I swear this show gets better every season. Breaking Bad is about the slow build, and this season perfected the technique. We knew from the first episode that this season would be about Walt vs Gus, and slowly over 13 episodes things would move closer and closer to that confrontation being resolved. Then they hit you with the last string of episodes where everything comes together and things get crazy.
"I won."
With that line Walter White finally finds himself as the kingpin meth dealer of Albuquerque, and we realize that the transformation from Walt to Heisenberg, Mr. Chips to Scarface, is finally complete. The powers that be have one more trick up their sleeve, though. Like a punch in the gut, the camera zooms in on the flower pot in Walt's backyard and we realize that he was the one who poisoned Brock. Mr. White has found himself living squarely on the other side of right. He is the villain now. The man that we were routing for not so long ago to beat cancer and to survive Tuco is now a master manipulator, a murderer on a few occasions, and is willing to poison a child to make sure he comes out on top. Walt finds himself victorious at the end, but I was struck by how most of the season moved Walt out of focus. While he was working away in the superlab under the watchful eye of the camera and trying to find a way to kill Gus, the other characters had a lot of development.
Jesse Pinkman was slated to die at the end of the first season. Thankfully after that season was cut short by the writers strike, Vince Gilligan reassessed and decided to keep him. Aaron Paul has developed into the co-lead and the real heart of this show. As Walt delves into more evil, he pulls Jesse with him. The evil that Jesse has committed hurts him, though. After killing Gale, Jesse shuts down. He still comes into work, but at home he needs to have something going on at all times or else he'll have to think about what he did some more. Aaron Paul conveys all of this without saying anything. Mike comes along and gives him purpose again, and the two of them enter into a nice mentoring situation. Gus knew just how to play Jesse, but Walt's hooks were too deep. Even after they had their amazing and brutal fight, Jesse wouldn't let Gus kill Walt. You get the feeling that even Mike finds himself caring for Jesse as their relationship deepens.
Skyler finds herself getting sucked deeper into the Walter White black hole. She's set up the car wash to launder money, but didn't realize the sheer amount of money that Walt makes. As she gets let in little by little to the trouble that Walt has found himself in, it slowly dawns on her that this a potentially dangerous line of work. When she voices her concerns, Walt informs her that he is the one who knocks, in an amazing monologue by Bryan Cranstan. She takes Holly and leaves, and when she gets to the four corners she just can't bring herself to stay out. With the money in the back of her mind, she moves the quarter back to New Mexico and goes home. It will be interesting to see next season how she deals with knowing that Walt engineered the death of three people.
Hank was such an asshole when we first met him. While he hasn't loss many of those qualities, what we see now is a broken man. He hates to have Marie see him in his handicapped state and all he cares about is buying minerals off the internet. Hank finds his fire again, though, in the form of his continual hunt for Heisenberg. Slowly we see him coming out of his funk as he goes deeper into the investigation. Dean Norris then gives us the wonderful episode ending monologue where he lays out his theory to his DEA friends. A theory we know to be 100% true. A theory he wouldn't have even put together if Walt had just let him go on thinking that Gale was Heisenberg, but Walt's pride and hubris seem to have no bounds. Even after Gus worms his way out of it, Hank stays on the trail getting closer and closer to finding out everything.
Gustavo Fring, you will be missed. We learned so much more about the Chicken Man before he had half his face blown off. His vendetta against the cartel was motivated by much more than wanting to be the top dog in the meth business, they killed his partner and they were going to pay for it, no matter how long it took him. Now, twenty years later, Gus fulfills his revenge and takes out the head of the cartel and most of his underlings in one fell swoop. Gus is a man of precision, and nothing exemplified that more than him carefully taking off and folding his coat before he vomited up the poison he drank. Gus' mastermind plan for eliminating the cartel is great to watch come together, but it also makes Walt outsmarting him seem all the more amazing in comparison. I do hope we get some sort of wrapup to his backstory in Chile and why the cartel wouldn't kill him.
Walt may have been moved out of focus for a large portion of the season, but this is still his show. He was still trying to get Jesse to poison Gus, getting punched out by Mike, giving Hank the idea of Gale not being Heisenberg and then doing everything he can to keep Hank off the trail, and informing Skyler who it is that knocks. Bryan Cranston, of course, still outshines everyone in everything this show gives him to do. I can practically guarantee that he going to win a fourth Emmy for this season. Two particular moments really stood out for me. The first was his talk with Walter Jr. while hopped up on pain meds. His story of his father informs so much of why Walter is the way he is, and Cranston's performance is just top notch throughout the whole thing. The other moment left me with chills and stuck with me for a long time afterward. When everything seems to have reach the breaking point, Walt goes down into the crawl space to get the money he needs to have him and his family disappear and finds that most of it is gone. In that moment Walter White breaks and laughs. Laughs at the pure absurdity of it all and because there's nothing else for him to do. As the episode ends with Walt lying in there, laughing maniacally, framed in a way that it looks like he's been buried. Walter White died there, and Heisenberg emerged to finally finish Gus, no matter what the cost.
I was also struck this season by the pace of episodes. Not many shows will let shots linger the way this show does. To let the vistas take over a scene. The wide shot of the clouds going over Gus telling Walt that he's fired is one of the most spectacular shots I've ever seen done on television. A lot of shows move along a breakneck speed, trying to fit in everything they can into their 43 minutes. Not this show, it lets things breath. This is most evident in the season premiere. Gus comes down the stairs in the superlab, undresses, puts on the lab coat, kills Victor with the titular box cutter, and then redresses himself. The whole sequence takes 10 minutes, but the thing that is most striking is that from the moment he kills Victor to when he tells them to get back to work on his way out the door, there is not a single line of dialogue. That's nearly 4 minutes with nothing said, even musical montages don't go on for that long. We are just left to contemplate the enormity of what just happened. I can't think of any other show, and very few movies, that would do something like that, just amazing.
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