Recap:
In the opening, an unknown kid on a dirtbike rides through the desert. He spots a tarantula, places it in a jar, and rides away.
Walt visits Hank at his new office after his promotion last week, and they discuss how Skyler is going back to work and seeing a therapist. Walt feigns a breakdown, saying Skyler “doesn’t love him” and repeating Skyler’s remarks about the kids not being safe. When Hank leaves to get him a coffee, Walt seizes the opportunity to place bugs in his office.
Walt, Jesse and Mike kidnap Lydia, and force her to call Hank and ask about the GPS tracer to prove if she or the DEA placed the tracker on the Methlaymine. Initially, the phonecall yields that Hank knows nothing of it, and Mike and Walt agree to kill Lydia. They also realize the supply is useless—the DEA will assume a heist is going down, meaning that they’ll be bugging the entire warehouse. Mike believes they could steal as much as they can get before the cops get there. However, upon overhearing more of Hank’s phonecalls, they realize that another department placed the tracker on the barrel and tagged all of them (and Hank chastises them for the sloppiness.) Mike still perceives Lydia as a threat and wants to kill her. Jesse wants to keep her alive since she saved them, but Mike reveals that she put a hit out on him. Then, in a moment of desperation, Lydia promises an “ocean” of Methlyamine instead of barrels.
Walter talks to her, and she gives her side of the story: she was protecting herself from the men Mike was protecting, and when he wouldn’t kill them, she had to, and Mike being on the list too was basically collateral damage. She goes on to tell them about a delivery train containing thousands of gallons of Methylamine—and it passes through a”dark territory,” which has no coverage for communication and no alarms. Lydia’s job allows her to get the vital information (including which car it’s contained in.) They debate about whether or not they can do it, particularly because Mike believes they’d have to be killed, while Jesse naturally doesn’t want to kill anyone.
Meanwhile, at Hank and Marie’s, Walter Jr. has been acting like “Emo McGhee” as Hank puts it, thanks to his parents kicking him out without telling him why.
Mike and Walt argue over the pros and cons of doing the train heist, continuing to bring up the guys Mike has to pay up, versus the men they might have to kill on the train; Jesse ends the argument with a new idea: ripping off the train without anyone knowing it got robbed.
At the train site, Walt, Jesse and Mike use the exterminator crew to bury two tanks under the ground. They fill one with water, and leave the other open for the Methylamine, explaining to Todd that they are going to replace the Methylamine’s weight in water in the tanks. If anyone notices it’s watered down after the fact, they’ll blame China for sending a weaker batch.
Walt comes home, where Walter Jr. has returned and locked himself in his room. Walt tells him to get out—not because he’s kicking him out, but because “we’re your parents,” not giving him an exact reason. Junior does eventually leave, and Skyler tells Walt she knows she’s a hostage, and will be his partner as long as the children aren’t there on the day someone comes to harm him and his family.
On the day of the heist, the gang drives dumps truck on the train tracks, feigning a breakdown to get the train to stop. When it’s fully stopped and the engineers are distracted trying to help get the truck off the tracks, Walt, Jesse and Todd start siphoning the Methlaymine and replacing it with water. Things are going smoothly at first, until a good Samaritan arrives and manages to push the truck completely off of the tracks. With the distraction gone, the engineers start the train back up—but Walt refuses to end the process until he reaches his goal. At the last second, he commands them to end the siphoning; Todd jumps off of the train just in time, while Jesse survives by remaining on the tracks under the train until it’s gone by.
As the group celebrates their win, they notice the kid on the dirtbike from the teaser, who witnessed at least the end of the robbery. Before anyone else can make a move, Todd pulls out a gun and shoots the kid. As he lies dead on the ground, the tarantula escapes from the jar.
Review:
Breaking Bad is one of those rare shows that almost never has a “bad” episode. Whereas Smallville has its “Ageless” and Buffy has its “Beer Bad,” which are basically flawed ideas even at the concept stage, Breaking Bad seldom has an episode that’s universally regarded as a stinker. A major reason Breaking Bad averts it (aside from having shorter seasons) is because it tends to avoid having definitive gimmicks or plots for its episodes; things will tie together thematically, but not necessarily overtly. There’s no “concept” for it to fail at in any given individual episode. In fact, episodes that are more controversial are the ones like season three’s “Fly,” which does carry a bit of a gimmicky, one-episode concept: “Walt and Jesse spend an episode chasing a fly.”
Personally, I loved “Fly,” but it’s understandable why some viewers wouldn’t. And on paper, “Dead Freight” seems to follow suit, in terms of its simple, one-sentence premise: “Walt and the gang stage a train heist.” You could see this as something Vince Gilligan wrote on a napkin when he was coming up for ideas for the season. It’s simple and straightforward, but crazy and ambitious at the same time. It’s a completely different type of story than Breaking Bad’s done before, a different genre even. So though we’ve all grown to trust the show’s quality, there was still a chance that this might not go very well.
But it succeeded, even surpassing last week’s strong plot momentum. Sure, the concept was gimmicky, but the show took that gimmick and played it as fully as it could and completely straight, and it didn’t feel like a gimmick as a result. The story purpose for robbing a train made sense, and still played into the overarching plot. And their method for the heist wasn’t overly Ocean’s Eleven-style complicated, like in Community‘s heist parody; in fact, it was surprisingly simple. The focus wasn’t so much on the creativity of the plan, but the efficiency of it. And many of the tropes the show has established are in play here; the Walt/Mike argument stopped by a bright idea from Jesse, just like the premiere; Walt being an egomaniacal jerk and almost getting everyone killed; Walter Jr. being frustrated about his parents keeping secrets; Skyler letting Walt know what she thinks of him, etc. But just like the plan for the heist, the episode doesn’t play with originality so much as efficiency, making it an episode that clicks in all the right places even when it’s not doing anything new.
Of course, having so much of the story be straightforward and rather simple also helped it on another angle—the ending. Another Breaking Bad trope is its weird/surreal/seemingly-non-sequitur teasers, but this one is turned on its head, paving way to the incredibly chilling cliffhanger. The shocker is set-up beautifully, playing off of the previous tension that had been built throughout the hour. The train sequence is as suspenseful as you’d expect, particularly building on what seemed like Todd’s impending death (he’s the only exterminator they’ve built up, and there’s plenty of fun ways he could have died trying to get off that train.)
But to have everything go smoothly, achieve a release and assume this episode might actually an oddly happy ending—which would, of course, match the very traditional plot structure—then suddenly twist it around and completely destroy that in the last few seconds is devastating. It doesn’t evoke tears or a scream, it evokes complete numbness. We could have seen it coming, because all the clues were there, but we didn’t because the episode was so carefully laid out. Having the killer be the one we all expected to die (and who seemed to be a pretty smart, down-to-Earth guy) only drove the knife in further.
Though the earlier scenes are unfortunately overshadowed by the train heist material, they’re still very strong. Walt’s “breakdown” with Hank was well-played, having us initially question, if only for a second, if Walt is being sincere. It’s possible he’s sorta-kinda hurt by Skyler’s lack of love for him, but he obviously doesn’t let it bother him too much. While I tend to believe Walt has gone too far into douchebag territory to really honestly care for his family, I like that there’s still some ambiguity about it. Could some of his crying over Skyler have been sincere? Does he really want his kids to stay around, or is having them another way to “win” against Skyler and inflate his ego?
If there’s one minor gripe I have about this episode, it’s that I do find it odd that the plan to expose what they thought was Lydia’s scheme was essentially a lose-lose. Whether she really put the tracker on the barrel or not, having her call the DEA means they’d be alerted and the stock would be lost. It’s surprising that Walt would approve of that plan. We could infer that they did the standard Walt/Mike argument and Jesse broke in and brought Walt over to his side, like the end of “Hazard Pay,” but it’s hard to say since we didn’t see it happen.
In any case, there’s not much bad to say here. It was suspenseful, enlightening, fun, and shocking, all without feeling too forced. The show promised an episode about a train heist, and it delivered exactly what we expected and wanted, only to twist it in the end and leave us drooling for more. As the show gets closer and closer to the end, it’s certainly not losing any steam.
Some stray tidbits
- “Dead Freight” = “Dead Weight” in case you didn’t catch that.
- I didn’t touch on them much, but Skyler’s brief “hostage” speech to Walt and the Lydia interrogation were incredibly strong and entertaining scenes.
- There’s been two Jesse James references this season. Just an observation.
- So Hank and Marie are definitely having kids soon, right? Because Hank is adorable with Holly.
- The entire sequence with Jesse under train is fantastic.
- “It’s a pistol, not a gun. I’m expecting precision here.”
- “Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head.”
- “Either one of you guys know about engines? Of course you do, that’s why they call you an engineer!”
