This is it. This is the episode that Breaking Bad is about. I’m certain of it.
All other episodes were what people think Breaking Bad is about. The trickster meth cookerie, the clever escapes, the convenient alignments. Even though we all pretend that Breaking Bad is surprising in a completely revolutionary, radical way - it really is not. It is totally conservative in how surprising it is, it just happens to be more brilliant at it than most other shows of the same genre. No matter how much we tried to paint it as cruel, gritty and real, it seldom really is. It just shows hints of it to keep us in line for what the show is really about. We were doubly mislead by the amazing writers into thinking ourselves artsy in our appreciation for the brilliance and extravagance of the plot.
The show is about us and how warped our understanding of buying into the evil path is. How it is so destructive, we all rather put it away in our minds instead of accepting it.
It is about how every tiny piece of evil we accept builds up and eventually leads to a cascade that dissolves into mayhem absent of any redemption. We have a kind of arrogance about denying precisely how bleak that evil path can be, but like the saying goes - it destroys everything except itself. This episode was the inevitable triumph of evil over the people who think they can control it, consuming everything it can get its hands on, abusing the people it still has use for, disposing of the people it does not.
That same arrogance surfaced in last weeks comments, about how cheesy this western shootout was and I guess there is some truth to that. But no matter how many cheesy westerns have worked us to the point where “guns in the desert” seem like theater - it’s what happens. People with guns meet and some of them die. In that regard, it’s another double subversion - a trope teased and then played straight.
It’s always hard to successfully play a trope straight. Joe Wright once said (or quoted somebody else, I can’t remember) that Happy Endings are harder to do than Sad Endings because they are much harder to do in a way that satisfies. You can think up a million cheesy ways to end a love story, but one that satisfies? That’s tough. (Then again, it is arguable whether it isn’t just as hard to make a truly satisfactory Sad Ending.)
Similarly, the drugs-and-gangsters genre thrives on extravagance and we have seens lots of it. Crystals produced awesome chemical explosions, people were walking around and adjusting their tie with half their heads blown off, the whole nine yards.
But after all that, here is what is real: You end up with a bunch of sociopaths in a desert and they take precisely everything they can from you. Meth Damons persuasion that Walt be allowed to leave is the only exception to the rule and as we saw from the fallout, it’s not like Walt can make much use of his freedom, at least for now.
What really tied everything together into a singularly brilliant expression was Hank explaining what is happening to Walt: You’re the smartest guy we all know, yet you are a dumb idiot in the face of evil. It had made its mind up ten minutes ago and you’re still running your mouth trying to game it.
There are no compromises to be made, no persuasion tactics, no tricks. Walt tries to offer morals - evil has no morals. Walt tries to offer money - evil already has its money. His money. When Hank spoke his last words, I almost thought they would straight up kill Walt as well afterwards, since they have no need for him anymore. But this is, I guess, why so much emphasis was put on the colorful train heist story time before. Evil at least respects evil. This is the tiny bit of leeway Walt has bought himself. A shallow prize to win when you think about how different this scene could have played out.
The episode even shortly mislead us into believing that Walt volunteered the location of the money for a return that would never come. Nope, evil uncle here had already put 2 and 2 together.
Heck, they could have waited on the side, let the cops leave and then start digging. But nope again, that was not the maximum amount of cruelty and benefit to evil that was possible. (They were also still hoping to get Walt cooking again.)
Hank is the only person who really knows this because he has seen it all the time in his career. We were quick to discard it as heroic or idealistic. But it simply is realistic. He played a tough guy because that’s all you can do.
This brings us back to Jesse - Once again an indentured servant. He had many brushes with it before, but now it’s the full story. Don’t comply and we will destroy the tiny bit of humanity that you have left, the last people you care about.
For the longest time, Walt was the fantasy of drug dealer extravagance - you’re brilliant and resourceful, you get all the bells and whistles, all the money, all the cool guy, badass attitude and only when things get a little rough do you need to show up and play tough until the problem mostly deals with itself by one kind of magic or another. When “push came to shove” he was a bumbling idiot. An amateur, wannabe tough guy who at least got away with it somehow.
But Jesse is what actually happens: You end up as a literal slave to that thin sliver of ambition that you have erected against your drug fueled self loathing. You were hopeful, resilient, you tried to outsmart it. Instead, you end up drenched in self loathing from start to finish, long after your ambition has left you. It has destroyed everything except itself minus two innocent people that are only alive so that Jesse produces for the benefit of evil.
And for how long? How long until Meth Damon can produce the shade of blue that Lydia requested? The only silver lining on that horizon is that he might prove himself a useful peon, living a little longer in the service of an evil that he is now physically scared of. That he crawls away from in his pit, beaten, bloody and bruised, that he no longer even begs mercy from (except for begging to be believed that he told the truth) because he knows there is none to be expected.
As for Meth Damon - By now it is kind of hard to fathom just how uncompromisingly straight evil this character is played. Hiding behind that thick forhead is a clockwork that maximises evil in every situation it is applied. Make no mistake about it - he was the one responsible for torturing Jesse, who pulled together the strings about what cute picture they have to put on the wall to keep him in line. He said the first directly to his uncle, the second was probably a direct result of it. Even more than that, he now put Jesse on a literal leash.
Think about that for a second - Jesse was pulled out of a hole in the ground after being beaten for what seems like days. He has no idea what is happening to him and he gets brought up into a lab.
And then he is chained to an iron bar on the ceiling, put up there for the express purpose of abusing him for money.
(Him and Meth Damon in one room is also interesting because they’re such a stark contrast. Jesse went out of his way to protect a child while his opposite shot one in cold blood for profit. Jesse slipped into a world of evil he doesn’t understand while the other was brought up in a culture of evil.)
Still, his fate is the hardest to predict. I guess mostly because it’s so bloody hard to read either his actions or his face.
As for my predictions for this episode, only one came true: People were already shot. it just wasn’t shown yet. Gomey was made a red shirt (kind of literally) (I mean come on - a shotgun at that distance? Really?) and Hank is incapacitated. No keeping them alive for whatever purpose, no pre meditated scheme to trick them into emptying their magazines. Just death.
Predicting what will follow is tough, of course, but I don’t see much room for salvation.
Walt has already extracted the maximum from his dilemma for his family by absolving Skyler from the status of an accomplice and he had to add “kidnapper” to his downward spiral to purchase it. He cut the tiny thread that their marriage was left dangling on by first assaulting and then insulting his wife. He has made himself a monster in the eyes of his son and all he got from his daughter was a diaper change, a hug and the certainty that, really, she’d rather be with her mom. (Cranston deserves all the Emmies for that scene alone, although he can share a couple with Gunn for the scene on the streets. Goddamnit, the onions. Both of them. All of them! Jeez!)
The only open threads now left are Jesse and the power that he has transferred to the Aryans in the form of 70 millions and a soon to be thriving meth production. I think just as the phone conversation with Skyler, telling Jesse about how he watched his girlfriend die was about coming to terms with the extent of his own downfall and displaying it to others (the Aryans in this case) so that he can purchase a sliver of leeway. Not sure how he will use it for Jesse, but making it brutally clear to the nazis that he cut his ties with Jesse would make a good cover for any further action.
But in the long run, I don’t have much hope for either Jesse or Walt.
It is obvious to me now that Jesse has to die to finally prove the point that his role of a self loathing addict has precisely one outcome - death. It’s the writers way of saying: No seriously, no bullshit or funny high school educational videos. Seriously, this is what will happen to you. You will have a bad time and then you will die and even that won’t be so great.
Similarly, Walt has only his own life to offer now. Maybe we will see a little play on how he would soon die of cancer anyways, but the only tool he has left is a suicide mission. Hence the BFG and Poison Pill. Only then will he finally, literally, have swallowed his pride.
The last remaining hope I have is that he will force himself into a corner, almost kill himself with the Ricin (so as to not also become a servant) and then find a last option out. Pretty sure if they go this far, he won’t survive that either, though. If he does, it will probably be about Lydia - she showed before that she can be manipulated with certain pressure points.
This series, man, I tell you. Phew.
