In which a heist is pulled and a spider is caught.
Even for a show so fond of puzzling or oblique cold opens, this week’s was exceptional. A child tears across the desert on a little motorbike. He stops to catch a spider in a glass jar, then continues on his way. Credits. It seems like a classic BREAKING BAD move: an arresting image to start us off, giving the audience something to mull over. What’s the significance of the spider? Who is this little kid? Instead of (or as well as) this, though, it’s a technique the show has an even greater grasp on: the long term set up. At this stage in the game, there are so many secrets hanging over the heads of the characters, so many potential plot points waiting to be deployed. Jesse doesn’t know that Walt poised Brock and left Jane choking on her own vomit. Hank doesn’t know any of his brother-in-law’s recent activities. And Walt still has a vial of ricin hidden in a plug socket. The kid at the beginning, then, serves to illustrate Mike’s words of warning: ‘there are two kinds of heist: those where the guys get away with it, and those that leave witnesses.’
With the weight of his secrets and lies on his shoulders, Skyler is operating as a sounding board for Walt’s issues. Last week he casually discussed his return to the meth business and the time Jesse pointed a gun at him. This week, he almost boastfully throws out the little titbit that he’s planning on robbing a train. His partnership with Skyler is now strictly business, a deal he accepts on the terms that the kids stay away from their volatile home. Indeed, he manages to make his wife useful even when she’s not around. In a cold-hearted display of Walt’s increased acting prowess, he plays the part of the wronged husband well enough to make Hank leave his own office, allowing him to bug the head of the DEA.
It’s through this bug that the team realises Lydia was telling the truth all along: the tracker on the barrel of methylamine came from the somewhat inept Houston branch of the DEA. This leaves Lydia alive, but Walt and co needing a new source. From here, we get perhaps the ballsiest caper yet on BREAKING BAD: robbing a chemical-laden freight train. It’s fair to say that we’ve come a long way from the internal, often claustrophobic conflicts of BREAKING BAD’s earlier days. But the evolution feels natural, for the most part. The characters are playing for higher stakes; their motivations and moral stances have changed, muddied. Rather than doing whatever it takes to make a little money for his family before he dies, Walt now wants… everything, basically. ‘Just because you shot Jesse James, don’t make you Jesse James,’ Mike said to Walt a few weeks ago. It seems like that wasn’t true. Only instead of robbing trains with brute force and firepower, Walt’s gang robs trains with complex schemes and machinery.
And this is a big part of the reason the heightened action sequences still fit into BREAKING BAD’s mostly realistic world. We see the thought process, the planning and preparation that goes into a seemingly impossible heist. In this world, a plan doesn’t simply come together. Much of the show’s earlier action or suspense sequences took the form of Walt and Jesse getting into a dangerous situation, then improvising a way out of it. They got stranded in the desert and built a new battery; they killed Gale to guarantee their usefulness to Gus Fring. They’ve learned from past mistakes now. Whilst sitting through another bickering session between Mike and Walt, a light bulb goes off over Jesse’s head. A perfect plot that would allow them to steal a huge amount of methylamine without having to kill any witnesses. But the world of BREAKING BAD is often governed by fate. They steal their chemicals, getting away with it by the skin of their teeth. They celebrate their victory. Then, they realise a child is watching them, and Todd, recent addition to the team, shoots the boy dead, his face showing no sign of emotion.
Obviously, this event is going to hang heavily over the next episode of BREAKING BAD, and potentially, the rest of the season. There are only three episodes left at this point, and where the show is headed is unclear. The murder of a child, though, is likely to give us a key insight into the current moral statuses of our lead characters. Jesse, we know, has a soft spot for children, and his anguished cries closing off this episode are a reminder of this. More interesting will be Walt’s reaction. As we saw last season, he’s not averse to hurting children, but this is somewhat different to the Brock situation. Though killing kids is surely not on Walt’s to-do list, he did say last week ‘nothing stops this train’. Season five’s Walter White has been cocky and aggressive, but hasn’t really had to face anything particularly troubling. This situation ought to shine a light on just how morally bereft he truly is.
Other thoughts:
- Comedian Bill Burr returns as the guy whose truck gets stuck on the train tracks. The train engineers were remarkably patient with that whole annoying situation, I thought.
- Skyler continues her crusade to take down Walter White through passive smoking. I liked how she interacted with no one other than Walt this week, making her seem more like the ‘hostage’ she claimed to be.
- Bit of a parenting theme this week – Lydia making Walt swear on his children’s lives, Hank cradling Holly and dealing with a sulky Walt Jr – which is brutally undercut by Todd shooting the kid at the end. A clever thing about Walter White is that, like Tony Soprano, no matter how many awful things he does, you never doubt his love for his kids.
- ‘Panicking, breaking down into tears, I remember how you like to do that.’
- And before the shock finish, another great “’Yeah, bitch!’
