This post is dedicated to the memory of Pana Stamos. I was fortunate enough to call her a friend for two years, decades ago. We drifted apart before Breaking Bad ever aired, but I know it was one of her favorite television shows.
Requested By
Lemonspawn, Kerr, and EdwinSorrow on Discord
What do I know about this series going into it?
Made by Vince Gilligan and starring Bryan Cranston, it’s about a high school chemistry teacher named Walter White who discovers he has cancer and starts dealing meth under the pseudonym “Heisenberg” to pay for the cancer treatments. And even though he is given multiple chances to get the money in other ways, he decides he likes dealing drugs. Along the way he uses his chemistry knowledge to make bombs, throws a pizza on the roof of his house, yells “I am the one who knocks” at his wife Skyler, has to avoid his brother-in-law the DEA officer, and deals with Mexican drug cartels and white supremacists. The episode titles in the second season secretly refer to a plane that goes down over Albuquerque in the season finale, with a half-burned teddy bear that lands in his swimming pool. There’s also a character named Jesse who either dies choking on his vomit or fails to save somebody else choking on vomit.
It's amazing how much you can absorb through cultural osmosis. And yet I’ve only ever watched a single scene of the show… this one.
Recap
Walter removes snow from the window of his Volvo and gets in. He’s coughing. He gets a screwdriver out of the glove compartment and starts trying to hot-wire the car; I guess it isn’t his after all.
A police car pulls up behind him. “Just get me home, I’ll do the rest,” he murmurs to himself; is he talking to God? The universe? The police? Luckily the cop car moves on without investigating, because they can’t see into the snow-covered car. Even more luckily, he doesn’t need to hot-wire the car: when he uses the screwdriver to pull down the visor1 the keys fall into his lap. He starts the engine.
Opening credits.
Walter drives up to a gas station, where I discover the car has New Hampshire plates. The trunk is filled with cash and pills; he takes a pill and drinks water from the hose.
Walter uses a pay phone to call someone named Susan, pretending to be a New York Times reporter. He asks when “Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz” are coming home and gets their address. Then he leaves his watch on top of the pay phone.
Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz come home, where Walter is lying in wait. He stealthily enters behind them.
Turns out he knows them, calling them Gretchen and Elliot, and they know him. They ask what he wants, but he wants to give them something. It’s in my car! Trust me! Elliott refuses at first (wouldn’t you?) but gives in after Walt threatens him. What he’s giving them is the cash: $9,720,000. He’s giving it to them to give it to his son in trust when the latter turns 18 in ten months.
Why don’t you give it to your son yourself, Gretchen asks? Because Walter’s family hates him and wants nothing to do with him or his ill-gotten gains. But if you do it, he tells the rich couple, they’ll accept the money.
Walter insists they shake hands, which they do, very reluctantly. But then he signals out the window – and two sniper dots appear on Gretchen and Elliot’s chests. If my kids don’t get the money, the $200,000 I paid these two hitmen…
Odd; he said kids, plural. Yet he only mentioned his son turning 18 in ten months and said all the money goes to him. Is there an older sibling that doesn’t need the money? A younger sibling too far from 18 to wait for? Does he just hate his other kid?
Outside, Walter picks up his accomplices: two teenagers with laser pointers. They’re not morally happy with what they did2 – yet the discussion then turns to a new drug called “blue meth”. It’s of high enough quality that they were sure he makes it. Walter deduces that it must be Jesse.
Cut to a man in a carpentry workshop, making a box and expressing almost orgasmic pride in his work – but it turns out to be a dream. He’s actually a worker in what I assume is a meth lab, with a chain attaching him to the ceiling that gives him only enough freedom to move around the lab.
Walter makes another stop, during which we see his trunk has a machine gun inside.
He walks through an abandoned building on which Heisenberg is written on the wall, and there’s a brief flashback to the very beginning of the series.
Elsewhere, a respectable-looking woman with a suitcase enters a restaurant and asks for chamomile tea. She is joined at her table by a younger man, as Walter surreptitiously watches from the next table over. Walter joins them, startling them, and offers a deal: he knows Todd is running out of “methylamine”, and he wants to offer them a recipe for meth that doesn’t require it. Todd starts to say no but the woman asks how much: A million dollars. “Jack should hear this,” she says, but Todd is still very hesitant. When Walter leaves, she reveals to Todd that she was lying. Just look at Walter, she says; he looks terrible, he’s clearly not doing well. If the police catch him, it’ll be doing him a favor.
It's the middle of the desert, and Walter has built the machine gun into an automated, rotating turret that he hooks up to the car’s remote key.
A woman calls Skyler: I have news about Walter. He’s in town. They found the car he stole in New Hampshire, somebody saw him in his old house, the police are getting anonymous calls with all sorts of plans that may or may not be Walter trying to spread their resources thin. So the police are monitoring his likely targets: Skyler, her, Flynn’s school.
Skyler thanks her for the warning and hangs up, and the camera moves slightly to reveal that Walter is already standing in her kitchen. “It’s over,” he says; he wants to say goodbye. She’s afraid, though: You’re turning yourself in? But fear of you is the only reason the bad guys are staying away from me. He says something will happen tonight and after that she won’t need to fear anymore.
Walter gives her a lottery ticket whose numbers are disguised GPS coordinates to where he buried Hank and Steve Gomez and all his money3. He insists that he didn’t kill Hank and Steve; the bad guys who are after him did. And he knows she doesn’t want the money, but she can at least trade the information and money for a deal with the prosecutor4.
He also comes clean: I did everything I did for me, not for our family. I liked it and it made me feel alive. She’s surprised at this sudden honesty. Finally, he asks to see his baby daughter before he goes; this is the Holly that’s been mentioned a couple of times, and finally an explanation for the plural in “kids”.
Just outside the house, two men in a car (probably the plainclothes police patrol) watch a kid with crutches (probably Flynn) get off a school bus. From behind another house, Walter watches Flynn, then turns and walks away.
That night, Walter drives up to a padlocked gate, where he is apparently expected. One of the guards comes out and asks about the car, then they open the gate and let them in, giving him directions to drive up to the clubhouse. Before he enters, they pat him down to look for guns and a wire.
Walter is brought in to talk to Jack; turns out Todd did tell him about the offer. But Jack gives the obvious retort: “We’ll get more methylamine”.
They put a gun to his head and prepare to take him out back and kill him. But Walter delays: “You owe me,” he says, because you partnered with Jesse Pinkman instead of killing him like you promised. Jack is furious: You calling me a liar? Just because Jesse is alive doesn’t mean we’re partners. I’ll prove we aren’t partners, defending my honor, and then kill you. He orders Jesse brought out, in chains, during which Walter surreptitiously grabs the car keys. Jack furiously asks Walter if Jesse looks like a partner in his current state. Take a close look, he says, and then I’ll kill you myself for that insult.
Walter looks Jesse over, but it’s just an excuse to get close enough. He tackles Jesse to the ground and activates the machine gun. Everyone in the room is killed except for the two of them - and Todd, who just before the gunfire crouched down to pull Walter off Jesse. Todd’s survival doesn’t last long, though; once the gunfire ends, Jesse wraps his chains around Todd’s neck and kills him while Walter stands and watches.
While Jesse unlocks himself, Walter picks up a gun and gets ready to execute Jack, who is badly wounded but not dead. Jack offers to tell Walter where his money is, but Walter doesn’t care and kills him.
Walter then passes Jesse the gun, who points it at Walter. “Do it,” Walter says. “You want this.” Jesse demands that Walter admit that he wants this, which Walter readily does, but Jesse drops the gun. “Then do it yourself.”
A phone rings in the pocket of one of the dead guys. Walter pulls it out and answers. “Is he gone?” asks the woman on the other end. “He’s gone,” says Walt. It takes her a moment to realize that it’s not Todd speaking, and me a moment to realize this must be the woman from the meeting in the coffee shop. He asks how she’s feeling. Sick? That would be the ricin that I put in your tea.”
Jesse grabs another car, flees the compound, and drives away cackling. Walter is severely injured, though, from broken glass. He goes into the meth lab and admires the work as dozens of police cars drive up; before they come in, he collapses and dies on the floor.
Unresolved questions
Ricin is a lot less dangerous when ingested than it is when inhaled or injected. It’s still dangerous, though, so: does the woman survive?
What happens to Jesse? Does he smash his car up while joyriding through the forest? Is he caught by the police?
We can assume the Schwartzes are so freaked out that they create the trust as Walter demanded. But is Flynn fooled? Does he accept the money?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 4/10. I wanted to give this higher – most of the episode certainly deserved it – but the ending was too contrived. Walter’s plan required far too many things to go right:
Jack doesn’t kill him immediately
Jack indulges him and takes Jesse to him rather than the other way around5
The people in the room happened to be standing in places where every single one of them was incapacitated (at the very least) by the first few shots, before they could duck
There wasn’t a single guard anywhere else in the compound who came running in response to the gunfire6
Walter himself happens to be wounded severely enough that he can die before he is taken into custody.
Most of the episode - most of the decisions Walter made, most of his behavior - was built around this specific outcome. We know he doesn’t have the guts to actually kill himself, but nothing else that he did all episode makes sense if he survives and the police show up and throw him in jail for life. It’s a major problem with how the plot is structured.
Writing: 8/10. Excellent use of irrelevant conversation to offset and accentuate the relevant. Normally this category is where I am at my longest-winded, but this time I have little else to comment on.
Production: 9/10. Top-notch camera work and set design. The extended scene in the Schwartzes’ kitchen, where Walter is wandering around just out of view while Gretchen and Elliott have innocent conversation, was magnificent at building tension almost to the breaking point. There’s the scene in Skyler’s kitchen that uses a piece of the set’s architecture twice, first to hide Walter from our view (the innocent little zoom that reveals him is masterful) and then to symbolize the unbridgeable divide between him and his (ex-?)wife. And there’s the zoom on the teacup that makes you question if Walter did something to the tea that you didn’t notice, which doesn’t pay off until 20 minutes later, long after you dismissed it as just a dramatic scene transition.
The acting, too, was great. You can see why Bryan Cranston is lauded for his performance, but everybody else in the episode pulled their weight too. I want to highlight Jesse’s behavior in the carpentry scene and the subtly different ways that Elliott and Gretchen expressed reluctance to shake Walter’s hand. A lot of thought went into those moments.
Characterization: 7/10. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about this show online in recent months, in which people seemed to fundamentally misunderstand why Walter does what he does. (Look at me, being all arrogant and assuming I know better than they do, having seen all of one episode.) And while yes, it’s true, he wants to provide for his family, his admission to Skyler couldn’t be clearer: he did it all for himself. The danger, the desperate improvisation, the fear, gave him emotions that he wasn’t feeling in his mundane existence; the cancer (which wasn’t even mentioned in the episode, aside from the occasional coughing!) was just the excuse he was looking for to abandon it for something more exciting.
I had little exposure to most of the other characters’ personalities, but I liked what I saw. The Schwartzes seem to be a genuinely loving couple, with an odd tinge that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m curious as to the backstory of the very respectable-looking woman at the table with Todd. And finally I think – but am not sure – that Skyler still feels love for Walter despite everything and is still struggling with what her husband has become.
Accessibility: 8/10. It may just be thanks to how much I already knew about the show, but at no point did I feel lost. I still have leftover questions – who the people in the compound were, why they hated Walter so much, who Hank and Steve are, etc. - but none of those truly impacted my understanding of what was going on. Most of my backstory questions have any number of readily imaginable answers.
Closure: 7/10. Normally the death of the main character and most of the supporting characters rates a lot higher on closure, especially because the episode from the beginning took pains to broadcast that Walter is deliberately putting his affairs in order before he goes out in a blaze of glory. But I had to dock a couple of points because of the artificiality of the setup, as discussed above under Story. There were half a dozen ways his attack could have ended differently that would have undone all of the events of the episode. For instance, if I understood Skyler correctly, had Walter died without taking literally everybody out with him, any who remained would have come after her and Flynn, which would have made the entire plotline with the money irrelevant. So while there is almost complete closure, it’s highly contrived.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I have a tendency to start and abandon shows like this. I start them because they are extremely high quality, and I abandon them because I can’t handle, emotionally, how irredeemable the characters are. I started Deadwood from the beginning after reviewing its finale, and couldn’t make it past the first few episodes despite the presence of Seth Bullock; I similarly started Succession after that finale and am on the verge of dropping it as well.
Will I start Breaking Bad, knowing I’ll almost certainly drop it too, and for the same reasons? …Maybe. Maybe.
Why? To avoid leaving fingerprints? But he touches everything else in the car with his bare hands.
It’s hard to get a handle on his relationship with these two; do they always work for him? Did he hire them just this one time? Have these characters been seen before?
Except presumably what he gave to the Schwartzes.
I’m surprised to discover that she was involved in his drug empire, given everything I’ve heard from outside the show and everything I’ve seen so far in the episode.
Wouldn’t you, in Jack’s place? Wouldn’t the visual of Jesse chained to the ceiling, walking around like a zombie, cooking meth at gunpoint, be a much more dramatic way to prove the point?
What happened to the second gate guard, who is still at the gate?