Spoilers for tonight's "Breaking Bad" coming up just as soon as I do tequila shots with my kid..."I'm not exactly sure who that was yesterday, but it wasn't me." -WaltOh yes it was, Walt. Yes it was.
After giving us our most extended tease yet of what I've taken to calling The Curious Incident of the Burnt Teddybear in the Daytime(*), "Over" dials back on the action and shows Walt struggling to deal with a longer life than he expected before the good news he got at the end of "4 Days Out."
(*) So in addition to the charred bear and Walt's glasses, we now have the smashed-up windshield to his car, not to mention two corpses laid out on his driveway. Should we assume the cartel shows up on his doorstep? Or is there a chance this could all be the result of an accident? Might Walt have done an uncharacteristically sloppy job installing the new water heater?
As you might expect him to, Walt tries to leave the world of crystal meth behind (other than accepting his share of the profits from the last batch they cooked in the desert), trying to be a more attentive husband and father, and even doing some long-overdue repair work on the house.
But this is not who Walt really wants to be. He wrecks the party Skyler throws to celebrate his remission by pouring one drink of tequila after another into Walter Jr., finally stepping to Hank for the sin of daring to play surrogate father figure to Jr. while Walt's been distracted these past months. And as Jr. vomits into the pool and Skyler, Hank and the other guests look hurt, Walt looks like he's been bathing in schadenfreude, like he can only enjoy the party if everyone else feels as miserable as he does to live this straight life.
(Good lord, does Bryan Cranston make a good/bad mean drunk.)
The remainder of the episode wears its subtext on its sleeve, as Walt gets around to replacing the decaying water heater. Just as his meth career seemed to be more about damage control than cooking meth, he finds that fixing the water heater only exposes another problem, in the rotted foundation that only he can see.
"Just cut it out and start fresh," he says, but that's easier to do with floor boards than with the rot in his soul. And as Walt makes yet another trip to the hardware store and stumbles across an aspiring meth cooker loading up on supplies, he recognizes once and for all that the only thing that gives him personal satisfaction -- that makes this extended life he's gotten worth living -- is playing drug lord, and he chases the cook and his partner away with a menacing threat to "Stay out of my territory."
When Walt announces his plans for retirement, Jesse takes it very well, understandably. First, he was expecting Walt to be dead, and is simply happy that the guy's still alive. Second, where Walt feels more vital the deeper he gets into this drug empire, Jesse is still a little scared of it, and he can understand why someone might want to get out. Both of these attitudes, by the way, put him one up on Walt, I fear; were the roles reversed, Walt wouldn't take kindly to Jesse's attempt to get out of the business if it inconvenienced him.
And with Walt spending the episode in semi-retirement, and the drug operation apparently running itself well for the moment, Jesse gets to focus on the state of his relationship with Jane -- and the realization that he's more invested in it than she is.
While I like Krysten Ritter's addition to the show, this subplot was the least compelling part of "Over." It provided some more hints about Jane, and about her dad (who was more than ready to use a key to go into Jane's house on his own), but it mainly felt like set-up for something coming down the road.
We have three more episodes to go this season, and where last year the show was only starting to find itself when the strike shut things down ahead of schedule, this year the show has been brilliant from the start, and I feel confident that it's all building to something explosive -- regardless of what happens to that poor teddy bear.
Some other thoughts on "Over":
• Skyler and Walt have been getting on much better ever since he lied to her about Gretchen and Elliot, but part of that was predicated on her belief that, if Walt ever got better, he'd become happier, and easier to live with. But that's not what he's about, and as his ceaseless misery becomes more obvious to her, she starts going after Ted Beneke, even knocking over her pencil cup to lure him into her office at the end of a shift. How do you think Walt will react if he finds out another man's been invading his personal turf?
• Jane's dad was played by John de Lancie, probably best known as Q from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
• Dean Norris always gets off one or two hilarious lines an episode. This week, it was his deadpan delivery of "Wow. Inspirational." in response to Walt's depressing toast at the party.
• Loved Jesse quoting the infamous"This is your drugs. This is your brain on drugs." commercial while cooking eggs. (I prefer that ad's simplicity to the sequel with Rachael Leigh Cook.)
• I talked about director of photography Michael Slovis' gorgeous work in my review of "4 Days Out." Phil Abraham, the director of "Over," was himself a longtime DP (notably on "The Sopranos"), and between the two of them, we get a number of the requisite haunting shots, whether it's Walt hanging upside down in the crawl space like an alien invader, or the light of the sunset oscillating like a UFO beacon. (Possibly piloted by Walt?)
• I liked Jesse's superhero sketches, particularly Kanga-Man (who, as Jane points out, is kind of a Kanga-She-Male), and Rewindo, whose power is to run away really fast. Jesse may want to invoke that power the next time Walt proposes an exponential expansion plan.
• Walt's money literally has blood on it. Maybe he needs to literally launder it again, like he did in the first season. That, or ask Saul Goodman where he can get some clean, crisp bills.
What did everybody else think?
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