Breaking Bad: No Mas

 "I'm the bad guy..."

This is, as I knew it would be, a magnificent season opener. It points forward, of course, as season openers do. The opening, yellow-tinted, scene introduces us to a pair of baddies and some surreal imagery of the sort we've come to expect.

Also Skyler is definitely divorcing Walt... and, in an extraordinary scene, she gets him to confess the truth and blackmails him into staying away from his two children forever. Ouch. Not sure if prison is actually worse than that, but this certainly looks as though the family stuff is going to recede into the background. And this, of course, is going to mean more Heisenberg and less Walt. Of which more later.

There are some neat scenes here. Hank unknowingly handling the drug money. The sheer awfulness of Jesse's rehab. But most of the emphasis here is on the duality between Walt and Heisenberg. So Walt sets fire to the drug money, and Heisenberg stops him. There's a big event at school to talk through the enormity of the plane crash, and what Walt says is pure, sociopathic Heisenberg, awkward and tone deaf as well as self-serving in its denial of the incomprehensible enormity of it all. Then he does the same thing later with Jesse, trying to minimise his guilt.

Yet it's Walt, not Heisenberg, who refuses Gus' offer for a big job. We know this won't last. But this looks like a season in which Heisenberg takes over more and more. Extraordinary telly, as ever.