and unfairly (but true-to-form) on Walt’s part—their relationship reaches a breaking point, in a scene that’s as intense as any that Cranston and Paul have heretofore played.1

  The previous few episodes left unclear exactly where Jesse’s loyalties lie. Has he declined to poison Gus because he’s starting to like the guy, because he can’t deal with killing another man, or simply because his opportunities have never been as perfect as they might seem to Walt? Based on Jesse’s reaction to Gus at dinner (a darker version of the dinner Gus once invited Walt to), and what he makes clear in his monologue to Walt back at his house, it seems Jesse was unable to commit the murder under those specific circumstances—not to mention just straight up scared. Nevertheless, it seems that his loyalty still lies with Walt—especially after witnessing the flunky’s murder and the threats Mike makes to Walt at the lab. But Walt undermines that loyalty by offending Jesse so deeply. As a result, Jesse becomes a key wild card in this war with Gus and Walt loses his only friend. Jesse, for his part, no longer has loyalty to anyone but himself and what’s left of his morals.

  Breaking Bad has done a lot of interesting, complicated things with sympathy over the years. There were times as far back as season one when it felt like the show was already treating Walt as the villain and Jesse as the one the audience could root for. However, this stretch of season four has started to subvert our own loyalty to our antiheroes by suggesting our sympathies should lie with the Chicken Man, who keeps doing terrible things mainly because Walt and Jesse give him no other choice in the matter. The series’ reliance on sympathy is fluid and flexible: Walt’s a son of a bitch, but at the moment he’s being manipulated by more powerful and ruthless forces. Gus has a tragic origin story that makes him seem both more human and more like Walt and/or Jesse, but he’s also been responsible for many deaths (on top of all the collateral damage he racks up as a drug kingpin). Skyler has on some level been trapped by circumstance, but she has chosen to go deeper and deeper into Walt’s world. Jesse has been manipulated and used by Walt from the beginning of their professional relationship, but he tried to use a twelve-step group as a drug client base. Hank is obsessed with Gus as much out of his own sense of ego as of any desire for justice. The good guys have deep flaws, and the villains have moments of abundant humanity. They’re all trapped in a big calamity, and no matter what they do to try to get out, they inevitably get pulled in deeper.

  This sinkhole situation is a problem for Skyler, too. She looks at the (legitimate) receipts for the car wash and begins to wonder if Walt might be able to eventually retire from the drug game, not comprehending how Gus would respond to such a request. Her ignorance of the criminal world is revealed again when she attempts to get Ted Beneke out of his IRS debacle by putting on a skimpy dress and pretending to be his incompetent bimbo girlfriend-turned-accountant, not realizing the depth of the financial hole Ted is in. She has enough cash stashed in those garment bags to get the IRS off Ted’s back, but that would be like one of Walt’s solutions from early in the series: an answer to one problem that winds up creating three more messes to clean up.

  Outside his distribution center, Gus stands up to the cartel’s representative in impressive fashion, striding out into his field of fire without even flinching as the bullets approach, knowing that the cartel needs him alive.2 His triumph is short-lived, however, because he knows the cartel has more resources than he does, and they can use those resources to keep coming and coming. So he capitulates, and hopes that sending Jesse to Mexico rather than Walt will allow him to both survive and keep his business thriving. Though Jesse points out all the holes in this plan to Walt, especially his own insecurity with cooking meth on his own, the two partners then have a spectacular falling out. Walt’s not going to help Jesse through it at all; Pinkman has to go it alone.

  “Bug” opens with a provocative teaser: a broken, blood-stained pair of eyeglasses, an obscured figure in suede shoes dripping more and more blood as he moves. It’s an image that suggests something truly bad is coming, and once we see those shoes on Walt’s feet in the very next scene, we fear the worst. Walt may survive that fight (as does Jesse), but the violent breakup of the White/Pinkman partnership is apocalyptic in its own right, and signals the promise of yet more terrible events on the horizon.

  1 On the other hand, the stunt doubling work isn’t the best the show has ever done. The crew do their best though the use of shadows and long shots to obscure the fact that we are suddenly watching two men other than Cranston and Paul hurl each other around the room, but when your two leads are bald or close to it, and your viewers have spent a lot of time staring at the shape of their skulls, it’s really hard to replace them in a fight that long and not have the substitution seem obvious.

  2 In that moment, Gus seems more Terminator than man.

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 10

  “Salud”

  Written by Peter Gould & Gennifer Hutchison

  Directed by Michelle MacLaren

  Zafiro Añejo

  “The bad way to remember you would be the way you’ve been this whole last year. At least last night, you were—you were real, you know?”—Walter Jr.

  It’s funny: For all the show’s talk of
growth and decay and transformation, the actual dynamic between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman seemed stable for a long time. There was a notable realignment between the start of the series (when Walt played the part of the sympathetic suburban dad and Jesse the skeevy idiot) and the beginning of the second season (when Walt started to openly embrace his role as Heisenberg and as an overbearing bully, while Jesse elicited our compassion). This dynamic is the one the show has more or less operated on in the episodes since.

  The fight at the end of “Bug” (S4E9) blew up their relationship but good. And in the wake of that, “Salud” suggests that their roles might be reversing once again.

  The more obvious shift comes from Jesse, who does one hell of a Mr. White impression for all the chemists in the Mexican equivalent of the super lab. He doesn’t have Walt to coach him, but because he’s spent the better part of a year (in the show’s timeline) studying this guy—seeing how he treats his inferiors (which, in Walt’s eyes, is everyone) and how he carries himself—he pulls it off beautifully. It’s a performance the lives of Gus, Mike, and himself literally depend on,1 and when the violence starts after Gus murders Don Eladio and most of his capos, Jesse reacts without thinking to the sight of Mike being wounded by turning and quickly emptying a clip into the offending gunman. In the past Jesse avoided having to kill, and he struggled tremendously with both the act of murdering Gale and its aftermath. Here, it’s an instinct, just as it’s been for Walt when he’s become Heisenberg in the past. Jesse lights up a cartel enforcer, pulls the injured Mike into the car, and peels out of Eladio’s compound, playing the protective hero for others in the way Walt has for him in the past.

  Walt, on the other hand, spends the episode trying to heal from the physical and emotional smackdown Jesse laid on him at the end of “Bug.” It seems his brutal encounter with his former partner might finally make him realize that he’s disappeared far too deep into the role of Heisenberg, and that it might be better for everyone in his life if he tries to retire the role.

  Of course, much of this regret is fueled by painkillers and booze, and as we saw back in “Fly” (S3E10), narcotics have a way of loosing both Walt’s tongue and his sense of guilt. He confesses to Walter Jr. just how sorry he is, and his tears and pain are so genuine that it’s clear this is not just part of his cover story about gambling. (Walt has become a good actor, but he’s no Bryan Cranston.) He may be conveniently exploiting his emotions to sell the story (and, in doing so, again engaging in awful parenting), but in that moment, he seems to truly feel terrible about everything he’s done to his surrogate son—whom he confuses with his real son as Walter Jr. tucks him in—and maybe about everything he’s ever done as Heisenberg.

  It’s no surprise that in the sobering (and sober) light of the following day, Walt tries to walk back what he’s already begun to view as a moment of weakness, but Walter Jr. won’t let him.2 Revealing a piece of backstory that explains quite a bit about Walter White’s pride and fear of being seen as weak, dying slowly in a hospital, and being cared for, Walt delivers a long monologue about his one memory of his father and explains that he doesn’t want Walter Jr. to view him that way. But in Walter Jr.’s eyes, the crying and apologetic Walt is more real and much closer to the dad he grew up knowing than the secretive, angry, emotionally abusive criminal that he’s gotten a glimpse of this past year.

  Discussions of the show tend to go back and forth about which version of the lead is the real man: Walter White or Heisenberg? Walter Jr. wants to believe it’s the former; Walter Sr., the latter. Walt’s vulnerability after his showdown with Jesse gives his son’s theory credence, but physical wounds heal far more easily than emotional ones do. Walt may want to be done with Heisenberg, but Heisenberg isn’t done yet.

  And, of course, there’s the man who’s a better Heisenberg than the actual Heisenberg: Gustavo Fring, whose lengthy revenge plot against Don Eladio and the Salamanca family reaches its violent apex with his poisoning stunt beside the very same pool where Max died. Walt and Jesse have often schemed to poison someone with ricin, but Gus actually does it, with the precision that’s become his trademark. (Note how carefully he folds the towel he places on the bathroom floor as he prepares to vomit up the poison before it can affect him like it will his enemies.) Gus is everything Walter White wishes himself to be, but better and more successful, including the way he’s able to pretend to be healthier than he is after ingesting some of the poison, grandly warning Eladio’s surviving men that they can choose to fill up their pockets and run, “Or fight me and die.” It’s the kind of faked sense of strength Walt was never able to convey when he was suffering from the cancer at its roughest.

  Jesse has long been looking for the kind of father figure that Walt is only occasionally willing to be. Now he has two new role models in Gus and the wounded Mike, who lavish him with more respect than Walt ever has, and are better at virtually everything else Walt aspires to be. As Walt has a vulnerable morning with his actual son, his surrogate son has never seemed further out of his reach.

  1 The stakes are much higher for Jesse and company than they are for Saul when he has to weave a ridiculous story for Ted Beneke about a dead relative in Luxembourg who left Ted the exact amount of money he owes in back taxes. Saul rightly thinks this is a bad idea based on his professional experience, but perhaps his pop culture acumen is playing a role too. Sklyer’s plan is more or less the plot of a latter-era Three’s Company episode where Jack’s roommates tried to trick Jack into thinking he’d won the money he needed to pay the rent, only to watch him spend it on a fancy leather coat, and sure enough, Ted’s first impulse here is to use the money from “Great Aunt Birgid” for a new Mercedes.

  2 While Walter Jr.’s primary dramatic function is to represent the normal life Walter is risking with his criminal activity, RJ Mitte does well in these rare showcases where he’s asked to do more than eat breakfast. Walter Jr.’s tearful reaction to seeing his father so battered, sad, and apologetic is very nicely played.

  SEASON 4 / EPISODE 11

  “Crawl Space”

  Written by George Mastras & Sam Catlin

  Directed by Scott Winant

  Nothing Left

  “You are done.” —Gus

  The final shot of “Crawl Space” is among the most iconic and chilling of all of Breaking Bad’s indelible images, and with good reason. Walt has spent plenty of time in that eponymous spot underneath the house, whether doing more repair work than he needs to or stashing drug money. But here it serves a dark new purpose: It’s the setting where we watch Walt become undone and collapse in a fit of grim, hysterical laughter upon learning that the cash he needs to get himself and his family away from Gus Fring forever has been taken by Skyler and given to Ted Beneke. The crawl space has always been shot like an alien part of the home, but the overhead angle Scott Winant uses to frame the final moment of this episode, with Walt’s head and torso visible through the open hatch, makes it look for all the world like we are looking at Walter White in a casket.

  Of course, for this full borderline-psychotic break to occur, an enormous amount of stress has to be put on our protagonist, and “Crawl Space” offers that in spades. The episode is a fiasco for virtually everyone involved.

  And what a fiasco it is. Mike is recuperating in a very white tent inside a Mexican warehouse. Gus is putting on a good front but still recovering slowly from the poison he ingested at Don Eladio’s. Tio Hector, trapped inside his paralyzed body, is forced to listen to his hated rival gloat about destroying Hector’s life’s work and his family.1 Ted suffers, at minimum, a horrific injury while running away from Saul’s goons, Kuby and Huell,2 as they try to reclaim the money Skyler gave him. Jesse’s running the super lab on his own, and though he doesn’t want Walt dead, he also understandably wants nothing to do with him. Hank is marked for death by Gus, and Walt is planning to blow up his life and run away—except, of course, that Skyler has already spent the great majority of the money he needs to do so on buying the
car wash and paying off her ex-lover’s tax bill.

  This is a disaster of such epic proportions that you can hardly blame Walt for letting his primal screams of anguish turn into maniacal laughter. In a sick and twisted way, this situation is almost hilarious; it seems every plot line has coalesced, on an almost cosmic level, to prevent Walt from escaping. For Walter White, who’s been preparing to die for a long time now, laughter is the only response afforded him, and the only one he can muster.

  The creative team has seemed to spend the back half of season four trying to top itself with each week’s closing scene: Hank’s monologue at the end of “Problem Dog” (S4E7); the death of Max in the long Spanish-language flashback in “Hermanos” (S4E8); Walt and Jesse’s throw down in “Bug” (S4E9); Gus taking out Don Eladio’s entire organization in one fell swoop in “Salud” (S4E10). Now this: Walter White finally pulling the ripcord on his life, only to discover he doesn’t have the money to pay for the parachute. Instead of landing safely, he’s left lying amid the filth and light cash reserves of the crawl space, laughing his fool head off while it dawns on Skyler just how bad things have gotten.

  Ordinarily, TV shows where each episode tries to outdo the one before become unbearable in a hurry (see the later seasons of any Ryan Murphy or David E. Kelley show), but here every climatic final sequence feels like another drop in the bucket as the escalating stakes force Walt’s world to crumble at the same time that Gus’s empire keeps ascending. Walt has alienated his wife and his partner, has lied to and hurt his son, has lost most of the money that he got in business with Gus Fring for in the first place, and now he’s just hung a very large “Kill Me” sign over his head at the precise moment he finds he has no way out. The intensity of Cranston’s performance as Walt races home for the cash to pay Saul’s disappearance expert is so vivid and anguished that it’s hard for a viewer not to feel like their own life is also at risk, until it all climaxes in a moment that Walter White is not equipped to handle.