[SPOILERS] The final two episodes of a remarkable season somehow squeeze the quality level even tighter. John Shiban's "Phoenix" offered several surprise developments, and a ghastly climax to leave you feeling hollow, while season finale "ABQ" offered raw edge and a divisive denouement...Against expectations, Walt (Bryan Cranston) manages to make the drop with his 38 pounds of meth, but we're denied an appearances from his buyer Gus. And, while Walt succeeds in securing his financial future with a $1.2 million payout, is comes at the cost of missing Skyler (Anna Gunn) give birth to his daughter. At the hospital later, he also has to live with the knowledge Skyler's boss Ted (Christopher Cousins) played a heroic role in getting his wife safely to the hospital and helping her through the birth.
As his wife convalesces, Walt hides his fortune in crisp dollar bills behind wall insulation at home, finding it frustrating he can't share his success with anyone -- well, only Jesse (Aaron), who has woken up from his drug-addled stupor and wrongly believes a burglar has stolen their meth. Upset over his partner's failure to help (which led to him missing the birth of his daughter), Walt lets Jesse strew awhile by not revealing he who took the drugs. Still annoyed nobody can share in his victory, Walt wakes up that night to feed his new baby and can't resist showing her his wall of money; a telling and strangely sad way of demonstrating Walt's frustrations.
Walt's irritation is a big part of "Phoenix", as he's shown son Walt Jr's (RJ Mitte) home-made website asking for donations to pay for his dad's medical expenses -- an act of charity that Walt's pride finds difficult to accept. He seeks guidance from lawyer Saul (Bob Odenkirk), who's becoming something of a useful sounding board, and is told that there's a way to funnel Walt's drug money into his son's website so that it appears to be the work of thousands of small donators and not one anonymous philanthropist.Jesse's story picks up where it left off, with him falling deeper into hard drugs thanks to girlfriend Jane's (Krysten Ritter) expertise in the field. After confronting Walt in his classroom, Jesse is told he won't receive his share of the $1.2 million, as Walt's too concerned he'll inject it all and kill himself. Jesse will have to prove he's clean before the cash is his. It's quite a parental concern on Walt's part, and "Phoenix" certainly shows how Walt's started to see Jesse as family a little later...
Jane's father Donald (John de Lancie) makes a welcome return after his debut a few weeks ago, surprising his daughter on her doorstep when she fails to attend a Narcotic Anonymous meeting with him, then discovering she's shacked up with tenant Jesse and has relapsed after 18 months. Furious, Donald seems like he's going to evict Jesse and call the cops, but Jane manages to talk him round and promises to go to rehab in the morning.
Despite her introduction as a beacon of light for Jesse earlier this season, Jane is quickly becoming a problem for everyone. After hearing about how much her boyfriend stands to receive in cash from Walt, she calls him at home and the conversation soon darkens into blackmail. Walt can't risk Jane exposing him to the world as a drug dealer, so has no choice but to drop a bag of bank-notes at Jesse's house.
It's here that the episode takes a coincidental turn that's easy to accept because it was so well-written, with Walt leaving Skyler late at night with the excuse to buy diapers, then hitting a bar and meeting Donald drowning his sorrows. Obviously, both men don't realize how they're just one-degree of separation apart in the world, but their conversation about responsibility and fatherhood inspires Walt to return to Jesse's house and demand he get some help.The resulting scene is one of Breaking Bad's best ever, as Walt arrives through the backdoor to find Jane and Jesse once again in a drug-fuelled stupor, lying together in bed. It's at this moment that Jane starts to vomit in her sleep and Walt realizes she's choking and unable to rouse herself to consciousness. His first instinct is to go to her, to shift her body and clear her airway, but... then a terrible realization strikes his lizard brain -- if Jane dies in her sleep, it benefits him in two ways: she'll be dead and unable to blackmail him in future, and Jesse will lose her as a bad influence and it will serve as a wakeup call to get clean.
It's true that Bryan Cranston is a magnificent actor (so much so that you take it for granted on this show now), but the moment Walt makes the decision to let a young woman die in front of him -- someone else's daughter, a person who's just made mistakes and doesn't deserve such an ignoble checkout -- is a masterclass in screen acting. We first met Walter White as a likeable chemistry teacher with too much pride, but it's clearer than ever that he's transforming into something altogether more despicable. And the wonderful thing is: he's still sympathetic and, in a terrible way, you can half-understand his thinking here, while at the same time urging him to just do the right thing and save a girl's life. As is common with TV shows, a birth heralds a death, but never so cruelly was the cosmos balanced...
Well, there's no going back now, Mr. White...
"ABQ"
Here it is. The big finale. We start with a full, extended version of the monochrome flashforwards that have been dotted throughout the season (the one-eyed teddy in the pool, the smashed car window, the evidence-bagging haz-mat team, two dead bodies laid on the lawn), then extend out to see the whole neighbourhood's in dire straits, with two columns of smoke rising from other houses in the distance. What's going on?
Before we get to that divisive climax, this episode is all about the fallout to Jane's death, opening with the bed-springs of Jesse's bed squeaking for an altogether depressing reason, as he fruitlessly tries to resuscitate his OD'd girlfriend. At home, Walt takes Jesse's frantic call and makes arrangements with Saul to send over a "fixer" to dispose of any incriminating evidence from the bedroom and advise him on what to say when he calls the hospital...
It's all very raw and depressing, brilliantly portrayed by Aaron Paul. There's a really painful scene when Jane's father Donald arrives to see her, too, when he drifts into Jesse's home to find his daughter being unceremoniously zipped up into a body-bag like a hunk of meat. We're expecting a terrible outburst of anger directed at Jesse, clearly the easiest person to blame for his daughter's overdose, but it never comes. It's just too shocking and painful, and de Lancie handles the scene with a solemn, hollow dignity.
And throughout it all, Walt (who so willingly let Jane die because it benefited him) gets to have breakfast and enjoy his family's love, the only irritation being f his son's "Save Walter White" website -- which is now racking up donations, possibly because Saul's plan to feed Walt's drug money into fake donations is working. It wasn't made clear. Maybe strangers really are that kind, which gives Walt yet another reason to hate himself -- he doesn't deserve the generosity of strangers, and he's not quite the loving father, husband and schoolteacher everyone sees.
Hank (Dean Norris) has been pushed into the background for the last quarter of this season, sadly. I was expecting more from his promotion to the big-leagues and panic attack in the elevator, but his role has been overshadowed lately. "ABQ" has him starting a donations fund for his brother-in-law at the DEA, before we're once again left to marvel at his detective skills. Or, more accurately, his unerringly accurate hunches. It seems Hank doesn't believe they arrested the real Heisenberg awhile back, and he's back on the trail of the mysterious blue-meth dealer following Combo's murder.
In one scene (that felt a little too coincidental, really) Hank meets some local business sponsors of an outreach community program, and they include fast-food restaurant manager Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) -- whom we know is actually the big-time drug baron who paid $1.2 million for Walt's product. During their meet, Gus notices the fund for Walter and learns two pieces of information that will doubtless fuel the drama next season: 1, Walter is battling lung cancer; 2, Walt's brother-in-law is one of the city's leading drug-enforcers. Will this put the kibosh on Gus doing more business with Walt in future?
Later, Walt is told that Jesse's not taking the death of his girlfriend very well and finds him crashed at a local, dilapidated crack house. He manages to rescue him from that awful situation, to enroll him at a top-class rehab clinic. Then, it's back home to face another difficult situation with his family, who have managed to get themselves on television to promote Walt's cancer battle and the success of his son's homemade website. Again, Walt has to suffer in silence and sits uncomfortably throughout the TV interview, his face slowly crumbling at the discord between his two lives. Another great bit of close-up acting from Cranston.
"ABQ" also features the Walt's operation to remove his shrunken tumour, a sequence that sets in motion another Skyler asks Walt where his cell phone is, and Walt (injected with a pre-op relaxant), replies "which one?" A reply that again rakes up Skyler's doubt over her husband's activities when he went missing for days, in a "fugue state".
From there we jump forward in time seven weeks, to find Walt has now grown a goatee beard (giving him a devilish look you can't help but notice), and is recovering well. The good news sours when Walt returns home, finding Skyler packing her bags to stay with relatives the weekend, and issuing a demand that he be gone when she gets back. They're separating. Walt does his best to change her mind (feigning his shock and ignorance of anything being wrong in their marriage), but has been doing her detective word these past seen weeks. His cell phone slipup started it, but she also got the truth from Gretchen about the fact she wasn't paying Walt's medical expenses, so suspects he's having an affair and his fancy-woman was paying his bills. She also called Walt's mother (whom he claimed he visited for four days), but was shocked to find she wasn't even aware her son had cancer.
Walt can't really talk himself out of this amount of evidence, so promises to tell Skyler the truth if she'll stay... but it doesn't work. His wife's just too scared to know the truth, as it must be so terrible. Quite a shocking turn of events, and something that will immediately impact the third season. Will Walt come clean to Skyler? Unlikely, once he has time to think up an excuse for his actions. Will that mean faking an affair, as it's easier to be punished for that than admit to his drug-dealing? We'll have to wait and see.
The episode ends on a love-it-or-hate-it moment that explains the season-long flashforwards to that creepy teddy and Walt's home in disarray. Events turn on Donald, fresh back to work after a few months to grieve the death of his daughter Jane, and we discover he has a particularly stressful job: air traffic controller. Clearly he's still unfit for work, as he gets confused at his radar screen and causes a mid-air collision over Albuquerque! Sat in his back garden at the pool, Walt leaps up at the sound of the crash above him, and we're treated to a beautiful bear's-eye-view of the teddy bear as it falls from the jet and splashes into Walt's pool. We're left to fill in the other blanks (so clearly those dead bodies were passengers.)
Now, I have to admit this ending disappointed me. I understand the thinking behind it, and it was certainly totally unpredictable, but it also felt almost ludicrously coincidental. Interesting, creator Vince Gilligan revealed that every episode that featured a teddy flashforward had a title that eventually spelt out a message: "Seven-Thirty-Seven", "Down", "Over", "ABQ". Quite cool, but only in retrospect. There was no way anyone would have spotted that in-joke. It's not that I was disappointed the reveal didn't involve a rival drug cartel targeting Walt (maybe after identifying him through his TV appearance), or as a gas explosion (the result of Walt's DIY with his boiler a few episodes back), but I just found this explanation quite... well, misplaced. Breaking Bad's always been a very realistic series and, while planes certainly do crash sometimes, the coincidence of the man responsible being Donald, and for it to happen over Walt's neighbourhood... it felt like creepy karma more befitting an X-Files Gilligan may have wrote in the '90s. It took me out of the reality, somewhat.
Of course, while it felt a little stupid, it didn't derail the episode and still packed a peculiar punch. I'm just not sure where it's meant to lead: do we care to see Donald jailed for his error? Not particularly. Will Walt ever know the circumstances behind the tragedy? Doubtful. Will a part of next season deal with the aftershock of a community thrust into the limelight of having a plane crash on their town? Maybe. But it feels like we lost focus here. I can't really see how this event will feed into the main story, justifiably.
Overall, "Phoenix" and "ABQ" were both excellent episodes with only a few very minor flaws. Perfect acting, great scripts, with some big advancements in the storyline and some tragic moments that stick in the memory like a safety-pin. The only frustration is that we'll have to wait until 2010 to see where the story goes from here.
written by: John Shiban (2.12) / Vince Gilligan (2.13) directed by: Colin Bucksey (2.12) / Adam Bernstein (2.13) starring: Bryan Cranston (Walter), Aaron Paul (Jesse), Krysten Ritter (Jane), Anna Gunn (Skyler), RJ Mitte (Walt Jr), Betsy Brandt (Marie), Dean Norris (Hank), John de Lancie (Donald), Giancarlo Esposito (Gus), Brother Eden Douglas (Air Traffic Controller), Daniel D. Halleck (Paul), Christopher Cousins (Ted), David House (Dr. Delcavoli), Sam McMurray (Dr. Victor Bravenec), Steven Michael Quezada (Gomez), Michael Shamus Wiles (DEA Chief) & Jonathan Banks (Mike)
