Breaking Bad: Walter White Does a Barrel Roll
Think of Krazy-8 as the original sin.
Walt didn’t want to kill the drug dealer back in Season 1, after all, even begging the man to come up with good reasons to let him live: “I sure as hell am looking for any reason not to, any good reason at all. Sell me. Tell me what it is.” In the end, when he realized that Krazy-8 was planning to stab him to death with a shard of a broken plate despite swearing that he’d walk away, Walt realized he had to take him out.
You’d like to think Walt has learned something – anything – since then, but when the latest episode opens we find him having roughly the same conversation. Except rather than trying to convince Krazy-8, he’s trying to convince Hank to help him find a way out of the situation that doesn’t end in murder: “Nothing can change what just happened, but you can walk out of here alive if you’ll just promise us that you’ll let this go,” pleads Walt. “Hank, you’ve got to tell him that you we can work this out.”
One look at Hank tells Nazi Jack that this is a no-go solution, but c’mon: He knew that even before he looked. They’ve all been sitting in checkmate since the moment those cars rolled up last episode, and Walt is the only one who actually needs to see the pieces move to know the game is over. Or as Hank puts it to Walt: “You’re the smartest guy I ever met and you’re too stupid to see – he made up his mind 10 minutes ago.” Leave it to Breaking Bad to drop a Watchmen reference as a walkup to the most devastating moment on the show in an episode titled “Ozymandias.”
Because that’s when Jack shoots Hank in the head.
Then while Walt is curled up in a ball and freaking out completely, the Nazis steal all but one barrel of Walt’s money, and roll the bodies into the pit that previously contained Walt’s money, because it is a metaphor. The lottery ticket that Walt bought now contains the coordinates for the corpses of Hank and Gomez – big winner! – and the night Walt went out to bury his barrels of money, he was digging their graves. Arguably, he’s been digging them for a long time.
Immediately afterwards, Jack tries to sell Walt’s own game right back to him, and have that very same conversation Walt had with Krazy-8 about not wanting to kill him if he doesn’t have to: “So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get in your car and you’re going to drive out of here. No hard feelings. We square? Hey man, I gotta know we’re square or we’re gonna go that other way.”
Remember Gus sitting at the table with Jesse after Jesse’s attempt on the lives of the dealers who had Combo killed, saying, “My men will come back inside, and you will shake their hands, and you will make peace.” And Don Eladio by the pool with Gus, saying, “There’s no place for emotion in this. You of all people should understand. Business is business.”
Business is always business until it isn’t, and someone does something so terrible that you can’t walk away no matter how much money is on the table. It happened to Krazy-8, to Jesse, to the Salamanca cousins, and of course, to Gus.
Gus, you may recall, watched his partner Max get shot in the head by Hector Salamanca and Don Eladio, and was forced to lie beside the body and look in his eyes while Salamanca said, “Look at him. You did this to him.” As an eerily similar Walt lies on his side next to Hank’s body, it’s hard to imagine he isn’t feeling something similar. And like Gus, who ultimately took out Eladio and the cartel in a spectacular mass poisoning, I’m guessing Walt will be more interested in revenge than guilt.
Screenshot: Walt (Bryan Cranston) above, Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) below.
Sure, the ricin we saw in the flash-forward may play a role in some future revenge plot, especially for someone who loves poison as much as Walt. For the moment, however, he’s no match for the heavily-armed Nazis and must grudgingly shake Jack’s hand. But since the best remedy for feeling powerless is apparently making others feel that way too, Walt — like the cousins — is willing to settle for a temporary scapegoat: Jesse Pinkman, whom Todd helpfully offers to torture and kill.
Right before the Nazis haul Jesse away, Walt tells them to stop, and walks over to Jesse with a distinctive, pained expression on his face. It’s the look of grief and guilt we’ve seen so many times before, the look that makes us think he’s going to have a last-second change of heart, or at least apologize. Instead he loads the final round of ammunition and fires: “I watched Jane die. I could have saved her, but I didn’t.”
Jesse goes limp, much like Walt did a few minutes ago, as he was reeling from Hank’s murder, which is probably the point. Walt nods twice at Jack in the scene: the first time agreeing to Jesse’s murder, and the second agreeing to Jesse’s torture and murder. Those two small nods are likely the most evil things he’s ever done.
And then Walt, well… he does a barrel roll. After his bullet-punctured car runs out of gas, he ends up rolling his final barrel of cash through the desert, which apparently takes him full circle since he rolls right past a pair of khaki pants lying on the ground. (The series premiere, you may remember, opened on a shot of these same pants flying through the air as the Krazy-8 debacle unfolded in the RV.)
Screenshot: The pilot (above) and “Ozymandias” (below)
Marie, meanwhile, still thinks Hank is alive and Walt is in custody, and goes to warn her sister about what’s about to happen – forcing Skyler to finally, finally finally tell Walt Jr. (aka Flynn) the truth. He… does not react well.
Walt Jr. has long been the voice of the Skyler haters, in a way that neatly demonstrates the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma of her character. First, he criticized her as the naggy albatross who was always giving Walt a hard time, and now he criticizes her as deceitful and corrupt for not fighting him harder. “If all this is true and you knew about it, then you’re as bad as him!” Walt Jr. shouts at his mother in the car. That theory gets debunked rather quickly when they arrive home to discover Walt is not in custody, but rather packing their bags for an immediate departure.
Skyler pulls a D’Angelo Barksdale demanding to know where Hank is and when she realizes he’s dead, it finally happens: Skyler makes her stand. It involves brandishing a very large knife and telling Walt (finally!) to get out of the house. When Walt refuses to back down, an incredibly harrowing struggle ensues, where the pointy end of the weapon keeps shifting from character to character and it seems like anyone could get stabbed at any time. Although no one ends ends up badly hurt, it’s a lot easier to see Walt for what he truly is when he’s menacing his wife and son with a bloody knife. It gets easier still when Walt grabs his infant daughter and bolts for the door.
This has always been a show about duality (note that Todd’s torture of Jesse only mutilates half of his face, much like the damage done to Gus Fring and the pink bear) and this episode features two phone calls between Walt and Skyler that say a great deal not only about the two personas of Walt, but also about how they’re still more connected than they are separate.
The first call, during the cold open, flashes all the way back to Walt’s very first time cooking with Jesse in the RV, at the same place in the desert where Hank later dies. Before the call, we see Walt rehearsing his lie to Skyler — maybe even the original lie — about how he’s actually working at the car wash. The second call, the one Walt makes to Skyler after kidnapping Holly (and shortly before returning her) is just as much a deception, but one with a very different intent: Rather than convincing Skyler that he’s a good guy, it’s designed to convince everyone else that he’s the bad guy, and take full responsibility for his crimes.
As much as the show has been about the march from Walt to Heisenberg, the moment where Walt goes full-on Heisenberg is actually one of his most human and selfless in recent memory. In order to remove the shadow of blame from Skyler, he has to turn into a monster – the uncomplicated, mustache-twisting villain that he isn’t, rather than the far more complicated, human villain that he really is. The result is so cruel and over the top that eventually even Skyler recognizes it for what it is: a lifeline, albeit one tossed to her the man who almost drowned her.
There’s a lot of what goes around finally coming around in the episode, which is perhaps why Walt and Jesse both find themselves in the same positions where they put Krazy-8 by the end: Jesse held captive by someone who plans to kill him — and keeps him locked up with the help of a U-shaped padlock — while Walt is forced to play nice with a man who killed one of his family members, and swear he’s not interested the retribution he almost will certainly seek. Will it end any better for Walt than it did for Krazy-8 if he goes looking for vengeance?
Think of the M60 in Walt’s trunk as the shard of cracked yellow plate hidden in Krazy-8′s pocket, the poisoned bottle of Zafiro Anejo.
And the last words we hear from Walt before he hangs up the phone: “I’ve still got things left to do.”
