Breaking Bad 101

by Alan Sepinwall

  In the scenes set in the present, we get confirmation, in a brutally casual fashion, that Walt’s cancer has indeed come back, as we’re so busy focusing on the content of his phone conversation with Saul that it takes a moment to recognize that he’s in a chemo suite. Perhaps this is part of the reason why, though Hank wants to move slowly and deliberately toward a confrontation with Walt about his secret identity, Walt forces his hand (specifically, his right fist) and they discuss it long before any of us are expecting. Yet what makes the episode so impressive is that it never feels like it’s racing to catch up. An awful lot of things happen, but they happen at the same measured pace that makes Breaking Bad great.

  Take the teaser. It runs four minutes, and the only words spoken (other than some background chatter by the skaters) are “Hello, Carol.” It takes its time to let you soak in the realization of where we are and exactly what’s happened to the place we’ve spent so much time in even as it forces Walt to slowly confront the consequences of his actions in the place he was allegedly acting to protect. The fact that he lingers to offer a wry greeting to Carol, rather than sprinting for the car the moment she sees him, says volumes about how little Walt cares about people knowing he’s back in Albuquerque. Whatever his plans are, they are not long-term ones.

  Or take the visit present-day Walt makes to Jesse’s house to talk him out of his plan to give blood money to Drew Sharp’s family. It’s a long conversation that calls back to their previous argument on the subject from “Say My Name” (S5E7), and again illustrates their twisted paternal relationship (note Walt again calling Jesse “son”). Mainly it’s another scene in which Walter White lies through his teeth to Jesse Pinkman, who has to just sit there, terrified and disgusted, pretending to believe him.

  Jesse’s arc in this episode feels a bit like what he went through in season four after killing Gale, and though it’s here condensed into an hour, it doesn’t feel rushed. Knowing what Jesse has experienced in the past allows us to understand why he might be desperate to find an outlet for his feelings of helplessness and remorse, and reminds us to appreciate just how much he’s come to hate and fear his former partner. It’s not hard at all to comprehend what he’s going through and why he feels like those bags of cash are an anchor pulling him into the abyss.

  Speaking of getting pulled into the abyss: Hank has unraveled the mystery of Heisenberg and now must face the consequences. The Hank/Walt confrontation at the end of the episode is a marvel of tension, with each man sniffing around the other, trying to figure out what he knows. Just when the men seem to reach a stalemate and we accept that there will be no confrontation today, Walt (who just can’t help himself) pulls the tracking device out of his pocket and throws down the metaphorical gauntlet. Walt doesn’t have a lot of time left, either,2 and impulse control has never been his strong suit—particularly where his sense of justice, or his sense of self, are at stake. He didn’t have to fight the bullies who were mocking Walter Jr. at the mall, didn’t have to blow up Ken Wins’s car, didn’t have to confront the would-be meth cookers at the hardware store, didn’t have to convince Hank that Gale wasn’t Heisenberg. But he did all of those things because for Walt, his sense of justice and his sense of self are interchangeable; they manifest in self-righteous indignation. As much as Walt may be enjoying his retirement (and what may very well be his last days on earth with Skyler and his kids), he cannot resist demonstrating to Hank that he has outsmarted him, and he cannot resist demanding to learn what his brother-in-law knows. He is The One Who Knocks, but he is also The One Who Gloats. Poor Hank Schrader has to bear the brunt of his brother-in-law’s braggadocio, while barely keeping up with a world that no longer makes sense to him.3

  The episode ends with the men at an impasse: Walt threatens Hank (who has, of course, put almost all of the puzzle pieces together upon recognizing Walt’s true role), but neither man is sure what to do next. The episode makes clear that many things will happen between this moment and Walt’s trip to retrieve the ricin capsule, while also implying that they’re going to have to happen quickly.

  1 The writers didn’t even figure out major plot points for the series’ endgame (everything from the machine gun’s target to whether Walt would live or die) until after they returned from the long hiatus following “Gliding Over All.”

  2 Though his current prognosis of dying in six months is clearly proven wrong by the Mr. Lambert scenes, which take place about nine months from this episode.

  3 Great sound design work on the sequence where a stunned Hank emerges from the bathroom after his epiphany and steps back out onto the patio. The sliding glass door sounds like an airlock opening, because Hank is now stepping out into the void, with no clear sense of up or down.

  SEASON 5 / EPISODE 10

  “Buried”

  Written by Thomas Schnauz

  Directed by Michelle MacLaren

  Fresh in Her Mind

  “You can’t give yourself up without giving up the money. That’s the way this works, Walt. So maybe our best move here is to stay quiet.” —Skyler

  Breaking Bad was one of the best dramas in the best era for them in television history. But that era is an overwhelmingly male-dominated one, filled with stories of charismatic men doing terrible things and women who object to that behavior, and are pilloried by the fans as a result.

  With Breaking Bad, we have a show with a male lead, a male second lead, a wave of larger-than-life male antagonists, and a host of male-centric concerns. The Walter White we meet in the pilot is dying, not just of the cancer, but of a lifestyle where he feels he earns too little money, believes he is emasculated at work and at home, and where his sex life is so uninspired that he gets a distracted hand job from Skyler while she’s monitoring an eBay auction and hassling him about painting the nursery. By becoming Heisenberg, he’s able to (ostensibly) provide for his family in the event of his death, but he’s also able to feel like a “real man” for the first time in forever. The show is an equal blend of organized crime and Western motifs, positively dripping with the power fantasy of machismo as Heisenberg gradually gets the better of each man put in front of him. Beyond Skyler and Marie (and baby Holly), there are only a handful of women who get significant speaking roles through five seasons: Jane, Lydia, Gretchen, Andrea, Jesse’s hooker friend Wendy (Julia Minesci), Saul’s secretary Francesca (Tina Parker), and maybe Skank. It’s a male show geared toward a male audience; AMC’s ratings demographics for “Blood Money” reported that the audience was 62 percent men.

  Perhaps because of the interests of the show and those of its perceived core audience, the female characters often suffer from the same misogynistic audience reactions as their predecessors did on The Sopranos, Mad Men, et al. Walter White is (as Hank notes in this very episode) a monster who has destroyed many lives, but it’s Skyler White who seems to draw more objections from fans, in the same way that Betty Draper acted as a fanboy punching bag, even though Don’s behavior is objectively worse than his wife’s. We are conditioned to bond with the protagonists of our stories, and to resent those who stand in their way and call them out for the very actions we’ve come to cheer. At the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, both Anna Gunn and Vince Gilligan talked about this phenomenon. Gunn noted that the audience has to root for Walt on some level for the show to be in balance, and that the demonization of Skyler in some quarters is a necessary but unfortunate byproduct, while Gilligan said viewers are uncomfortable identifying with powerless characters, which is what the series has made Skyler into for nearly its entire run.

  That birthday hand job scene helps complete the picture of the existence Walter White finds so demeaning that he’d be willing, even eager, to become a meth cook. But it also creates a very strong, very negative initial impression of Skyler. She spends most of the first season desperately trying to save her husband’s life, and she becomes completely trapped in season three when Walt exerts his power over her by moving back into the house against her will, knowing she won’t rat him
out to the cops. Yet it’s that early image of a distant wife in a boring marriage that sticks with some, as well as later moments when she haplessly intrudes into Walt’s business by trying to help her family by laundering his money. She’s a victim of Walt’s criminal lifestyle, but the structure of the series turns her into one more nuisance for Heisenberg to solve.

  Marie isn’t introduced in the best light, either. In the first season, she’s treated as little more than Skyler’s annoying, gossipy sister (who undercuts Skyler’s intervention to get Walt to accept treatment by suggesting Walt is probably wise to skip chemo), and for a long time her defining traits are her kleptomania and her love of purple. Nor does Lydia fare much better. When we first meet her, she’s a nervous wreck, wildly out of her depth in the drug game, making a fool of herself with Mike at the coffee shop, and unable to put on a matching pair of shoes for an important day at the office. When Mike, perhaps the most show’s reasonable character at that stage, decides the world is better off without Lydia in it, we have been given little evidence with which to argue against him.

  Gilligan and the other writers are acutely aware of, and not at all comfortable with, the dominant fan reaction to the women of Breaking Bad, and I suspect their desire to balance the scales a bit was one of the driving forces behind “Buried.” It’s not an episode that suddenly flips the gender or power dynamics of the series—Skyler, for instance, again has to choose between two horrible options, after which matters are again beyond her control—but it’s one of the few where most of the action is driven by the women of the series.

  It’s an incredible episode, in part because of the work of another woman of Breaking Bad—the show’s best regular director, Michelle MacLaren. From start to finish, the episode is gorgeous to look at, but taut and heartbreaking.

  Let’s start with MacLaren, because her contributions to the hour are enormous. Since “4 Days Out” (S2E9), she’s shown us just what she can do when you give her a few desert vistas to shoot, and, in “I.F.T.” (S3E3), she proved just how agonizing she can make a scene in which Skyler is painted into the tightest, most humiliating of corners. Here, she makes the sequence where Walt buries the money look beautiful, just as she renders the six-and-a-half-minute diner conversation between Skyler and Hank among the most uncomfortable scenes the show has ever done.

  MacLaren puts an incredible amount of care put into every individual frame and scene. Consider, for instance, Walt’s exit from Hank’s garage, mere moments after he warned him to tread lightly at the end of “Blood Money” (S5E9) This is a show that’s toyed with Western tropes practically from the start, but never in a better-looking, more pure homage than the shot of Hank and Walt staring each other down from opposite ends of the driveway, posed for all the world like a pair of aging gunslingers getting ready to draw, with Hank’s garage remote filling in for a trusty six-shooter. It’s just one image of many in the hour, and a brief one at that, but it’s as visually striking and evocative as single frames get, as is the overhead shot of Jesse twirling aimlessly on the merry-go-round (sporting a much emptier look on his face than he did in his overhead shot after his first dose of heroin), or the perfectly framed image of Huell and Kuby enjoying the bed of money,1 or the close-up of Lydia’s Louboutins stepping carefully around corpses and spent shotgun shells.

  MacLaren shows just as much skill in working with the actors. In that diner scene, our focus is understandably on Skyler, who’s completely at a loss for what to do or say, and Anna Gunn is fantastic throughout, particularly when Skyler makes a scene just so she can get away from this man who will not stop asking her invasive and aggressive questions. Over the course of six-plus minutes, Gunn goes through a wide range of emotions as Skyler’s understanding of the situation shifts with each new piece of information about how much Hank knows—including the fact that Walt’s cancer has returned, and the way his failing health changes her entire moral calculus. But look at Dean Norris for a minute or four. Look at how empty and remote his eyes are, listen to how strained and lost his voice sounds. Hank is only tenuously connected to reality as he knows it, and though Skyler understandably feels like she’s being bulldozed, Hank has no more control of that conversation than she does. He’s a drowning man hoping she’ll toss him a rope if he speaks forcefully enough.

  There’s so much quiet in their voices in that scene, and again when Marie goes to confront Skyler at the house. The whole family has been placed in unexpected, untenable territory. Nobody knows where to go, what to say, whom to trust. But just as Skyler ultimately recognizes who has the power in her talk with Hank, it’s Marie who figures things out—far more quickly than her DEA agent husband—simply by reading her sister’s face and recognizing how the puzzle pieces would have to fit together given this strange new information. In a way, Marie’s interrogation of Skyler evokes the one Skyler put Walt through back in the season three premiere, as she guessed that he was dealing heroin, then cocaine, before he finally blurted out that it was meth. But that earlier scene was played for dark laughs. There is nothing funny here, as one sister realizes to what extent the other has betrayed her and her husband, leading to a brutal slap and then an even more brutal screaming match over who will be taking care of Holly. Once again, Marie is trying to take something that’s not hers, but this time it’s altruistic, and devastating; even with the limited information she has, it’s hard to blame her for having the primal desire to grab the baby and run.

  Hank and Marie don’t know that Skyler’s involvement in the business is only on the money end of things; if she were to testify against Walt, her attorney could possibly get her immunity for that fact, but she has a perfectly valid reason for not wanting to talk into Hank’s recorder at the diner. That said, Marie turns out to be right: Skyler ultimately doesn’t want to talk because she thinks that if they stay mum, they will get to keep the money they so desperately need—especially if Walt may die in a few months. She has the chance to do the right thing here, but she’ll opt for some sort of financial security, for trying to uphold Walt’s reputation in his kids’ eyes, and for a low public profile. No half measures anymore for Skyler White, either. She’s going for it all, dammit.

  This sticky moral situation is what’s makes Skyler such a complicated, prickly character, and one whom even the show doesn’t always want us to like, even though her circumstances are usually much more sympathetic than Walt’s. She had her opportunities to turn Walt in back in season three, but she chose not to, in part because of her fear of what this would do to her kids. After the Cousins shot Hank, she started involving herself in Walt’s business, insisting on the gambling cover story so they could pay for Hank’s rehab, then on the car wash as the means to launder the drug money. Again, much of this is understandable—she wants to help her brother-in-law, especially since his injury was caused by Walt (by proxy), and she wants to exert what minimal control she can over a situation in which she’s been denied any. She’s also descending into a world of criminality when she really, really shouldn’t.

  She is not a saint. If she were a saint, she wouldn’t belong on a show that recognizes the many messy contradictions that come with being a human being on this planet, trying to navigate through the world. She’s a complicated person: sometimes a victim, sometimes a fool, sometimes a heroine. She is, in other words, a worthy, fascinating character in this story. Even if it’s primarily Walt’s story, Skyler’s role matters, and will need to be considered again before things are over and done with.

  Lydia, meanwhile, is still the aggravating neurotic we met in the first half of season five—this time wearing blood-soled shoes for the occasion—but she’s picked up lessons from both Mike and Walt, and has decided to have Todd, Uncle Jack, and their crew kill Declan (who took over distribution of the blue meth after Mike’s “retirement,” and who’s been running the whole operation since Walt quit) in order to take over the empire. This is a more dangerous Lydia than before, and she’s linked up with a pretty nasty crew.

 
While Walt lies on the bathroom floor—yet another character speaking in a soft, distant voice as his world has been remade—he reiterates a statement he’s made a few times before (including in “I.F.T.”) about how all these terrible deeds will have been for nothing if his family doesn’t benefit. These words, and the general demeanor of Mr. Lambert, do not necessarily suggest good things are coming for Skyler and the kids. Walt’s road to hell has been paved with nothing but supposed good intentions for his family. Walt refuses to send Hank on “a trip to Belize” (to borrow Saul’s grimly amusing euphemism) because he’s family—which seems to be the one thing he still believes in ahead of his own survival and glory—but the episode’s final scene suggests that Walt will regret making this decision. Hank and Jesse may despise each other, but, at this point, both men hate Walter White far more, and can bring about his undoing if they can ever work together.

  A few scenes earlier, Hank acknowledges to Marie what we’ve known all along: that the moment he turns Walt in to the DEA, his career ends. It’s as open and vulnerable as we’ve seen Hank since “One Minute” ([S3E7], also from the MacLaren/Thomas Schnauz creative team) when he confessed that after shooting Tuco he realized, “I’m just not the man I thought I was.” Here, he’s again worried about the kind of man he is, or can be, justifying his decision not to take what he has to Gomez by explaining, “I can be the man who caught him, at least.” And though “Buried” is an episode where so much of the action is driven by the women, it ends with two men—one of whom has had a lot to do in the hour, one of whom hasn’t said a single word—about to come face to face, and perhaps team up to take down the great Heisenberg.