Walt and Jesse are no better at being criminals than they were when we left them in the first season. As Hank notes while he and Gomez watch surveillance footage of their methylamine caper, the two men have “book learning but no street skills.” But they are also, perhaps more worryingly, limited by what they don’t know. We know, for instance, that Tuco’s bodyguard Gonzo (Jesus Payan Jr.) died an accidental death when the stack of cars fell on his arm while he was trying to move No-Doze’s (Cesar Garcia) body, but Walt and Jesse believe Tuco killed him to get rid of all witnesses to No-Doze’s murder. Walt and Jesse are right that Tuco is far too unstable to stay in business with, but their ignorance sends them down a specific path, on a particular schedule, that they might otherwise have avoided.
But “Seven Thirty-Seven” is at its most powerful when it’s demonstrating the impact Walt’s illicit career is having on his personal life. The scene where Walt returns home after watching Tuco beat a man to death is remarkable in its monstrousness, and in the performances from Anna Gunn and Bryan Cranston.2 We saw throughout the first season that Walt’s cancer diagnosis and his newfound talent had woken him—and his libido—up from a long emotional slumber. So when Walt tries to have sex with Skyler in the kitchen after the encounter with Tuco, it at first seems like another case of him converting his anxiety about his own mortality into sexual energy. But when Skyler (covered in a mud mask, unprepared, and not in the mood) tries to slow him down, it turns into Walt asserting his dominance over whomever is handy.
Even for a show about a dying man who becomes a drug dealer, even for a show that’s already spent so many different episodes dealing with murder and the disposal of human remains, this is incredibly dark, risky territory to take your main character to, and it’s a credit to Cranston and Gunn that they were willing to play it as real and raw as they did. It’s by no means pleasant to watch, but it also doesn’t feel exploitative or manipulative. It fits what we’ve come to understand about Walt and the way his fears are wrapped up in his need for power and respect, such that he would take his violent response to the incident at the junk-yard out on his innocent and unsuspecting wife. And the look of absolute horror and shame on his face when Skyler finally forces him away shows that he’s not yet a monster, even though he sometimes goes to that monstrous place.
Thespian, Direct Thyself
What was it like for Bryan Cranston to have to both direct and act in that ugly Walt/Skyler kitchen scene in the season two premiere?
“I did the character work before,” he says. “So I knew what I wanted to do by the time we started shooting. So that when I’m on stage talking with Anna (Gunn) and guiding her through this, and with Michael Slovis, my DP, I wanted to make sure I was clear where I wanted to go with this. And it is a violent act. I wanted to make sure Anna was physically safe, for one, emotionally safe, number two, and then carry on with it.
“And from a character standpoint, Walt had this bottled-up sense of anxiety, and he just witnessed a brutal beating that was so violent to him—remember, he’s new to it—that he’s reeling from it, and doesn’t know where to place it, and just needs comfort right now. So I wanted to specifically make Walt go to his wife for comfort, and what happens is that in seeking comfort—just come up from behind her and smell her and feel safe—what happens often with men is it gets misplaced, it gets confused. He gets charged up, kind of excited and aggressive, and tries to get this angst out, this sense of tension.
“And that’s why he goes to that point. That’s how Bryan had to justify it and then tell Walt how to play it.”
There’s also a sense of the creative team’s greater confidence and willingness to experiment in this episode—whether exemplified by the Walt/Skyler scene or the fact that the season opens with an abstract, puzzling, largely black-and-white teaser featuring a pink teddy bear floating in a pool and the sound of sirens in the distance. The series premiere began with an unusual scene that would be explained later in that hour. By this stage, Gilligan and company feel no need to even return to the teddy bear for the moment, trusting that their audience has learned to be patient with Breaking Bad and the pace at which its story reveals itself.
1 This episode even replays the bulk of season one’s final scene, for the sake of newcomers and/or return viewers who understandably forgot things over the previous three hundred and sixty-four days.
2 Cranston had to direct himself as Walt, as his character was in the process of taking out all his fear and anger on his unsuspecting wife.
SEASON 2 / EPISODE 2
“Grilled”
Written by George Mastras
Directed by Charles Haid
The Captured
“Let him bleed.” —Walt
“Grilled” is, by design, a very claustrophobic episode of Breaking Bad. Walt and Jesse spend the bulk of the hour as prisoners of the erratic and violent Tuco, and on those rare occasions when we get a break from their perilous circumstances, it’s to show how Skyler has become a prisoner of her circumstance.
It can be easy to ignore the heinousness of Walt’s actions and feel sympathy for him at this stage, simply because he’s the show’s central character, and played by the inherently likable Bryan Cranston. But Walt’s also a stubborn jackass who threw away a promising career over a sense of juvenile resentment, and who went into this insane, dangerous, harmful career in meth when he had better options open to him. He makes himself emotionally distant from his wife, and begins disappearing for hours or more at a time, before coming home and terrifying her. As if that wasn’t enough, he chooses to deal with people like Tuco, who could kill him long before the cancer gets to finish the job.
For Skyler, it’s almost worse than if he were already dead. It’s the anticipation of her husband’s death—and the ignorance of what he’s actually up to—that’s crushing to her. Though she’s carrying an unexpected baby and dealing with her equally distant son, Skyler now realizes that her only support system is made up of an irritating sister and a well-meaning but obnoxious brother-in-law. She feels like she might as well be on her own. Unlike Walt, who’s exhilarated by moonlighting as a meth cook, entering a world of drugs and violence hasn’t allowed Skyler to “awaken.” Instead, she’s miserable, and scared, and confused, and not sure when—or if—she’ll ever see her husband again.
If anything, the scenes of Jesse and Walt almost provide relief from the ones we spend with Skyler, because at least there’s humor mixed in with the terror. Tuco is capable of anything, and they’re trapped in the middle of nowhere with him1 and his invalid uncle (or Tio, in Spanish),2 but they’re also bickering the way they always do. Jesse inadvertently talks Tuco out of using the poisoned meth because he claims it has chili powder in it—which works both as a callback to his original Cap’n Cook recipe for meth (“It’s my signature!”) and as a payoff to the scene from “Seven Thirty-Seven” (S2E1) where Jesse questioned the details (or lack thereof) of Walt’s plan for getting Tuco to take it. Later, when Jesse tries to get Walt to “jump on the grenade” and attack Tuco since he’s dying, Walt points out that all he has to use as a weapon is a fly swatter. Even though their lives are at risk the entire time—a situation made worse when Tio turns out to be much more alert than he looks—the show manages to find light moments that make the horror more bearable.
Hank’s sudden arrival takes care of the larger Tuco problem after he wins a Wild West-style gunfight, but Jesse and Walt still have lots of messes to clean up. Tuco dies next to Jesse’s car,3 and someone’s going to want to know who gut-shot him before Hank came along. And Walt will have to explain not only his absence, but also the second cell phone that Hank identified.
Nothing on Breaking Bad ever comes easy.
Tuco to Go
When the Breaking Bad writers reconvened to begin breaking the stories for the show’s second season, one of their central ideas was that Walt would be stuck working for Tuco for most, if not all, of the year. Peter Gould remembers multiple Tuco pitches from tho
se early meetings, including one that had him listening to motivational tapes, and another where he mentioned a bomb shelter where he “went to the mattresses.”
But actor Raymond Cruz had always been on loan to the show from his day job as one of the detectives on TNT’s The Closer, and the arrangement came to an end much more abruptly than anyone at AMC was expecting. Not only would he have to leave quickly, but Breaking Bad essentially could do just one more episode with him. So, like Walt and Jesse did every time one of their plans went awry, the writers had to improvise.
1 Tuco suggests setting up Walt and Jesse in a super lab of some kind, rather than cooking their meth in a beat-up RV. This seems like a plan someone might want to try somewhere down the road….
2 Tio is played by Mark Margolis, the first of two notable Scarface alums to appear on a TV show whose creator referenced the film every time he pitched it.
3 While we haven’t yet gotten back to the burned teddy bear from the opening of the season premiere, the show continues to create wonderfully eerie tableaux for each episode’s opener—in this case, Jesse’s car bouncing up and down in the middle of the desert. The sound and sight of the car’s malfunctioning hydraulics add an extra disturbing touch to Tuco and Hank’s shoot-out.
SEASON 2 / EPISODE 3
“Bit by a Dead Bee”
Written by Peter Gould
Directed by Terry McDonough
Fugue State
“Jesse, what’s changed?—Walt
If the kidnapping scenario in “Grilled” (S2E2) is a familiar narrative from other crime stories, then the plot of “Bit by A Dead Bee” goes where few other crime stories would dare. Any other show that aired an episode like “Grilled” would spend five minutes in its next episode on the story Breaking Bad spends this entire hour telling. Anywhere else on television, Walt would turn up naked in the supermarket feigning a blackout, and the story would just move on from there. But in Breaking Bad, Walt has to concoct an explanation for where he’s been while Hank and Skyler were frantically looking for him. Here the complication that arises from his stunt—that “in-between moment”—is the story.
After all, just telling people you were in a “fugue state” only goes so far, even if you are on a heavy dose of experimental cancer meds. There will be follow-up questions, and specialists to be seen, and all the other headaches Walt didn’t even consider when he did his supermarket striptease. (At this point, Walt is better at poking holes in Jesse’s plans than identifying them in his own.) This is yet another problem Walt has to solve, which he finally does by spinning a new lie (or, rather, a huge omission of the truth) to the shrink.1 And there’s that delicious pause right after he asks about doctor-patient confidentiality when you begin to wonder if he’s going to spill his guts about the whole criminal enterprise, just so he can discuss it with someone who’s actually a grown-up and not an impatient kid like Jesse.
Just watch Walt’s mental gears turn in that moment. I’ve seen the scene at least a half-dozen times over the years, and each time I come away thinking that he almost did tell the doctor the truth—or that he was simply calculating how much of the truth (in this case, his unhappiness at home) he needed to reveal to get out of this situation. And if that’s not enough Cranston genius, take a second look at Walt after he’s snuck back into the house to hide the gun and cash. Watching Walter Jr. comfort Skyler, he realizes that he’s an intruder in his own home and that his family has already moved on without him. They’re like the family depicted in the painting in Walt’s hospital room: waving goodbye to the man in the rowboat, but perfectly fine on their own.
Walt and Jesse’s near-death experience with Tuco was in many ways even more traumatic than their previous run-in with Krazy-8, and perhaps would be enough to give less desperate men pause about continuing down this road. But as Walt notes, nothing has changed about their financial circumstances. The bodies that have dropped around them are cause enough for nightmares, but not for a ceasefire. Walt has chosen this path, and there’s no turning back now.
Meanwhile, Hank’s muted reaction to the killing of Tuco, when all his DEA colleagues want to celebrate his gunslinging ways, suggests how the world around Walt is starting to become deeper and more complicated. Hank was introduced as the kind of swinging dick whose easy masculinity Walt envies and resents, and the kind who would accept the attaboys from his co-workers and go hit a bar to tell stories about the day he shot Tuco Salamanca. But it’s not sitting right with him, clearly. This marks the beginning of a shift in the way the show treats Hank, one of the most notable changes in season two. Breaking Bad starts to take Hank more seriously (with Dean Norris proving more than up to the task of some heavier and more internal material), which creates a new potential adversary for Walt right after he’s just escaped the last one.
1 Played here by the wonderful Harry Groener, Tony-nominated stage veteran perhaps best known to TV audiences for playing the evil mayor of Sunnydale on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
SEASON 2 / EPISODE 4
“Down”
Written by Sam Catlin
Directed by John Dahl
Descending
“Shut up and say something that isn’t complete bullshit.” —Skyler
Vince Gilligan describes Breaking Bad as a show about metamorphosis, about “a guy transforming from a good, law-abiding citizen to a drug kingpin.” We watch that transformation in progress, seeing Walt change from a milquetoast family man into a loathsome bastard; he’s a villain not just in the sense of criminality, but also in terms of actively (if not always intentionally) inflicting misery on the people around him.
We got signs all throughout the first season that Walt wasn’t quite the innocent victim he first appeared to be, most notably in “Gray Matter” (S1E5). But an episode like this one shows that his faults have expanded from simple stubborn pride to dangerous levels of willful ignorance. In “Down,” Walt tries, and spectacularly fails, to mend fences with Skyler, and he continually shouts over Jesse’s attempts to explain his dire circumstances. He can’t fix things with his wife, and he can’t listen to his partner, because he can’t even begin to contemplate perspectives other than his own.
What’s also fascinating about this episode—other than the great work by Cranston, Gunn, and Paul—is how clear it becomes that Walt understands he has already crossed the line of no return. He’s been skulking around too long for Skyler to not want answers, and he can’t give them to her. What he’s done is so monstrous—even before you factor in the deaths of Krazy-8, Tuco, and others—that Skyler wouldn’t be able to get past it, and her bullshit detector is too well-honed for him to give her anything short of the awful truth. His choice has already damned him, so he might as well keep on going and hope he can come up with enough money1 to provide for Skyler and “Flynn”2 (a nickname the rebellious Walter Jr. starts using3) after he’s gone.
Jesse’s storyline, moving in parallel to Walt’s, is of the so-sad-it’s-funny variety. Jesse’s parents, looking to scare him straight, move to sell his aunt’s house out from under him,4 which forces him to move further and further down his ladder of acquaintances until he’s reduced to sleeping on cardboard inside the RV.5 The glimpse of his old bandmate,6 now clean-cut with a wife and a kid, provides a telling contrast to Jesse, a dirtball who sells drugs and falls into outdoor toilets—and brings home just how far he’s fallen. Jesse, like Walt, has had opportunities to do something other than get sucked deeper into the drug game, and he hasn’t taken them. And even though you can tell he wants nothing more than to get away from his (surprisingly dangerous) former science teacher and maybe pursue the life his parents always had in mind for him, he’s just as stuck, too. If anything, his lack of higher education, non-criminal job history, and supportive family gives him fewer avenues of escape than Walt would have if he wanted. He has no house, minimal money, and nothing to his name except for a mobile drug lab that he has to steal back from Badger’s mechanic cousin who tries to sell it away from him.
It’s a low moment not only for Jesse, but for the partnership, as their brawl ends with Walt inviting his former student to simply put him out of both their misery. Jesse declines, and that seems to be enough to calm them both down for the moment, but they’re stuck with each other, growing further and further apart from their loved ones—and sinking further and further down.
1 Note that when he’s counting the rolls of banded money and realizes there’s an odd number, he thinks for only half a moment before keeping the extra one for himself, rather than splitting it between himself and Jesse.
2 Flynn’s driving lesson with his dad demonstrates that Walt isn’t only tough on his students, as he pushes his son to use only one foot on the pedals, despite how hard it is for the kid to do it due to his cerebral palsy. When Walt tells him, “Don’t set limits for yourself,” he seems to be setting out his own mission statement as much as he is trying to impart fatherly wisdom.
3 Walter Jr. shares not only his father’s name, but his preference for a cooler-sounding alias.
4 This was a case of the story bending to practical considerations, as the home’s real owners sold it, making the house unavailable to production for the moment.
5 The moment where a frustrated Jesse slams the phone down on the counter, only to see it immediately scooped up by a mover, is comic gold.
Breaking Bad 101 Page 5
