This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Breaking Bad.

This season of Breaking Bad begins with Walt attempting to behave like a human being, and ends with him acting with chilly menace. It’s a fitting frame for the major question posed by the final season of this masterful show: is Walter White a man or a monster? Can chatting with a cheerful diner waitress who encourages him to take a birthday deal because “Free meal. Free is good, even if I was like, rich,” talking about Boston’s science museum, leaving her a hundred dollars as a tip, be Walt relearning what it is to be a human being? Or has he passed beyond a veil such that he’ll always be the man telling his fearful wife “I forgive you,” unable to acknowledge the grave harm he’s done other people?

Part of the reason Walt seems unlikely to reembrace his humanity is that Hank is always standing in his way, the recipient of the praise, the potential great man Walt thinks others should understand him to be. Walt may tell Skyler “I won” after he kills Gus, but he can only feel his victory for a moment before his son begins attributing it to Hank. Walter Jr. remembers visiting Los Pollos Hermanos with Hank, who was “Just toying with the guy, like I got my eye on you, like that…When this hits the news, Uncle Hank is going to be a hero, even more so than before,” Walter Jr. enthuses to his father. Walt can never be as good as Hank. But he can be definitively, memorably worse.

And one of the things this episode establishes is how disgusted and intimidated other bad men are by Walt. Mike would love to be “done listening to this asshole talk,” but Jesse intervenes. “Oh, Jesse. Jesus. What is it with you guys? Honest to God,” Mike wants to know. There’s something incredibly sad about watching Jesse defend his original mentor, the man who’s done him so much wrong even as he’s kept him alive, against the man who might have given him some sort of code and respect even as he introduce him to life as a criminal. Mike’s a practical man, recognizing that Walt is right about the cameras, collaborates in their scheme to discover where Gus’s laptop is being held. I love his dry sense of humor as he identifies himself on the phone as “Inspector Dave Clark, Dave Clark, like the Dave Clark five,” a perfect execution of an obviously ludicrous detail. But Walter’s chilly intelligence and entitlement are repulsive to Mike, who tells Walt “You know how they say it’s been a pleasure? It hasn’t.”

While Walt needs to deal with Mike as an equal, he’s viciously condescending to Saul, telling him “You’re not Clarence Darrow. You’re a two-bit, bus-bench lawyer, and you work for me.” And Saul is withering in his assessment of his complicity with “Beg borrow or steal I’m your Huckleberry, I go the extra mile. Only you never told me that kid would end up in the hospital. Take that and get out of here. You and me, we’re done.” It’s a testament to Walt’s growing arrogance that he can threaten the man he once relied on, that he’s confident enough in his ability to extricate himself from trouble that he no longer needs to cultivate Saul, that he can treat him like an errand boy in Walt’s own schemes.

And his plan to erase Gus’s hard drive is a wild act of genius, dark magic wrought by magnets. But if you mess with forces of nature, sometimes they mess back. Inspecting Gus’s laptop, a cop discovers something different. “Fring, Gustavo, laptop computer. Glass screen is broken and in pieces, bag still sealed.” Cop “Fring, Gustavo, framed photograph of two men, damaged. The glass is broken,” and he notices that the photo’s slid down, revealing a name, Banc Cayman, and some numbers. “Huh. Check it out. That’s not on the manifest.” Walt can’t predict anything. His belief he can seems likely to be his downfall.

This post contains spoilers through the October 23 episode of The Walking Dead.

I wrote in the Atlantic last week that I thought the most frightening thing about The Walking Dead wasn’t necessarily the zombies themselves, but the obstacle they present to things that ought to be normal and routine. That was certainly the case last night, where the two biggest risks are ones that wouldn’t have been a problem in the apocalypse: T-Dog’s infected cut and the possibility that Carl won’t survive surgery.

T-Dog gets most directly at the irony of it all. “Wouldn’t that be the thing,” he tells Dale as they wait by the RV for the rest of the group to return from hunting for Sophia. “The world gone to hell. The dead rose up to eat the living. Theodore Duggs get done in by a cut on his arm.” This is what’s really scary about living through a zombie apocalypse. What if you safeguard your humanity, and it turns out not to matter in the slightest because your humanity isn’t of any use to you? Rick may be willing to give all the blood in the world, but in the absence of anesthetics or a proper surgical theater, it may not save his son, and it may weaken him to a point of extreme danger.
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This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 2 episode of Breaking Bad, “End Times.”

After the tension of the last two episodes, the simultaneous de-escalation and realignments of this episode felt necessary. For the past couple of weeks, it’s been hard for me to see a way for the terrible tension to stretch out for a full season between this one. I still can’t necessarily see the shape of how they’re going to do it, but I now feel like the show can make this story last.

Given how vile Walt’s become, in a way it’s a relief to see him step up to the plate, even if it’s in a sad, suicidal sort of way, telling Skyler, who begs him to find an alternative that “There isn’t. There was. But now there isn’t…Oh, Skyler. Skyler. I have lived under the threat of death for a year now, and because of that, I’ve made choices. I, alone, should suffer the consequences of those choices. And those consequences, they’re coming. No more prolonging the inevitable.” He’s being a man for the first time in ages, and it’s a reminder of why we liked him, why there was this nasty little thrill in rooting for Walter White once upon a time.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 25 episode of Breaking Bad, “Crawl Space.”

It was almost impossible to imagine how Breaking Bad would up the ante after Gus decimated the cartel at the possible cost of his and Mike’s lives. But this episode was, if anything, operating at a higher key for a longer time. And in both its range of emotions and cinematography, “Crawl Space” is one of the most movie-like episodes of television I’ve ever seen, particularly in its exploration of two key themes: the darkness of Gus’ full emergence as supervillain, and the dark, terrible humor of Ted’s death.

We’ve always known that Gus was a mastermind. But there’s something interesting about the show’s decision to kick his deviousness up a notch, to show us that not only is he capable of taking out an entire cartel via poison, but that he has a full-on medical lab standing by, including enough blood to save Jesse, Mike, and himself under any circumstances. The man knows Jesse as Jesse doesn’t even know himself, down to Jesse’s blood type. It’s impressive, but it’s also fairly terrifying. As is the fact that he gets up from a poisoning to tell Jesse, “There are many good ways south. Unfortunately, only one good way North. It’s six miles to Texas. I have a man there,” and starts walking back to America. The coldness of that confidence, the conviction that he won’t get caught walking back into the country, is startling. He can’t be killed by drugs or constrained by borders, Chilean, American, or otherwise. There’s a real power in that, a non-white immigrant who is essentially unafraid of the law, who’s even tamed the very institutions that might shut him down for being not just a drug dealer but a drug dealer who hides behind the facade of American small business to peddle a wily and destructively addictive drug.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 11 episode of Breaking Bad, Bug.

One of my relatives always wears the same kinds of shoes that Walter White wears, those ultimate Dad shoes, and so there was something particularly shocking about the sight of blood on them tonight. Breaking Bad can be precious — I was supremely irritated by both the teddy bear in the pool and the absurdity of the second-season events that lead up to it — but tonight, the episode was both a masterwork of the menace of the everyday, and proof of deeply impressive long-range planning.

We’ve all seen a reckoning stalking towards Walt, but I’m not sure I saw anything coming for Skyler. It would have been enough if Ted was Skyler’s revenge affair, the weak man she took up with when her husband went through the first stage of his increasingly unnerving transformation. But there’s something magnificent about his reappearance at the moment when she’s faking transactions to launder drug money, down to the level of a faux-cheery, “Thank you. Please give this to your car care professional,” with every faked receipt. The man who gave her the respite from her husband when she needed it and the skills to join Walt’s criminal enterprise is now reaching out to pull her back to — and down with — him.
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This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 21 episode of Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad is a show where exchanges of information or realizations are often as important as murders executed or trucks hijacked, and last night’s episode was very much about a core realization: Walt is no longer as invested in the well-being of his family as he is in his own self-image. We’ve known that for a while, I think, but it was still shocking to see Skylar’s shock over when Walt lashed out at her with a justification of his own significance, a violent reaction to the cover story she suggests if they ever need to go to the police, that he is being manipulated by Gus and his operation. “That is it exactly. You’re not exactly Dr. Joyce Brothers here,” Walt raves at her. “A tremendous weight lifted off me. I finally understand myself…Who is it you’re talking to right now? Who is it you think you see?…I am not in danger. I am the danger.”

The only real shock for us as an audience was the idea that Walt was going to be able to abide by a cover story written by his wife, that he clearly hated from the beginning, that cast him as weak, small, the kind of man he was before he started cooking meth, bullying kids who bullied his son, forcing his son to drink Tequila until he vomited, buying his son off with sports cars. We’ve never had much idea of who Walter Junior is, whether he has some rich interior life at school we know nothing about. But he’s the one undamaged person on the show (unless we count Baby Holly), and it’s fascinating to wonder how long his innocence can last, and who or what he’ll be when it’s destroyed by his father’s death, disgrace, or imprisonment.

As Walt sabotages his family, he’s trying to restore what he thinks is the natural order with Jesse, too. “Is there something about you that I don’t know? Are you a former Navy SEAL? Do you have to have your hands registered as lethal weapons?” he asks Jesse about his work with Mike. “Do you think you mean anything to these people?” Jesse snaps back at him, “I see they can’t outright kill me, but they don’t want me getting high. I see this thing probably started as Gus getting Mike to babysit me. But you know what? I saved Mike from getting robbed, from getting killed, maybe. So maybe I’m not such a loser after all.” But Walt has an answer for that too, sensing Gus’s setup and his play, telling Jesse, “This whole thing, it’s all about me.” Except that maybe it’s not. In an operation on a house full of methheads, Jesse proves his mettle and strategic thinking. “I hear you can handle yourself,” Gus tells him when they meet outside a diner. “I like to think I see things in people.”

Walt, in contrast to Gus, is making a serious management error. After he takes over the car wash from his old boss, committing the ultimate insult of taking the framed first dollar the guy made on the place on the grounds that the car wash is being sold to him “as is,” Walt feels like he’s above cleaning out the lab without Jesse’s help. So he bribes a bunch of Gus’ other employees to do the work for him — only to have Tyrus show up and send them back to Honduras (as a side note, it’s really nice for a show set in a border state to finally have an immigration subplot, however minor). “You tell Gus to blame me, not them,” Walt protests, realizing too late that he’s added staff to Gus’ tidy conspiracy. “He does,” Tyrus reassures him. Skylar’s right that “someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.” But someone needs to protect that man from himself, too, it seems. This episode is called “Cornered,” and Walt’s walked firmly and directly back into many of them.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 7 episode of Breaking Bad.

I’ve learned a lot of things about being a criminal from Breaking Bad, including “bring extra water if you’re going into the desert to cook meth,” and “you probably can’t maintain an addict’s sobriety if you’re going to put him in proximity to a large meth cooking operation.” Tonight’s lessons: don’t bring a machine gun to a fight with a man wearing a snow suit and with a considerable tolerance for pain, and your own karaoke performance of “Major Tom” is probably not actually the thing you want to leave for posterity. But in addition to those lessons (and the show’s Yglesias-friendly case for relaxing barbering regulations so Jesse can find alternate, if less lucrative, employment), this was, to me, the best episode this season in the way it pushed the awful emotional and plot momentum of the show forward.

The linchpin of these developments was Skylar’s decision to force Walt to deliver a plausible version of a story in which he won enough money gambling to buy the car wash — and secretly, so far, pay for Hank’s physical therapy (As Skylar tells Walt about Marie’s decision to keep their secret, “I seem to recall you’d rather sell drugs than take help.”). It’s a good remedy to the plausibility problems of the previous episode (though presumably Walt has to gamble somewhere — they’re not that good at thinking this through yet), and more importantly, it lets Walt and Skylar have it out over the terms in which Walt’s willing to apologize to Skylar for the events of the previous three seasons. “‘I’m terribly, terribly ashamed of my actions,’” Walt asks, reading through the script she’s written for him. “Two terriblies?” “It’s supposed to show contrition,” she snaps back, only to have Walt fall back on the same excuse he always falls back on “And why am I so ashamed?…I was, and am, providing for our family.” But Skylar’s ready to speak the brutal truth about her husband, and what it means to her to concoct this narrative, telling her husband: “For a fired school teacher who cooks crystal meth, I’d say you come out ahead.”
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“I’ve done a terrible thing. But I’ve done it for a good reason. I did it for us. That is college tuition for Walter Jr. And Holly, eighteen years down the road. And it’s health insurance for you and the kids. For Jr.’s physical therapy. His SAT tutor. It’s money for groceries, gas, for birthdays and graduation parties. Skyler, that money is for this roof over your head. The mortgage that you are not going to be able to afford on a part-time bookkeeper’s salary when I’m gone.” -Walter White

“New Zealand, that’s where they, uh, that’s where they made Lord of the Rings! I say we just move there, yo! I mean, you could do your art, right? Like, you could like paint the local castles and shit, and I can be a bush pilot!” -Jesse Pinkman

Pretty much as long as we’ve had television, we’ve used that medium to explore manichean struggles between good and evil. For much of television history, figuring out who’s on what side’s been relatively simple: cops and robbers, cops and rapists, cops and murderers. Perry Mason was a defense attorney, sure, but his clients almost always turned out not to have committed the crimes of which they were accused. If our moral art was about dividing the guilty from the innocent, that was a fairly easy project. The Wire basically preserved the distinction between criminals and the law, but suggested that there were people worth of sympathy on both sides of the divide. To a certain extent, Breaking Bad is the inverse of The Wire. Both criminals and the law are equally dislikable. And the key moral question of the show isn’t whether people commit crimes, or inflict vast damage on society. It’s about how clearly they see themselves, and what they’re doing.

I. Freaks

Where The Wire sketches a broad picture of the impact of the drug trade on society, the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with actual addicts. It’s a systematic show rather than an interior one. We see Bubbles on the nod, but not what it’s like to be on the nod. It’s characteristic of the interiority of Breaking Bad that we spend much more time with addicts, most important among them Jesse.
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Bryan Cranston as Walter White in 'Breaking Bad.'

A quick note on this, and at least a few subsequent episodes of Breaking Bad: the show’s something I’ve been meaning to catch up with for a while, but in between a summer of Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter, I just haven’t had time. I’ll be making a concentrated effort to get right over the next few weeks, but please be patient with me as I work on this, and keep in mind that these recaps are going to be the observations of someone who’s read up, but is none the less a n00b. Also, new schedule: these will go up first thing on Monday, and the True Blood open threads will go up right after lunch.

Watching this first episode, it strikes me that one thing AMC’s made a hallmark across all of their major shows is silence. Whether it’s Don Draper letting smoke curl into the air, Detective Linden parsing a scene, or Rick Grimes walking a gas station, or tonight, Walter and Jesse watching Gus dress for a murder, AMC understands how incredibly uncomfortable an unbroken quiet is, especially when awful things hover on the other side of it.

I always love it when directors use horror movie tactics to communicate, like the scene in Heartburn when Meryl Streep, her hair half-teased, staggers out of the bathroom to confront Jack Nicholson about his infidelity, looking for all the world like the monster in the closet. So I loved all the details in tonight’s episode, the masks on Gale’s wall and the potato battery clock on his shelf, a tuber Frankenstein’s monster; the dark hallway Skylar stares down as she rattles the gate into Walt’s condo and the glass eye she finds in his pristine Ikea kitchen cabinets.
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