Breaking Bad - Season 5 Episode 4 - Video Recap and Review - Fifty-One
Skylar and Walt go head-to-head over the fate of their children in "Fifty-One," the latest installment in a long-line of exceptional Breaking Bad episodes, as we reach the halfway point of the first half of this show's final season. What little good might have been left is now provably gone. Walter White IS Heisenberg now, and not even his family is safe.
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It's the big five-one for Walter White (Bryan Cranston), and though he certainly seems more stoked about this birthday than he did his fiftieth back in season one, leasing new cars for both himself and Walt Jr., Skylar (Anna Gunn) is less than thrilled. Oh, she'll cook him a big dinner, bake him a chocolate cake, even break up the bacon over his eggs into the shape of his new age (we saw Walt, in a flashforward in the premiere, doing this over his eggs at Denny's into the shape of the number 52). But she's not going to be happy about it.
She's invited the Schraders for the big dinner and, on the ride over, Marie (Betsy Brandt) discreetly informs Hank (Dean Norris) about Skylar's infidelity and its possible role in the strain between she and Walt. Hank is floored by the news, but it's hardly at the forefront of his mind, as he's just received a promotion to Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Albuquerque branch of the DEA. Of course, this doesn't mean Hank is oblivious to what's happening. He's among the first to notice Skylar's elusiveness at dinner. As if in a fugue state during the dinner party, she walks into the pool, submerging herself completely and allowing the water to drown out the sound of Walt's voice. Her dress fans out around her, her eyes cold and listless. It's a disturbing visual image, made more so by Walt coming in on the left side of the frame, as if materializing out of nowhere: Skylar cannot escape Walt, no matter how hard she tries. No amount of water will purify her from her involvement with Walt's criminal enterprise. However, Skylar's dip is interpreted by Marie as a suicide attempt, leading her to offer to take the kids until Skylar is well again. We can see the wheels begin to turn in Walt's head, as he starts to suspect that this wasn't a spontaneous act of a depressed woman, but a calculated act to find a way to get the kids out of the house and out of harm's way, precisely as she's wanted.
Walt, for his part, doesn't give a damn about subtlety these days, eschewing the Gus Fring business model of a conservative public image for the trappings of wealth fueled by funds that go well beyond what the owner of a car wash should be able to manage (Walt's excuse for the new cars is that he leased them as opposed to buying them, so as not to raise suspicions; as if that is, in any way, going to alleviate the damage of the public image Walt is choosing to show to the world. Gustavo Fring, he is not). Walt genuinely believes that, with Fring out of the picture, it will be “smooth-sailing from here on out,” but he seems blind to the damage his new attitude has on his family. He tries to gently lull Skylar into accepting the security of which he's so certain, but Skylar has finally reached her breaking point.
What follows is one of the most riveting scenes in the show's history, as Walt and Skylar engage in a verbal chess match, with Skylar intent on seeing the kids out of the house, while Walt refuses to allow her to take his children. Every plan Skylar tries to throw Walt's way (“Maybe I'll go to the police, give myself a black eye, tell them you beat me when you found about my lover.”) is swatted away by Walt (“So you want to involve Ted in this? That oughta be fun.”). Even her idea to send Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte) away to boarding school is tossed aside when Walt forces Skylar to realize how much Walt Jr. would resent her for it. In five seasons, Walter White has never been more terrifying as he is here, advancing on a desperate and mortified Skylar, who backs away from him and onto their bed, trapped against the headboard. There, Skylar finally rails against Walt, admitting that her plans are weak and that she has none of Walt's “magic” at getting what she wants, and so, she declares, all she can do is wait. “Wait? What are you waiting for?” Walt asks.
“For the cancer to come back.”
Check and mate.
Walt is irredeemably vile, and to see him rendered speechless by Skylar in such grandiose fashion is a supreme fist-pumping moment from a show full of such moments. Walt can become the drug kingpin of Albuquerque, eliminate every Gus Fring who would dare come after his throne, but Walter White has no dominion over biology, over the naked science of his body and the cancer lying dormant within.
The confrontation has rattled him to the point that he's barely present, mentally, when Jesse (Aaron Paul) and Mike (Jonathan Banks) have an argument over Lydia, the paranoid methylamine provider Mike spared two episodes ago. While checking out the inventory, she and Jesse discover what looks to be evidence of DEA surveillance of their operation on one of the barrels. Mike seems to think that Lydia planted it there herself as a way to break her arrangement with him, while Jesse believes it might actually be the work of the DEA, leading to a vote, which Walt breaks by insisting that they will not kill Lydia, they will move forward. “Nothing stops this train. Nothing.”
It's Walt reclaiming agency in his life after being put in his place by Skylar, putting on the Heisenberg persona, with Heisenberg's trademark hat sitting in his lap. Between the cars, the hat, and the way he interacts with his underlings, Walt is more intent on living the role than Gus Fring was in living the criminal truth beneath the surface of his chicken-slinging facade. This could prove to be a critical mistake on Walter's part, casting subtlety aside for the reckless abandon of image, shifting gears in his personal life with each shift in gear of his brand new car. If this half of Breaking Bad's final season had a title, it would be “Hubris,” as Walt plunges further into the abyss off of his certainty in the myth of Heisenberg: his infallibility, his unmatched business acumen, and his power to bend others to his will. Jesse gives him a Rolex watch as a birthday present, and Walt takes the opportunity to use this as a jumping off point to put Skylar in her place. Walt explains that the man who gave him this watch wanted him dead not too long ago. “He changed his mind about me, Skylar, and so will you,” he tells her, more a declaration than a prediction or suggestion. Skylar remains on-edge, but with the closing shot, of the Rolex watch ticking away, the screen going black at “51,” we can see that perhaps time might just be on her side.
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