You've seen Jonathan Banks before: his IMDB rap sheet lists 133 acting credits over the last 40 years, reading, in part, like a list of the most popular TV shows: Barnaby Jones, Hill Street Blues, Simon & Simon, Falcon Crest, Designing Women, Walker Texas Ranger, Alias, ER, Dexter, Modern Family, and so on. And then there's the movies: would you believe me if I told you he was in "Airplane!," the seminal absurdist spoof of the 80's? It's true, here's a picture:
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| "He's all over the place. What an asshole!" |
If you're of a certain age, and you didn't grow up under a rock, you also saw him in Beverly Hills Cop, playing the thug who guns down Eddie Murphy's best friend at the beginning of the film:
All this is to say that Jonathan Banks has been around the block, something he shares with Mike, the character he now plays on Breaking Bad. One can imagine all of these different roles and scenes swirling around in Banks's head as he prepares to play Mike, and you can imagine him putting all that experience into playing the world-weary Mike, who's seen it all before, who's tired and grumpy and doesn't want to be bothered. It's in this episode that Mike comes to the forefront, as he deals with unexpected fallout from the magnet scheme last week.
But we start in Germany, at the headquarters of Madrigal Elektromotive, the multi-national corporation behind Los Pollos Hermanos and Gus's meth operation. Herr Schuler is tasting sauces in the company's test kitchen, but his mind is a million miles away. There's a handful of cops in his office who would like a word with him, presumably about his connection to Gus. Instead of talking to them, he grabs an emergency defibrillator off the wall and locks himself in a bathroom. He calmly undresses and hangs his clothes up, shades of the deliberate way Gus did much the same in last year's opener "Box Cutter." And then he electrocutes himself. Exeunt Herr Schuler, cue opening credits. Great opening scene, one that should probably have been the cold open for the season premiere, if they had wanted to save the flash-forward for another time.
The open question concerning Madrigal is this: who knew? Is there a big bad, some powerful Chilean ex-military badass at the top of the Madrigal food chain, or was it just Schuler and the woman I haven't mentioned yet, Lydia? Early in the episode, Mike is sitting at a diner when a woman comes in and sits in the booth next to his. Judging from her interaction with the waitress, the diner is beyond slumming for her, but she came to see Mike. There's some good comedy that comes from their interplay; she's acting like she's in a James Bond movie, but Mike has no time and no patience for it. She wants Mike to kill the 11 men who know enough about the operation to sink her if the DEA ever got their claws into them. Mike knows the guys are solid; he hand-picked them, vetted them carefully, and they are well-paid to take the heat if things ever got out of hand, wheelchair-bomb wise. He manages to talk her out of it, or at least she agrees to drop the idea, but when the DEA finds the very same money earmarked for those guys, she finds that one of the 11 is willing to carry out the hits. His name is Chris, and he manages to kill one man before Mike kills him. So Mike travels to Houston (not made obvious in the episode, but Gilligan confirmed it.) to pay Lydia a visit. He is about to kill her when she starts pleading with him that she not disappear. She actually wants her young daughter to find her body. Something in her pleading and Mike's own self-interest save her life, as Mike, instead of killing her, asks her if she can still get methalymine, the blue precursor that Walt and Jesse are having a hard time finding. Mike calls Walt and agrees to join the operation.
I jumped ahead a little because I wanted to talk about Mike before I talked about Walt. This really was Mike's episode, and well-deserved for both the character and the actor, but the star of the show had a few moments, too. We see him channeling the calm dominance of Gus Fring as he moves his pieces around the board, first trying to recruit Mike into a 3-way partnership then directing Saul to find them a new place to cook. (We get a good laugh here when Jesse refers to the RV as "the crystal ship" and insists that's what he's always called it.) Walt has changed, and it's made plain by his interactions in this episode with his two partners, Jesse and Skyler.
In a wonderfully shot montage we see Walt preparing a dummy ricin cigarette while we hear a phone call between him and Jesse. Jesse can't stop thinking about the cigarette that disappeared out of his pocket; he's worried that someone will find it and poison themselves. This is a very human and vulnerable worry, and it illustrates the degree to which Jesse is now the moral center of the series. If you remember, one of Saul's guys, at Walt's behest, lifted the cigarette off Jesse at the end of last season as part of Walt's plan to poison the kid and make Jesse think that Gus did it. So now that Jesse is worried about the missing cigarette, Walt feels compelled to protect his lie by making a dummy cig for Jesse to find. Walt plays Jesse for a sucker, and Jesse is so relieved when he finds the cigarette that he breaks down in tears. We the audience, at that point, want Jesse to scream at Walt for making ricin in the first place, scream at him for turning them both into killers. We want Jesse to turn his back on Walt and move on, but Jesse is actually crying out of guilt for having blamed Walt for poisoning the kid. You feel his pain and despair, but you also feel sorry for him for being duped by the man he trusts the most. This scene, the way it's written and the way it's played by Paul and Cranston, sets up what could be the game-ending conflict of the series. You hope Jesse will get wise, but you're afraid he won't, and you're afraid because you know that Walt would kill Jesse in a minute if Jesse ever became a threat.
Skyler, poor Skyler. The woman we hated for so long has become a victim. She's living with a man she hardly knows anymore, a man she's deathly afraid of. She has gone into this very depressed, submissive mode that lacks any of the spark or bite she previously had. In her scenes with Walt this week, the camera stays on her, and we don't see Walt's face. We see him from the chest down, directing Skyler to get out of bed. We see her sad face in bed as Walt gets undressed, telling her that the guilt she feels over the Ted situation will go away in time. This is a situation that fills me with dread, because I know Skyler is a fiery woman, and once she snaps out of the funk she may decide to do something about her husband. Whether she goes to the DEA or tries to take matters into her own hands, Walt won't like it. Walt is now so far gone into the Heisenberg persona that he's forgotten why he started down this road in the first place, to provide for his family after he's gone, and he will kill Skyler if he feels threatened by her.
What was Hank up to this week? We got 2 scenes of the big guy: one with Gomie and Merker and one with Gomie and Mike. (Am I the only one who remembers that Hank left the DEA after he beat the snot out of Jesse? His investigation into Gus last year was on his own time, and we haven't seen him officially reinstated. I guess we have to take that as a given.) Merker's been thrown under the bus for the Gus situation, and he has a drink with Hank and Gomie before he leaves. The key takeaway in this scene is Merker's story about having Gus over to his house for dinner once, laughing and telling stories, pretending to be one person while he was actually someone else. Right under Merker's nose. Sound familiar? It just adds to the dread/tension level that the camera's not on Merker during this story, it's on Hank. Dean Norris plays it so well that you really can't tell how Hank is reacting to it. The big question on my mind regarding Hank is whether, on some level, he knows about Walt. It could be that he suspects, but he knows that he would go down just as hard himself. My own interpretation is that some part of his mind knows, and there's something tickling him just out of reach of his consciousness. What he'll do when he becomes fully aware is anyone's guess.
The other Hank scene was great. They bring in Mike and turn on the heat. Hank's doing his best, but Mike is an ex-cop and far too smart to fall for that kind of intimidation. It's a battle of iron wills, and Mike wins, ultimately because Hank and Gomie have nothing but their hunches to go on. It's a great moment when Mike puts his hands on the table, palms down, and looks at the two agents. "What, did you forget your handcuffs?" Mike is such a badass.
I think that's all I have for this week. After the jump break, minor spoilers. You have been warned.
Next week's episode is called "Hazard Pay" and will see the return of two of my favorite recurring characters: Skinny Pete and Badger. I wonder if Walt and Jesse are going to bring them in?
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