Breaking Bad - "Fifty-One" Review

There is no Walt. Only Heisenberg. 

These reviews are starting to become a bit ridiculous, and a bit repetitive. Episode after episode just seem to highlight the fact that Walt is becoming more and more reprehensible. But the fact is that this continues to happen episode after episode and there's truly no respite from the evil that continues to brew inside him. And this episode is no different. Directed by Rian Johnson, who directed the season three episode "Fly" and also the excellent "Brick" with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and next month's "Looper", did another fantastic job creating tension in small situations and doing quite a bit with a relatively scaled back episode.

Despite the fact that this episode is titled after Walt's birthday, the focus is clearly on Skyler and the way her world seems to be crumbling around her and her futile attempts to protect her children from the self-professed "danger". Her suggestion to send Walter Jr. away to boarding school is met with nothing but a dismissive attitude.

We are now exactly one year from the start of the entire series from the characters point of view. And Skyler is as terrified as ever. Her role thus far this season has to have been a very difficult one for Anna Gunn to play. Her dialogue has been minimal and her primary function has been essentially to just look borderline insane for these last few episodes. But Gunn's success is clearly evident given that every moment she is on screen, I feel uncomfortable and fear for her. Even when Walt is having an otherwise unassuming conversation with Walt Jr., her expression just permeates discomfort.

Where Walt is expecting a huge party thrown in his honor, the reality is that Hank and Marie are invited over for a low-key dinner. Skyler won't even break the bacon in the shape of a 51 for him at breakfast! How dare she?! And as she listens to them rattle on about what's happened over the last year at dinner, she snaps. She jumps into the pool and looks like she may be attempting to drown herself.

Yet, that's not what she's doing at all. These are acts of desperation. This action has allowed Marie and Hank to take the kids for at least a few days. She tells Walt she has no plan. That she is going to do everything in her power to try and keep her children away from this drug dealing criminality. From her point of view, it's too late for her. Her hands are dirty. She can't go to the police without incriminating herself and every other idea is met with a scathing counterpoint by Heisenberg himself. Walt is winning, and nothing is going to knock him from the top.

Meanwhile, Hank is pulled off the Fring case and promoted to director of the ABQ office. What's finally clear to the rest of the DEA is how great of an officer he is and he's being rewarded for it. His only downfall is how he can't see that his greatest collar is right under his nose. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before that becomes evident, as quick as things have been moving along for Walt.

But our man Jesse doesn't have much to do this episode, unfortunately. After a quick cook with Walt in some suburban house somewhere, he's delegated by Mike to go pick up some precursor at Madrigal in Houston from Mike's old pal Lydia. When he pulls the barrel off the shelf, Lydia notices a GPS tracker and Jesse scrams back to New Mexico. After Mike's deduction that Lydia planted the GPS to get out of their arrangement, he makes the decision to kill her and ramp down production until they find some more methylamine. To Walt, this is unacceptable. They will continue as planned.

After their meeting, Jesse gives Walt a watch for his birthday. Walt sees this as another glorious victory and goes home to tell Skyler all about it. The man who had put a gun to his head, ready to pull the trigger, a few short weeks ago, gave him a birthday present. And now he believes that Skyler will come around just like Jesse did.

Something tells me that's not going to happen.


EPISODE GRADE: B

"Breaking Bad" - "Madrigal" Review

Salt or ricin?

There is very little question that Breaking Bad is the most fascinating show on television. They have the capability to quickly change tone from episode to episode while staying consistent with the larger themes at hand. Even the more coincidental, sometimes somewhat unbelievable, things that happen make sense in the overall scheme of the show while simultaneously being extraordinarily entertaining. So of course when they make the shift to this Mike-centric episode, getting a deeper look at the ever-awesome Jonathon Banks' character and why after Gus' death he will continue to be an integral part of Walt and Jesse's life, that it ends up being nothing short of spectacular.

The episode starts in Germany at Madrigal Electromotive, the conglomerate that was financing Gus Fring's meth empire. After a thrilling demonstration of different dipping flavors for one of their restaurants, an executive is summoned to speak with some police officers. Except, instead of meeting with them, he takes a detour into the bathroom with a defibrillator and kills himself. Kudos to the creative suicide.

Soon after, Walt is shown creating a fake ricin cigarette to replace the one he stole from Jesse. The smart thing to do would be to destroy the ricin altogether, but instead Walt hides the ricin behind an electrical outlet behind a nightstand. Solid hiding spot, but I'll be damned if that doesn't end up coming back into play sometime in these final fourteen episodes. Could Walt's final, irredeemable act be using this ricin against someone we care about? I wouldn't be surprised.

After this, Walt heads over to Jesse's house to help Jesse search for the lost ricin cigarette. It doesn't make sense that it's lost. But after pouring over every inch of the house, they look in one last spot: the amazing DJ Rooma. (Actually, I think Tom Haverford owns the rights to that one, so we'll just call it a regular Roomba.) Jesse pulls the fake ricin out of the pile of dust and garbage the Roomba had swept up and almost immediately breaks down. The fact that he was so close to killing his "mentor" for lack of a better term over something that he now believes was a misunderstanding just crushes him. Jesse hates that he came so close to that, and Aaron Paul sells it so convincingly that just give this man all the awards. All of them. And as a viewer, it's crushing to watch Walt console him, telling him it wasn't Jesse's fault that he got blamed. ESPECIALLY because Walt is in fact to blame.

I even found myself questioning my own morality when I justify that, well, Walt didn't KILL the kid. He just poisoned him a bit. I can't believe I would even attempt to argue that fact. I think I want to see Jesse and Walt continue to get along, but there's no way in the endgame where that will be an option.

Walt then proposes to Jesse they continue to cook, and approach Mike to help with distribution. Mike, seeing Walt as a wildcard who cannot be controlled and whose methods do nothing but put people in danger, declines immediately. There's no way he is going to hook up with these guys and warns Jesse in a fatherly way against continuing to associate with Mr. White. Yet, it just wouldn't be Breaking Bad if things ended up that way.

After a short interrogation by the DEA to members of Madrigal, one of those employees, Lydia, tracks down Mike in a diner. Her European style clearly doesn't mesh well with our salt of the earth diners. She attempts to communicate with Mike clandestinely, but Mike has none of it and sits next to her where she proposes that he kill the 11 people on Los Pollos Hermanos payroll that could be traced back to Madrigal and Gus' operations. She's scared. She does not want to go down. Once again, Mike shuts this down. There is no way he is going to take these people out who he has no reason to believe will talk.

Mike is then brought in to be interrogated by the DEA, specifically Hank and Gomez. The back and forth between Hank and Mike is fantastic, each showing how gifted they are both as actors and characters. At least until Hank reveals that he has taken away the $2 million in one of Gus' offshore accounts under the name of Mike's Hungry Hungry Hippo loving granddaughter. (Mike playing Hungry Hungry Hippos against an 8 year old is one of the highlights of this entire series. Thank you for that, Vince Gilligan.) Mike plays dumb but is clearly incensed at this news. News that shows that he couldn't care less about his own life and the only important person in his life is this granddaughter of his.

Walt and Jesse then visit a neutered Saul Goodman who clearly has fear in his heart after the altercation from last week. Hopefully he'll get his moxie back a bit in the future. They still haven't come up with the logistics as to how they're going to start cooking again, but Walt's opinion is that if Gus could do it, then he can do it. Because in Walt's mind, he's definitely superior to Gus at this point. The one rub is that they're now out of methylamine and there doesn't seem to be any to be found.

Meanwhile, Mike's reluctance to murder his colleagues isn't going to stop our new friend Lydia. She co-opts one of the 11 to start killing all those people, including Mike. Even blowing a hole into our old friend Mr. Chow's head. After already getting a hole in his hand. Guy just can't catch a break. Mike doesn't fall for the ruse and disarms the murderer and reluctantly pulls the trigger a few times. His next step is to visit Lydia in her home and take her out once and for all. But moments before he is to pull the trigger, he stops and asks if she can still get her hands on methylamine. She says possibly. And so, Mike reenters into his partnership with Jesse and Walt.

You can almost see the someone off screen pumping up Walt's head larger and larger with each new win he achieves. It's irrelevant how Mike came to the decision, only that he did. And to Walt, that means what he is doing is working. So he then goes to bed with a Skyler who has been shown almost exclusively in bed the entire episode, her fear prescient as Walt touches her and tenderly kisses her arm. His justifications that he gives to her, that this is all for the family, have now fallen on deaf ears. If this were even remotely true, he would have stopped quite a while ago. But instead he lies in bed with a terrified wife feeling untouchable. And we all know how long those sorts of things last.

Frankly, despite the complete shift in pacing, this was still a fantastically brilliant episode of television. More of Walt's machinations would have been nice, but what was there was great.  I cannot fathom how they are able to so seemingly effortlessly combine tension, drama, and humor in one hour of television, but Gilligan and his team have done it.

EPISODE GRADE: A-