This is why that moment looks so funereal, because his death seems like the only way out of this utter catastrophe. But as Bryan Cranston puts it, in that moment, “Walter White is dead, and Heisenberg rises from the ashes.”
1 Note that in this scene, Tio is watching the famous “What have I done?” climactic moment from The Bridge on the River Kwai. That’s a sentiment that more or less applies to Walter White, who is also obsessed with making the best possible product for the worst possible reasons, and who has been known to blow things up in the end..
2 With even Saul under extreme stress due to the Walt/Gus cold war, many of season four’s lightest moments come courtesy of Kuby and (especially) Huell, played by comedians Bill Burr and Lavell Crawford, respectively. These two are at times only slightly more competent henchmen than Badger and Skinny Pete.
SEASON 4 / EPISODE 12
“End Times”
Written by Thomas Schnauz & Moira Walley-Beckett
Directed by Vince Gilligan
Predator and Prey
“I have lived under the threat of death for a year now. Because of that, I’ve made choices. Listen to me. I alone should suffer the consequences of those choices. No one else. And those consequences, they‘re coming. No more prolonging the inevitable.”—Walt
Breaking Bad is a show about a man with a death sentence. As with most legal death sentences, though, we’ve had plenty of time to wait between pronouncement of sentence and its execution. It’s a testament to Bryan Cranston’s performance, and to the ability of Vince Gilligan and the rest of the creative team to build and sustain tension while constantly pushing the story forward, that it rarely feels like they’re stalling the inevitable, because the in-between moments are necessary to make the big ones hit as hard as they do.
“End Times” is another brilliant, knuckle-whitening demonstration of that effective talent. We know intellectually that Walt isn’t going to die in this episode. Yet the scene where Jesse is the one who knocks for Walt is almost unbearably tense; Aaron Paul is so raw in the moment that you can almost imagine him pulling the trigger in a fit of indignant rage, and the show reinventing itself as The Jesse Pinkman Story. Likewise, though I didn’t expect Walt to successfully blow up Gus’s car—because when has a Walter/Jesse assassination attempt ever gone according to plan?—I still caught my breath when Gus stopped himself and went to look out of the parking garage.1
As befits an episode with an apocalyptic warning for a title, this is an hour tinged with dread. The music is ominous throughout, the camera is so often in tight on Walt or Jesse—or, in the case of the hospital scene where Jesse tells Andrea about the ricin, constantly on the move with them—that the overall feel is one of absolute foreboding. Instead of helping to alleviate the pressure, Walt disappearing for a large chunk of the episode only makes it worse. Walt says what he believes to be his final goodbyes to Skyler and Holly, and he doesn’t even get a chance to do the same with his son. Saul packs up to skip town as quickly as possible. The mood of the whole episode is so dark that you’re half-expecting Skyler to be shot by a Gus-employed sniper the moment she steps out onto the balcony of Hank and Marie’s house for a calming cigarette.
To top it all off, Chekhov’s Ricin Cigarette,2 which we’d all but forgotten about these past few episodes, returns to haunt one of our protagonists, as it appears Jesse has once again inadvertently set things in motion for Gus to order the death of a child related to Andrea.
The episode leaves it ambiguous, even as Jesse lays out what appears to be a pretty blatant chain-of-custody timeline. Poisoning Brock and making it look like Walt did it would be convoluted even by the standards of a mastermind like Gustavo Fring, but Gus also has by now gathered that Walter White cannot be killed by conventional means. He spent a long time underestimating the loyalty Walt and Jesse still have for each other, and if he can find a way to trick one into murdering the other, what does he care if some little boy is collateral damage in the quest to the salvage his empire and destroy his most troublesome opponent?
Unlike other recent chapters of the story or climactic episodes from previous seasons, Walt and Jesse aren’t under direct threat of death as the credits roll, though Gus is still trying very hard to eliminate Walt. The math of the series also ensures Walt’s safety, as a fifth and final season had already been ordered at the time this episode aired. So, by the logic of the show, perhaps the Chicken Man will have to be taken out instead. But “End Times” is so tense, so surprising, and so well crafted that it feels like anything could happen now. It’s a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse seems destined to get one over on the cat; we’re just being held in a state of agony and ecstasy as we wait to see how he does it.
1 Though previous episodes in season four had Gus calmly walking through a field of fire and raining oratory down on Don Eladio’s men—even as poison coursed through his body—his instinct to not get into the explosive-rigged car is the closest he’s come to pure supervillainy, as if he had a spider-sense on top of his many other intellectual gifts.
2 The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once explained that if you put a gun on stage in the first act, you must fire it in the second; otherwise, audiences will grow distracted waiting for the shot that never comes. Similarly, once Jesse hid the ricin capsule inside his cigarette pack, there was no way Breaking Bad wouldn’t put it to use at some point.
SEASON 4 / EPISODE 13
“Face Off”
Written and directed by Vince Gilligan
Lilies of the Valley
“Was this you? What happened?” —Skyler
“I won.” —Walt
“Face Off” documents Walter White’s greatest victory, and perhaps Breaking Bad’s as well. Never before has Walt overcome such enormous odds, nor taken down so formidable a foe, as when he orders the explosive death of Gustavo Fring. And as a piece of suspense, with a cathartic release (the final shot of Gus revealing that the episode’s title is meant to be taken literally) before a stomach-churning closing revelation, “Face Off” is the summation of nearly every narrative and stylistic lesson the series has learned over its four seasons.
But before we celebrate either victory, as Walt so obviously feels he deserves, we have to ask ourselves two questions:
1. Do we believe Walter White would poison a child to pull off this plan?
2. Do we think it was fair of Breaking Bad to keep that part of the plan hidden from us until after it was done?
The answer to the first question is sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, “yes.” Once, Walt would have recoiled at the idea of in any way risking the life of an innocent boy to further his own ends, even if he felt confident that the Lily of the Valley berries would hurt Brock but not kill him. That’s the Walt that emerges in “Fly” (S3E10): the Walt who recognized that he had lived for too damn long and was likely to only hurt people going forward. But any semblance of decency Walt had left died down in the crawl space (if he even still had it after he let Jane die), replaced by a desperate, wounded animal called Heisenberg who will do anything to survive. The episode forecasts Walt’s extreme selfishness in the earlier scene where Walt sends his next door neighbor Becky1 into his house, like a canary in a coal mine, just to flush out any goons Gus might have parked there. As with Brock, he’s relieved that she survives, but he still sent her in there in the first place, knowing full well that she could have stumbled across the killers and taken a bullet as a result. This is who Walt is: a guy who will use anything and anyone, innocent or guilty, to keep himself alive.
So, no, it’s not a stretch to think that Walt would cheat in this way—endangering Brock, lying to Jesse about it in order to win him back—to pull off what he perceives as his crowning triumph. But the way Breaking Bad presents Walt’s repugnant maneuver is a cheat of the narrative ethos the series has established since its first episode, albeit a cheat that may be necessary to accomplish the most shocking aspects of “Face Off.”
Though the series began as one pr
imarily focused on Walt, it always had a third-person point of view. We followed Walt, but we also saw what his family, his partner, and his enemies were doing. The Cousins wandered around Albuquerque for half a season without Walt even learning of their existence, and if season four didn’t show us everything Gus was planning, it showed us enough of each side of his war with Walt so that we could tell who had the advantage at any given moment. And even when we were in the dark on an enemy’s actions and motives, we always knew what Walt was doing and why. From the pilot through the early part of “End Times,” no steps were skipped, no big secrets kept from us2 when it came to the rise of Walter Hartwell White.
Until this one.
Walt is missing from “End Times” (S4E12) from the moment his spun revolver points itself at the plant to Jesse’s appearance at his door to confront him about Brock. We don’t know where he is, what he’s doing, or why he’s doing it. The concluding shot of “Face Off” makes clear that he used the Lily of the Valley to make the poison that put Brock in the hospital, confirming that Jesse’s original suspicions about Huell lifting the cigarette pack from his pocket and Walt poisoning Brock were wrong in their specifics, but correct in general. But we don’t know how he did it, or even that he did it, until long after the deed was already done. This is a show that devoted two of its first three episodes to proper corpse disposal methods. It’s a show that once had Walt challenge Jesse on such a basic criminal procedure as loading a revolver, and that lingered over each agonizing second as he elected not to save Jane’s life. This is a show that has demonstrated time and again that it values these in-between moments, that it treasures not only the story but also every step it takes along the way. At every point before now, Breaking Bad has made clear that we understand exactly how Walt does everything that he does, and how far he’s fallen from the man we met in the pilot. We bear witness to everything—but not this.
How would “End Times” and “Face Off” play if we stayed with Walt after the revolver stopped spinning, watched him turn the berries into something Brock might eat or drink, arrange for Saul to have Huell pick Jesse’s pocket,3 then rehearse the lie over and over again until Jesse comes in to confront him? It would probably, in many ways, be unbearable: Walt’s most despicable act yet played out for us—and only us—to see, while poor Jesse is duped into realigning himself with the man he was completely justified in wanting to kill. Knowing this in real time would have made it awfully difficult to take any pleasure in seeing this Walter White plan come together, because we would have the horrible cost of it at the front of our minds throughout. No matter how deftly Gilligan assembles the rest of the plan, which involves Jesse pointing Walt to Hector Salamanca, who turns out to be ready, willing, and able to make himself, his wheelchair, and his trademark bell into the instruments of their mutual enemy’s destruction, the tragedy of Brock’s fate would seem too great.
It’s arguably for this reason that Gilligan decides to keep the biggest leap forward on Walt’s path to complete monstrousness from his viewers until after Walt thinks he’s won. Presenting it in this way might violate the show’s storytelling rules, but it also makes us complicit in Walt’s crime just after we might have been enjoying the spoils of his victory. Walt may be guilty, but then, Gilligan implies, so are we. Season four plays with our sympathies just as much as season two did, only this time the fulcrum is between Walt and Gus rather than Walt and Jesse, and there are many times when it seems as if Gus is the one we should be rooting for. But when we think Gus poisoned Brock—when we are duped right along with Jesse—it grants us a kind of permission to fully root for Team Walt again, loudly and with less equivocation. Walt isn’t good, but a Gus who would poison a child to turn two enemies against each other is clearly evil, and in need of as much retribution as Walt can point at him.
When Gus realizes that Tio’s bell isn’t ringing because it’s become a trigger for the bomb Walt has strapped to the wheelchair,4 and when he reflexively straightens his tie even though half his face is gone and he’s seconds from death,5 it’s a grand triumph for Walt, and for all of us who have allowed themselves to cheer for him again … which only makes the episode’s final shot all the crueler and more effective.
It had been many episodes since it was as easy to take Walt’s side as it has been in these two hours; it is our relative sympathy for Walt that makes the revelation of his evil hit so much harder. We might cheer Gus’s death, and enjoy the sight of Walt and Jesse working together like a well-oiled machine as they arrange the fiery destruction of the super lab—a payoff that not only allows them to get revenge for their miserable time working there, but also to heal their season-long schism—and we might revel in that image of Walt on the top of the parking deck, master of all he surveys, (especially the station wagon that Gustavo Fring will never get to drive home). With Gus dead, most of his enemies in the cartel eliminated, and Mike still recuperating south of the border, Walt has before him an uncontested road to finally becoming the kingpin he’s long fancied himself to be. If the coldness of the way he announces his victory to Skyler is startling (and terrifying to her), it also feels in keeping with the masterful maneuver he just pulled off. And this is when Vince Gilligan rips down the curtain and shows that Walt actually accomplished this trick at grave cost to whatever remains of his soul.
The misdirection works on us for the same reason it worked on Jesse: We want to believe, even after all that he’s done (even after the death of Jane, which we have knowledge of that Jesse lacks), that this is a line Walt would never even think of crossing. We have been conditioned to think this because he’s a father himself who is tender with Flynn and Holly, because we were introduced to him as a relatively normal man who fell into a life of crime without realizing its full implications, and because, frankly, he is the main character on the show we’ve been watching for four seasons. Even in the cable TV antihero universe that made Breaking Bad possible, it feels unthinkable for a protagonist to knowingly endanger a child in this way. Walter White, though, not only did it, but did it in such a nefarious and underhanded fashion that the only way to feel the full brunt of it is to find out about it right as we’re encouraged to dance at the victory party.
This is part of the savage cruelty of this moment, and of its genius. Yes, this narrative cheat justifies itself through its sheer effectiveness and makes us complicit in Walt’s undeniable corruption, but it also reveals something much deeper and perhaps more unsettling than Walt’s actions. By keeping this crucial information from us until the very end, “Face Off” violates the most basic narrative rules of Breaking Bad in order to show us that we may have gotten too comfortable with our protagonist. Up until now, we have spent almost every narratively essential moment with Walt, and assumed we knew everything about him that we needed to know. In a single gut-punching shot, Vince Gilligan shows us just how wrong we were.
A Sharp-Dressed Man, to the End
Giancarlo Esposito knew his time on Breaking Bad was always borrowed, and was surprised Gus survived season three, let alone became Walt’s greatest and longest-lasting nemesis. So when Vince Gilligan approached him early in season four to discuss the Chicken Man’s eventual demise, Esposito was less concerned with losing the role of a lifetime than ensuring his alter ego went out right.
Gilligan “said it could be a number of different ways,” Esposito says, “and I said, ‘Whichever way he goes, it should be really big and really strong,’ and he said, ‘We won’t do it until the end of the season.’ But he was already toying with an explosion, and then he said, ‘If it were to be an explosion, what might Gus be doing?’ And that’s when I said [he mimes straightening his tie, just as Gus did in his final moments of life], ‘Well, you know, probably that.’ I always button and unbutton my jacket, because Gus was so much better dressed when you saw him outside of Los Pollos Hermanos. When you saw him at the restaurant, he was in a clip-on tie, but outside of it, we got to see his refined self, which I loved. So I said, ‘First, maybe I’d be
buying a jacket, but more than likely what I always do is I always want to make sure my tie is straight, because I don’t want it crooked, and I’m just very meticulous in that way.’
“And he went, ‘Ah.’”
The Nighttime Juice Box Man
While the Breaking Bad writers usually thought things through on a deeper level of detail than they were obligated or wanted to reveal on the show, Walt’s exact method for poisoning Brock never got that far.
“We would joke that Brock would later point at Walt and say, ‘That’s the Nighttime Juice Box Man!’,” Thomas Schnauz explains. “We figured he somehow got the poison in a juice box, either at home or school. We never nailed it down, but it was a funny thought of Walt sneaking in at night, and Brock seeing him, and Walt just going, ‘Shhhhhh.’ Kind of Grinch-like.”
Gilligan, meanwhile, knew that keeping Walt’s poison plan hidden from the audience for as long as he did was a significant departure from the show’s storytelling style, but felt it appropriate to do under the circumstances.
“I think it’s because there’s no bigger reveal than the fact that Walt would poison a child (albeit to save his own life and the lives of his family),” he argues. “That’s the moment that truly makes him no better than Gus. Simply put, it seemed wise to me to save Walt’s deepest, darkest secret until the very end.”
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