When Skyler tells Junior what his father has been up to the for the past year, he responds, “You’re completely out of your mind” and, once again, he blames her: “If all this is true and you knew about it, you’re as bad as him.”Īnd then all hell breaks loose back at the White house. “I for one could not be happier,” Marie says about Walt’s supposed arrest. His Aunt Marie, unknowingly in grieving clothes for her husband, twists her sister’s arm to tell Junior the truth about his father.
Walt simply watches while Jesse is carted off into de facto slavery and probably an imminent death (once Todd learns how to cook correctly from his new chained mentor).īack at the car wash, Walt Junior has the opposite of an “A1 day.” And I didn’t,” his admission of moral guilt and his callous indifference, applies to his Jesse, too. Walt’s last words to Jesse, “I could have saved her. And I didn’t.” His repetition of the phrase “I watched” – here a deed of active, culpable passivity – finds an analogy in what will probably Walt and Jesse’s final encounter. I watched her overdose and choke to death. As a final, extremely gratuitous bit of revenge for Jesse threatening his family, Walt gets real with his former student: “I watched Jane die. The strategizing genius Todd stays his uncle’s hand Jesse could be the one to bring up the purity of their product in Walt’s absence. Apparently blaming Jesse for Hank’s death, Walt demands that Jack finish the job he came to do: kill his onetime surrogate son.
Yet Walt’s redemption arc takes an unexpected detour. There were eleven million reasons to make Walt into a convenient third body in that hole.)
(Although I’m not sure that I believed that the ever-practical Jack would leave Walt alive if the latter wasn’t the protagonist of a TV show, Todd’s sentimentality or no. But of course, only unhappy people imagine such radically different futures for themselves, and Jack and his gang are more than ecstatic with their present situation, with $70 million in cash and Jesse, the key to the future of their empire, in their hands. You can do everything. … You can have any future that you want,” Walt spins, ironically foreshadowing the episode’s end. Walt’s desperate plea to give up all $80 million of his fortune to save Hank’s life went a long way toward that redemptive streak. I’ve argued before that the latter-half of the current season has the show making Walt sympathetic again. I predicted Hank and Gomez’s deaths last week, but it was still devastating all the same – the heartbreak compounded by Hank’s refusal to be reduced to the kind of simpering pleading that’s kept Walt alive in the past five seasons (“My name is ASAC Schrader and you can go fuck yourself”), as well as Walt’s delusion that he still had any control over Todd’s uncle. In the same middle of nowhere, a year and change later, Walter watches his own hired guns kill his brother-in-law and bury him in the hole he himself had dug to hide the spoils of his greed and ego. You know Bogdan” spiel might well be Walt’s first cook-related lie to Skyler – a performance he’s perfected through rehearsal and, later, habit. Walt sneers at his former student’s stooping intellect Jesse can’t help rolling his eyes at the older man’s fastidiousness (and not-so-tight, not-so-white manties). In the middle of a picturesque nowhere, the duo is preparing one of their first batches. “Ozymandias” opens with a deceptively calm, even innocent time that also happens to be the beginning of Walt and Jesse’s ends. So many of the events that we’ve long awaited happen in the Moira Walley-Beckett-penned, Rian Johnson-helmed episode that the different layers of catharses are vertiginous, both exhilarating and nauseating.
(Between “Ozymandias” and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Gilligan sure is rewarding all his viewers with English degrees.)
“Ozymandias” will likely be the scene in which God reaches out to Adam. In creating and crafting such an astounding episode of television (not to mention series), though, Gilligan has thrown down the gauntlet to TV critics, historians, audiences, and his peers: Breaking Bad is TV’s version of the Sistine Chapel. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” By his haughty, fearsome decree, “Nothing beside remains. Vince Gilligan evokes Percy Shelly’s famous poem, in which the titular “king of kings” commands future generations, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” In Shelly’s telling, though, Ozymandias was an accomplished fool. “Ozymandias” has got to be some kind of epic meta-dare.