Recap:
The gang is disassembling and melting down the dirtbike and body of the dead child from the previous episode. Todd goes outside and joins Jesse in a smoke and tries to make conversation, saying “S*** happens, huh?” to which Jesse responds by punching him in the face.
Todd pleads his case to Walt, Jesse and Mike about why he shot the kid; he didn’t want to take a chance that the kid would let something spill, and was only thinking about the business. Jesse is still enraged at Todd’s actions, but Todd has connections in prison, so they worry he could talk. The options are that they either fire Todd, and thus will have to pay him off to keep him quiet; they kill him; or they keep him on staff and keep an eye on him. Mike and Walt vote for the last option, meaning Todd will stay in the business with them (though Mike still threatens him to behave.)
Gomez and his partner are tailing Mike in the park, who makes what the officers believe is a dead drop. When they investigate, the note simply reads “F*** You.” Back home, Mike listens to the bug in Hank’s office, and realizes how hot they are on his trail.
Marie and Skyler talk about the kids, leading to Skyler breaking down once again. When Marie tries to get Skyler to talk to her, Skyler only tells her that she and Walt are terrible parents, and she doesn’t want Marie to know the terrible truths about them. Marie assumes she’s talking about the affair with Ted, and tells Skyler she knows and thinks she should forgive herself, hoping that Skyler will feel better now that it’s off her chest.
At the tented house Walt and Jesse are cooking in, Jesse catches a news report on the missing kid they killed and is visibly distraught. Walt tells him he’s been broken up and unable to sleep too, but reinforces that they finally have everything they need; after they cook through the Methlyamine in a year, there will be time for soul searching. Walt decides to let Jesse go home early; but before Jesse leaves, he sees Walt happily whistling while he cooks, clearly not too broken up about the situation. He then gets a phonecall.
That night, Walt goes to the headquarters to drop off the batch, and sees Mike and Jesse there. Mike reveals that the DEA has been on his trail—to which Walt explodes with rage—but Mike agrees that the best option is for him to quit. Walt suggests Jesse to take Mike’s distribution duties, but Jesse says he wants out too, unable to handle it anymore. Mike still has a connection with Fring that will pay for 2/3 of the Methylamine, which evenly split would be five million between the two of them. Mike would cover the longterm hazard pay for the men in prison, meaning they could all walk away just fine. Jesse invites Walt to join and sell his part, too, but he refuses to budge and sell to his competitor. He chastises Jesse for selling his share for “pennies on the dollar.” Jesse knows that $5 million is not pennies, and asks Walt, “Are we in the meth business, or the money business?”
Mike and Jesse meet with their contact to sell their 2/3 of the Methylamine. However, the contact wants the blue stuff off the market, and determines that this isn’t all the Methylamine. He will only agree to buy if he can have all of it, because he’s in it to increase the demand, not just the supply, and there’s no deal without it.
Jesse calls Walt, and Walt surprisingly invites him over to his house. Jesse tells him about the inability to make the deal, and pleads with him to back out of cooking, which Walt continues to reject. Jesse cites “$737,000” that Walt said he needed originally when they started, and $5 million is more than they could imagine. It would be a way out, and this is what they worked for. Walt, however, believes they’d be selling out, and even selling it for $5 million is throwing it away. Walt brings up Gray Matter, the company he co-founded. Walt took a buyout for $5,000 when he decided to leave, and now it’s worth billions, and he’s still bitter about making that mistake. He’s not in the meth business or the money business, he’s in the empire business. Skyler arrives home, and though both Skyler and Jesse are clearly uncomfortable, Walt invites Jesse to stay for dinner.
The dinner is, of course, extremely awkward, and Skyler is standoffish as usual. After Jesse struggles to make conversation and Skyler drinks lots of wine, she calls out Walt on telling other people about her affair, and subsequently storms off. Walt tells Jesse how his kids are gone and his wife is waiting for him to die—the business is all he has left, and they want to take it away from him.
Mike catches Walt at the headquarters trying to steal the Methlaymine and nabs him at gunpoint, forcing him to stay in the room all night. Mike has to leave to make another appointment, and locks Walt to a radiator. After a few attempts, Walt strips the wiring of the coffee machine and uses the electric charge to burn off his ziptie cuffs (burning his wrist in the process.)
Mike’s appointment was with Hank and Gomez ; Saul is representing him, and claiming that their unwarranted tailing is technically stalking, taking a toll on Mike’s physical and mental well-being, and files a restraining order (citing that he knows a judge who hates police harassment of senior citizens.) It was a gamble and only a temporary solution, but it does give Mike a solid 24 hours of the DEA backing off.
Mike returns and the Methylamine is completely gone. He puts his gun to Walt’s head when he finds him, but Jesse stops him from shooting—Walt has a plan for them to get out while Walt gets to keep his business, and “Everybody wins.”
Review:
Things are very straightforward this time around, which for a show normally soaked (and occasionally spilling over) with subtext and symbolic imagery, is pretty odd. But it works as a theme here, with characters saying exactly what they mean and being fairly upfront with their motivations, a complete 180 from the quiet, secret-heavy place the show started. What results is an hour that isn’t particularly surprising, but still enjoyable because of how these reveals are used and who they’re being delivered to.
Walt spills a whole load of motivations to Jesse, tying the show back to its earliest seasons. While Gretchen and Walt’s former partners in Gray Matter played into the plot through season two, it’d been mostly in the background and gone without mention for the past few seasons. Now, it’s nice to bring it up and say definitively how much of an impact Walt’s dealings with the company had on him. It doesn’t feel like a cheat or expository since it was heavily implied early on, but it’s a solid reminder of what drives Walt. It’s not that he inherently has a hungry ego, he was just so profoundly wounded by his mistake (not to mention jealous) that forming his own empire is the only thing that makes up for it. Fear of a missed opportunity and “what ifs” are something we all have to deal with, but Walt’s major character flaw, it seems, is his inability to deal with it. Or rather, what he learned from it was not that “s*** happens,” but “if it happens, never let it happen again.”
Walt’s rant to Jesse also provided the first very subtle “final season” tropes we’ve gotten. (I know we’re getting another mini-season next year, but for all intents and purposes these final 16 are function as “the final season” considering they were all written as the last arc of the show.) In this case, it’s the “references to the first season” trope, which this episode does very well by tying in Gray Matter and especially the very specific reference to Walt’s original $737,000 figure. It’s cool for longtime fans, but also an effective way to remind us just how much Walt has grown (devolved?) from the fearful man just trying to die with pride and support his family to the egomaniac we see now.
Of course, a day isn’t complete without Walt manipulating Jesse in some way. While he was being honest with his motivations, his next confession to Jesse about the loss of his family and the fact that the business is “all he has left”—while truthful, still reeks of “Pity me until I get what I want!” It’s ambiguous in the same vein as his scene with Hank last week; Walt definitely is losing his family, and it could be hurting him, but does it make him anymore sympathetic if he’s twisting that pain into new ways to get people on his side? After all, Jesse seems plenty apt to try out whatever new and wacky plan Walt came up with.
Jesse’s gone through quite an emotional roller coaster throughout the show, and it really shows here. While Walt has a specific event that sparked his deep-seeded motivation to cook, Jesse…doesn’t really. He runs solely on his emotional investment and base logic; cooking meth used to be cool and got him money, so he did it. Now that he’s seen so much death and horror, it’s not cool anymore, so he doesn’t want to cook. There isn’t much more to it, really, and because of that he’s probably the most logical character of the bunch. There’s no complex attachment to the business, no specific people he’s doing it for, so getting out with lots of money works just fine. The problem is that, as has been said many times, Jesse is fiercely loyal and trusting, so even if his logic tells him to get out no matter what, he’s still going to try to appease Walt since he’s emotionally invested in him, as a father figure and friend. So when Jesse’s upfront about his motivation, not being able to handle the bad stuff that comes with cooking, Walt can grab on to his emotional side like a shark.
We established Mike’s main motivation in “Madrigal” as leaving something behind for his granddaughter, but he’s finally straight about what’s been going on with his end of the plot. It was fun seeing him yank the DEA around so much, but the most engaging stuff is just how determined he is to get out of the business now. This makes his second major attempt this season potentially thwarted, and it’s becoming more evident that he’s more than jaded with the entire situation.
Skyler is the only one who wasn’t completely upfront about what’s happening, for obvious reasons. But between she and Walt, more and more about their situation is being fed to Hank and Marie. It was ingenious of the show to bring back the Ted affair of season 3 to provide a cover to keep Hank and Marie at bay, but how long can that last as an excuse? It’ll be interesting to see that if (when?) Hank discovers the truth about Heisenburg, it isn’t because of his DEA investigation, but because of his and Marie’s interaction with Walt and Skyler’s personal lives.
Significant action and plot movement was fairly light here. Walt burning the ziptie from his wrists was clever and brutal (and makes me wonder how well that would actually work, but this is Breaking Bad we’re talking about.) And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the hilariously awkward dinner scene. I’m a sucker for good awkward dinner scenes, and we got some good material here. The only complaint is that it could have lasted a little longer, because Jesse’s attempts to stir up conversation were hilarious.
If there’s a major downside, it’s that the end unfortunately feels a little rushed. It’s obviously meant to cut off abruptly during the tension on purpose, and normally this show can pull that off, but something about it didn’t work as well this time. The climax didn’t quite reach the peak we’d expect before it ended, so instead of the tension building to a high point before pulling the plug and leaving us in a state of fear/catharsis/generally craving for more, it just kind of stops and trusts we’ll come back for the answer. But I’m willing to forgive it since the show pulled off such a brilliant cliffhanger last week, and I do appreciate the effort to do a different kind of cliffhanger. It’s an average episode, overall, just because it doesn’t provide much that’s particularly new—but average on Breaking Bad is only about half a notch below “amazing.”
Some stray tidbits:
- This now makes two weeks in a row of brilliant and memorable cold opens, though for very different reasons.
- Between this and Community last season, “Todd” might become the go-to name for “person everyone hates.”
- Jesse, I love you, but…Ricky Hitler? What?
- Turns out the tarantula in the jar from last week didn’t escape—Todd’s keeping it. Either this means the guy isn’t really a whack job since it means he’s sentimental and feels bad about what he did, or he’s even more of a whack job for keeping a souvenir from the kid he killed.
- I mention Betsy Brandt here a lot, because there’s not a great place for her in the main review—but this episode is another example of how much Marie has grown this season, dealing with the Skyler stuff.
- I wonder how much Walt would freak if he heard Mike’s contact call the meth “Fring’s Blue.”
- Let’s just look at Aaron Paul for a little bit.
- Mike’s birthday would involve Walt sitting alone in a room with him all night. Is there something about Mike we don’t know?
- “I’ve never seen anybody work so hard not to get 5 million dollars.”
