Since Digital Refrain apparently no longer exists (pour one out), I'm continuing my BrBa recaps on my personal blog. Previous entries from last summer can be found here.
"What's wrong with Hank?"- Walter White
Another Breaking Bad season premiere, another strange, apocalyptic cold open. This one takes place first in the White's abandoned pool, where a cadre of skaters are shredding some sick lines (the super rad skate video camera angles that looked like they were ripped straight from Lords of Dogtown were a treat). Soon after, Beard Walt arrives, grabs a crowbar, jimmies his way into the fence surrounding the obviously condemned property, stares at the "HEISENBERG" graffiti on his former living room wall, and promptly heads into his old bedroom, removing Chekhov's ricin from it's resting place for purposes currently unknown (although I'd imagine he might use it for poisoning someone). Walt's really gathering what remains of his inventory. Back outside, Walt prepares to leave before he notices his former neighbor, Carol, staring at him as though he's literally Satan. He greets her hello, and she drops that fresh new shipment of oranges she was bringing to Francis Ford Coppola.
After the intro, we return to Walt and Skyler's bedroom, in the halcyon days of Walt's blissful retirement, slowly panning in on the bathroom door that holds Hank. Soon enough, he slowly creeps forth, excuses himself and Marie, and has a panic attack on the drive home, crushing some poor sod's mailbox, but not before carefully stashing Walt's copy of Leaves of Grass in Marie's bag. Upon returning home, Hank immediately sets about comparing the handwriting of Gale's dedication in Leaves of Grass to the samples he has from his case. Sure enough, they're a perfect match. Hank stares at the wall blankly.
Cut to Walt managing the ever-loving shit out of the A1A carwash. He might be retired from meth-making, but he's not retired from his obsessive need to fix. After pitching his idea to buy more carwashes to Skyler in an effort to put more of a dent in the mountain of money they now have in storage, he returns to the counter, only to have Lydia Rodart-Quayle approach him after checking her car in. She asks him to return, "for a few days," bemoaning the poor quality of the "viable operation" he left her. Walt is surprisingly uninterested. His refutation while still maintaining his smiling businessman persona is so Gus Fring that I was almost shocked he didn't tell her to smile and shake his hand. If this show were from Lydia's perspective, Walt might be the most terrifying man in existence. Once she leaves, Skyler inquires why she would be washing a rental car, and Walt, again surprisingly, admits who she is and that she wanted him back. Skyler confronts her and tells her never to come back, and considering that Skyler has what appears to be a four foot height advantage on her, I can't blame Lydia for doing just that. She's not gone, though. Not by a long shot. She said Walt's refusal to come back was putting her in a box, and that he knows what could happen if he does that. Not like she hasn't put a hit out on an uncooperative business partner before.
Back at Shraderbrau International Headquarters, Hank has apparently decided to take some time off work, or at least actually going to work. Some DEA agents drop off what appears to be all of the files on The Fring Case (tm), and Hank gets going on some good old fashioned police work in our first montage of the final episodes. It's fun to note that even surveillance photos of Mike Ehrmantraut are blurry. Even cameras were afraid of him. The man was a pro. One of the best bits of this montage is Hank re-watching the old security tapes from the methylamine heist in Season 1 and seeing the blurry figures slowly crystallize into Jesse and Walt in his mind. Dean Norris is on point in this episode. The other best bit is saved for last, when he holds up the Cousins' old drawing of what is now obviously Walter White.
What we get next is the king and champion of the ongoing "Badger and Skinny Pete argue about pop culture while Jesse Pinkman sinks into an existential hole" series. After discussing the existential crises inherent in a teleporter system (and Pete goes all "The Prestige" on it), Badger launches into his soon to be written script about the original Star Trek, which is too brilliant to be uttered here. Jesse gets up and leaves in the middle, obviously too moved by the brilliance and majesty of Badger's strangely accurate Star Trek knowledge, and pays a visit to Saul Goodman. While being stonewalled in the waiting room, he whips out a doobie and stares laconic daggers at poor Huell until Saul lets him in. Jesse brought his two giant bags o' money, and he wants Saul to give one to Kaylee, Mike's granddaughter, and one to Drew Sharp's parents. Saul scoffs at the sheer lunacy of giving money not only to the parents of a missing child, but to someone who's already had drug money snatched up by the DEA not once, but twice. Nevertheless, Saul agrees to do it, but not before digging through his drawer of phones and giving Walt a call, who says he'll handle it. Cut to the reveal that Walt is receiving treatment again.
Next, we have Walt arriving at Jesse's and carefully, painfully, explaining to Jesse that Mike can take care of his own affairs. Jesse throws Walt's old "Blood Money" quip back at him, which Walt chalks up to "the heat of the moment," again surprisingly admitting that he was wrong in that particular moment. Walt tells Jesse that they both need to stop focusing on the past, revealing to his former partner that he, too, is out of the game. When he asks why Kaylee needs this money, and that Mike is "perfectly capable of looking after his own granddaughter," Jesse reveals that he thinks Mike is dead, since Walt's offing of the remnants of the Fring men in jail would mean Mike is coming for him, and that's not how Walt does business. Jesse states that not only does he think Mike is dead, but that he thinks Walt knows that. Walt practically begs Jesse to believe him, lying directly to his face and pulling out every stop he has in the "Manipulate Jesse Pinkman" playbook. Jesse seems to relent, telling Walt that it's "like you said. He's alive." Walt agrees, and Jesse's face goes cold. If he's learned one thing throughout all of this, it's that you should generally believe the exact opposite of whatever Walter White says.
During the White family dinner, Walt excuses himself to the bathroom, where he throws up (after meticulously folding a towel for his knees in a nearly perfect imitation of Gus Fring). While recovering, he scrounges around in the fateful magazine bin and doesn't see Leaves of Grass. He asks Skyler if she's seen it, shrugs it off and goes to sleep. Or does he? Heading out to his car in his full Tony Soprano regalia, he starts searching around his car, eventually finding the same bug he and Hank put on Gus' car in Season 4. Looking around in fear, Walt realizes what I myself realized: he went to Saul's. He went to Jesse's.
Lesser shows (and even lesser Breaking Bad episodes, ones focused on telling a longform, slow burn, 13 episode final season) might have ended here, but this episode thankfully, gloriously, magnificently does not. First, we're treated to local street tough Jesse Pinkman lounging outside the Dog House (where he bought a pistol in fear way back when Tuco Salamanca was hunting him in Season 2. Jesse wishes for a monster as tame as Tuco Salamanca). A homeless man raps on his window, asking for change. Jesse doesn't respond, and the man walks away. Suddenly, Jesse rolls down his window and tells the man he has something for him: a clump of bills, probably thousands of dollars, of his ill gotten gains. Going full Lady Macbeth, Jesse drives away and starts firing clumps of bills into people's yards and off their porches and into storm drains. He's finally done.
Then, we're treated to the episode's centerpiece scene, and probably what you've been thinking and talking and yammering about since it aired: Hank, talking with some delviery cronies in his garage, when Walter White shows up. Panicking, Hank shovels his files away and greets his brother in law with the shred of good will he still has towards him. Both men vaguely probe one another through small talk, with Walt slipping in a few suspicious grimaces when Hank looks away. Walt gives the old "if there's anything I can do" platitudes, and starts to head out, when, like he did with Mike, he stops. He pauses. He stews. He turns around, and instead of a snub-nose, he's got a simple question. And a tracking bug. He asks Hank if he would happen to know anything about it, and Hank simply stares ahead, not responding and not reacting. After a few seconds, Hank reaches for his garage door remote, and closes it. Walt asks if he's okay, and that he "doesn't like the way you're looking at me right now." Hank continues to stare. Walt starts to stare back, the stare he only breaks out for the big guns. For the enemies. For a brief moment, both men are standing at their full height, wordlessly acknowledging one another as foes, it would seem.
And then, Hank acknowledges it with his fist upside Walt's face. Hank picks Walt up and holds him to garage door, sneering that all along, "it was you." He begins to rail off the evidence: Walt drove into traffic to keep Hank away from the laundromat. Walt used Hank's cell phone to draw him away from the Crystal Ship. Walt killed ten witnesses. Walt bombed a nursing home. Heisenberg. Heisenberg. "I will put you under the jail," he snarls, and Walt begins to stammer that the wild accusations he is making will destroy their family. Hank replies that he doesn't give a shit about family, and Walt pulls out his trump card: the cancer is back. His one, true implacable foe. "Good," Hank replies, saying that he hopes Walt rots. "I'm sorry you feel that way," Walt retorts, explaining that in six months, there won't be a Heisenberg to prosecute, and Hank doesn't have enough time to prove it. Walt will never see the inside of a jail cell.
"What's the point?" he asks, nearly begging. He really is out. He wants to be done. Hank suggests that Skyler brings the kids over to their house and then they'll talk. Walt snaps that that isn't going to happen. Hank responds that he doesn't even know who he's talking to, Walt responds that, if Hank doesn't know who he's talking to, then perhaps his best course would be to "tread lightly." He delivers this not in his Heisenberg snarl, but in the whispered tone of a desperate, dying man, which of course makes it all the more terrifying. We pan out to the two of them staring at one another in a darkened garage, both of them ready to deliver some scorched Earth, motherfucker. We know from the cold open that one of them does. We'll see just which one over the next seven episodes.
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