********SPOILER ALERT********
If you haven't watched this week's episode of "Breaking Bad" you really shouldn't read any further. This recap is bursting at the seams with spoilers. I know, you're shaking like Skinny Pete after a week off of the blue, but you really should wait until after you've seen this episode to read this recap. You have been warned.
One sign that what you are experiencing is a truly great piece of art is when you know exactly what is about to happen but are still tremendously emotionally effected by the event. That is what happened with "Ozymandias," Sunday night's episode of "Breaking Bad."
Last week's episode ended with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers; the screen went dark in the middle of the shootout. Thanks to the flash forwards viewers knew that Walt was going to walk away unscathed. Yet it seemed inevitable that Hank, Gomez or Jesse were going to meet their end early on in the next episode, if not all three of them.
Despite going into the episode completely compared to lose a major character it still hurt when they showed Gomez face down in the dust, and that wasn't even close to the main heartache for the scene. Much like in the shootout with the cartel hit men we get a brief glimpse of the wheels in Hank's head turning furiously as he tried to find a way out of a hopeless situation. This time his luck wouldn't be so good.
It was somewhat surprising that after all that had gone down between them that Walt still offered to give up all of his money in exchange for Hank's life; it showed that there still is some of the timid science teacher left in his soul.
As unpleasant as it must be to get shot in the middle of the desert by a white supremacist meth dealer, I'd like to think that Hank took some satisfaction by zinging Walt with his last words.
"You're the smartest guy I ever met, and you're too stupid to see - he made up his mind 10 minutes ago."
While Walt may have shown flashes of his old self by trying to bargain for Hank's life he showed viciousness unlike anything we had ever seen from him by giving up Jesse. Walt was borderline catatonic as the Aryans were preparing to leave him in the desert on his own when his wrath came to the surface and he gave up Jesse.
It would have been one thing just to let the Aryans kill him, which Walt did give the go-ahead for, but it was a whole other thing when Walt told Jesse that he let Jane die as he allowed the Aryans to take him away to be tortured.
On one hand the argument can be made that Walt felt he would never see his former partner again and that he wanted to come clean and admit to the only wrongdoing of his that Jesse had yet to figure out. That makes him seem good and honorable.
That's not what this was. This was spite. This was anger. This was revenge at Jesse for selling him out. Walt wanted to make sure that he was emotionally destroyed before he was physically destroyed.
A few weeks ago there was a very memorable scene with Hank and Skyler talking in a diner. It was during this conversation that Skyler seemed to choose sides; instead of playing innocent and working with Hank to take down her husband she appeared dead-set on protecting her family at absolutely any cost.
It is this urge to protect her family, and more importantly the urge to protect her children, that led Skyler to pull a knife on Walt and effectively tear destroy any chance the White family had at a peaceful reconciliation. Hank's death was a step too far and everything finally imploded.
After five seasons of successfully turning Walt into a monster the show seemed to take Walt even farther than was ever imagined possible as he grabbed Holly and ran out of the house. Walt truly was a monster... until the world's quietest baby finally talked.
For the entirety of her 18 months of existence (in TV time) Holly has barely uttered a peep. She almost never cried and was almost more of a silent prop than anything else at times during the show. Then, as Walt is changing her diaper and clearly trying to come to grips with the enormity of what he had done, Holly utters her first words: "No momma."
Continuing the emotional roller coaster that he had been on for the episode Walt finds a way to walk his way back from being a complete psychopath to doing what was in his baby girl's best interest but not before making a phone call to Skyler.
Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Vulture, has a fantastic take on the phone call that is a must read. You can catch it at this link.
I'll spare you from going to in depth on the phone call, I definitely agree with Seitz and I think he says it better than I can, but there is one thing I disagree with that I want to touch on. I do believe that Walt is purposely saying the things he says because he knows the police are on the line. I think that Walt is saying those things to make sure the police don't connect Skyler to what he has done. I fully understand the argument that Walt has come unhinged he follows up the phone call with the most rational thing he does the entire episode by leaving Holly at the fire department. To me the call seems to be a calculated move by Walt.
Through the entirety of the show Walt has had one singular goal; to take care of his family. Now, often he justified criminal acts that did nothing to further that goal by using the excuse of protecting his family but the point is that in Walt's mind he was always working for the same cause. Every dollar he made, every batch of blue he cooked and every meth kingpin he blew up was done so that when the cancer had finally claimed his life Walt's family could carry on without him.
After Sunday night's episode there is no family left for him to take care of. Which means that for the last two episodes Walt is capable of doing just about anything; and we know that he has an enormous machine gun and a dose of ricin with which to do it.
