Breaking Bad | 3x11 | Abiquiu

This was a pretty low-key episode, a definite calm before the storm with groundwork being laid for the final two. That being said we did get the fairly huge step of Skylar taking on a role in Walt’s business, which doesn’t seem like finale setup to me so much as something that will only begin to pay off next season. 

Very exciting to see Jane again in the opener. Krysten Ritter had hinted on Twitter that she’d be back, so I’d been imagining some kind of dream sequence or hallucination, maybe where Walt was tormented by an accusatory, smart-talking Jane a la the dead folks on Six Feet Under, or Amber on House. The latter's sort of an interesting parallel – House, feeling responsible for the death of his best friend’s girlfriend, began to hallucinate her everywhere. If Walt gets a little more unhinged, maybe we’ll see Jane again before too long.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that Jesse and Jane made it to the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit after Jesse’s four-day desert detour. Their conversation in the car brought up a lot of interesting parallels to future stuff – maybe most obvious was Jane’s “I just threw up a little bit in my mouth” line, made fairly horrific considering the way she ultimately died. 

Jane talking about fixation, and the idea of wanting to make a feeling last, plays really powerfully into episode 303 with Jesse playing her voicemail recording over and over, clinging to what little he had left. And fixation was central to Fly, with Walt’s seemingly inexplicable obsession gradually giving way to deeper meaning: “Sometimes you get fixated on something, and you might not even get why.”

Moving onto Jesse…it is a sad day when Badger and Skinny Pete are giving you moral lessons; “There’s like, positivity and stuff goin’ on here.” We saw a return of the predatory, seductive Jesse from the gas station scene earlier this season in the way he maneuvered Andrea. And yet what this episode ultimately showed is that no matter how much he claims to be “the bad guy”, he simply isn’t unscrupulous and has a powerful internal sense of right and wrong.  There are certain lines that are absolutes for him (children being one), which is interesting as one of the things that’s really scary about Walt, by contrast, is his ability to blur those moral lines in his own mind. 

If there is one absolute Walt seems to have held onto, it’s family and the need to protect them at all costs. When it came to the revelation that Skylar hadn’t divorced Walt, it struck me that she’d probably had time to really think about the reality of what he had done, and it maybe didn’t repel her as much as she would have liked. In contrast to the downtrodden husband from the pilot, he’s now shown himself to be a man who will stop at absolutely nothing to provide for his family, and there’s something very attractive about that on a sort of primal level. Especially as Skylar has had the luxury of hearing only Walt’s sanitized version of events - I doubt the possibility of his having killed, for example, has even crossed her mind. His “Do you really want to know? Really?” was very telling in this sense, because there’s a whole lot she is better off not knowing.

When Gus talked about the “mistake” Walt shouldn’t make twice, there was some ambiguity in terms of whether he meant Jesse or Skylar. My guess is Jesse, because although bringing Skylar into the business may well prove to be a mistake, it’s not one Walt has made before, whereas Gus has warned Walt before about his attachment to Jesse. I’d be tempted to say that Gus is someone who sees almost all attachments as weaknesses or mistakes, since he seems to be so permanently alone himself, but he did mention “the kids” not eating the recipe he cooked.  Does he have family?  It would make sense in order to keep up the “responsible local business owner” front, but where the heck are they?

Finally, Jesse’s sudden desire to go after the guys who killed Combo is, to me, heavily linked to his feelings about Jane. The decision to open the episode with that flashback felt very deliberate – Jesse stated last week that Jane’s death was nobody’s fault, but that means he has nobody to strike out at, nothing to direct his rage towards. So again we’re back to the idea of fixation, with Jesse desperate to avenge Combo because he has no way to avenge Jane. Thoughts?

Other thoughts:
-  “I once convinced a woman that I was Kevin Costner, and it worked because I believed it.”
-  While Hank’s bad temper is understandable, there was something ferociously irrational about the way he reacted to the hospital bed in his room.  Marie handled him with so much grace, but I’m wondering whether his PTSD will soon progress to the point where he becomes genuinely frightening to be around. 
-  “My name is Brandon.  And this is, I believe, Peter.”  Heh.