Breaking Bad - Recap: Desert Rat

Credit: AMC

One of the big ongoing stories of the season has been the notion of Walt's (Bryan Cranston) past catching up with him. We all knew sooner or later his empire would have to come crumbling down. But over the past five seasons, he's always managed to find impossibly, miraculous ways to stave off the inevitable, to the point where it wasn't completely beyond the realm of possibility that he might actually get away with all of this. Given the complex morality on both sides of the divide, it's hard to know who the show even expects us to root for, if anyone at all. Both Jesse (Aaron Paul) and Hank feel betrayed by Walt, with different codes of ethics having been violated: for Jesse, he feels the trust between them as partners has been breached, to the point that Walt is no longer someone he can even stomach knowing; Hank, meanwhile, feels that Walt has betrayed the familial trust that exists between them. They're both right to want to catch Walt and bring him to justice, to make certain he answers for his myriad crimes. Yet Walt there's also a peculiar sense of honor in Walt's desperation to ensure that his family is provided for after his death, even if there's no honor in the hubris and short-sightedness that led him to this point in the first place. It's moral conflicts like this that make an episode like "To'hajiilee" as thematically enriching as it is narratively engaging. This is an episode of wall-to-wall chaos, after all.

So Jesse's plan to bring Walt to justice involves tricking Huell (Lavell Crawford) into revealing the location of Walt's money. It's a dicey plan at first, but Hank adds several convincing layers to the plan, staging and photographing a fake murder scene to make Huell believe that Walt has had Jesse killed, which further bolsters Hank's lie that Huell is next on the hit list. Hank even convinces Huell not to contact Saul (Bob Odenkirk), stating that Saul sold him out, and adding that Walt would be able to track Huell's location from his cell phone. While Hank and Jesse work to bring Walt out into the open, Walt is working towards the same ends against Jesse. But he has to turn to harder criminals to get the job done...

Todd (Jesse Plemons) and his uncle, Jack (Michael Bowen) have been having a pretty lousy week, getting grilled by Lydia (Laura Fraser) about the lack of blue coloring in their meth, in addition to the still-underwhelming purity percentage of the product. But the answer to their problems comes in the form of Walt, who calls Todd to order a hit on Jesse. He meets with the White Supremacist gang and says he wants the hit to be quick and painless. Jack sees this as an opportunity to get out of their quandary by agreeing to perform the hit, but only if Walt agrees to cook for them. Walt begrudgingly agrees to do one cook for them, but states he'll only do it after the hit is done, again reiterating that the murder be quick and painless. It's a scene that nimbly serves the function of introducing a wild card into the narrative, in the form of the Aryan gang; the scene also serves to illustrate Walt's continuing fondness for his former protege, as he admits that Jesse is "like family" to him. At some level, Walt might even still believe his spiel last week to Skyler (Anna Gunn), in which he insisted that he could get control of the Jesse situation, since Jesse is only "a threat to himself."

Credit: AMC

Walt's flaw is in assuming that his opponents have the same sense of familial loyalty -- he never considers for one minute that Jesse would ever team up with Hank, in much the same way he assumes Hank wouldn't kill him, since he himself would never kill Hank. But Walt's shortcoming (well, one of them, anyway) has always been his failure to recognize that his enemies don't have the same internalized limits as he does. Gus Fring stated that he would have no problem killing Walt's infant daughter if it came to that, and Tuco Salamanca had no problem beating up (and killing) his own men. One would think Walt would have learned by now that all's fair in love and meth, but apparently he still thinks enough of his enemies to assume there are lines they won't cross. And so it makes a certain kind of sense that Walt would feel so betrayed by Jesse once it's revealed that he's been working with Hank, although there's genuine hypocrisy in Walt calling Jesse a "coward" when, not twelve hours earlier, Walt was trying to lure Jesse out into the open by playing on his connection with Angela and Brock, the very child he poisoned once before. But then, that hypocrisy swings both ways, as Jesse was every bit the cook that Walt was, and it's not like Jesse hasn't killed his share of people. Yet despite feeling bad about his crimes, he never turns himself in. He instead works to bring Walt down with him, while adopting an air of superiority. That complexity drives the friction between the two parties, as Walt is not only angry at Jesse for ratting him out, he's disappointed: in describing to Jack his reasons for needing Jesse killed, Walt insists that Jesse is no rat. Again, Walt lands in a lousy position due to his failure to consider every angle, no matter how unlikely.

It's this short-sightedness that results in Walt's capture, as Jesse texts Walt a picture of his money in what looks to be the barrels he buried out in the desert. Walt hops in his car and speeds out to the sight of the money, with Jesse taunting him over the phone the entire time, threatening to burn every dollar if he hangs up. Of course, not only was the photo a fake, but Jesse was presumably keeping Walt on the line so Hank and Gomez could trace his location. In essence, Walt leads them right to the evidence needed to take him down. When he realizes this, Walt hides behind a rock and calls Jack, telling him his coordinates and pleading with the gang to hurry before it's too late. But Walt quickly recognizes that Jesse hasn't come alone -- he's brought Hank. Walt doesn't want Hank killed, so he calls off the hit and tells Jack not to come. What follows is a moment that I'm not sure I thought I'd ever see: Hank formally arresting Walt for his crimes. It's as close as Walt has ever come to facing justice, and Jesse appears torn about the outcome, darting between anxiety and smiles. However, Jesse quickly flies off the handle when Walt calls him a coward, causing the two former partners to tussle. The fight is broken up and Walt is put in Hank's SUV to be taken to the station, while Jesse and Gomez get in Walt's car to wait for a search team to arrive to dig for the money. But Hank doesn't leave until he first calls Marie (Betsy Brandt) to report the good news: he has Walt. It's all over.

Marie is overcome with emotion, caught between happiness and relief that Walt will finally meet justice. But the call itself proves to be a big mistake on Hank's part, as that time would have been better spent getting the hell out of there, since Jack's crew arrives on the scene anyway. They still need Walt to cook for them, which he won't be able to do if he's dead or behind bars, and so Jack attempts a rescue mission, demanding to see Hank and Gomez's badges when they identify themselves as law enforcement. When Hank and Gomez don't produce identification, Jack's gang opens fire, despite Walt's panicked, desperate shouts from the back seat of the closed SUV for Jack not to fire. Even now, he doesn't want anything to happen to Hank, but Walt doesn't have the power he once had. Walt is just Walt now, devoid of the influence and power of the Heisenberg persona. So while he might yet survive and escape jail time once again, there's a very real possibility that it will be over Hank's dead body (and perhaps even Gomez and Jesse's bodies as well), which is something Walt has never really wanted. He's always tried to be a different kind of criminal, to be guided by a certain principle of loyalty. Too bad that loyalty is proven incapable of being upheld.

"To'hajiilee" ends on that terrific, intense shootout, and while it might be the most maddening cliffhanger of the summer television season, it's everything around that ending that works so masterfully. Anyone could have died at any moment, and it wouldn't have felt the least bit out of place. The stakes are exceedingly high, and it's very likely that there will be far more victims than survivors. With only three episodes left, it's almost a certainty that the past will start catching up with these characters, and I'm not sure guys like Walt or Jesse are fast enough to outrun it.