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08-20-2012 I know a girl who When you're wakin' Will make you breakfast With veggie bacon She don't cook dinner She don't bake cake She don't use lemons For goodness sake She uses Allllllbertson's beans Allllllbertson's beans Allllllbertson's beans -Flaming Lips, kinda sorta Building an empire must be difficult. If you're Walter White, no one wants to see you succeed. No one. Not rival drug dealers, not the DEA, not your wife, not your partners, and I'm willing to guess none of the viewers at home either. No matter how much we enjoy Breaking Bad from the comfort of our living rooms, there had to be a part of all of us rooting for Jesse and Mike (and Walt, if need be) to take the $5 million for their methylamine and call it a day. And hey, let's not forget that this show is taking place all the way back in 2009. That $5M in 2012 dollars is now a tasty ... uh, over $5.3 million. Actually, that was meant to be a joke. I initially thought that it would have appreciated about $20 with the ups and downs of the economy recently, but I suppose $300,000 is nothing to sneeze at. Yeah, bitch! Economics! Speaking of our friend with the wide vocabulary, what a knockout episode for Jesse. A shiner delivered and a shining performance. No one, and I mean no one, can take an awkward, wide-eyed, drink of ice water or fork full of lemon+almond green beans like Aaron Paul. The TMI dinner Jesse shared with Skyler and Walt was so painful and comedic that the only thing missing was Michael Scott and his neon beer sign. This scene was a classic for me. A couple questions though. Could the writers have tightened up the Skyler/Marie discussion scene just a touch and added another two minutes here to allow for Jesse to give a full-blown monolog? Aaron Paul has proven to be sooooo good when he gets on a roll! Next, Skyler had just found out that Walt crapped on her and leaked word of her affair to her admittedly "loud-mouth" sister. Why was she bringing home such a nice dinner? We're used to the amount of food on the dining room table being analogous to how well the White family is getting along. This spread throws that correlation all to hell. Last, and hold on to your hats, I'm actually going to dish out a compliment to Skyler: I was impressed by how she angrily clanged the bottle of wine off of her wine glass...even pulling it off in one fluid motion while getting up from the table!  "Choice!" As for scenes that didn't leave a good taste in my mouth, we opened where last week's gut-punch closer left off. With the hydrofluoric acid back in play, it was very easy to remember how just the 2nd episode of the series fully sucked me in to Breaking Bad. There was something about seeing 7-11's worst-testing flavor ever - Human Slurpee - splash down from Jesse's 2nd floor to 1st floor that had me thinking, "Whoa, this show is for real! It was darkly humorous then, but now seeing a corpse turned to slurry doesn't give me the same joy. Go figure. Maybe there is a difference between dissolving a drug dealer and dissolving an innocent 14-year old Drew Sharp. Combine that with the perpetrators now being rather calculating (hey, they got the correct containers this time!) instead of newbies at the whole crime thing, and we have a somber beginning to this episode. One's mind does not have to wander too far from the manner in which the dirt bike was dismembered to envision how the second barrel would soon be filled. The characters close to this killing all have their layers peeled back a bit for us. Todd keeps the tarantuala, and to our disgust, seems to admire it as a medallion for his good work. Jesse is visably upset. If Vivian Ward is our favorite "hooker with a heart of gold," then Jesse is certainly our "cooker with a heart of gold." (Just meth and frozen lasagna though.) Walt sees only green lights and doesn't get caught up in the event. He stays true to his promise that nothing stops this train. In fact, we have another heart-to-heart between Walt and Jesse under the Big Top where Walt seems to show some remorse, only to start whistling a tune a moment later. We already know these moments of fatherly kindness are a sham, but now Jesse seems to realize this as well. And then we have Mike. Seasoned law enforcer and criminal. If he were on The Wire, he could play ironman. Mike. And he is coming unraveled. He's slamming kids half his age against walls (fences?), then playing with his granddaughter, then listening to Hank weigh in on the Miracle Whip vs. mayo dilemma, then trying to deal the DEA a couple "F(blurred)(blurred)K You"s. He also makes the rookie mistake of leaving Walt alone, cliche-edly (you know I'm not afraid to make up words, right?) zip-tied to a radiator....for a meeting where it didn't seem his presense was all that essential! So. Neither Jesse nor Mike think it's worthy of a mention that Walt arc-torched the zip-tie off his wrist?! That took some cajones! I would have enjoyed a quick, "Yo, Mr. White, you, uh, nearly torched your wrist off, maaaan!" Or maybe Mike could have squirted some hot sauce in the wound. Any kind of acknowledgement would have been nice. Not to mention, isn't anyone gonna be pissed when they come in to work the next day and have no coffee? It's bad enough thinking about how white-collar working stiffs would react to such a situation, much less a group of professional criminals. More on Walt. It was nice to see him working his magic with Jesse again in the White living room, where he recently bluffed the pants off Jesse with a gun to his head. Was his whole yarn about Gray Matter and building empires a crock of crap too? The jury is still out on how much of that was true. However, if revenge is his game, he would be the 2nd meth lord in town to have that as his motivation, but the only one to still have a pulse and the right side of his face intact. It is very hard for me to buy in to Walt's desire to build an empire. There sure is a lot you can do with $5 million. It's possible that he might even be able to win his wife back by getting out of the business and giving their children a safe home again. This is the first time in a while that no one has been hot on his heels with a gun, shiny axe, or pointed broken plate shard. Sticky points/Quick hits: **How long has elapsed in the show since Skyler "started therapy"? Doesn't seem like more than a couple days. **Declan seemed a little too smart in his conversation with a tight-lipped Mike. **If Mike can cover all legacy costs with his $5 million, his $2M in the Cayman's is indeed substantially more than Fring's other men. Predictions: The plan Walt's references at the end of this episode involves double-crossing Declan and his crew of methylamine buyers. As members of the sports media are so fond of saying, "...and here's why." 1) There was an ad on TV for fake caviar. Call it foreshadowing. 2) From a storyline perspective, Walt's life is rather decent right now. (ie. He's not running for his life.) Sure, he has plenty of problems at home and elsewhere higher on Maslow's Pyramid, but he isn't in immediate danger, which is rare in this series. I say look for another deal with the Declan, but with some sort of inferior or substandard product being substituted for the real thing. Final thoughts: Cranston for the Emmy Outside of thrashing up a storm trying to land a Mr. Coffee, Cranston doesn't get very animated in this episode. But he still conveys a ton through his facial expressions and the way he delivers lines. As he explained to Lydia just one episode ago, "Do you understand the concept of leverage? ... Because you have NONE." This episode hinged on Walt's leverage against the yet-again-budding-partnership between Jesse and Mike. (Set against the backdrop of Walt's past, where Elliott and Gretchen edged him out of Gray Matter, which we do know to be true.) When Walt realizes that Jesse and Mike have been coordinating behind his back to sell their shares of the methylamine, his face is that of resignation and controlled panic. Heisenberg slips away and it's back to the drawing board to see if another plan can be hatched. Luckily for him, in walks Declan and his big, intuitive brain, walking away from a deal that won't allow him to monopolize the meth market. Smash cut to Cranston's ability to once again return the smugness to his face, to his words, to his voice, to his tone. We have some great facial close-ups from many of the cast in this episode, but Cranston, like his character's product, is a cut above the rest. Tune in next week to the show... and my blog! -T |
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