Blue is Our Brand

Hi friends,

Sorry I didn’t get the chance to join the conversation last week, but to extend it, I’d like to pick up on one of Bryan’s points – that Walt has always had his meth cooking skills to fall back on and, without them, he’s left quite vulnerable. For all the incredible action and plot movement twists and gasp-out-loud moments this week, I think this simple point remains at the core of the current narrative: Walt’s the only one who can make the meth blue…it’s the perfectly simple truth that he is never going to escape his own creation.

Mr. White, he’s the devil

Hey folks,

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but this episode felt like it was trying to get a lot of things in place for the last four episodes. Not a whole lot happened necessarily, but we got some interesting setups. Most notably, Jesse is cooperating with the DEA (I loved the moment when Marie

I’m in the empire business.

Starting at the beginning, I love how Breaking Bad is never willing to gloss over the details of the aftermath. I think a lot of shows would have said, “And then, they got rid of the evidence.” Instead we got to see a beautifully haunting and detailed deconstruction of the motor bike. The scene was full of details like slicing the hand grips off of the handle bars and sawing the wheels in half to fit them in the barrel. And the haunting sound design of only non-diegetic music floating around was really wonderful. Did you think that Walt actually showed some real remorse during the cold open? I thought there were moments when his face looked like he actually was bothered by what had happened. Then in the next scene we get to hear how he has already rationalized himself into believing that Todd probably did the right thing. Walt has really toned his rationalization reflex muscles.

It’s always darkest before the dawn.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Hank says this to Walt in an attempt to console him about his marriage with Skyler. But, if you read it as a foreshadowing about what is coming, this episode takes a quick turn towards the darkness. It gets damn dark. Todd has shown initiative to help out the operation. He sought to impress Walt by telling him about the nanny-cam in the house they are about to cook in. And in an attempt to impress Walt and Jesse with quick thinking about keeping the heist a secret, Todd decides to shoot the little boy who sees the end of the heist. I wonder how Walt and Mike are going to react to this terrible situation.

Going forward where?

Dear Bryan,

Well, here we have it: a perfect episode to show us just how far Walt has come and just how deluded he is about his future. There were many hints of this escalation and delusion, but how about that scene of Walt and Skyler in bed at the end of the episode for starters? Walt reprises his creepy, possessive manipulator role with the added ick factor of paralleling the sex scene at the end of the very first episode of the series. Then, Walt has returned home after stowing the corpse of Emilio in the RV outside Jesse’s house and the almost-corpse of Crazy 8 in Jesse’s basement. His first attempt at breaking bad has not gone so well and he is wracked with guilt, anxiety, and just the first taste of power. He initiates sex with Skyler with the desperation and intensity of a man who almost died (besides the fact that he thinks he is dying of lung cancer) and she is shocked, but also titilated, by his intensity: “Walt, is that you?” she asks breathlessly.