Monday 17 January 2022

Breaking Bad: Green Light

 "I caught my second wife screwing my stepdad, ok?"

This is another superb episode (aren't they all?) with particularly excellent acting on display all around. It's also an episode where Walt- or, as he for pretty much the whole episode, Heisenberg- pushes away literally everybody in his life.

We begin with Jesse being competent, assured and very much in the image of his mentor as he cooks meth, does it well, and holds his nerve as a cop approaches during a deal. We then hear, via the bug planted a couple of episodes ago, Walt's furious reaction to learning that Skyler is sleeping with Ted, and his not-exactly-dignified response.

But it gets worse. He suddenly loses his job, after we haven't seen him teaching for ages, in an act of blatant self-sabotage. He furiously washes his hands of Saul and Mike and then, in a rather interesting scene, with Jesse, whose impressive mastery of meth making makes him quite transparently jealous. 

He's at rock bottom. Yet the calm and clever, safety-first, Volvo driving Gus (you can keep the credit for that, Dave!) spots an opportunity with Jesse apparently cooking while Walt, at rock bottom, is refusing to have anything to do with meth. 

The only way for Walt, I suspect, is up. The same is not necessarily true for Hank, who is becoming increasingly and disturbingly obsessed in his search for Heisenberg as displacement activity for either going to El Paso or admitting that he's afraid to go. His detective work is impressive- Hank, for all his laddishness, is far from stupid- but he's slowly alienating everyone in a way that mirrors Walt. This is intense stuff, and I fear it may be leading somewhere very dark indeed.

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