Yet Jesse doesn’t believe Walt cares one iota about him, and that, ironically, works in Walt’s favor here. Walt is so convinced of his powers of persuasion that he’s genuinely willing to sit in public and discuss Brock’s poisoning with Jesse, which would have given Hank and Gomez the opening they needed to build a case against Walt. But because Jesse is convinced, with very good reason, that everything Walt says is a lie, his spider-sense starts tingling at the sight of the big bald dude staring in Walt’s direction. As it turns out, the guy is just waiting for his daughter, and by bolting, Jesse both prevents Walt from doing something stupid and convinces him to sic Uncle Jack and his Aryan pals on the Jesse problem.
Jesse’s dilemma, and his despair, lead to another standout episode for Aaron Paul; his bellow of “HE CAN’T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!” when Hank stops him from torching the White residence is as painful and powerful as any line he’s delivered on the series. Despite all the sympathy the character has earned from us, it’s hard not to feel like he blows it here, enormously. At the same time, though, it’s hard to blame him. As he tells Hank and Gomez, “Mr. White? He’s the Devil. He is smarter than you. He is luckier than you. Whatever you think is supposed to happen, I’m telling you, the exact reverse opposite is going to happen.” He fails to listen to his own advice on this—if his impulse is that Walt is lying, then it must mean Walt is actually sincere—but the part where he rightfully identifies Walt’s luck is crucial. Walter White has accomplished many extraordinary things in his criminal career, but he’s also been extraordinarily lucky along the way. Events always seem to line up in ways that allow one of his cockamamie plans to work. (It helps that Walt has a roomful of award-winning writers helping him advance his career.) Here, he’s about to confess one of his greatest sins to a man wearing a wire for the DEA, and he’s spared his own foolishness because an intimidating bald man happens to look in the perfect direction at the perfect moment.
It’s almost funny to see Walt escape that situation after an episode in which he seems so hapless, so often. “Confessions” (S5E11) put Walt’s master thespian skills on display, while “Rabid Dog” shows us the difference between acting and improvisation. Walt is great when he has even a small amount of time with which to plan out his lies, but when he has to perform without any sort of script in his head, he runs into trouble. Look at the Walt who sneaks into the house looking for Jesse in the opening scene: This isn’t the master criminal Heisenberg, but a guy uncertain of the situation or outcome. Listen to Walt recalibrate his lies in mid-sentence as he talks to Skyler at the hotel; he can think and lie on his feet, but it doesn’t come as easily to him as when he can rehearse the scene in his head. (And it’s worth mentioning that even then, he’s not always perfect; the “pump malfunction” lie is so ridiculous, and told so poorly, that he’s only saved by Junior giving him the out to tell a second lie about a cancer-related mishap.)
Nearly everyone else in “Rabid Dog” is ready to get rid of Jesse, but Walt fights that instinct as long as he can, before finally and reluctantly placing the call to Todd. Based on the massacres of Mike’s guys and Declan’s crew that he helped engineer, Uncle Jack is both willing and able to take care of Walt’s Old Yeller problem. Earlier in the episode, Marie’s therapist Dave offers some sound advice: “There is no problem, no matter how difficult, or painful, or seemingly unsolvable, that violence won’t make worse.” It’s an old saw, but an interesting one to insert into a series like this, that stars a man who has solved so many of his problems through violence—but whose solutions usually beget more problems that require more violence to solve.
Uncle Jack may not be the most impressive character Walt’s ever teamed up with, but there’s an air of doom around him and his neo-Nazi buddies, especially given how close we are to the end, and what little we know about what Walt’s situation will be like a few months down the road. Had Jesse walked up to the bench and let Walt talk to him about Brock, Walt might have been in handcuffs shortly thereafter. But Jesse’s decision not to approach Walt was only the latest effect of the lasting psychological power Walt has over everyone in his circle—and there are only more brutal consequences to come.
SEASON 5 / EPISODE 13
“To’hajiilee”
Written by George Mastras
Directed by Michelle MacLaren
Back to the Burial Grounds
“It’s over!” —Hank
Great entertainment can transport us so wholly to another world that it’s easy to forget that this one exists for a little while. When you’re fully absorbed in a great book, a great movie, or an amazing hour of television like “To’hajiilee,” you may lose track of time, of temperature, and possibly of the need to breathe.
Nearly twenty minutes of screen time pass from the moment Jesse texts Walt the faked money barrel photo to the closing credits. More than fifteen minutes pass from the moment Walt arrives at the spot where he buried the money to the credits, and more than ten minutes pass from the moment we return from the final act break and Walt is prepared to surrender himself to Hank. I know this only because I went back, multiple viewings later, to clock it all. In the moment, the action seemed to be simultaneously taking place in an instant and over an eternity. A parade could have gone by my window and I wouldn’t have noticed. I’m sure I inhaled and exhaled, if only because I’m alive right now writing these words that you’re reading, but I’ll be damned if I was aware of any contracting or expanding of my lungs as Walt, Jesse, Hank, Gomez, and then the Nazis all converged in the spot where Walt and Jesse first cooked their meth—the same spot where the arrival of Emilio and Krazy-8 made it clear to both Walt and us that nothing on Breaking Bad would ever go as expected.
Until Uncle Jack and his crew arrived loaded for bear, this felt like a pretty damn spectacular version of how Breaking Bad should end. The great Heisenberg is outsmarted by two men he would never expect to be working together—and whose intelligence he has continually underestimated—using the same kind of chicanery that he himself employed to take out Gus Fring. He confesses many of his biggest sins, returns to the scene of his first crime, and is cuffed and Mirandized by his brother-in-law.
It doesn’t feature every single element we might demand from a conclusion to the series—Skyler’s not involved, we don’t see Walter Jr. find out the truth about his dad, and a few other plot threads like Jane’s death are left dangling—but had this been the climax of the series (followed by perhaps one more episode dealing with the fallout), it would have been immensely satisfying. It wouldn’t have been a happy ending—the White family would be ruined, Hank’s career would be destroyed, Jesse would likely have gone to jail, and the Nazis and Lydia would still be out there profiting off an inferior copy of Walt’s product—but after all the terrible things Walt has done, it’d have been about as close to happy as possible.
George Mastras’s script and Michelle MacLaren’s direction sure as heck treat this like the moment the series has been building up to. There’s not only a callback to the pilot, but also the very careful pacing of the episode once Walt surrenders. The way MacLaren shoots each image of Walter White in the desert makes it seem like it’s the conclusion of an epic feature film: Walter of Arabia. The camera savors every single moment of Walt’s undoing (as do we), from watching him circle around looking for signs that his buried treasure has been discovered (looking every bit like Eli Wallach’s Tuco in the famous “Ecstasy of Gold” sequence from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) to depicting his long, slow walk, arms outstretched in the penitent gesture demanded by Hank, as Jesse watches in disbelief that they actually got the sonuvabitch. Jesse has every right to distrust that Walt will let himself be taken in: There’s that briefest of moments where you wonder if Walt is going to attempt suicide-by-cop, like he was planning to in the pilot episode, before he drops the revolver on Hank’s orders. It is beautiful to look at, and every bit the heroic victory that Hank and many viewers were hoping for. The look of complete and utter defeat—and, per
haps, a tinge of relief?—on Walt’s face as he hides behind the rocks and realizes what has happened could absolutely have worked as the final emotional catharsis this character and the actor who plays him have been building toward for the last five seasons.
But the luxuriating goes on too long—not for the audience, but for Hank. He takes great pleasure, and time, in discussing who gets to recite Walt’s Miranda rights, and in placing a phone call to Marie ahead of calling for backup from the DEA or the tribal police. At first, I was just terrified that Jesse and Gomez would be left behind in a location that Uncle Jack was almost certainly driving toward, but then as Hank made that beautiful (and, in hindsight, almost certainly tragic) call to Marie, I began to realize just how bad this was about to get. It’s such a happy moment—every time I re-watch it, my heart breaks a little more at Betsy Brandt’s relieved, joyous delivery of the line, “I’m much better now”—that the only way Hank would have seemed more doomed by the end of it would have been if he’d told Marie that he was going to buy a boat called The Live-4-Ever.
That the episode ends mid-gunfight could give viewers the hope that Hank has one last miraculous shootout in him (though one in which he has no advance warning and far more opponents than just the Cousins). But this feels more like us getting to watch Hank enjoy his triumph right before it is snatched away, at the hands of some of the most loathsome characters in the history of the series. The Cousins clearly weren’t good guys, but they had a kind of larger-than-life evil grandeur; Hank’s death at their hands would have felt tragic, but not stomach-churningly real. Uncle Jack and his crew aren’t outsized like the Cousins, or Gus. They aren’t slick or complex or almost superhumanly competent like Mike. They’re just brutal sleazeballs who take advantage of what’s been put in front of them, and now they’re in a position to take possession of Walt, his money, and possibly Jesse. I feel sick about this every time I revisit the episode, and want to yell at both Walt and Hank to do something—anything!—differently: Walt, do not give the Nazis the GPS coordinates of your money, even if you don’t tell them the money is there! Hank, get your damaged hip in that car with Walt and drive the hell out of there to book him! But this is simply how it has to be. Walt is under too much pressure, and has made too many bad decisions during the course of the show, just as Hank has too much of his pride, and his marriage, wrapped up in the pursuit of Walt. These are the decisions they were always going to make. You can’t fight fate, and neither can Walter White and Hank Schrader.
The repellent nature of Uncle Jack and company seems an appropriate place for the story to turn in the closing hours. Some fans and critics have interpreted the Nazis as an intentional corrective to the adoration that white male antihero Walt has gotten for his various “badass” deeds over the years. To me, they feel more like a repudiation of Walt’s own belief in his life of crime and how it should work. Walt has always fancied himself above the likes of Krazy-8 and Tuco, imagining he’s a mogul like Gus: someone who will use his mind and his force of will to build a fortune without having to lower himself into the muck that consumes everyone else in the drug trade. Time and again, events have proven this belief wrong, as he does and says things that the pre-cancer Walter White wouldn’t have been able to fathom. That the neo-Nazis are the last foes he has to conquer—not a “worthy” adversary like Gus, or Mike, or anyone else Walt wouldn’t feel disgusted to share a room with under less urgent circumstances—feels like the final indignity from Walt’s point of view, and the final reminder that Walt is not better than other criminals. He’s just more proud.
Like Jesse said about Mr. White in the previous episode, just when you think Breaking Bad is about to do something, the exact opposite happens. For most of its second half, “To’hajiilee” builds toward what could have been an excellent close to the tale of Heisenberg … and then it swerves into dark territory that makes clear the story’s not done yet.
We knew that this couldn’t be the show’s actual conclusion, due to the flash-forwards to Walt as Mr. Lambert. But in this moment, the artistry and intensity of that final desert sequence are so powerful that they can obliterate our memory just as easily they can a sense of time and a need to inhale.
SEASON 5 / EPISODE 14
“Ozymandias”
Written by Moira Walley-Beckett
Directed by Rian Johnson
And Despair
“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?! WE’RE A FAMILY!!!
… We’re a family.” —Walter
About seven seconds pass between the time Walter White screams the words “WE’RE A FAMILY!!!” and the time he whispers them, and they are an eternity. They are everything. Those seven seconds are what Breaking Bad has been building to for the previous fifty-nine hours. They are the shattering of every illusion Walter White has ever had about himself. They are the terrified faces of his wife and son as they huddle together on the floor, trying to wish him into the cornfield. They are all his bogus self-rationalizations being dipped in acid until they are no longer recognizable. They are Walter White finally, after so much time and so much sin, coming to terms with everything he has lost.
“Ozymandias” is the greatest hour Breaking Bad has ever given its audience. It is also the most terrible. It is merciless in what it does to Walt, what it does to Hank and Skyler and Flynn and Marie, and what it does to us.
It’s staggering how many horrible things happen in this hour. We return to the shootout in the desert with Gomez already dead, and Hank soon follows him.1 Jack and the Nazis get their hands on nearly all of Walt’s fortune, leaving him pushing the one remaining barrel through the desert.2 Walt tells Jesse about Jane—entirely out of spite, because he has to punish someone for Hank’s murder, even if he knows it’s his own fault3—then leaves him in the hands of Todd, who tortures Jesse and forces him to cook meth. Walt steals baby Holly, leaving a wrecked Skyler kneeling in the street. It’s the worst possible nightmare scenario for all the characters we have even a shred of affection for (but an awfully good day at the office for the Nazis). Individually, any of these events would be enough to make for one of the darkest Breaking Bads ever; shown all together, they hurl us into a bottomless pit and leave us feeling somewhere between the catatonic look on Walt’s face after Jack shoots Hank and the hysterical one on Skyler’s when Walt drives off with their daughter.
In an episode full of metaphorical stabs to the gut (and one literal slash to Walt’s hand), none resonate more than those seven seconds at the end of Walt and Skyler’s fight. It’s not just that the brawl itself is so ugly, with Holly’s cries echoing from just off-camera while Flynn watches paralyzed with shock. After all, Walter White has been in the middle of ugly fights before. It’s that the air has been let out of the final balloon Walt floated for himself and others as he tried to justify the path he was going down. Every part of his belief in the greater good of his actions has been a lie, and bit by bit he is now being forced to reckon with that reality.
He told himself that he could make money cooking meth without hurting anyone, but that piece of fiction was abandoned almost instantly. He told himself he would only do it until he had enough money to pay for his treatment, but he got better and kept cooking. He thought he could talk Skyler into continuing the marriage, but she called the cops on him,4 walked into the swimming pool to try to get herself and the kids away from him, and told him that she was just waiting for him to die. Walt thought he could do this without ever running afoul of or endangering Hank, but instead, Hank and Steve Gomez are lying in the hole that previously held his fortune. He thought he could keep his hands clean of Jesse’s murder—which, really, is the cause of so much of what happens in this episode, since if he hadn’t needed to outsource this particular crime, Hank would still be alive and Walt would be behind bars. He thought he could talk his way out of any situation, up to and including convincing a stone killer like Uncle Jack to let Hank live.
When all those illusions are gone—when Hank and Gomez are dead, when Jack ride
s off with all but one barrel of Walt’s cash with Jesse as his prisoner—the one that Walt still clings so tightly to is that he has done all of this for his family, and that as a result, his family will follow him into the unknown, no matter what they have heard and what they believe. Walt’s capacity for self-deception is still so boundless that even after Skyler intuits what happened in the desert, even after she pulls a very large carving knife on him and shrieks at him to leave the house, he is convinced he can change her mind. Even after she cuts his palm, after they wrestle on the floor, after Flynn—who only minutes earlier was directing all his anger toward Skyler—has tackled him and positioned himself as his mother’s human shield, Walt somehow still thinks he’s being the only reasonable party.
“WE’RE A FAMILY!!!” he bellows. Because being in a family, in Walt’s eyes, means forgiving any deed, including being responsible for the murder of another member of that family.
But something miraculous happens in this scene: Those eyes finally truly see what he has wrought, and how his wife and son look at him, and that lie is gone, forever. Yes, they are a family, but some sins run too deep even for family. Walt has lost them, and as a result he’s lost everything. Each of these monstrous things he has done has been for them—or so he has told himself, even as we’ve seen many seasons worth of evidence to the contrary as we watched the pleasure Walt took in becoming a master criminal—and if they want no part of him, then what was the point after all? Why did all of these people, including his own brother-in-law, have to die? Why couldn’t the damn cancer have just taken him on the night he talked about it with Jesse, back in “Fly” (S3E10)?
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