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.

S01E03: ...and the Bag's in the River

As the episode opens, Walt and Jesse are painstakingly cleaning up the remains of Emilio’s body and flushing them down the toilet. Walt’s using a different kind of gas mask as he works than Jesse, because they left that one mask in the desert (love that attention to detail) - this means they must have noticed one mask was missing by now, but don’t seem to have realized this means the other mask might still be out there as evidence.

As they scrub the bloody pulp what was once a person from the floor, Walt’s thinking of a memory: a younger him and his ex, Gretchen Schwartz, enumerating all the elements that make up a human body and in what proportions. “There’s got to be more to a human being than that,” Walt said, back then - but as current Walt flushes yet another bucket of red slush down the toilet, it seems abstractly appropriate to just think of it as that mechanically enumerated list of chemicals, a formless, meaningless soup.

(Walt and Gretchen puzzle over why, when Walt quickly sums up all their percentages, they end up with 99.888042%. This is probably because their numbers vary widely in precision - they start with whole numbers, 63% hydrogen, 26% oxygen, 9% carbon, only to then move on to nitrogen at 1.25%, calcium 0.25%, iron 0.00004%, sodium 0.04%, and phosphorus 0.19%. Setting aside the fact that actually these numbers only add up to 99.73004% - I’m guessing we didn’t necessarily see them mention all the trace elements included in their calculation on-screen - surely the missing 0.111958% can simply be found in the rounding errors on the numbers that don’t have several digits after the decimal point. Walt, brilliant scientist, really should know that when you add together different measurements, you need to add up the error margins on all the numbers too; you can’t just pretend an unqualified 63% is precisely a 63.000000%. But this is a TV show, and the point it’s trying to make with these flashbacks is a characterizational one about Walt’s scientific worldview and his ability to do very quick mental arithmetic, plus establishing his prior relationship with Gretchen, so mystery of the missing human element it is.)

While Walt and Jesse are cleaning, some of the acid-mixed blood leaks between the floorboards and slowly drips down into the basement, where Krazy-8 watches. He says nothing, but he must be able to make a pretty good guess that this is what’s left of his cousin Emilio.

Krazy-8 is easily forgotten next to Breaking Bad’s other, more colorful antagonists who stick around for more than three episodes - but I think he’s somewhat underrated. This is a very good episode, and Krazy-8 in particular has a lot more going on here than he seems to the first time you watch it. He is pretty smart, in a way you can’t quite appreciate on a first viewing because the calculated thought that must be behind what he’s doing and saying doesn’t really start to become clear until the very end of the episode/opening of the next, and I don’t really see anyone talking about this. Good thing I’m about to talk about it, a lot!

The wedge

After the whole grueling affair of the cleanup (and that glorious bit with Walt and Jesse standing opposite each other in kiddie pools taking turns spraying the blood off each other with a garden hose - season one loves these juxtapositions of something horrific with something very goofy and mundane, and I very much love them too), Walt goes to look after their prisoner. He flushes the sanitary bucket down the toilet (…why is there a toilet in the basement, just standing there, on its own, in the open? Is this an America thing?), disinfects it, and slides it back to Krazy-8. K8 watches him silently as he sprays his gloves with disinfectant as well and disposes of them (Walt’s so careful and clean, so incongruous with this entire murdering and criminality thing).

Walt, Krazy-8 has realized, is clearly the weakest link here. He’s obviously not a criminal - he’s just some high school chemistry teacher, with a family and a normal life. He’s obviously reluctant to kill him - reluctant enough to have given him water and a sandwich and basic accommodations, even. And he obviously still doesn’t like this at all - he’s barely looking at Krazy-8 even while he’s down here. Krazy-8’s best shot at getting out of this alive is to get to Walt.

So, when Walt prepares to head upstairs, Krazy-8 finally talks - to force Walt to actually confront what he’s doing, make him fully feel that discomfort. “Hey, look at me. Turn around and look at me.”

Slowly, Walt turns and looks. Indicating the bike lock he’s still attached to the pole by, K8 tells him that he wouldn’t do this to his worst enemy - it’s degrading. Walt pauses, fiddling with his sleeve, rolling it down, and then just says he’s sorry, preparing to leave again. Krazy-8 presses on and says he should either kill him or let him go - but that he knows Walt’s hoping he’ll make it easy and will just drop dead on his own (almost definitely true). Then: “You don’t have it in you, Walter.”

And that’s when Walt pauses on his way up the stairs, tensing as it immediately dawns upon him. “How do you know my name?”

Krazy-8 says Jesse told him. Walt walks back down the stairs, approaching, almost intimidating, and asks if they had to threaten or beat it out of him. K8 says not even close. That Jesse freely told them Walt taught him chemistry in high school, that his son is “retarded or in a wheelchair or something”. “That partner of yours? He’s got a big mouth.” And again, he tells Walt he doesn’t belong in this business.

Walt can’t quite respond to that. “So I should just let you go, then?” Well, it’s that or cold-blooded murder, K8 points out - “besides, your real problem’s sitting upstairs.”

It’s easy for Walt to buy this as a genuine warning, and for a first-time viewer. We might remember that, back in episode one, Krazy-8 and Emilio were actually getting pretty threatening towards Jesse before we cut away - but we didn’t see exactly how he started talking, and there, too, Krazy-8 confronted Jesse about whether he’d been the one who ratted Emilio out to the police, so at the very least it seems very consistent and reasonable that Krazy-8 seems to have some persistent suspicions about Jesse and might express that, whether out of spite or pragmatism. First time through, we’re meant to be suspicious of Jesse too, wonder if he really did turn in his previous partner and might betray Walt.

But actually, as we learn at the tail end of this episode (and more explicitly in the next), Krazy-8 himself was the police snitch that tipped the DEA off about Emilio. So he knows perfectly well that Jesse didn’t snitch on anyone, and always knew that; he doesn’t actually suspect Jesse of anything. So why would Krazy-8 just go and tell Walt that Jesse told him stuff? Because he is telling Walt this to manipulate him into distrusting Jesse. Because Walt, he thinks, is his ticket out of here, if he can just get to him - but Jesse knows the business a lot better, he’s scared and emotional and kind of paranoid, and Jesse knows him. He has a shot with Walt, but Jesse, for all his squeamishness about the idea of actually murdering him, would pretty much never agree to just trust him and let him go free. So what he really needs is to get Jesse out of the way, or at least for Walt to free him without consulting Jesse, and to do that he needs to damage Walt’s trust in him. And if he succeeds at that, well, then Krazy-8 will start to seem trustworthy for telling him not to trust Jesse, right?

So there’s no way mentioning Walt’s name back there was anything but very deliberate on Krazy-8’s part. He wanted Walt to notice so he could start to drive in that wedge between them, without it coming off like he’s just randomly offering “helpful advice” out of nowhere (which’d just seem highly suspicious). And he correctly deduced that Walt would notice if he just referred to him by name.

(In part, though, calling him by name is also a way of making it more personal, creating a tiny hint of a human connection to make Walt less comfortable with killing him.)

The gambit works; Walt already didn’t trust Jesse very well, and this seemed to be all the confirmation it took. Without knowing Krazy-8 is actually the snitch, Walt can’t reconstruct the line of logic that I outlined above - to him it just seems like Krazy-8 doesn’t trust Jesse and is making use of this fact to tell Walt he has bigger problems. He might suspect Krazy-8 wants to earn his trust by telling him, but not that the suspicions he’s planting are largely false. (Obviously the actual bit where Jesse told him about Walt is true - but Walt comes out of this very much having picked up on the implication Jesse is likely snitching for the police too, which is not.) Krazy-8 is pretty good at this.

(My really hot take on Krazy-8: it’s possible he may actually genuinely have faked unconsciousness for a bit of episode two, or at least one way or another was not as unconscious as he seemed. Between them first leaving him in the basement after Walt recaptures him and when they later hear noises and go back down to investigate, Walt and Jesse just so happen be to pretty loudly discussing some of the very things I’ve just explained Krazy-8 seems to be keenly aware of in this episode: Walt was hoping he was a man of business who might listen to reason and come to a mutually self-interested agreement, while Jesse was adamant that no, he doesn’t have high hopes Krazy-8 won’t murder their entire families if they let him go. That conversation would also have shown him that Walt and Jesse are already kind of at each other’s throats and it probably wouldn’t take too much to tip the scales - though he could also potentially have heard the argument at the end of last episode, or Jesse yelling about how terrible Walt is while melting Emilio, which happened after he woke up. Either way, it sounds like pure paranoia when Jesse suggests maybe he’s faking it and biding his time there, but it’d actually make a lot of good sense if he just so happened to be right, and Krazy-8 really was listening in to that conversation, and the unexplained noise that they heard really was him consciously moving around. I’m not going to say this is definitely true; it does feel very crackpottish, and Krazy-8 is also just good at getting a sense of people either way, so he may just have made some very good educated guesses as to Walt’s state of mind. But it’s a hilarious thought and fits better than it has any right to.)

And so, when Walt heads upstairs, he immediately breaks into Jesse’s bathroom (where he’s smoking some of their meth) to confront him about telling K8 about his name/occupation/family, call him a damn junkie, and try to flush the meth down the toilet. (This is where those glorious “Get off the toilet!” “No!” [ridiculous kicking match] gifs come from.) Jesse retrieves it from the toilet without hesitation before Walt can flush it, throws it out the window, and then runs down the stairs to retrieve it from the flowerbed, while Walt chases him. (This is part Jesse being an addict and part, as he notes, “That’s worth forty grand, you stupid shit!” - though judging from the meth prices later in this season, he’s exaggerating the actual number here.)

While running down after Jesse, though, Walt has a coughing fit and collapses. By the time he’s gotten back on his feet, Jesse’s opened the gates and gotten in his car and is about to make off with the drugs. Walt drags him back out and says they’ve got work to do, and they argue viciously; Jesse says he didn’t ask for any of this, that he can’t even live in his house anymore, and insists the coin flip is sacred. He did his part; Walt’s job is waiting for him in the basement. And with that, Jesse drives off to escape all this - Walt’s verbal abuse, Krazy-8, the murder that has to happen but that he simultaneously dreads and doesn’t really want to know of, the house where he just spent hours scrubbing the remains of someone he once considered a friend off the floors. This isn’t a very thought-out decision - but right now he just can’t stay here.

Walt’s on his own now - or, in other words, everything is going exactly as Krazy-8 would have hoped for.

Marijuana misunderstandings

Meanwhile, Skyler and Walt Jr. are painting the baby’s room, while Marie sits and talks, establishing some of her less than pleasant personality traits - her shoes “make me look like I should be changing bedpans, like I should be squeaking around bringing soup to some disgusting old person, then take the bus home to my sixteen cats”. (This is largely a classist sort of thing, tying in with her thing about trying to appear glamorous and wealthy - but also, please note specifically her distaste for the idea of caretaking for the bedridden, and put a large pin in that for way, way later. I actually love Marie and think she’s fascinating, and will get into that more later, but this does not preclude her being kind of a shitty person a lot of the time and frequently extremely infuriating.)

Walt Jr. answers his phone with “Yo, what’s up?”, and Skyler tells him to please not use the word ‘yo’, which now just reminds her uncomfortably of that kid who’s dealing drugs to Walt.

Marie nitpicks Skyler’s paintwork after Walt Jr. leaves and asks if she should really be up on a ladder in her pregnant state; Skyler would love to switch places, but Marie ignores that (she’s not dirtying herself with manual work!) and just asks why Skyler didn’t get Walt to do this. Skyler sardonically goes “There’s an idea.” This, of course, is the painting that she was trying to get Walt to do in episode one, but he never got around to; apparently she chose to take matters into her own hands after discovering her husband apparently didn’t have any time for painting but clearly had plenty of time to befriend some drug dealer and get into recreational marijuana.

Skyler uses working on a short story about a stoner character (her writing hobby was also established in episode one) as an excuse to ask Marie about what smoking pot in college did to her mood, hoping to figure out if this is the reason for all of Walt’s weird behaviour recently. Marie says it made her more serious, but Skyler remarks offhandedly that it just made her lightheaded. (I like this mention that they both smoked a bit of pot in college, particularly since they seem to know this about each other - or at least Marie doesn’t react to Skyler mentioning her own (Skyler’s) weed habit, though she’s somewhat scandalized Skyler would bring up Marie’s because obviously she’d like to think she is above that sort of thing - but Walt probably didn’t know this about Skyler or I expect he would’ve brought it up in the hospital conversation last episode. Skyler had a life before Walt, and of course there are things her sister knows about her that Walt wouldn’t.) As soon as Skyler probes further, though, Marie sees through the writing excuse - and assumes that she’s asking because Walt Jr. is smoking pot. Skyler has no problem telling her, right hand to God, that he’s not, as far as she knows… which to Marie just sounds like a confirmation.

So Marie ends up calling Hank (or, well, he calls her back a couple of hours later) to encourage him to scare Walt Jr. straight. Hank is initially reluctant; shouldn’t his dad be doing this? Marie’s response is an exasperated “Hank, he respects you”; the implicit “unlike Walt” says a lot. (After the phone call, she casually shoplifts a pair of shoes and leaves the ones she was wearing, the ones she complained about earlier, in the shop in their place. There’s something especially audacious about that.)

Thus, under the pretense of going to get ice cream, Hank drives Walt Jr. to the “Crystal Palace”, a seedy motel full of Albuquerque’s less fortunate citizens, to gawk at the drug addicts and lecture him about gateway drugs. Walt Jr. is understandably confused but takes it in stride, chuckling at Hank’s crude, over-the-top scaremongering descriptions. Hank comes close to possibly admitting he tried marijuana back in the day himself - he starts to talk about having been young once and how the world’s a messed-up place and “just this once” - but then abruptly pivots to calling over minor recurring character Wendy the sex worker as she’s minding her own business.

He shows her off like some kind of lurid spectacle, condescendingly chastising her for talking, ordering her to show her diseased teeth. To Hank, she is subhuman, a cautionary tale and nothing more. As far as he’s concerned, criminals and drug addicts just lose their people status somewhere along the way and become something gross and contemptible. Hank has various unsavoury traits including a bunch of more surface-level casual bigotry, but I think this is the very worst of him, this utter dehumanization of people he judges to be disgusting. He just has no trace of empathy or even sympathy for someone like Wendy, and it’s just deeply unpleasant to watch.

(When Hank tells Wendy to go over to Walt Jr.’s side of the car and asks how much she charges, she’s revolted; “Hey, I’m not doing him, he’s a kid.” Obviously, he was not actually about to hire her at all and is just wasting her time, but I really like the use of this line to establish the basic humanity and morals that she has, in contrast to the way Hank’s treating her right now. All in all, out of the two of them Wendy distinctly comes off as the better person in this exchange, and I appreciate that.)

But for all of Hank’s awfulness here, he is very human and not just a designated shallow asshole character. Unfortunately, people dehumanize other people all the time, and even people who treat designated others with horrible cruelty usually still love their families and friends. When Walt Jr. asks him why he’s telling him all this, his first response is “Because I love you, you little bastard” - and when Wendy asks if Walt Jr. is handicapped, Hank immediately jumps to say he broke his leg playing football and turn the subject to his beefy arms, clearly hoping to divert the sort of negative attention directed towards his disability that Walt Jr. must deal with all the time. Hank genuinely cares about him, and you get a real sense of that too.

(Before they leave, Hank asks, “So what did you think?”; Walt Jr. responds, “Cool.” Good job, Hank, you definitely turned him off drugs forever.)

Unknown to them, Jesse is hiding out in Wendy’s room at the motel, watching them leave from the window. As Wendy returns, he frantically urges her to close and lock the door before asking about who that was and whether they were after him - after he and Walt parted on such bad terms earlier, it’s started to sink in for him that leaving might have been a really bad idea. Walt had previously blackmailed him, threatened to turn him in to the cops if he refused to work with him; what if he made good on those threats and actually went to the police? That or, you know, Walt let Krazy-8 get away and now he’s after him.

Anyway, Jesse’s there right now because he’s hired her (they’re previously acquainted but this looks extremely transactional) - but judging from his lack of interest in the actual sex and the fact he keeps staring out the window the whole time, he almost definitely did so mostly as an excuse to lay low at her place for a bit. There isn’t a lot of Jesse in this episode (alas), but he is not having a good time, is what I’m saying. Next episode, which does contain a lot of Jesse, will be following up on this.

Pros and cons

Walt, since Jesse left, has been constructing a pros and cons list for murdering Krazy-8, as one does. The list looks like this, as best we can see:

LET HIM LIVE

• It’s the moral thing to do
• Judeo-Christian principles (that is a super-weird way of putting it on a list, Walt)
• You are not a murderer (right? That’s Other Walt)
• Sanctity of life
• He may listen to reason
• Post-traumatic stress
• Won’t be able to live with yourself
• Murder is wrong!

KILL HIM

• He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go.

It’s a pretty clumsy list. The “Let him live” list is literally half just different ways to state that murder is wrong (it’s the moral thing to do/Judeo-Christian principles/sanctity of life/murder is wrong), three points about how it’d be psychologically difficult and scarring (you are not a murderer/post-traumatic stress/won’t be able to live with yourself), and then that stray “He may listen to reason”. May. Walt tried really hard to fill out that left side, persuade himself that he shouldn’t kill this guy - but none of this is really at all persuasive, as much as he’d like it to be. Abstract moral principles just don’t hold all that much weight to him; next to the risk to him and his family (after all, Krazy-8 knows who he is), none of that really matters at all. Those are real, tangible, terrifying consequences. How can he decide this based on anything else?

But it feels so bad to decide actually you are a murderer after all, to imagine actually going down there with the intent of personally taking the life of another human being. He pretty much already knows he is probably going to end up doing it, one way or another - he has to - but he recoils away from the thought, stalls, makes this pointless list, hopes some way, somehow, he’ll discover some magical way to get out of this without doing it.

It’s late in the evening when Walt finally remembers Skyler and calls her to tell her Bogdan’s keeping him late at the car wash again. He actually tells her she’s right and he really needs to learn to say no. The thought that he let Bogdan walk all over him like that already feels frustrating, like he should never have put up with that in the first place - he’s technically eroding his excuse by saying this, making it less believable next time, but he can’t not say it at this point.

Eroding his excuse doesn’t actually matter, though, because Skyler is already on to him, because she’s the best and she does things offscreen while we’re watching Walt, almost as if she’s a real person and not a convenient prop. She already called Bogdan to ask about Walt when it got to be late, and she learned that he quit the car wash job two weeks ago. Wherever he is, she says, he might as well stay there for the night - and she hangs up. Things are crumbling.

Bonding

As Walt stands there with the phone, Krazy-8 calls out to him again, asking for more food - calling him Walter again, of course. Dutifully, Walt makes him another sandwich, and he even cuts the crust off - almost parental. Taking care of someone helpless like this is, in a twisted way, kind of like taking care of a child. A sort of reversed, parental form of Stockholm syndrome.

On the way down the stairs with the sandwich, though, Walt has another coughing fit, worse than it’s ever been before - Krazy-8 watches evenly, his face expressionless - and then actually faints and collapses at the bottom of the stairs, sending the plate with the sandwich flying to the floor and shattering.

When Walt comes to, Krazy-8 says he’s been out for ten or fifteen minutes. He asks about the coughing; “Were you on the same shit you used on me?” That doesn’t really make any sense; I’d read it as a joke if he didn’t look dead serious while saying it. Either way I think odds are Krazy-8 knows perfectly well that’s not it; he’s just trying to prompt Walt to correct him, tell him what’s really going on. And he does. The first person Walt tells about his cancer is the prisoner he’s holding captive and contemplating murdering.

Walt gathers up the sandwich and plate shards and goes back to the kitchen to throw them in the trash and make a new sandwich. But this time, he grabs a sixpack of beer as well. He’s alone here for the night with Krazy-8, apparently, and in a weird way telling him about his cancer has created a smidgen of a strange, precarious intimacy between them. Might as well make the most of it.

(By the way, note this is Jesse’s beer; they’re at his house. Walt, do you always just freely raid the cupboards when you’re at someone else’s place. Making Krazy-8 sandwiches, sure, the guy needs to eat. The beer? Totally didn’t need to take that.)

As Krazy-8 examines the sandwich, Walt assures him it’s safe and he didn’t poison it; Krazy-8 says that’d be the way to do it if he was going to, him being a chemist and all. I think what he was actually looking at there, though, was the cut-off crust. Krazy-8 is pretty sure Walt is still waffling about killing him, and this extra consideration for his sandwich preferences only confirms that.

Walt rolls a can of beer across the floor to him, still careful not to come anywhere within reach - and asks him his real name (Domingo) and where he’s from. Krazy-8 points out that getting to know him isn’t going to help Walt kill him - which is very true. But at this point Walt kind of wants to be persuaded to let him live. “I sure as hell am looking for any reason not to [kill you]. I mean, any good reason at all.” Krazy-8’s always been telling him he doesn’t have it in him - but at this point Walt’s more concerned that he totally does have it in him and is going to do it, and that’s a disturbing thought. Walt asks K8 to sell him on releasing him.

(Note how “Murder is wrong” just does not qualify as “any good reason at all” to Walt, even when he’s written it out in four different ways. Again, Walt is incredibly pragmatically-minded and consequentialist in thinking; the idea that murder is wrong is something he knows, sure, and could tell you, but it just doesn’t actually mean much of anything to him by itself, not really, not when push comes to shove. He has the same basic human aversion to violence and murder as your average person (now), but he can’t actually persuade himself of anything with “Murder is wrong”.)

Krazy-8 evenly makes his appeal. He says he’d promise to leave them alone, pretend all this never happened. “What’s best for both parties is we forget about it.” Note that this is exactly what Walt was proposing last episode about whether Krazy-8 would be willing to act out of mutual self-interest, just in slightly different words. (Again, K8 may just have picked up that this would be Walt’s kind of reasoning, but this is another blip in favor of him potentially listening in when Walt was talking about this.) But he also notes that anyone in this situation would make promises like that, and of course Walt can’t know if they’re true. This probably actually makes him more trustworthy to Walt - both this and the fact he pointed out getting to know him better wouldn’t help. Krazy-8’s got a pretty good grasp on Walt’s thought process - rather than gunning straight for that chance at increasing Walt’s sympathy for him or acting like Walt totally can trust him and hoping he just buys it, he’s frank about what’s going on and what the situation really is from Walt’s POV. This is how to actually make Walt like him: be on his intellectual level, voice what he’s thinking, make him feel like he’s not being manipulated.

But that’s not going to do it by itself. After a silence, Krazy-8 asks what else he can tell him, and Walt doesn’t know. Eventually he stands up, preparing to leave, and says K8’s going to have to convince him because he’s not going anywhere until he does. So Krazy-8 quickly turns back to Walt’s earlier question and tells him that he’s from here in town. He’s got a degree in business administration, but he originally wanted to study music, only to be discouraged by his dad because there’s no money in it. His dad owns a furniture store; Walt remembers the store’s commercial jingle, and they sing it together. Walt realizes he bought Walt Jr.’s crib from that store, and Krazy-8 might even have rung him up for it. K8 worked at the furniture store as a kid “until the day I said 'Fuck you’ and quit” - Walt can relate.

It’s a funny, natural, honest conversation, a quiet bonding moment. Walt gives Krazy-8 another beer - not by rolling it across the floor this time, but by just directly handing it to him, an implicit sign of growing trust (Walt still doesn’t come any closer than he needs to, though). Krazy-8 asks if Jesse knows Walt has cancer, and Walt tells him not even his family knows. Why? Because it’s not a conversation that I’m even remotely ready to have. Krazy-8, yet again quite perceptive, guesses his family’s why he’s doing this - that he wants to leave money to his folks. Chuckling, he offers to just write him a check if Walt lets him go. If this line of work doesn’t suit him, he should get out before it’s too late.

“I don’t know what to do,” Walt says after a moment of silence, his voice shaking.

“Yeah, you do.”

And after all this, after they’ve had a couple beers together and talked about the furniture store and their stupid jingle and the jobs they hated and the paradoxes of their situation, Walt believes him. Domingo’s a good kid, right? He seems so normal and honest and relatable - turned to drug dealing after quitting a shitty job, has a degree that should make him far too good for this, used to have dreams once but gave up on them. There’s no way he’d actually walk out of here and hurt Walt’s family, surely. It’d be so much nicer, so much easier, if Walt can just let him go now and everything can be normal again - or as normal as it can be, when he’s still got cancer.

So he goes up to the kitchen to get the keys. He finishes his can of beer, crumples it, and throws it in the garbage with the plate shards…

…and then he pauses. Opens the garbage again, takes out the shards, pieces them together on the counter. There’s a long, sharp piece missing.

And he knows exactly what this probably means. “No.” He digs through the trash again, looking for it, but nope; it’s still downstairs, in Krazy-8’s pocket. “No. No, don’t do this. Don’t do this. Why are you doing this?” he says to no one. He liked him; he trusted him. He told him he’s got cancer. And all the while as they were singing the stupid jingle and reminiscing and bonding, Krazy-8 was carrying a weapon to murder him with, probably hoping to gut him as soon as he’s released. This is a cruel business, and those who trust too easily end up dead.

The murder

There’s another shot of Walt silhouetted against the entrance to the basement. This time there’s no plastic bag - but we know he has just made the decision to kill him nonetheless, simply because of the parallel to the previous episode, and it’s brilliant.

The tension of the ensuing scene is absolutely grueling. Krazy-8 reassures Walt as he slowly, slowly descends with the key: “You are doing the right thing, Walter” - reassurance that probably emboldens him a bit even though K8 means it the exact opposite way.

Walt’s movements remain slow, hesitant, as he tells Krazy-8 to turn around so he can unlock him. He needs to confirm his intuition, because he just can’t do it without it; he probes for a reaction, trying to flush out the murderous intent that he knows is there.

“So you’re not angry?”

“Angry at you?” Krazy-8 shakes his head. “Nah. Live and let live, man.”

“That’s very understanding.”

“Whatever, man, I just wanna go home.”

“Me too.” He’s not lying. This hurts. All he wants is to not be here.

He pauses for a while, until Krazy-8 actually looks around and tells him to unlock him (he’s definitely already suspicious, though he doesn’t quite want to show it for fear of giving Walt more second thoughts at this precarious point). Walt reaches for the back of the bike lock, hand shaking. And then he sees Krazy-8’s hand going for his pocket. It’s that horrible confirmation he needed. A tear falls down his face. “The moment I do, are you gonna stick me with that broken piece of plate?”

And as Krazy-8 reacts, pulling out the plate shard, Walt pulls on the bike lock with all his might, choking him against the pole. They struggle for an ugly, horrifying while - some thirty seconds, long enough for the scene to just be intensely uncomfortable to watch, as it should be. Krazy-8’s jerky efforts to stab blindly behind him eventually hit Walt’s shin, but Walt keeps pulling, and in the end K8’s struggles become limp, feeble flails and he collapses, and Walt with him, muttering shocked apologies. Back when he first came down here with a plastic bag, he was hoping this would be easy and peaceful. Instead his first premeditated murder ends up a violent, brutal, traumatic affair, made so much worse by all of Walt’s previous efforts to persuade himself not to do it.

But ultimately, Walt can deal with that. Fundamentally, it’s just a bunch of chemicals. He takes a sick day to recover and dispose of the body overnight, and the next morning he sits in his stationary car on a bridge, reminiscing again about that time going over the elements of the human body with Gretchen. “Doesn’t it seem like something’s missing?” says Walt’s younger self, folding his arms at the blackboard. “What about the soul?” Gretchen suggests. Walt chuckles and turns around before realizing she’s actually serious. He leans in to kiss her and says, “There’s nothing but chemistry here.” Whatever the missing 0.1% is (error margins, Walt!), it’s not an immaterial soul. Krazy-8 was there, but now he’s gone, and nobody has to ever know any of this ever happened, and that’s all there is to it. Walt composes himself and drives home.

Aftermath

When Jesse returns the next day, he stares anxiously at the house from his car for a moment before approaching it, afraid of what he’ll find there. He checks the RV first and finds it spotless, the glassware gone. The basement is empty, bike lock neatly put away. One way or another, Walt presumably did it, and there’s no more Krazy-8 to worry about. And yet somehow he doesn’t feel all that great about it.

Worse, now Jesse’s partner is the guy who murdered Krazy-8 and then disappeared without a word, and it’s hard to feel entirely reassured by that. Jesse saw none of Walt’s struggle this episode; all he knows is Walt chased him around trying to flush his drugs and then killed a man and cleaned everything up and left. Is Walt still angry? If he was capable of murdering him, what else is he capable of? All in all, Jesse’s overall paranoia is not all that soothed.

Back out in the desert where the climax of the pilot happened, Hank and Gomez are investigating what they’ve clearly identified as a meth cook site. They figure there was some form of mobile meth lab there, a fire started probably by accident, and then the cooks left - “So why’d that little hair-gelled shit leave his car?” It’s Krazy-8’s car they’re talking about, of course, since that’s the one that was left behind (they find a sample of Walt’s meth in it) - and the fact they’re talking about him means they know who he is. And then, just before they’re called over to check out this gas mask, they conclude this means their snitch has been killed, presumably because they figure K8 would’ve at least taken the meth with him otherwise. Ergo, Krazy-8 was a police snitch all along.

When Walt arrives back at his house, he finds Skyler sitting on their bed; when she looks up, she’s crying. And finally, finally, Walt decides to tell her about his cancer. If he was ready to kill a man, then he can suck it up and have that conversation.

Hank and Gomez’s conversation is fairly opaque and I know I didn’t properly understand it on my first viewing; I’m pretty sure I originally thought they were talking about Jesse. We’re going to hear it stated more clearly in the opening of the next episode that it was Krazy-8 who was the snitch, but I’m really fond of the fact Breaking Bad will put in a scene like this where you can absolutely piece something significant together just from what’s said in it, but it’s pretty subtle and will probably just fly over a lot of first-time viewers’ heads. (It’d be bad if they didn’t reveal actually important information more explicitly at all, of course - part of the writers’ job is to make sure you can follow the story without having to solve puzzles to do it - but here it doesn’t matter since it’s information we’re going to see more explicitly too before anything else relevant happens.)

But nonetheless, I think on my first time through, this was the episode that absolutely convinced me this show isn’t just up my alley, it’s ridiculously good. The entire second half of the episode, with Walt’s conversation with Krazy-8 and the murder, is just perfectly built up - the human connection, the small world, Walt’s evolving mental state through it all and Bryan Cranston’s incredibly nuanced performance, the eventual betrayal, the tension, the sheer undiluted awfulness of the actual death. This isn’t just a show about a middle-aged chemist using chemistry to outwit drug dealers; this is a show about people, and how a particular, real, carefully built-up person might approach a genuinely horrible moral dilemma, and the drug dealers are real people too, and the protagonist has to really, actually grapple with the idea of murdering a person. It’s so good and I just knew this was something really special.

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