Breaking Bad: The Kindness of Strangers

 Midway through "Phoenix," the next-to-last episode of Breaking Bad's stellar second season, Walter White takes his newborn daughter on a walk through their house. It's late at night, and little Holly has just woken up.

 You can see in the picture here what happens next. Walt's just made a little over a million dollars on a drug deal, and he needs someone to share it with. So why not the one person in his family who can't judge him, freak out and/or call the cops?

 "Daddy did that for you," Walt coos.

 If the baby could talk, she'd tell Walt he was full of crap. Walt did this for himself. If his motives were really about preserving his family, he'd let his family (and friends) help him. But his pride forces him to be the breadwinner, the one who saves the day. Which means no act of "charity" -- whether it's his son's PayPal account or his brother-in-law's offer to buy the state-of-the-art security system for the pool -- is good enough.

I could probably write a great deal about Walt and his sense of pride. But what I really should talk about is the final minutes of the episode, and the worst thing we've ever seen Walt do.

Who would have guessed something as simple as rolling a baby on its side would serve as a horrifying act of foreshadowing? We see Walt do it early in the episode, putting a blanket next to little Holly so that she sleeps on her side. If the baby spits up, she won't choke.

 Much later in the episode, Walt goes to Jesse's apartment. Jane has just blackmailed Walt into turning over Jesse's share of their cash. (Walt didn't want to do because he figured Jesse would basically just put the money back into the drug trade, i.e. feed his and Jane's habits).

 Angry over what has happened, Walt goes to a bar, giving Skyler a lame excuse about not being able to find diapers. The man at the next stool is appreciative of Walt's lie, seeing not a drug kingpin who consistently lies to his wife, but a guy who just needed to get out of the house.

 The man at the next stool is Donald, Jane's father, which makes what happens in the next scene all the more terrible. He has a lot on his mind too, having just seen Jane relapse after 18 months of clean time. (It was clear from their conversation that she's been an addict for a long time.)

 "You can't give up on them," Donald says, and this is enough to prompt Walt to go back to Jesse to...what? Talk? Make up? We don't know, because Jesse and Jane are both passed out when Walt gets there.

 Jane is on her back, and as Walt tries to rouse Jesse, she begins to cough, and vomit. Walt goes to her to roll her over...

 ...but then stops.

  He lets her choke, and thus lets her die.

 Walt has killed people before, both in both cases it was basically self-defense. Maybe not in the most literal, legal sense, as in: Someone is coming at you with a knife. But the men both had planned to kill him in the very near future.

 Jane's a different case. Her murder -- even if it's what the Law & Order DAs would call "depraved indifference" -- was far more cold blooded. To Walt, it was an equation: the less people who know what he really is, the better. Poor, poor Jane. Poor, poor Donald. But not poor, poor Walt. Even if he survives whatever horrible thing happens in next week's finale, he's damned.

 Other thoughts:

• Walter Jr.'s Save Walter White.com site is a real one. The essay written there is heartbreaking.
• Despite the overall darkness of this episode, there were some funny moments, like Jesse's "It's the 20th century" when talking about Walt's outdated classroom, and Saul's suggestion that Walt claim "I found a bag of money by the railroad tracks."
• Krysten Ritter did a fine job this week in her final apperance as Jane, capturing all the lies, bargaining and rationalization brought on by addiction. Then again, Walt does all those things too without any drugs touching his system. In a way, he's the biggest addict on the show.
• Anyone else want to guess the sonar pool alarm will play a role in the finale?

 Tom Coombe

Comments

[Kent Merritt]

Another great episode...maybe one of the best of the series.
I was a little confused with the opening sequence, where Walt delivers the drugs at that abandoned motel. Did he meet someone there? Was the money just sitting somewhere for him to pick up? What was the purpose of rollng that tire?! It all seemed very rushed and unclear to me.

[Tom Coombe]

I don't think we needed to see the whole motel scene. Obviously, Walt was gone for a long time, long enough for the whole labor (and for Walter Jr. to have changed his first diaper), so they needed to compress time. As for the tire, I think it showed how desperate Walt was; it's a nice metaphor: the wheels coming off, so to speak.

[Chris Casey]

I have a bad feeling one of the kids dies in the pool. Chekov wrote of the gun in the drawer, I can't believe that the pool was introduced this way and isn't used. I agree with the metaphor of the tire. Walt's life is going to crash and burn. You know he is going to lose all that money.

[Tom Coombe]

On Walt losing his money: that thought occurred to me during Saul's spiel about getting the hacker from Belarus to funnel the drug cash into the Pay Pal account. There's just so many ways that could go wrong.

[Holden Caulfield]

I really have no comment, Tom, because you spelled out everything I felt about this episode. The only other shoe that I am waiting to see dropped is when Walt's jealousy explodes on Skyler's boss, Ted.

I like this little in joke on the "Save Walter White" website: "He likes to cook
because of chemistry."

I just convinced a guy at work to read your blog and now you are taking a hiatus? That is what I call breaking bad.

[Tom Coombe]

"He likes to cook because of chemistry." How did I miss that?

I appreciate you spreading the word, but it's not that much of a hiatus. I'll try to post new things every few days, just not on a daily basis.