Walt (Bryan Cranston) tries to call it quits in last night’s Breaking Bad.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers.
GLIDING o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul — not life alone,
Death, many deaths I’ll sing.
—WALT WHITMAN
The tragedy of Walter White is that he believes his own bullshit.
When he says, “I’m doing this for my family,” as he’s repeated so many times, he believes it, despite all evidence to the contrary. When he tells Todd, in the opening scene of last night’s episode, that killing Mike “had to be done,” he believes that, too, despite his realization at the end of “Say My Name” that he could get the names of Gus Fring’s men from Lydia. And when he tells Skyler that he’s out, he really does think that he’s put his criminal days behind him, once and for all.
We know better.
Walt’s done too much, killed too many, and ruined too many lives for his redemption to be so cheaply bought. He’s in too deep, and he’s dragged too many down with him — he may try to claw his way out, but we all know that within a few months he’ll be buying a machine gun from a man with New Hampshire plates. There’s no escape for him now, not from Hank and not from the cancer, which his visit to the doctor’s office — and the episode’s title, a reference to the above Whitman poem about death’s inevitability — reminds us is still very much a factor. Skyler may not have to wait for it to come back much longer.
Most of the episode is spent simply getting Walt to the point of even wanting to get out of the business. When the episode begins, Walt is just as arrogant and manipulative as ever, leading Jesse to believe Mike got away fine and then harshly reminding him that “There is no ‘we,’ Jesse. I’m the only vote left.” He’s still the dangerously overconfident man that bested Gus Fring, having apparently learned very little from his unnecessary run-in with Mike at the end of last week’s episode.
But, slowly, over the course of the episode, he moves towards saying those two words: “I’m out.” The turning point comes during his conversation with Hank, which comes at right about the halfway point of the episode. Hearing himself described as a monster finally seems to inspire some (relatively) honest self-examination from Walt, so that when Skyler shows him the huge pile of money he’s accumulated and asks him how large it needs to be before he quits, he’s actually willing to listen. It’s the first time in a long time that anyone’s been able to break through Walt’s ironclad armor of denial and self-justification, perhaps because Hank (who’s limping badly in the scene, a reminder of all Walt’s put him through) is so visibly shaken by what he’s seen and perhaps because Walt’s just lonely enough to be vulnerable, having pushed away everyone he’s ever loved or worked with, minus run-of-the-mill Todd and a clearly terrified Saul. He even visits Jesse (who thinks Walt’s there to kill him) to pay him back his cut and is more amused than annoyed when Jesse goes to hide his bong.
It’s a side of Walt we haven’t seen in several seasons, if at all. He’s humbled, and seems to have some grasp of just how much he’s lost by building his meth empire, reminiscing with Jesse about the good old days cooking in the RV. The best explanation he can come up with for his fall from grace is “inertia” – once you get started down the criminal path, it’s oh-so-hard to change course. For Walt, there’s nothing as addictive as the thrill of the outlaw life and the apparent freedom and self-determination it offers. He was hooked from the first and it inexorably lead him here, which is more or less rock-bottom – with a wife that hates you, children you don’t see, and a double-digit body count. It just takes Hank calling him a monster for him to begin to realize it.
But, prior to that, we get to see some good-old-fashioned Heisenberg action. Lydia brings Walt the list of names he tried to get from Mike, setting up the first of two stellar montages, in which Walt’s new buddies — a bunch of prison thugs with swastika tattoos that know Todd’s uncle — take out the nine potential informants in an orgy of prison violence, all set to Nat King Cole’s “Pick Yourself Up.” (Chorus: “Will you remember the famous men/ Who had to fall to rise again/ So take a deep breath…/ Dust yourself off…/ Pick yourself up/ And start all over again.” Seems relevant, huh?) It’s a fantastic sequence that never strays into glorification of violence, instead aiming to show just how horrifying this carefully orchestrated massacre is, climaxing with the stomach-churning death-by-immolation of the final informant.
Lydia also brings Walt a business proposal, one that ends up saving her life. (Chekov’s ricin makes another appearance.) In the second montage — this one set to the rather obvious choice of “Crystal Blue Persuasion” by Tommy James and The Shondells — Heisenberg’s blue meth goes international, flooding the Czech drug markets and earning Walt ungodly amounts of cash. The sequence does a nice job of showing just how many people Walt has infected with his evil, dragging down everyone around him and poisoning his very community, as the final shot, of the Vamonos Pest tents going up across a suburban neighborhood, makes abundantly clear.
But, despite the enormity of his crimes and of the Madrigal operation, Walt comes to think that he can just step back into the life he lead before he broke bad. He’s fooled himself, as he’s fooled himself so many times before, always to his detriment and the detriment of everyone and everything he touches, into believing he can just take the money and run. Or, rather, take the money and sit around on sunny afternoons talking about Schraderbrau and hair products with his reunited family. It’s a doomed idyll, a house built on a rotten foundation.
And that brings us to that final scene, and Hank’s fateful trip to the bathroom. For a moment, at least, the Whites and Schraders seem at peace, but we all know that it can’t last. Nothing is that easy, and so, when Hank picks up that copy of Leaves of Grass — glimpsed earlier in the episode as Walt is showering — it’s easy to imagine where the show is heading. Hank knows, now — how much he can put together remains to be seen, but Walt is suddenly and surely on his radar in a way he’s never been before — and the only ways I can imagine this ending are with either Hank or Walt dead. Possibly both. The end is nigh, and it’s sure to be explosive.
It’s a terrifically executed scene — what show but Breaking Bad could make a trip to the toilet so nerve-wracking? — and a reminder of the show’s core philosophy: there’s always a loose end. No matter how perfect the plan and regardless of how infallible Walt may seem, there’s always — always — something just outside his field of vision. Be it a fly in a lab or a kid on a dirt bike, there’s always something beyond his control. Because no matter how badly Walt may want to believe he can bend the world to his will, there’s always going to be a loose end — and the one Hank just pulled at may unravel the whole damn thing.
gifford@umdbk.com
