Breaking Bad - Recap: Stamped on These Lifeless Things

Credit: AMC

While the episode is one Point of No Return after another, it's most interesting in how it's bookended by two phone calls. At the start of the episode, we flashback to Walt and Jesse's (Aaron Paul) cooking days in the desert, with Walt prepping the first meth-related lie he'll ever recite to Skyler, and then calling her to deliver it. It's a look back on the days of Skyler's blissful ignorance of Walt's activities, and it makes a heartbreaking pair with the phone call that closes the episode, as Walt delivers the last meth-related lie he'll ever recite to Skyler. It occurs after Walt takes off with baby Holly during an argument in the White household that's a breathtaking bit of business. In this phone call, he's purposely playing the villain, aware that the police are likely listening in on the other line. He essentially takes credit for everything that has happened, from the complete running of the meth empire to the death of Hank (Dean Norris). Walt declares that Hank crossed him and had to die, leaving out that he'd actually pleaded with crazed neo-Nazi Jack to allow his brother-in-law to live. In essence, Walt was doing one last solid for his family before disappearing from their lives, allowing the police to believe that Skyler had neither a knowledge of nor a part in his business. Walt drops baby Holly off at a fire department and leaves, presumably never to return, having lost the family he did this all for in the first place.

Credit: AMC

Yet any feeling of sympathy one might have for Walt must come with an understandable touch of conflict, since so much of what he does goes beyond simply "doing it for the family." We pick up from last week's breathless cliffhanger with the death of Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada), and Hank being held at gunpoint, at the mercy of wild-eyed Jack. Walt attempts to bargain for Hank's life, offering the gnag leader the entire $80 million buried beneath the sands of the To'hajiilee Indian Reservation. But Hank doesn't make it easy for Walt, as he refuses to beg for his life. "My name is ASAC Schrader and you can go f*** yourself," he spews. When Walt tries to talk Hank out of being so difficult, Hank wearily tells his brother-in-law, "You're the smartest man I've ever met, but you're too stupid to see that he made up his mind 10 minutes ago." Jack shoots Hank dead right in front of Walt, who collapses to the ground in immeasurable shock and grief, a shot reminiscent of Gus Fring's devastated reaction to the death of his brother figure in the season four episode "Hermanos" (the Spanish word for "brother").

Credit: AMC

Credit: AMC

Upon awaking from his grief-stricken collapse, and witnessing Hank and Gomez's bodies being unceremoniously chucked into the hole where the barrels of money once resided, Walt is a changed man. It's as if he's channeling his anger and despondency over Hank's death into his rivalry with Jesse, pointing him out to the Nazis and having them put him on his knees with a gun to his head. It might have been the end for Jesse if Todd, of all people, hadn't stepped in and argued that they should spare him -- at least until they can learn what, if anything, he told the DEA. And so they haul Jesse away, but not before Walt delivers a moment that many have been awaiting for three seasons: he admits to Jesse that he was there the night Jane died, that he watched her choking on her own vomit and elected to do nothing. It's a ruthless, cold-blooded moment that's as exceptionally delivered by Cranston as it is responded to by Aaron Paul, as Jesse completely falls to pieces while being dragged away. This is the narrative at its most bleak and hopeless, and it only gets more bleak and hopeless from here, as Jesse is beaten within an inch of his life, harnessed to a track cable in a meth lab and forced to cook alongside Todd (Jesse Plemons). The man once referred to as a "rabid dog" is now literally on a leash like one. Though Jesse has had his share of tricks up his sleeve, things aren't exactly looking all that promising. And Jesse is hardly the only person whose world comes crashing down at the altar of Walter White...

Credit: AMC

Credit: AMC

Marie (Betsy Brandt) is still of the mind that Hank has Walt in custody, and she goes to the car wash to deliver the news to Skyler. She stops just short of gloating, exercising the power she wields over her sister by forcing her to bring Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte) in to tell finally tell him the truth. I always figured this day would come, but I never really gave serious consideration to how I might have expected Walt Jr. to react to the news. Here, his disbelief and anger feels like the most honest reaction for the character, and it's one of RJ Mitte's best scenes in the entire series, as he goes from believing his mother is lying, to essentially calling her on her B.S., declaring that she's just as bad as his father for going along with it. Walt Jr. hasn't been nearly as put-upon as some other characters in the series, but he's one of the few completely innocent characters, a kid who's broken no laws and has done nothing wrong except being born into this twisted family with its morally dubious patriarch. When Skyler and Walt Jr. return to their house, they discover Walt has returned, having purchased a truck off a stranger with part of the single barrel of money left to him by the Nazis. It's here where Walt basically crosses the event horizon, as he no longer has any chance of reclaiming his family...

Credit: AMC

When Skyler demands to know where Hank is, it becomes immediately apparent to her that he's dead, and that revelation turns the situation on its head as Skyler decides it's time to defend her family from the man tasked with providing for it. The shot is beautifully constructed, as Skyler is presented with two options, either picking up the phone and dialing the police, or picking up a kitchen knife and taking matters into her own hands. She opts for the latter, and this results in Walt and Skyler wrestling around the floor for the knife while Holly wails in the background along with Junior, who pleads with his parents to stop. Eventually, it's Junior himself who decides to come to the rescue, tackling his father and shielding his mother from further harm. "But we're family!" Walt repeats, slowly falling apart with each utterance, and it's at this point that he realizes his family is irretrievably lost to him, all the more so once Junior whips out his phone and calls the police, lying and claiming that his father pulled a knife on them. In a last-ditch gambit, Walt grabs Holly and runs out the door, hopping into the pickup truck and making off with her while Skyler pleads with Walt to bring her daughter back. It's a scene of exhausting emotional intensity, and everyone involved does series-best work, particularly Gunn and Mitte, who imbue the scene with an adversarial quality. They're no longer in the mood to even try and understand this man they once knew, they simply want him out of their lives so they can begin the process of sorting things out and rebuilding. But Walt denies them closure by taking Holly, and it's this conflict that carries the rest of the episode.

Credit: AMC

Ultimately, it becomes likely that Walt took Holly in order to ensure that the police would be home for the phone call he makes to close out the episode, as Walt calls and takes responsibility for the meth business, getting Skyler off the hook with law enforcement by stating that she repeatedly begged him to stop. However, the call also confirms Marie's worst nightmare. Hank is dead, and their "I love you" over the phone last week would be the last words shared between them. She doesn't even get the solace of knowing where he's buried. But it's that phone call itself that shows the last remaining shreds of Walter White's humanity, as twisted as that might sound. Even if he'll eventually have committed all these crimes for nothing, he still loves his family. He knows he isn't what's best for Holly, especially after hearing her crying for her "mama." It's utterly devastating, as Walt hangs up and gives one last, longing look to his baby girl. It may be tiring, at some level, to continually deliver such high praise to Bryan Cranston, but the man is an inexhaustible well of talent, finding humanity in the monster, and a monster within the man. There's a reason the episode is titled "Ozymandias," as the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem of the same name is a fitting parallel for the tale of Walter White. While Heisenberg has taken on mythic status, he's essentially the king of nothing, at this point.

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Ozymandias" is an all-time great episode of television, and cements Breaking Bad's place in the TV pantheon.