Breaking Bad: You Should Tread Lightly

                      I'll take "Who is getting the ricin." for $100

 

 

If you haven't joined the other 6 million of us that watched Sunday, your DVR is calling you name.  Get on it! SPOILERS PRESENT!

 

Well, it happened.  And I am so glad it did.  The conversation/confrontation between Walt and Hank happened.  We knew it was going to eventually happen for the past four years (since the start of the second season) , and I have envisioned it countless times.  The main reason that I am glad that it happened in this episode was that I didn’t want to watch Walt and Hank play a cat and mouse game for the next three or four weeks.  I didn’t want to see a constant back and forth of “Is he going to find this?” or “Does Walt know?”, complete with crafty cliff hangers.  Now, it is all out in the open.  And where does the show go for the last seven weeks?  I have no freaking idea, and that is why Breaking Bad is the best thing ever on TV.

A few more observations:

1)      We already pretty much knew this from the first part of season five and most of season four, but Walt is a complete monster and you cannot believe anything he says to anybody.  Do we really know that he is “out” of the meth game?  Other than what he says, what proof do we have? (the same way he was clear of cancer for the first part of season five)  And he lies to everybody.  There is no character that he confides in or has an earnest conversation with.  Every single thing he says to anybody has some kind of manipulative pretext to it. 

2)      Nobody is safe.  In the first couple of seasons, the “bad drug dealers” were the ones in danger of Walt’s calculative murder methods.  Now, as Jesse has already figured out (he is the only one I think that truly knows it), nobody is safe from Walt, with the exception of Skylar and his kids.  Walt would kill Hank, Marie, Saul or anybody else in his way and not think twice about it.  I would like to think he would still not kill Jesse, but I don’t know. 

3)      The only way Walt is going down, ever, is either by cancer, or from somebody who does not underestimate him.  The entire series shows how a middle aged high school chemistry teacher builds a drug empire using one constant method;  no matter how ruthless he becomes, he still appears to others like a middle aged high  chemistry school teacher (even though the Aztec has been replaced by the Charger).   This has been happening since Walt killed the two “bad drug dealers” in the RV and he has been steadily working his way up the food chain. Walt took out Gus and Mike; a crazy successful drug lord and a crazy successful mercenary/hitman that always stayed one step ahead of their competitors, because they never understood how dangerous Walt really was.  I think by this point in the series, the only logical course of action for every remaining character is to catch the next Russian rocket to the International Space Station and wait for the show to end.  Of course, that would leave us just seven hours of watching Walt wander around a car wash, shot using cool camera angles.  But that would still be better than watching the 22nd season of the Kardashians.