“This game we're playing? You don't got the street cred to survive it."
This ewpisode really raises the stakes and moves things to a higher level. The pressure is on, not only for Walt in keeping both his lives together (Or is it Heisenberg? It's increasingly ambiguous which is the alter ego, with a lot of credit due to Bryan Cranston's facial acting, as ever) but for Jesse and Walt in maintaining the meth dealing in the face of increasingly hostuile competition.
The first scene- with one of Jesse's underlings being killed- is extraordinary in how bloody tense it is, and the horror of the eventual killing (by a kid on a bike with a gun!) really hits home. It hits home for Jesse too, who falls completely to pieces, his rewaction being a total contrast to the now clearly sociopathic Walt. It's clear that Jesse is far from cut out for the role he's occupying- and, implicity, the role that may partly have made Jane fall for him- and he's only there because, as Walt later says out loud, he does what he's told.
Except, of course, having fallen to pieces, he doesn'r- with consequences not only for Walt but for Jane, the poor girl, who has fallen for him hard. After so much effort to give up, she gets back on the heroin wagon for him, and we get a deeply disturbing scene straight out of Trainspotting.
Meanwhile, Walt's life continues to be complex. His improved condition means that further surgery looms- and, this being America, this means forking out a six figure sum, which is a lot of meth. I can't help feeling that the NHS must be keeping this country's drug problem from reaching quite the same level. His relationship with Skyler continues to be deceptively smooth; there's no conflic, but they're increasingly distant, and both have secrets. Noonly is Skyler clearly close to affair territory with her boss, but a bit of forensic bookkeeping seems set to lead her to dabble in criminality, rather neatly paralleling her husband.
Oh, and the baby is due. Speaking as a father, I can say that this is the biggest thing that can ever happen to a bloke.. yet Walt, with more superbly subtle acting from Cranston, clearly cares about this much less than the meth.
More the focus of the plot, though, is our introduction (via Saul, becoming more and more Hyman Roth) to Gus, a distributor who is professional, risk-averse and, I'm sure, important. I know this more, perhaps, than would have been obvious in 2009 as Giancatlo Esposito has since become a well-known actor, courtesy of The Boys and The Mandalorian.
The end shows how clever the plotting is: with Jesse out of it, Walt is under pressure, taking huge risks to get the meth to Gus' underlings. And that's when Skyler's waters break....
An extraordinary, and pivotal, episode.
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