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| Heisenberg was Here: Walt takes in the destruction wrought by Heisenberg |
In 2009, I
sat down one evening to watch Breaking
Bad, a show then finishing up its second-season. All I knew was that it was on AMC, and like Showtime’s Weeds, told the story of an unlikely middle-class character that gets involved in
the drug business because of money problems. Another thing I knew was that it starred Malcolm’s dad from Malcolm
in the Middle (Bryan Cranston). Like many of premium cable’s shows over the last decade, I
was hooked after one episode. After a marathon session of
the entire season followed by the first half of the second season the following
evening, I was caught up with the rest of fans, anticipating the next episode
and what would happen to partners-in-crime, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.
As much as I
loved Weeds, this show is something
entirely different and rises to places that show played with but never actually
went. Similar to Weeds, Breaking Bad uses humor regularly to lighten the show’s darker elements.
Initially, the absurdity of a socially awkward, somewhat bumbling high school
chemistry teacher partnering up with a drug-dealing, gangster wannabe and his
former student to cook meth provides many of the shows plotlines, often to
humorous effect. Despite the smiles and laughs, the viewer knows this is
dangerous territory to be treading. We always knew we were relatively safe in
the world of Weeds with its beautiful, white woman playing
in the world of pot dealing (even though later seasons did successfully raise the
stakes the higher she reached on the food chain, the show never tried to be
what it wasn’t) Walter White’s new universe centers around a drug whose
involvement brings with it far more dangerous repercussions, definitely from
the effects of use and arguably more deadly and shady characters involved in
its production and distribution.
We’ve always
had a suspicion that this story wouldn’t end well. Walter White gradually transformed
from protagonist to antagonist during the course of the show’s four and a half
seasons. This metamorphosis has been scripted brilliantly. The show hasn’t hid
it from us. It’s been in plain view. Walt’s beginning moral argument for making
money to provide his family because of his terminal cancer diagnosis gives us
just enough of a grey area to justify accompanying him on his journey. At each step
along the way, that area has grown darker and darker until eventually you
realize you’re sitting in a pitch black room and the hero you’ve rooted for is
now the villain. Most of the time, the character was walking a fine line
between the two and then becoming both at once. We’re not used to experiencing
this in our stories. Sure, we’ve become accustomed and now enjoy cheering on
the anti-hero. The current goldmine of quality TV shows on premium channel owes
much to this trope. Shows like Weeds,
The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood,
just to name a few, have explored this character deftly. What we haven’t
experienced is anything quite like this. At the end of the last episode before
the mid-season break, Walt has seemingly left the business and promises his
wife Skyler that he’s done with it. There’s something that rings hollow here,
not because we don’t necessarily believe he’ll keep his word (although there’s
nothing to make us think he will), it’s that we’ve stopped caring for this
character and hoping he succeeds. It doesn’t seem right to like and cheer on
the person that could do the things he’s done and gone to the places he’s went.
And now what? Just dust off and continue on? No. We lost Walt somehwhere along
the way and need this to play out now. We missed the point we could get off the
train, and although the last stretch has nearly no chance of being pretty, our
eyes are open and we need to see. There was always a sense of hoping and ultimately
knowing that Nancy Botwin would get out of the dangerous and often hilarious situations
she got herself into on Weeds. We no longer have that empathy for
Walter White. Let the chips fall where they may.
With only
eight episodes to go, season five’s second-half opener, “Blood Money,” picks up directly after the first-half’s
finale. “Blood Money” explores the consequences of gaining from wrongful or
criminal deeds, whether that is Skyler not turning Walt in because of the
effects it would have on her family, Jesse going along with Walt down the
rabbit hole, or Walt himself, escalating things to a point where there can be
no peaceful resolution among many other vile things. There is also something
else that saturates the entire episode and all of the show’s remaining
characters: a sense of staying in one place too long and not knowing it until too
late.
Even as a
viewer I had this feeling during the episode’s first minutes. The show opens in
a style similar to the way the airplane crash was shown to us throughout season
two. That season had several episodes open with the aftermath of the crash
without telling you what it was you were seeing. One was left with a host of
theories as to what it was building to but not fully revealed until the season’s
finale. This season’s first episode showed a future version of Walter White
obtaining a car with guns and supplies in the trunk and eating breakfast at a
diner. It’s slowly shown that it is his birthday, and the shape his bacon is
placed in by a stone-faced Walt lets you know that it is his 51st
birthday. We know this because he does the same thing in the series’ first
episode for his 50th surrounded by his family. What has happened up
to this point is left to the imagination. We are not shown future Walt again
until this episode. He returns to his home, a place we’ve become accustomed to
seeing and feel comfortable in. Now it is boarded up and weeds grow high in the
yard around it. “No trespassing” signs are on the erected fence around the
property and and on the gate at the end of the drive. The backyard pool, now
drained, has become a miniature skate park to some of the neighborhood youth. Walt
takes a crowbar from out of his car’s trunk, the same one from the season
opener, which is filled with what looks like enough supplies to fully equip a
team of Navy SEALS on a covert mission. After breaking the padlock on the front
door, we see what has become of his old home. Doors look as if they have been
broken down, possibly from a police raid, no furniture remains, and light falls
in beams through the boarded up windows illuminating the dust that’s built up.
He hears and then looks out onto the skateboarders before going over to an electrical
outlet. Taking out a screwdriver, he begins to remove its cover plate. Then we flash
to opening credits. The familiar periodic table and smoke from burning
methamphetamine, accompanied by the show’s theme music, always made me excited.
It was one of those feelings you get when viewing the opening moments of a show
you love and can’t wait to see what happens next. This time, however, I had a
feeling of unease, almost dread. There was a finality here that often isn’t
felt even with a series’ final episode. It was as if I’d been here too long.
The journey with Walter White was over and I was now with Heisenberg.
Everyone and
everything now feel as if they’ve stayed too long at the party
and don’t quite know how to say their goodbyes and make an exit. Jesse, who
I’ve long felt was the true protagonist of the show and as close to a hero as
we’re going to get, is practically swimming in it. The camera follows him from
one place to the next, dragging two oversized duffle-bags filled with five
million dollars. As his friends and former drug runners get high in his living
room, now dark and looking like it could be a den for urban squatters and drug
addicts, one of them tells about the script he once wrote for Star Trek. The same story could’ve been
told by these two likable misfits in an earlier season and it would’ve had a
completely different feel and provoked a different reaction. Here though, while
the story is still hilarious, it doesn’t give any joy. The camera frames Jesse in
the center of these two, sitting with a hundred-yard stare. This is a kid that
has been here too long, seen and done too many things, and now it’s time to
leave. The problem is that he can’t leave. The death of the kid in the desert
guaranteed that, and he’s haunted by the memory and the part he played in it.
All of these early Jesse scenes are dimly lit and everything looks old and
worn. When he goes to give the money to Saul, the reception area looks like it
could be the waiting room at the world’s oldest funeral home. The music playing
is even a tinny sounding recording of Battle Hymn of the Republic. Even Saul’s
office is darker than usual, and the middle-aged cleaning lady he’s obviously
just had sex with is not played for humorous effect. The time with Saul and his
laughable persona has played out. Is it just me, or does the Constitution painted
on the walls of Saul’s office look larger and more prominent? It’s also as if
the only light in the room fell on that writing like a spotlight.
While the
child’s death haunts Jesse, it’s the death of Mike that has completely broken
him. When Walt visits to try to reason with him about giving the money to Mike’s granddaughter and the
dead boy’s parents, he tries to convince Jesse that he hasn’t offed Mike and
that he’s alive and well, spinning lies without effort and off the cuff,
something that has worked on Jesse in the past. This time Jesse ain’t buying
it, and neither are we. We don’t even spend a good deal of time with him trying
to delude his former partner and protege. It all has an air of being done too
many times. When Walt ends the conversation with “I need you to believe this,
Jesse,” we don’t even pretend anymore that it's because Walt can't deal
with Jesse feeling badly about him. It is simply because he
doesn’t want to have to do what he sees as the obvious and inevitable alternative: killing Jesse. As Jesse lies back to Walt,
facing away from him, tears wet his eyes. He knows he’s stayed too
long with Walt and what the price has been. Mike was the father figure he had
wanted his whole life, one that the early-Walt hinted at becoming.
When Walt says “there’s nothing left to do but try to live decently,” we know
it’s true except for the “live decently” part.
The
brief appearance by Lydia, nervous, former associate of Walt, would previously have brought some light-hearted fun. The unlikely business-woman was always just on the cusp of being unbelievable as someone in her position because of her neurotic and paranoid nature, but it never completely crossed that
line. It allowed for another colorful and fun(if somewhat
two-dimensional) character to be put in place to fill out Heisenberg's empire building
dreams. It also added a touch of humor the show does so well.
By now, though, her presence only emphasizes the sense of finality. There is nothing funny in
her usual nervous tics and playing with sunglasses. It just underlines
the time for building things is over. It helps set the stage for the final act,
which will likely involve tearing everything down. The question is how far that
destruction will reach and who will be caught in the inevitable falling debris.
Walt finally
realizes that Hank has found and taken his copy of Leaves of Grass with the inscription from Gale. In the middle of
the night, he goes outside in his robe and slippers. It’s at this point, with
the realization coming to him, and all of the characters in place, we finally
begin to pick up and move toward that inevitable destruction. It’s a scene we’re
familiar with. Walt stands and you can almost see the wheels spinning in his
brain, running through possibility after possibility, various scenarios,
calculating odds and outcomes. Once this was the moment where Walter White
would desperately come to a decision about a way to get out of a situation that
seemed impossible to avoid. His eyebrows would arch, and his head would slowly
turn to the side. This however is something different. We aren’t seeing a plan form
for miraculous escape by characters we’ve grown to love. We are watching
Heisenberg realize his enemy has found him and there is nothing but cold-blooded
calculation etched into his face.
I was
surprised at how soon the confrontation between Hank and Walt occurs, when Walt
asks about the GPS tracking device found on his car and earlier used by the two
of them to track Gus. I’m happy that it’s happened this early though, as it
provides less time to be filled with build-up and more for the fireworks to fill
up the sky. There is a moment before the confrontation when Walt is walking away
from Hank and toward his car. He stops and stares forward briefly, deciding
whether to play a final gambit. He looks pained and nervous about the decision.
I think this is the last time we see Walter White, and it’s a brief and final farewell
from the character we cared for and cheered as he slowly dug a deep, dark hole for
himself and everyone around him. As Hank makes the ultimatum about what is to
be done, Walt throws away the mask entirely, and Heisenberg responds with his
own statement followed by a threat that frightens even the veteran DEA officer.
We’re left with Breaking Bad’s
version of a standoff between gunslingers, two arch-enemies finally meeting face
to face on a dusty street after foiling each other time and again, revolvers at
the ready. Who pulls and shoots first?
