This post discusses the fifth and six episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.*

Since I started this project, people have been telling me how terrific Veronica Mars is as a depiction of a relationship between parents and children. As someone who followed in my father’s footsteps in a general way professionally, I’ve enjoyed watching Keith and Veronica banter about, but what finally made that section of the show work for me was a scenario where Keith had to be more of a parent to Veronica than a partner, and where Veronica was hurt enough to act more like the teenager that she is than an adult in cargo pants and pigtails. What made this pair of episodes particularly powerful is the examples of bad parenting the tension between Keith and Veronica are juxtaposed against, both of which stem out of the kind of privilege that marks Neptune. Wealth may buy nice cars and gated mansions. But it doesn’t seem particularly capable of purchasing values or emotional connection.

Veronica and Keith run into trouble when both of them overestimate her maturity. Veronica, after hearing Rebecca James, her guidance counselor, leave a voicemail for Keith that makes it clear that the two of them are dating, tries to convince herself that she’s cool with what’s happening. “Next time, could you shoot for an actual teacher, because this has no impact on my grade-point average,” Veronica jokes with her dad. But her feelings about her mother, and the possibility of her mother’s return, remain entirely unresolved. Veronica’s still mailing burners to her mother’s friends, trying to figure out why she was drinking so heavily and acting so terrified. And because her father has treated her more like a partner than a parent, Veronica acts on her conflict in a way that reflects her confusion about their respective roles—by investigating Rebecca.

What made the confrontation between Veronica and Keith so painful was that it was a necessary readjustment for them after eight months of seemingly refusing to adapt to a new normal. “This is what we do,” Veronica told him when Keith reacted with fury to the news of her investigation. “This is how we survive. I was trying to protect you…You have let her into our life like it’s no big deal.” Acting like a private eye has made Veronica feel like she has the tools to handle her mother’s disappearance, and ideas like the burner phones certainly come from spending so much time with Keith. But sorting logistics isn’t the same way as resolving your feelings. And in this case, they’ve made Veronica’s confusion worse because of the contradiction between how hard Keith looks for other people, and how little he’s done to drag Veronica’s mother home for her. “You can find anybody. If she was a criminal, you’d make a couple of grand tracking her down, and you’d find her in a week,” Veronica sobs to her father in Kristen Bell’s most convincing bit of teenaged acting on the show.
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This post contains spoilers through the April 5 episode of Breaking Bad.

I wrote earlier this season about the haunted greatness of Skyler White, the character who sees Walter White with a terrible clarity, and who is hated by some fans of the show for it. There are other things going on in this episode of Breaking Bad, of course, but none so important as Skyler’s confrontation with her husband, and the show’s meditation on the ways that a tyrannical man can shatter the illusion of a woman as an equal partner in a marriage.

It’s fitting for an episode about Walt as a purveyor of emotional domestic abuse that so much of this hour of television focuses on food and the rituals around it. A year ago, Walt’s request for “Chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Life is good, Skyler,” might have been the ordinary ritual of a man asking his wife to indulge him on his birthday. Now, it’s an order that Skyler both fulfill Walt’s request, and that she fall emotionally in line with him, that she celebrate his birthday not just in deed but in her heart. For the rest of the episode, food and meals will be Skyler’s way of testing her new boundaries with Walt. When she serves him his birthday breakfast but neglects to rearrange the bacon into a “51,” Walter Junior reminds her “Mom, you forgot. Dad’s bacon? Mom’s got to.” And Walt, the menacingly mild paterfamilias tells her, “Well it is sort of a tradition,” putting it on her to respond. “What’s this, Holly,” he tells their daughter as Skyler complies. “Watch what she does with bacon. What is she doing?” Their baby and her care and safety are a powerful weapon Walt holds over his wife, especially since she’s told him “A new environment might be good for them,” but shied away from telling Walt exactly why she wants their children gone.

At their subsequent family meal, Skyler resists Walt’s wishes for a party, and opts instead for a small family gathering and a simple meal, though she does serve “Chocolate cake, as requested,” the setting for her terrible act of resistance against her husband: a suicide attempt that inspires Marie to volunteer to take Holly and Walter Junior for a few days. She’s been experimenting with self-harm earlier in the episode, twisting dental floss around her finger so tightly that it looks in danger of killing flesh. And when Skyler walks into that pool, it’s not clear that it’s entirely a feint. Knowing what she knows about Walt, how deeply she has come to revile him and the things she has followed him into, hearing him wax eloquent about her may have been too sickening to endure. Walt gets credit for being both a survivor and a grateful husband when he tells Hank and Marie “And Skyler, honey, remember that first week of chemotherapy, that night on the bathroom floor, what you said to me? I was so sick. It was rough going at first. But Skyler, she was right there, of course, putting wet washcloths on my forehead, and she sang to me, and this would go on day after day. I was lying there on the floor of the bathroom because it felt nice and cool. And I was asking her, if this could all be over.” But to Skyler, this recitation of her wifely perfection is a scourge, scoring her guilt deeper into her skin.

Whatever her intentions, Skyler’s response to Walt’s interrogation of her after he pulls her out of the pool is a beautifully written, tragic illustration of the resourcefulness and limitations of women in abusive relationships, even if her circumstances are horribly unique:
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Much of the last season of Breaking Bad involved a growing rift between Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the show’s high school teacher-turned drug kingpin, and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), his stoner partner in their meth business. It was a divide that almost ended in murder before Walt closed it in a terrifying act of deception, poisoning the son of Jesse’s girlfriend, and successfully blaming Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) for that monstrous act. In the fifth and final season of the show, which will air in two parts beginning on Sunday at 10 PM, it was inevitable that the two men would have a conversation about Gus’s death and their reunion. But I didn’t expect it to be so horrifyingly clarifying.

“I almost shot you. I almost killed you, all because…No, no, no. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how I could be so stupid,” Jesse breaks down in an upcoming episode. “I’m so sorry.” Walter comforts Jesse, rubbing his shoulders, telling the younger man soothingly: “You and I working together, having each other’s back, it’s what saved our lives. I want you to think about that as we go forward.” There’s something repulsive about that gesture of physical tenderness, of Walt forgiving Jesse even as he reels him in, yet again.

Walter White sells drugs. He’s committed murder. But underlying his crimes is a common dynamic. Walter White is an abuser. With his wife, Skyler, he is manipulative, physically cruel, and threatening. Last season, when he told Skyler that “A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks,” he had no real interest in reassuring her that he was safe, but in asserting that he could, and would, do great violence to anyone who stood in his way. This season, he’s setting himself up as the tin god of the White household, a man with the power to dispense forgiveness for the manifest wrongs he believes have been done to him, even as he becomes less and less able to see his own monstrosity.

With Jesse, his behavior is more like an adult abusing a child, which was one of the reasons watching him touch Jesse was so clammy. One of the show’s first iconic lines was Jesse’s delight at discovering that Walt had discovered a way to circumvent the central problem of meth production, obtaining pseudoephedrine. But it’s what comes after “Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!” that matters. Jesse demurs, saying he’ll leave the state and start over. And Walter reels him back in, neatly undercutting Jesse’s self-esteem, but promising that Walt can be the one to make Jesse a real boy:

This is the pattern of their interactions, whether with Jane, Jesse’s addict girlfriend, whose death Walt caused by negligence and callousness, or Brock, who Walt poisoned. Walter does dreadful things to Jesse, allows Jesse to shoulder responsibility and crippling guilt for them, and feeds on Jesse’s vulnerability by convincing the younger man that only Walt can restore him to wholeness, whether by sending Jesse to rehab or reenlisting him in an expanded drug production scheme. Jesse has sought out other mentors, most notably in the last season, Mike. But one of the great tragedies of the show is its illustration of how the claws Walt’s sunk into Jesse’s brain exert a more powerful pull than Mike and Gus’s treatment of Jesse as someone with potential. Walt has groomed Jesse to respond to his own guilt and shame more strongly than to straightforward affirmation, perverted his job as a teacher so they only thing Jesse is supposed to learn is Walt’s authority.

“You are trouble. I’m sorry the kid here doesn’t see it, but I sure as hell do,” Mike tells Walt at one point. James Poniewozik asked today in Time what a fitting outcome for Walt would be at the end of Breaking Bad, whether death might be an escape compared to the torture of shame and exposure. But I wonder if focusing on retribution for Walt might distract us from a more powerful and important outcome: freedom and wholeness for his victims.