Breaking Bad - Season 5 Episode 3 - Video Recap and Review - Hazard Pay
It seems we have our primary conflict for this half-season of Breaking Bad's final run. Walt has clearly become the antagonist, and while Mike is no saint, he lives by a moral code that puts him well above Walt in the high-horse department. If nothing else, this episode paints a portrait of two men who must coexist in the present, but who just won't be able to do so for terribly long. Criminals are as combustible as the elements used to cook their product, and twice as volatile when mishandled. “[Mike] handles business,” Walt tells Saul Goodman, “and I handle him.”
Hell of a job you're doing there, Walt.
In the cold open, Mike (Jonathan Banks) is visiting prisons in order to meet with each of his “guys,” reaffirm their loyalty, and put their minds at ease. After last week's debacle with Lydia and how effectively she was able to turn one of Mike's own men against him, it's not hard to see why Mike would be cautious. Of course, Mike is among the most thorough men on the show, to the point that I wonder if it wasn't his personality that rubbed off on Gustavo Fring and made him the fastidious, detail-oriented man he had been. Through these prison meetings, and really throughout the episode, we come to a more intimate understanding of Mike's code. The only thing the man seems to treasure more than his granddaughter is loyalty. Keep your mouth shut, and you'll be “made whole,” as Mike puts it. It's his principle of compensating a good soldier for services rendered in perpetuity. We saw last week what happens when an associate forgets his loyalty.
But this is only the jumping off point for the episode, as Walt (Bryan Cranston) gets his new operation going with a pretty ingenious bug-bombing front as the method for creating a moving laboratory. The bug bombing company, named Vamonos Pest, is legitimate, but they're fronting Heisenberg's operation in a way that avoids drawing any undue attention. Walt and Jesse (Aaron Paul), for their part, seem to enjoy the unquestioned respect of the exterminators, smirking as Mike instructs the associates that if they need to think of a name by which to address Walt and Jesse, it's simply “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” This all leads to another classic Breaking Bad montage, this time set to Was A Bee's cover of the classic showtune “On A Clear Day (I Can See Forever).” The cook is considerably less than the two-hundred pound hauls of the Fring administration, but the boys are back in the lab, and that seems to be all that matters in that moment. And hey, Walt and Jesse seem to be getting on better than perhaps at any point in the show's history, communicating the genuine warmth of friendship. In one particular scene, Walt tells Jesse that he has to take into consideration what secrets he's going to withhold from Andrea, should he become more serious with her. “Secrets create barriers between people,” Walt says. “Speaking from experience, believe me.” It takes on a darker meaning when factoring in just how many secrets exist between Walt and Jesse. I know I'm not the only one anxiously awaiting/dreading the day Jesse finds out about Walt's complicity in Jane's death or, worse, in Brock's poisoning.
On that front, we have an even more chilling sequence that undercuts the integrity of Walt's friendship with Jesse, as Walt pretends not to know Brock upon being introduced to him at Jesse's house. As Jesse and Andrea adjoin to the kitchen, Walt remains in the living room with Brock, where the two share a silent moment. We can only guess at what the stare down implies. Does Brock know it was Walt who poisoned him? If so, is he remaining silent under threat? Or is it simply that Walt was probing with his eyes, trying to ascertain what the boy knows? It's a rich sequence in which so much is communicated through so little. We still don't know exactly how Walt was able to poison Brock, but it's all simply a matter of logistics leading towards the same conclusion: Walter White is irredeemably lost.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the irony of Walt and Jesse taking in a post-cook viewing of a classic episode of “The Three Stooges,” as Walt's formerly three-man operation (Walt, Jesse, and Saul) is now comprised of four components (Walt, Jesse, Saul, and Mike). At this point, it's clear that Walt sees Mike, Jesse, and Saul as his stooges, likely not realizing that he himself is a stooge, in a manner of speaking. His hubris is giving way to stooge-like foolishness, starting with his boast at Hank's dinner table which put his brother-in-law back on Heisenberg's trail when he was well in the clear. I can't imagine that buying into his own legend isn't going to be what does Walt in, when it's all said and done.
As for other notable moments in the episode, Anna Gunn gets a key scene that should probably be in her Emmy nomination reel for next year (assuming that the Breaking Bad love carries over. This year is her first nomination in the four years the show has been on the air, after all). Skylar White has always been a problematic character because she's right, but has such an off-putting way about her righteousness. That's all rendered moot in this episode. Here, Gunn allows Skylar to wordlessly unravel under the weight of her knowledge about Walt's nascent criminal empire, building up to her outburst at sister Marie. It's a tremendous bit of acting on Gunn's part, and Betsy Brandt is a fine scene partner, as she sells the shock and confusion of what's happening. Marie might well be the show's most thoroughly insufferable character, but she really does means well. She isn't terribly unlike Hank in that regard: she's a good person whose heart is in the right place, but her methods are often condescending and confrontational. Also like Hank, Marie is perpetually suspicious while simultaneously being completely oblivious to what's going on right under her nose. Half the time, she doesn't recognize when something is clearly off, when there are issues of immediate concern right at her doorstep. Yet the other half of the time, much like Hank, she's hyper-aware, perceptive of things being out of balance, and suspicious of what people might be hiding from her. In a lot of ways, she's a much more key character than I've been giving her credit for all these years.
Skylar's breakdown leads to Marie's confrontation of Walt, and it's every bit as great as one would imagine. Walt, a master at emotional manipulation, uses Skylar's affair with Ted Beneke and his recent accident to explain his wife's emotional state. He wrings sympathy out of quiet hostility in one deft stroke. Notice how Walt face-palms with his left hand, displaying his wedding band to Marie as if to help her piece together his implication that Skylar was having an affair. After Marie gives him a heartfelt embrace before leaving, Walt proudly bites into an apple in victory, and spends the night showing his children Scarface, reveling in the violence and the bloodbath. “Everybody dies in this one,” Walt says, amused, unaware or unwilling to acknowledge how viable an end this could be for him.
The only scene better than Walt's masterful handling of Marie is his explosive face-off with Mike. As the cash from their latest cook sits in stacks on a table in front of them, Mike begins divvying up what their own cut is, and what the cut is for all the men they have to pay (Saul, the exterminators, Mike's “guys”). It's the latter tax (a “legacy tax,” as Mike calls it) that sticks in Walt's craw, as these aren't his men, but Mike and Fring's. While Walt has a point, Mike is trying to ensure the continued silence of men who could easily blow up their spot, though we're given to believe that it's really all a matter of principle with Mike, as his code won't allow him to leave his guys twisting in the wind. Jesse offers to let Mike take his share of the money for the tax, but Walt finally relents and Mike wins this round. That Jesse offers his money at all shows how much he's grown over the years, realizing that there are things in this world that are more important than money or reputation. He's wiser now, cooling Walt down by citing that while the cash haul is less, it's a higher amount per pound of product. Gone are the “yo” inflections in Jesse's speech, replaced with cool-headed observations and low-key confidences in Walt about continuing to pay Andrea's rent, despite breaking things off with her, because it's the right thing to do for her and Brock.
As if threatened by this outburst of maturity, Walt counters Jesse's observations with his theory about why Fring murdered Victor, one of his own underlings, last season right in front of them. Walt posits that perhaps it wasn't that Fring was sending them a message, but simply eliminating a liability. In trying to cook on his own, as if to show Fring that Walt and Jesse weren't needed, Victor “flew too close to the sun” and created the circumstances that led to his throat being cut. Either way, the implication is clear: if Walt has his way, Mike won't be long for this world. With his absolute control of the business end of things, leading to Walt and Jesse having to pay ridiculous fees to keep Mike's men, ex-employees of Gus Fring who've never even met Walt or Jesse, in line is too much for Walt to endure. Mike is flying way too close to the sun, and he's likely to get burned before his wings ever get the chance to melt.
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