This is a commentary on Breaking Bad; see the full list of commentaries here. Please be warned that the show gets pretty intense and the commentaries may include strong language and references to violence, sexuality and drug use.

S01E02: Cat's in the Bag...

After following straight from the ending of the previous episode - after quick, silent but intense sex Walt collapses in the bathroom - we flash back to where we left off with Walt and Jesse in the desert last episode. Pretty much the first thing Walt does is to take the videotape he made out of the camera and destroy it. It’s evidence, but also a memento of a moment of weakness, and Walt’s all too happy nobody will ever have to see it. (I admit I was a little disappointed the first time through that the tape, such a centerpiece of the opening of the pilot, does not actually end up being a plot point that might come back to bite Walt at some point. But it served its purpose well for the pilot itself, and that’s what it was for.)

Following from that, though, we’re about to see Breaking Bad really establish its black comedy chops in this episode. This is often a really funny show, and in season one, where things haven’t gotten quite as bleak and dramatic as they will later on, there’s a pretty good argument to be made that it’s really more of a very black comedy with intermittent seriousness and particularly nuanced character writing than a drama. Most of the pilot, though, goes into establishing the characters and premise, so while it has funny moments it’s not terribly comedy-oriented. Here in the second episode we can really get into just how amazingly things can go wrong for our protagonist pair, and it’s pretty glorious.

When they get somebody with a tow truck to tow the RV out of the ditch, Walt extremely awkwardly overexplains how it came about that he ended up there with no pants with his RV in a ditch (“Oh, yes, and my coffee mug, of coffee? My mug of coffee. It spills all over my pants.”), and Jesse, also awkwardly, tries to back up his story; they sound more obviously suspicious with every unnecessary extra elaboration they add, but the tow truck person has clearly seen some things and is unfazed. Walt has no money to pay for their services, so Jesse offers up a couple of bills, only then Walt grabs a bunch more money off him and pays them more, presumably in the unstated hope of persuading the tow truck driver to stay quiet about them being there. (The bills are soggy and gross with the chemical gunk that was floating around the floor of the RV; last episode, taking place after this flashback, we saw Walt collecting bills out of his dryer.)

As they step into the RV again, Jesse’s breathing is strained and tense; he is not good with dead bodies, which will be a running theme in this episode. (I love him a lot.) He asks if they can’t just dump the bodies here, but Walt’s too careful for that. They’ve been seen here; any dead body discovery has too much potential to implicate them. They’re going to have to really, truly, safely get rid of the bodies so that no one will ever find them, and he’s probably already got an idea starting to brew in his head. For now, though, they need to move.

As Walt wrestles with the ignition of the RV, both of them are stressed and scared, recovering from the entire ordeal they’ve just been through, and Walt’s difficulties starting the car easily work up their emotions into an argument. Walt channels his panic into angry determination, growling that the engine is going to start now, and then they’ll drive over to Jesse’s house. Jesse yells “My house?!”, understandably loath to keep two dead bodies anywhere near him overnight - and Walt viciously shouts at him to shut up, only to dissolve into a coughing fit. Once he recovers, probably now worried on top of everything about Jesse figuring out he has cancer, Walt hisses that they will go their separate ways, their paths will never cross, and they will never speak of this again; Jesse resentfully responds that that goes double for him. In this stressful moment, they’re deeply hostile and vitriolic towards each other… but then, as soon as the RV actually starts, they share in a moment of whooping celebration and high-five. A microcosm of early Walt and Jesse right there.

Unfortunately, that’s when Krazy-8 starts to move around in the back. One of their dead bodies isn’t quite so dead.

Complications

Catching up with the present, Walt wakes up naked on the bathroom floor as Skyler asks from beyond the door if he’s coming out. This would be a good time for Walt to tell her he has cancer… but he doesn’t. Instead, at breakfast, while Skyler waits for him to address the spending the night in the bathroom thing, Walt tells an awkwardly lengthy story about the high school having to reject seniors’ photos because they show cleavage. Nice, Walt.

This is then interrupted by a call from “AT&T”, a.k.a. Jesse very unconvincingly trying to sound like an AT&T employee on the answering machine until Walt picks up. Once he does… “You said he was practically dead, okay?! You said he would die any minute!”

Jesse is panicking: the drug dealer they poisoned and left for dead, whose cousin they killed, is sounding increasingly alive over in the RV parked right outside. (As he talks to Walt on the phone, he empties a ziploc bag of weed onto his kitchen counter in order to use the bag as an ice pack for his black eye, which has grown very large and noticeable since yesterday.) He wants Walt to call in sick from work and come help him deal with this now, but Walt hangs up on him (another dick move; again, Jesse’s got someone who would almost definitely murder him without a second thought just outside his house, he’s obviously in distress, and Walt’s leaving him to deal with this on his own without so much as a word of reassurance).

Despite Walt’s awkward effort to not actually answer what Jesse was saying, none of this “sales call” sounded at all convincing, and Skyler doesn’t buy it for a second; she approaches casually when Walt’s back is turned and overhears him telling Jesse to calm down in hushed tones. (Can I mention I love her? They could have done the totally oblivious spouse thing, but no, Skyler’s basically on to him from episode two. She won’t have all the information to figure everything out for a bit, but any time she actually witnesses something clearly suspect, she does not brush it off. It’s so good.)

Their goodbye before Walt leaves for work is awkward as hell (Walt kisses her on the cheek, she doesn’t kiss back), and as soon as Walt’s gone, Skyler goes to call “AT&T” back, only to get Jesse’s ridiculous answering machine. Later, she uses a not-very-convincing phone tracing website to discover Jesse’s website, which is even more ridiculous, contains the first mention of his band TwaughtHammer, and proclaims his love of MILFs. (My brain just went “Does Andrea count as a MILF” and then “Wait, does Jesse actually like MILFs because he loves kids??” My brain is definitely overthinking this one-time gag that will never be mentioned again.)

(Still more fascinating things on Jesse’s website: there’s a drawing of a busty woman with katanas, which he definitely drew himself, and it says that he’s a blue belt in Kung Fu with “shuriken certification”. The blue belt is the highest novice rank in Kung Fu, and although I don’t know much about martial arts, Googling suggests you can expect to move through the white, yellow and blue belts in about a year, so I’m guessing Jesse took Kung Fu lessons as a kid for a year and then dropped out of it, which sounds about right. Shuriken certification sounds extremely fake, but I Googled it too anyway just to be safe, and being that all the top results are about Breaking Bad, it sounds like yes, it’s extremely fake and Jesse is trying to make his very limited credentials sound cooler, which is very him. Also, his website has autoplaying background music. Jesse no.)

Either way, Jesse digs around in his aunt’s drawers for makeup to cover up his black eye. I’m not actually sure why he’s so determined to do something for it right now, when he’s just been panicking about the murderous drug dealer outside; the only actual reason to need to cosmetically cover it up would be if he’s planning to, you know, be around other people, and while it would make sense if he were just planning to bolt and get out of the house while he still can, he doesn’t actually seem nearly as frantic as earlier, so that doesn’t quite fit. (Maybe it’s just a distraction?) In the middle of trying to apply it, though, he glances outside and realizes to his horror that the RV door is open. He rushes out, armed with a baseball bat, to check on the RV, but his worst fears are confirmed - Krazy-8 is gone, and he has no idea where he went.

Moral dilemma

Walt’s suspiciously apropos chemistry lesson for today is on chirality - mirror images, where one version of the same chemical structure can be good and harmless, while its counterpart, made of the same atoms in the same structure only mirrored, is bad and dangerous. Walt is obviously distracted talking about the topic, thinking about the two versions of himself, Walt the husband and father and teacher and Walt the meth cook and murderer. The cognitive dissonance he experiences over the conflict between his actions in the past few days and his self-image as a family man pushes him to want to separate these identities, treat them almost like different people - tell himself that he’s still exactly the same person he always thought he was, only now there’s just also this other Walt (the one who will eventually be dubbed ‘Heisenberg’). But as much as he’d like to think of it that way, it’s a coping mechanism and nothing more; there is only one Walt, his two lives were always inevitably going to blend together, and even now as he’s trying to just be Walt the teacher as if nothing happened, he can’t stop stressing about the whole murder thing, and it’s impacting his teaching as he mishears a student as asking him about murder and can’t focus on the material.

When Walt finally has a break at school, he snatches some hydrofluoric acid from the school chemistry lab - clearly having been thinking over his plans for the bodies over the course of the schoolday. With that, he drives over towards Jesse’s house, hoping to take care of the bodies.

Only who should he bump into on the way to Jesse’s but the still-weak but very much living Krazy-8, stumbling along in the middle of the street?

Walt, bless him, has no idea what to do. Later, with time to think about it, he’ll come to the inescapable conclusion that they’ll have to kill him - but here, now, without any time to think, his first confused impulse is not to run him down, but to drive up to him and try to talk to him, at which Krazy-8 tries to flee only to run straight into a tree, which knocks him out cold again. This could’ve gone really badly, but by a narrative stroke of slapstick luck it didn’t, and so, Walt can awkwardly stuff Krazy-8 into his trunk and take him back to Jesse’s house.

Standing over the unconscious Krazy-8 as he breathes wheezily on the floor, Walt and Jesse wonder what now. Walt asks if Emilio is definitely dead, reiterates it after Jesse says yes, Jesse tells him he can go check it himself, and Walt hisses that maybe he should do that before Emilio goes off wandering down the street too. See what he’s doing there? Implying this is Jesse’s fault for not making properly sure Krazy-8 was really dead? Remember how, as we learned in the “AT&T call”, actually Walt had assured Jesse last night that K8 was as good as dead and would die any minute, and Jesse did in fact check on him to make sure, find that he was still sounding very alive, and call Walt about it? Jesse was not the one who was too quick to assume he was definitely dead and out of their hair and they’d be fine waiting to deal with it until Walt had a gap in his schedule. Walt is deflecting the blame, making Jesse responsible for his own fuckup.

That’s an asshole thing to do - but it’s also a very human thing. When people make drastic mistakes with serious consequences, most people’s kneejerk response to protect their self-image is to justify to themselves why it wasn’t their fault, not really, to reach for a scapegoat to blame for the consequences instead. Here, the real reason Walt made that assumption that Krazy-8 was probably going to die any moment was just denial and wishful thinking on his part - he really, really wanted the problem to just be gone after he took that desperate drastic measure of poisoning them, and to not have to subsequently deal with a murderous drug dealer whom he’d attempted to kill. But now that it’s turned out he was dangerously wrong, he can’t quite just admit that to himself - instead, his brain jumps to blaming Jesse and lashing out at him, as if everything would’ve been fine if only Jesse weren’t so incompetent, even though this was really more Walt’s fault than Jesse’s.

Breaking Bad is very, very good at characters being human; it’s possibly my favorite thing about it. There’s a lot of people being dicks to each other for human reasons, and I love it so much. I’ll be talking about this sort of thing a lot.

They end up attaching Krazy-8 to a pole in the basement using a bike lock that fits around his neck - which is Jesse’s idea! Possibly the first real hint that he can actually be pretty creative and ingenious.

As Walt and Jesse discuss their options, Walt continues to be very calculating. He hopes Krazy-8 is a man of business, capable of acting out of mutual self-interest; a man who could be reasoned with. He asks Jesse if he has a reputation for violence. (Jesse’s response: “Well, he did try to kill us both yesterday, so there’s that.”) Walt wants there to be a nonviolent solution, badly; he doesn’t want to kill anyone (else). But in theory, he’s willing to do it. If the only other option is calling the police and turning all of them in, then they’ll just have to kill him. It’s not a comfortable thought, but rationally he just can’t escape the fact it’ll have to be done. (He does not entertain the possibility of actually going to the police; after having to really confront what that would mean yesterday, it’s just not on the menu.)

Jesse, by contrast, is all visceral emotion and horror and squeamishness. He’s freaking out, paranoid that maybe Krazy-8 is just pretending to be unconscious so he can strike when they’re not looking (this is the motivation for locking him up). When Walt suggests they must dissolve Emilio’s body in acid (he can’t quite look Jesse in the eye as he says this, but Walt copes with that sort of thing by suppressing his emotional reaction and dressing up the horror of the suggestion in technical scientific language), Jesse is horrified and refuses to have anything to do with it; again, he is not good with dead bodies. (I wonder if he’s encountered dead bodies previously in the history of his association with Krazy-8 and Emilio, or if he was there when his aunt died and was kind of traumatized by that, or if it’s just the general human sort of discomfort with dead bodies, magnified by his overall emotionally-driven nature.) But once Walt suggests they flip a coin and one of them deals with Emilio’s body and the other with Krazy-8 (never quite saying the actual k-word, because that would make it real) - Jesse almost immediately volunteers to melt the body instead, the dread in his voice palpable as he says it. No matter how much he abhors the thought of liquifying a corpse, actually having to kill someone would be much, much worse.

(Oh, season one Jesse, I want to wrap you in blankets and give you cocoa and take you away from all this.)

Walt doesn’t accept that offer, but it doesn’t matter; the coin comes up in Jesse’s favor. Which means Walt sends Jesse out to buy a plastic container for the acid, and in the meantime he’s going to… deal with Krazy-8.

Dealing with Krazy-8

He’s having a drink, still trying to talk himself into it when Jesse calls (Walt’s expression listening to Jesse’s ridiculous answering machine message is great, this wretched exasperation that he’s somehow gotten himself into this situation where he’s making drugs and murdering people with this guy). He’s at the hardware store, asking exactly what sorts of containers Walt wanted again, and worries that the ones he names seem kind of flimsy, that “any decent acid’s gonna eat right through this”. Walt’s answer is “Not hydrofluoric.” Jesse asks why; Walt irritably makes a barbed remark about how Jesse spent all his lessons just jerking off and that as far as he’s concerned Jesse’s chemistry education is over, and Jesse drops it. (Put a pin in this conversation for later.)

Instead, Jesse changes the subject to awkwardly ask if he’s “done the thing”. When Walt admits that he’s working up to it, Jesse is pure sympathy and tries to be helpful - of course, because Jesse knows very well that Walt got stuck with the truly awful job here, and is still kind of horrified by this in general and has been mentally trying to rationalize it to himself. “You know what? I bet he doesn’t even wake up. You know, not even if you took him to the hospital right now. Now, if it was me I would just try to think of it like I was doing him a favor.” Right? They’re not really killing him, he’s like half-dead already, right? He’s probably not going to properly wake up anyway, right? They’re just doing him a favor, right? Jesse’s mental justifications are of a quite different kind than Walt’s - no rational calculus about the consequences here. He knows that that’s why they “have to”, of course, but that doesn’t emotionally justify it to him - he needs to also tell himself it’s not really properly murder-murder to try to placate his conscience. Walt hasn’t brought up anything of the kind, because that’s not really how his mind works - he probably suspects if Krazy-8 managed to regain consciousness before, he probably would recover, but his reasons for doing this are all simply about what will happen if he doesn’t. In his mindset, the comforting fictions that Jesse is telling himself just make him more uncomfortable - a reminder that this is wrong and he should feel pretty bad about it.

Afterwards, Walt agonizingly continues trying to decide on a murder method. He awkwardly picks up a kitchen knife and tries to hold it like he’s about to stab someone, then a hammer. Bryan Cranston is so brilliant in this scene; no words, just actions and nuanced body language and the little expressions on his face. Then, Walt turns to a kitchen cupboard and takes out a plastic bag with two guns in it - presumably the ones that Emilio and Krazy-8 brought to the desert in episode one (or so I assume, given Walt doesn’t have to search for them). He considers that - and then pauses and looks at the bag instead. Suffocation with a plastic bag seems so much less messy or violent, doesn’t it? Almost peaceful, even.

So we next cut to Walt, silhouetted against the entrance to the basement, holding the translucent bag in his hand where it’s starkly illuminated next to his shadowed figure. This is such a great shot, both visually and because it kind of knocks us back into the horror of what’s actually going on, after the kind of darkly comedic weapon-picking sequence. Walt’s so likeable and sympathetic (we think), but he just made a decision to kill a man, and right now, in this shot, he actually looks like it - he’s suddenly scary, in a way he’s never been so far because we’re so engrossed in his point of view.

…But unexpectedly, thanks to how long it took for Walt to work up to this, Krazy-8 is awake by now. Suffocating an unconscious, wheezing body is one thing; doing it to a conscious human person is quite another - especially when Krazy-8 actually confronts him with “What’re you gonna do?”

And so, Walt chickens out and flees back up the stairs, leaving the plastic bag behind.

Krazy-8 calls out for water, coughing - which has got to hit a little close to home for Walt. He ends up not only giving him water, but making him a sandwich, and throwing him a bucket, toilet paper and disinfectant (I like that he actually thought of that). Walt watches him tear the crust off the bread before eating it - another thing that humanizes him. He’s not just a person, he’s someone with innocent little quirks, something kind of childlike, even. (When Walt comments on it, K8 stops removing the crust and just takes a big bite out of it, as if to say no, he can eat it like this just fine - even though this was actually something that just made Walt less inclined to kill him.)

When Krazy-8 finally asks what happened to Emilio, and if he’s dead, Walt leaves the basement without answering. He’s not ready to have a conversation about that with the man he’s supposed to be murdering.

I love Walt’s tiny, tiny whisper of “Oh, I’m a coward.” He’s not a coward! He’s just a human person correctly identifying Krazy-8 as another human person, empathizing with him, and recoiling at the thought of murder, like all human persons should. But he thinks he should be able to do it. The consequences for him will be very bad if he doesn’t; he’s already worked out that this is the rational thing that he needs to do. Why can’t he just do it?

And then he takes another look at Jesse’s weed strewn over the kitchen counter after he emptied that ziploc bag, and decides to try some to take his mind off things. (He’s already a manufacturer of significantly worse drugs, he’s got cancer and he’s dying; what has he got to lose?) And we segue from attempted murder into another hilarious sequence wherein Walt has absolutely no idea how you go about rolling a joint, and doesn’t have a lighter so he lights it awkwardly using the gas stove. Walt is the most successful criminal and this is a very serious and dramatic show.

The cover story

When Jesse comes home (and is incredibly amused at his stuck-up chemistry teacher smoking weed, all the way until he realizes that that’s his weed that Walt just up and took without asking, which, yeah, a dick move), he explains that that he couldn’t find any plastic containers remotely big enough for a dead body; he’d ducked into an aisle at the store to awkwardly attempt to fit himself into the biggest ones, with little success. Walt, ever practical-minded, suggests cutting the body in half and using two containers; Jesse is revolted. But Walt’s got an ultrasound appointment to go to with Skyler, so he… leaves Jesse alone to deal with this, telling him that Krazy-8 is not only alive but awake only on his way out. This is, of course, another huge dick move, and Walt gives only the briefest of sorries and a vague promise that he’ll do it tomorrow before he leaves. He’s vague about where he’s going - probably because he wants Jesse to know as little about him as a person and his home life as possible. He’s probably pretty relieved to have a legitimate excuse to leave just then; I doubt he particularly wanted to have a prolonged conversation about his failure to do his part in their arrangement right now.

Both with the RV, the incident this morning, and now with this, Walt leaves Jesse to deal with difficult and unpleasant tasks and situations alone, while refusing to give him more than the barest minimum of help or support. And of course, if anything goes wrong, he’ll then blame Jesse for it anyway. This pattern is not exactly conscious on his part - but these are things he’d just love to not have to think about. After all, he hatched the whole plan of blackmailing Jesse into helping him so that Jesse could handle the unpleasant criminal aspects of this (though Walt of course inescapably ended up tangled up in that part anyway), hoping he’d be able to just continue his normal life without major disruptions to his routine and family life; if he has teaching to do, or an ultrasound appointment, Jesse’s just going to have to handle things in the meantime, right? That’s what Jesse’s for.

At the ultrasound, Walt tells Skyler he’d been hoping the baby was a girl; Skyler teases, “You remember you said that when she’s sixteen and starts dating.” Walt freezes for a moment as he realizes he’s not going to be around when his daughter’s sixteen. Remember, Skyler still doesn’t know about his cancer diagnosis, and is still looking forward to a couple more decades with her husband, for all of her suspicions about what’s going on with him lately.

But those suspicions are not gone; once the nurse leaves them alone, after an awkward silence, she asks, “Who’s Jesse Pinkman?” Skyler, you badass, following up. After a dumbfounded moment, Walt comes up with the perfect lie, inspired by his little foray into drug use today: “He sells me pot.” - and he looks very pleased with himself for a moment, before he realizes actually from Skyler’s perspective that’s kind of a pretty alarming revelation that he, DEA agent’s brother-in-law, has developed a secret drug habit out of nowhere (again, remember, she still has no idea he has cancer), and he awkwardly tries to walk it back a little. “Not a lot. I mean, I don’t know.” As Skyler blanches, he explains it as “I just haven’t quite been myself lately.” (This is just a figure of speech, but still, externalizing his criminal self as not himself.)

He starts to try to reassure her, say that while he hasn’t been himself he loves her and nothing will ever change that… only somewhere in the middle of saying that, his mind veers off course. After spending most of the day freaking out about melting bodies and murdering drug dealers only for Skyler to now be here getting on his case about smoking pot, which just seems like the most absurdly trivial thing in the world right now, his stress has turned into pent-up frustration, and he tells her, without pause, in the same quiet placating tones but with a growing tinge of mock sincerity, that what he needs right now is for her to please, just once, get out of his ass.

Skyler’s so flabbergasted that she just blinks at him, with no idea how to respond - not just because he’s being so hostile, but also because it’s so unlike him to complain or assert himself in general, and here he is with this almost teenagery attitude, basically accusing her of being a nag. Judging from his phrasing this is clearly not the first time Walt has felt kind of resentful of Skyler being all up in his business, but he may not ever have actually expressed it before, at least definitely not in so many words.

In the moment, for Walt, it probably feels like a relief to let this out, perhaps even a little triumphant, with Skyler speechless, actually apparently shutting up. But obviously, this did not actually serve to reassure her one bit (which tends to be the case when you needlessly antagonize people instead of just communicating honestly with them). Not only is her husband secretly smoking pot in some bizarre mid-life crisis and buying it off this immature junkie making calls to their house, he’s actually starting to sound like an immature junkie. Whoever this Jesse Pinkman is, this arrangement that they have is a terrible influence on Walt, and she’s going to have to cut this off at the source. (Jesse’s obviously not actually the source, but what else can she conclude? It’s not like anything else happened to Walt recently that might have triggered this weird change in him. Walt tell your wife you have cancer for the love of God)

(I say that, but of course, the reason he hasn’t told her, or anyone, is that people would start to worry about him and pity him, and if there’s one thing Walt can’t stand, it’s being pitied.)

Dealing with the body

Meanwhile, Jesse’s alone at his house, still stressed out of his mind about everything, smoking meth. He has to melt Emilio’s body somehow, only in order to do so he’d have to cut it up, and meanwhile Krazy-8 is right there, awake and alive and probably plotting their deaths, and Jesse can hear him coughing down there in the basement, and it just all blends together into this horrific, nightmarish meth-slush, until abruptly he stands up. “Just meat. It’s all just a bunch of meat.”

He’s going to get that body right now, and he’s going to melt it in that damn acid. He’s going to hold up his end of the deal, unlike Walt, this stupid stuck-up high school teacher who waltzed back into his life to fuck everything up and gas people and smoke his weed (who gave him the right). He’s still freaking out, it’s still a dead body and it’s been lying there in the heat for a day, but he’s going to do it, and as he puts on gloves he growls more frantic, meth-fueled encouragement to himself, repeating that it’s just a bunch of meat. (All of just how very much this freaks the hell out of Jesse is my favorite part of this episode, as much as I love pretty much all of it. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t start kind of liking him here on my first time through; this is extremely me.)

So he manages to wrap up the body in the tarp and pull it out of the RV, and is dragging it towards the house when…

(Man, I had totally forgotten that Skyler’s visit to Jesse’s house - just look at her, still not leaving it alone, doing her research, I love her - happened while Jesse was moving the body. It makes this entire conversation so much more terrifying and morbidly hilarious.)

…this woman appears at his gate and demands to talk to him, and opens the gate and is like inches away from seeing the body, and tells Jesse that Walt is her husband and “He told me everything”, and threatens to call the DEA if she has to. The look on Jesse’s face is amazing, just utter terror that she really does know everything and what’s she going to do, and then… “Do not sell marijuana to my husband.”

Jesse’s shifty eyes and confused “Okay” are just a glorious moment, but he manages to not screw it up, to just babblingly play along with this fake story that he had no idea was a thing, in a way that doesn’t actually make Skyler more suspicious because she could not possibly imagine the full scale of what’s actually going on right now. All she knows about Jesse is he’s some kind of hopeless ridiculous junkie, and it’s easy to write off his extremely awkward, terrified behaviour as simply being him intimidated by her firm stare and her credible threats about the DEA, as opposed to him having no idea what she’s talking about and also being currently in the process of moving a dead body in order to dissolve it in acid as per her husband’s instructions.

(Skyler tells Jesse, “You stay away from him, or you will be one sorry individual.” Skyler White, true prophet. She also tells him it’s not any of her business but he should consider a different line of work, which is cute - once she’s done the intimidation thing and hopefully scared him away from interacting with Walt ever again, and the kid genuinely looks like he’s never been this terrified in his life, she actually wants to try to encourage him in a positive direction, rather than just writing him off entirely.)

So, after this incredibly stressful encounter, Jesse retreats back inside with the body and goes straight for more meth. It’s hard to blame him at this point.

Finally, he drags the body up to his bathroom, puts it in the very-much-not-plastic bathtub along with the guns, dutifully puts on a gas mask, and pours the acid in, all the while ranting sarcastically about Walt, the assorted horribleness that he’s gotten him into, and the man who wants to murder them who’s still in the basement. “Let’s completely screw up your house so you never want to spend another night in it! Sure. You know, why not?” (Did you know Jesse really, really does not like dead bodies.) “Thank you so much for the opportunity. I always dreamt about, you know, melting bodies.”

When Walt gets home, Jesse confronts him about Skyler and the DEA brother-in-law, and angrily asks why he’d tell her Jesse sells him marijuana. In a moment of actual exhausted honesty, Walt tells him, “Because somehow it seemed preferable to admitting that I cook crystal meth and killed a man.” And Jesse actually lets it go. He gets it and sighs and doesn’t answer, leaves it alone. Yeah, it is preferable to that, of course it is.

Only then Walt comments on the smell of meth and shakes his head judgementally about it, and Jesse gets defensive and counters by yelling at him about how at least he did his part. (Note how Jesse wasn’t actually about to rag on him for this! He hated that Walt hadn’t done it, what with the terrified-of-the-killer-in-his-basement thing, but he knew that of course killing people is dreadful and he can totally empathize with why Walt hasn’t managed to, and knows he wouldn’t be doing any better in Walt’s situation. But when people get defensive and upset they lash out, try to win, so when Walt gets judgey and contemptuous at him, Jesse changes his mind about keeping that to himself in order to just strike back at Walt. People being dicks to each other for human reasons.) And then he mentions the bathtub, and adds in a complaint about being sent all over town to buy plastic junk when he’s got a perfectly good tub in the house already, at which point Walt has a horrible realization. And with appropriately comic timing, this is when the hydrofluoric acid melting its way through the bathtub and the floor finally breaks through the ceiling, leaving a gory pile of acidy meat slush in the corridor below.

When I first watched, again, I went along with Walt’s POV in just facepalming very hard at Jesse and assuming he did this because he’s just not very bright. Walt told him to get specific plastic containers, and then he just ignored him and used his bathtub; what an idiot. On my next couple of rewatches, with more sympathy for Jesse and knowing he’s smarter than I’d originally been giving him credit for, I chalked it up to the fact he’s very high at the time and probably not thinking terribly straight. It wasn’t until this rewatch that I realized that… this is actually Walt’s fault. (Well, partly.)

Remember that phone conversation that they had when Jesse was at the hardware store? Jesse was concerned right there that the acid would just melt right through the containers - clearly it’s not that Jesse didn’t know that’s a possible issue when you’re dealing with acid. And… Walt’s answer was Not hydrofluoric. Walt made it sound like the reason the acid wouldn’t melt through the containers was just that this specific acid won’t. And Jesse tried to ask why it wouldn’t, but Walt just got annoyed and shut him up. What Jesse ended up taking away from this conversation was that okay, this is apparently some kind of special acid that won’t just melt through everything, and also Walt’ll be a prick about it if he asks questions.

Could Jesse still have inferred, based on Walt being so specific about the containers, that it’d probably have to be this kind of container one way or another? Sure. This is clearly not Jesse’s finest intellectual moment. But it’s also nowhere near as purely idiotic as I unquestioningly assumed as a first-time viewer - and yet again, Walt doesn’t see his own responsibility in this. If he had bothered to actually explain why they really needed these exact containers, even just once it had gotten to the point where Jesse had come back empty-handed and it was clear the body wouldn’t fit into any of the containers he could have bought and the only way was to saw the body in half (something he was obviously not exactly keen on), this wouldn’t have happened. But instead, Walt wanted Jesse to just do what he’s told and not ask questions, and then left him alone and unsupported to get it done. It’s easy for Walt, especially in the middle of yet another confrontation, to see this as being entirely Jesse’s fault, because he is an imbecile incapable of following clear instructions - Walt’s clearly left as the unspoken “winner” of the argument they just had as he coldly explains what just happened and Jesse stares silently - and it’s incredibly easy for the viewer to unquestioningly buy that too.

Over the closing song of this episode, “The Hole” (one of my favorite songs featured in the show; the pilot’s ending song “Out of Time Man” was another), two kids playing in the desert discover one of their gas masks still lying around - a last, forgotten bit of evidence they were there.

It’s a strong image to close on, children innocently playing with the last remnants of what happened there. Walt and Jesse have no idea; as far as they’re concerned, once they clean up the corridor, the only loose end will be Krazy-8 - but he’s a hell of a loose end.

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