The long awaited return of the second half of the final season of Breaking Bad has finally arrived. So let's not waste any time, people. Here we go...
We open with a classic Breaking Bad shot of something we cannot at first decipher, but which turns out to be kids skateboarding in the empty swimming pool that was once filled behind Walter White's house. And then a bearded and disheveled Walt pulls up beside the driveway (which we can now see is abandoned and gated), pulls out a crowbar and heads in, where the inside is no less ruinous than the outside. It's been trashed, emptied and the word "Heisenberg" spray painted across a living room wall. Walt takes his time perusing through the place before finally pulling out the wall outlet where he's hidden the infamous ricin cigarette, which he then pockets and heads back out to the car. It's there that he turns around to face Carol the neighbor lady, who looks shocked and horrified to see him, but Walt just hilariously deadpans "Hello, Carol," as she drops her bag full of fruit all over the concrete.
This was a return to the flashforwards from last season, where obviously something dramatic has gone down, leaving Walt alone and a mess, and in the middle of events that are taking place a year (now 6 months) in the future. When we get back to the episode, we're in present day, as Hank has just exited from the bathroom where he has experienced his brutal awakening and realized that his brother-in-law is in fact Heisenberg. It's a pretty terrific performance from Dean Norris, as this revelation has disoriented, confused and angered him past all reason, and we see him rapidly speeding through these emotions as he figures out what to do next. He and Marie quickly leave the White's house with him feigning a stomach bug, and Hank is so upset that he crashes their car into a neighbor's yard. He brushes off Marie's concern as he barrels toward the garage to compare the handwriting in the Walt Whitman book he's taken to Gale's on the evidence he had stowed away.
At the car wash, Walt and Skyler seem to be trying to head up a normal business, and Walt tells Skyler he thinks they ought to buy another car wash in order to keep laundering all the money they've got (everyone remember that massive room of cash Skyler had stored last season?). She seems to agree but then Lydia shows up (Laura Fraser), complaining about problems with the operation Walt left her, but he blows her off, leaving Skyler to confront and fiercely order her off the premises. Skyler has apparently accepted Walt now that he's newly retired, but she may still be calmly awaiting his impending death (and close to getting her wish, as we see later).
Meanwhile, Hank's barricading himself in the garage with all the Heisenberg research, poring over every detail all over again, in a musical montage scene that's become another trademark of the show. Familiar faces pop up, such as the late Gus Fring, Gale Boetticher, and Drew Sharpe (the boy who was killed last season) in a collection of all the lives Walt's destroyed in his quest for power. Finally, Jesse makes his appearance in a hilarious few minutes where he's tuning out as Badger and Skinny Pete go over the details of Badger's as yet unwritten Star Trek script, and then he heads down to Saul's office, hauling along the two bags of cash Walt handed over to him in the last episode. Jesse wants to give the money to Mike's granddaughter and the parents of Drew Sharpe, an act of charity Saul strongly objects to in typical Saul fashion ("this still makes you two miracles short of a Sainthood, kid"), but Jesse is totally depressed and dejected, wrecked by the death of the boy and his growing disillusionment and fear of Walt.
This leads us to a great scene where Walt takes the money back to Jesse's and attempts to deal with him as he always has in the past, by putting on his "father" cap and reasoning with him in a faux- compassionate manner. Jesse says it's blood money that he doesn't want and says he knows Mike's dead and Walt probably killed him, but Walt firmly denies this outright, doing his best to reassure Jesse that Mike's not dead, and Jesse needs to move on from the child's death. This is where Bryan Cranston is so outstanding as the villainous Walt- Jesse responds to this kind of attitude and he knows it, so he lies straight to Jesse's face in such a sincere and reassuring way that we ourselves almost believe him, even though we all saw him kill Mike! Jesse seemingly accepts Walt's assurances, as he always has, but this time we see that he does not really believe it and his misplaced faith in Walt might have finally disappeared for good. His last scene in the episode shows him giving money to a homeless man and tossing the cash through his car window at random houses all over the neighborhood.
At the White family dinner table, we get a glimpse of Walter Jr., but just barely (I think earlier on we only the saw the back of his head, poor kid), and Walt leaves the table to go throw up in the bathroom- this following the reveal of Walt back at the chemo center confirms that his cancer has indeed returned. As Walt hovers over the toilet bowl he notices the Walt Whitman book missing, and after asking Skyler to explain Hank's mysterious illness again, the man smarter than everybody else in the room decides, on a whim, to check the bottom of his car in the middle of the night and lo and behold, he finds a tracking device. The show has now reached a turning point- Hank knows who Walt is, and Walt knows that he has caught on.
The final five minutes has Walt coming over to visit Hank in his garage, at first play acting concern over Hank's "stomach bug," but Hank isn't buying it and spends the whole chat ferociously glaring at Walt, unable to hide his feelings and pretend to be someone else, as is Walt's specialty. Walt starts to walk away, but then decides at the last minute to confront him over the tracker, and then comes a moment that I doubt anyone saw coming. Hank closes the garage door with the remote and belts Walt smack in the face, tosses him against the wall and accuses him of every nefarious action we've watched him commit over the past five seasons. Walt at first denies, then tacitly "confesses" (in a hypothetical sense of course), telling Hank he'd never be able to prove it or convince anyone, and then tells him his cancer's back anyway, he'll never end up in jail, and probably has just 6 months left to live. Hank orders him to give up Skyler and the kids and Walt flat out refuses. Hank then says he doesn't know who he is anymore and Walt responds with a line destined to become the new "I'm the one who knocks" quote, and it's a beaut. His final words before we fade to black: "If that's true...if you don't know who I am, then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly."
It's a stunner of a premiere, one of their best even, an expertly directed and shot episode, filled with the strange camera angles and lingering, quiet scenes of suspense that Breaking Bad has become famous for. One of the best features of the show is the anxiety you feel while watching it- through every hour it seems anything could happen at any time, and now that the scales have fallen from Hank's eyes, that sense is even more prominent, with the stakes even higher. I can't wait until next week, as we're now counting down to whatever the climax is going to be, and there's just 7 more hours to go.
Notes:
-I have to mention this, at the end of the hour AMC cheated us out of next week's previews by saying you have to stay tuned through the first commercial break of their new show Low Winter Sun to see them- and I'm telling you right now, this is NOT the way to get people to watch that show. If anything it's a major turn-off that creates resentment towards it. That first commercial did not occur by the way, for 25 MINUTES, and even then it wasn't the first thing up, you had to sit through a bunch of ads first. Un-fucking believable. Do this again AMC and we're going to have problems, Walter White style.
-It's utterly pointless to speculate about what's going to happen, especially since we only have 7 episodes left, but I can't help it and I'm going to allow myself one official Pointless Prediction per week. Here's my first: I think that Jesse will cut a deal with the DEA and turn on Walt, since he no longer trusts him and has lost all faith. I reserve the right to completely reverse myself on this of course, depending on what happens in the coming weeks, but for now, that's what I'm thinking. How about you?
