Breaking Bad: I.F.T.

 "This spice feels like it's been through a couple of guys already..."

This episode, for the first time, feels a little transitional, not so much an event in its own right but setting up all the pieces for future moves to be played. It's all brilliantly shot, and remains quality drama, but for the first time in an episode of Breaking Bad you can perhaps see the artifice of the plotting a little more.

It's an episode where Walt and Skyler dance around each other in a battle of wills, as Walt/Heisenberg pushes again Skyler's edict that he's to leave the house and have no contact with the kids, both using the baby as weapon disgracefully but with Walt/Heisenberg essentially calling Skyler's bluff and gaining what seems to be the upper hand, for now. And poor, innocent, Walt Jr is an important catalyst here. These scenes are full of extraordinary subtlety from the script and, espdcially, both Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn.

Meanwhile a depressed Jesse, living in his unfurnished house, rings Jane's phone again and agaknjust to hear her voice on the answerphone... until he no longer can. This a rather nice little microcosm for going through the stages of grief so, with Saul acting as the devil on his shoulder, it's back to cooking for him.

We also have Hank being sent back to El Paso which, much as he tries to pretend otherwise, terrifies him utterly. The events of the episode have me fearing for him; it's a brutal world out there, as we see in the opening film, shot like a Western and tinted in yellow to appear like a different world as Danny Trejo's Tortuga meets his comeuppance in scenes full of tension and reminiscent of something by Tarantino and Rodriguez. It's in this context that the plot to kill Walt is paused for a while as Gus vetoes any revenge while he and Heisenberg have "business"... but this pause has its limits, and is dependent on more cooking...

You can see the joins a bit here. But there's also real excellence here, as always in Breaking Bad.