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.

S01E07: A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal

Presumably on the evening of Walt’s confrontation with Tuco, he and Skyler attend a meeting for parents at the high school. A representative of the APD assures them that they’re taking the theft of school lab equipment for methamphetamine production very seriously and leaving no stone unturned in the search for the persons responsible, with a delightfully hokey sign on the whiteboard behind him that says “METH = DEATH”.

One of the parents asks why they’re talking like they haven’t caught anybody. What about that janitor who was dealing drugs? In the natural course of rumourmongering, the story of a janitor who privately smoked pot in his own home has become that he was dealing drugs, because exaggeration and worst possible interpretations sure are a thing that humans do. Other concerned parents cut in as the head teacher attempts to explain, asking about background checks, why he was hired, didn’t he steal the lab equipment?

As the discussion goes on, Walt sits there stonefaced, bored. He’s the one who stole the lab equipment, and not long ago he would have spent this meeting terrified and on edge, especially when they bring up how they’re looking into who else had access to it. But right now, after the high of last episode’s confrontation, Walt is feeling very sure of himself. Look at these bumbling idiots chasing each other in circles, with no idea that it was him, who’s sitting right there. Why should he even listen to this ridiculous back-and-forth? Last episode, he felt pretty guilty about his crime being pinned on Hugo, but if he’s feeling any of that right now, he’s managed to mostly suppress it.

His eyes slide down to Skyler’s skirt, beside him, and he sneaks his hand under the table to stroke her knee. She stops him, at first, but their sex life hasn’t been much to write home about lately; there was that time the other day, of course, but that wasn’t exactly focused on her pleasure, and there’s something kind of weirdly, illicitly thrilling about the fact he’s just doing this right now, at a meeting for their son’s school, where anyone could theoretically notice.

(In the background, somebody says they heard about a school in Canada where a groundskeeper was arrested for drugs, and then they found out half the kids were on LSD. Someone goes “Why didn’t you tell us about the LSD?!” Carmen desperately tries to clarify that there was absolutely no LSD involved here. Humans gonna human.)

They are snapped out of it when Carmen asks Walt to go over the list of equipment that was stolen. Skyler looks incredibly awkward, can’t quite believe what they were doing. Carmen thanks Walt for making a special effort to be there with them as the head of the science department even though he’s on medical leave, and everyone claps, oblivious to the fact they’re clapping for the very man responsible for the theft, who’s just been feeling up his wife instead of listening to any of this.

As Walt begins to read out the list, we flash forward to them having sex in their car after the meeting. Skyler asks, “Where did that come from, and why was it so damn good?” Walt responds, “Because it was illegal.”

To Skyler, he just means the naughty nature of public sexuality, and that’s pretty much the appeal for her. But of course, on Walt’s end there’s a whole lot more to it. He’s bathing in the thrill of criminality right now, high on his success with Tuco. He feels smart, invincible, untouchable, and this is just one more way to ride that high and hold on to that feeling. Walt likes breaking the law. And that’s something we’ll be exploring more facets of for the rest of this episode.

Overconfidence

The next day (or later), Walt goes to see Jesse. It turns out Jesse has made good on the claim from episode three that he doesn’t want to spend another night in his house after flushing two liquefied drug dealers down the toilet: as Walt arrives, a realtor is showing the house off to a couple, brushing off the shoddily repaired hole in the ceiling, inviting them to imagine all the things they could do in that big roomy basement where, unknown to them, a man was recently murdered.

(A thing I wondered rewatching this, which a first-time viewer might too if they remembered Walt mentioned the house belonged to Jesse’s aunt in episode one, is whether Jesse is actually able to sell the house when he’s not actually legally the owner. I checked and season two clarifies he had an agreement with his parents that he would find a buyer for the house and they’d split the price. It’s ambiguous whether that’s an agreement that always existed and Jesse’s just sort of hoping/assuming he’ll be fine looking for buyers and worrying about getting his parents to officially sign off on the sale later, or if Jesse actually contacted them offscreen about it after getting out of the hospital - bet that would’ve been a weird, awkward phone call, after how they parted in episode four.)

Jesse himself is out in the RV, ribs still bandaged. Walt asks how he’s doing, and he says about as well as Walt looks - this is the first time Jesse’s seen him since he shaved his head, and he thinks he looks like Lex Luthor. Walt says he visited him in the hospital when he was unconscious, still feeling a bit guilty and wanting to assure him he cared enough to do that, but Jesse says yeah, Skinny Pete told him Walt had been there asking for Tuco’s address, acting like he was out for blood. “But you are alive. Obviously you wised up.”

So Walt gets to make his grand reveal: he did go see Tuco - and he gives Jesse an envelope of money, his half of the $35,000 for the meth plus the entire extra $15,000 that Walt extorted out of Tuco (for my partner’s pain and suffering), because “You’ve earned it.”

He wants Jesse to be grateful, impressed. Jesse clearly thinks Walt actually going after Tuco would have been suicide - but no, he confronted him and won. He got all this money. He even got $15,000 extra just for Jesse, to make up for the beating he took. Surely, he imagines, Jesse will praise him, ask how he pulled it off, listen to him explain with the kind of awe that he showed when he saw Walt’s meth for the first time.

But instead, Jesse is suspicious. Tuco just gave him that money? And when Walt says they made a deal, Jesse gets angry, to the point of dragging himself out of bed. Walt made a deal with Tuco? The insane drug lord who put him in the hospital for the crime of expecting to be paid for the product? Walt says they came to an understanding, and tells Jesse to look at the money in his hand, to imagine making that much every week - they’d be making two pounds a week at $35,000 a pound. (This’d make Jesse’s share $35,000 per week; what he’s holding right now is $32,500.) Surely Jesse has to appreciate–

But no, Jesse is even less happy with that. Without even talking to him Walt made a commitment to this dangerous lunatic that they would scale up their operation to two pounds a week? Where’s he even going to get that amount of pseudoephedrine? “You think the meth fairy’s just gonna bring it to us?” Jesse drives 200 miles to Las Cruces to meet up with his ‘smurfs’ who buy him the pseudo and back. “That’s the bottleneck in your brilliant business plan. Of course, you would’ve known that if you would’ve just asked me.”

At this point Walt is finally out of words to argue with him, realizing creepingly that he may have acted a bit hastily, again. We don’t see how this meeting concludes, but we can take a wild guess that it was awkward.

This scene is a fun kind of reversal of what happened at the cook site last episode - Walt comes to Jesse bringing money, feeling like he’s done good, and done a favor for Jesse in particular, expecting approval, only for Jesse to viciously dress him down instead. Unfortunately for Walt, though, I find myself decidedly on Jesse’s side of the argument again here: Walt really did just announce to him that without consulting him he’s made a commitment for the two of them to keep working for the guy who just put Jesse in the hospital, and made wildly unrealistic promises about their productivity in his continuing ignorance of how the drug trade functions, having learned nothing about not making bold assumptions about what’s possible or feasible. Jesse has every right to be angry about this.

I really enjoy the way this plays out on a first viewing, though, because last episode made Walt’s victory feel so triumphant and easily sweeps you up with it, and yet now here’s Jesse just excoriating him for it, refusing to act even slightly grateful for either the fact he did it or even the $15,000 that he added on top of Jesse’s share, angrily going over why actually this was an incredibly dumb thing to do. It feels like such a rough slap in the face not just to Walt but the viewers (probably most of them!) who were unquestioningly cheering for Walt doing this. I remember actually disliking Jesse for this, first time through! That’s kind of a wild thought to me now because he’s right: as viscerally satisfying as it seemed to watch Walt order Tuco to buy two pounds off them every week, it absolutely was an incredibly rash and stupid move, and it was inexcusable to do it without Jesse’s consent when Jesse will have no choice but to be involved. But when you’re swept up with Walt, you can really feel how he feels here, and feel a kneejerk almost defensiveness on his behalf. Or at least I did that first time! This show is good at showing people feeling and acting in irrational ways that you can nonetheless understand.

It’s worth noting that Jesse is angry about Walt making the deal with Tuco before he comes up with a concrete reason this won’t work in the pseudo thing. Mainly, the idea of continuing to deal with Tuco in any capacity just thoroughly freaks him out, and that fear becomes anger when Walt is there trying to push him into it. The fact they can’t currently make that much meth is very correct too, but in the moment, it’s a convenient rationalization; it wasn’t the original reason he got angry, but humans always love to come up with more concrete reasons that justify the emotional reactions they’re already having.

Doctor’s visit

Walt and Skyler go to a checkup with Dr. Delcavoli about the cancer treatment; Walt mentions they have a baby shower planned next week, and it’ll be nice to have a day that’s just about Skyler, which makes her smile. The doctor asks how Walt’s feeling, and he says he’s actually feeling pretty decent; Skyler adds that his energy is better, that he’s even gotten more sexual, frisky (Walt looks awkward about her talking about it - understandable in any case, but probably particularly so given the real reasons for it). That means the chemo is working, right? She’s taking it all as a hopeful sign that he’s simply physically doing better, which makes a lot of sense - timing-wise this is happening not long after he started the treatment. But really, of course, his sudden sexual energy has very little to do with the treatment and everything to do with Walt riding that criminal high.

The doctor is cautious about concluding anything from this - maybe they’ve just got the antiemetics tuned right. Skyler’s face falls a bit, but then she brings up whether there’s anything else they could be doing to help the treatment along, like alternative medicine? She really wants the treatment to just work, one way or another, for Walt to just recover from the cancer and be okay and have his better energy and libido and raise their daughter with her - so when the doctor isn’t sure this necessarily means he’s recovering, she reaches for something else that could help, miracle cures she’s heard of, any hopeful avenue that could mean Walt just beats cancer and they live happily ever after.

Dr. Delcavoli very diplomatically tells her that anything that helps the patient have a more positive outlook is good, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the treatment, but it’s important to manage expectations. Skyler picks up on the obvious subtext that he doesn’t have a high opinion of the efficacy of alternative medicine, and her face falls again; she wanted to learn good news here, some sign that things really are looking up or that they can do something more to ensure Walt’s recovery, but as a professional Dr. Delcavoli can’t give them false hope: they must realize that cancer is cancer, and there are no simple, easy solutions.

This is a very low-key little scene that I initially wasn’t sure I’d get into in the commentary, but on a closer look it is doing a fair bit - for where Skyler’s character is at at this point, clinging to the hope the treatment’s just going to work and everything’s going to be fine; for establishing Walt really is feeling better since becoming Heisenberg; and of course setting up two different things for later in the episode: the upcoming baby shower… and Skyler’s interest in trying out alternative medicine, which Walt, ever practically-minded, has carefully filed away as useful. Everything serves multiple purposes.

Supply problems

When Walt and Jesse head out for their first meeting with Tuco, Walt dons the iconic hat and sunglasses look for the first time. Off-screen, Walt has been doing a bit of planning for the future, with more time to think than before his impulsive decision to confront Tuco, and among other things, he’s realized he should try not to be recognizable as his regular self: the Heisenberg identity can’t look plainly like Walter White the high school teacher, or he’ll wind up getting found out sooner or later.

Jesse is nervous as hell, and after some tense silence he starts to distract himself by frustratedly grilling Walt about why he arranged to meet in a junkyard, “a non-criminal’s idea of a drug meet”. Walt, also irritated, asks where he conducts his business. Without a pause, Jesse says Taco Cabeza - a nice public place, open 24 hours, nobody gets shot there. Or even the mall. “Skip the part where psycho-lunatic Tuco, you know, comes and steals my drugs and leaves me bleeding to death.” In other words, being here, somewhere discreet and out of the way, where Tuco could easily just murder them with no witnesses, has Jesse extremely on edge after his last encounter with Tuco. But as usual, Walt didn’t consult with Jesse on this - he just picked out a location that sounded to him like where a drug deal would take place. The notion of coming to Jesse for advice, in an area where Jesse legitimately has more experience, is still something that just does not occur to Walt.

As Tuco’s car approaches and Jesse is obviously agitated (he does this anxious gesture of grabbing his head as he takes a shaky breath, then winces in pain and touches his side as the stretch puts pressure on his cracked ribs, then sort of plays it off like he was just kind of casually stretching, and I love it), Walt tells him he doesn’t have to be there for this. He hesitates for a moment but then says “Nah. I’m no pussy. I’m good.” Toxic masculinity, ladies and gentlemen, stronger than fear of literal murder.

Tuco is all smiles as he comes out of the car, even casually apologizes for roughing up Jesse. Hilariously, he also comments on why the hell they’re way out in some junkyard (“They close the mall or something?”). Walt hands him a bag of meth - only just over half a pound, which he explains as being due to “production problems”. Tuco is unhappy and only hands over $17,000 for it - half the agreed-upon price of $35,000 per pound, minus $500 for wasting his time. “Hey, come on,” Walt begins to say, but when Tuco raises his voice, asks if he’s got something to say, they’re silent.

“You’re doing business like a couple little bitches,” Tuco says, turning around to leave. And the taunt pushes through Walt’s hesitation, to the plan he’d been turning over in his head but not told Jesse about yet - probably he wasn’t quite sure he’d go for it, but manages a little blaze of determination here to cast the dice and regain control. Last time, after all, he probably recalls, Tuco responded better to Walt being forceful about getting his way, pushing as far as he could.

So, as Jesse stares, Walt coldly insists he wants the full $70,000. “You like this product and you want more. Consider it a capital investment.”

Tuco is clearly annoyed but offers $52,000 with 25 points vig; Walt doesn’t know what that means, so Jesse has to explain that it’s weekly interest. Walt calculates on the spot that that means they’ll have to pay it back in $65,625 worth of meth, 1.875 pounds. (This number seems to be calculated as $52,500 * 1.25, so I guess Walt is including the $500 that Tuco knocked off for wasting his time.) Tuco says no, he wants two full pounds next Friday and no production problems. Walt one-ups that by asking, “Can you handle four pounds?” Jesse actually lifts his shades to stare at Walt.

Tuco tells Walt that talk is talk, and owing him money is bad, before throwing a wad of bills at them and pouring the rest of the money on the ground, making it clear he’s not happy. But he did agree, just like Walt thought.

As Walt begins to pick up the money, Jesse mutters, “What did you just do?”

New plan

Back at Jesse’s house, as Walt calmly scribbles something on a piece of paper, Jesse paces agitatedly, ranting: there aren’t enough smurfs in the world to get the pseudoephedrine to make four pounds of meth in a week. Walt, though, finally explains that they’re not going to need pseudoephedrine - they’re going to switch to a new method, one that uses methylamine instead.

Jesse looks at him in disbelief. No pseudo? Nope. And he breaks into a grin, sudden relief after a while of steadily growing anxiety. Walt actually has a plan, explaining a method patiently like it’s the simplest thing in the world; he’s about to pull off some new genius thing and just make this impossibility possible after all, and then maybe Tuco isn’t going to murder them both, and it’ll all just work out after all. One thing he actually likes about cooking with Walt is this idea of getting to do something awesome that he never could’ve imagined before, and while Walt keeps being ignorant when it comes to the world of dealing drugs, Walt’s powers of chemistry still seem magical enough that it actually feels like it checks out that if he has a cool chemistry plan, it really might just solve everything. “Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!”

(It doesn’t quite make sense that they made it all the way home with Jesse ranting for a while without Walt at any point just explaining what he’s thinking until now, but the way this plays out is fun, so I’ll give them this.)

What Walt has been writing down is a shopping list of everything they need to perform the new cook. He tells Jesse obtaining some of these items may be challenging - not in a concerned, this could be hard sort of way, but in a teacher giving a student a tough assignment sort of way. Jesse tries to read out the list, awkwardly mispronouncing its contents (he reads mm, as in millimeters, as M&M the candy, which is adorable, I will be taking no questions), which quickly sours his enthusiasm; now he just feels kind of stupid and in over his head, and last time he asked Walt about chemistry didn’t exactly get a great reception. He gets up and says forget it, he’s out, he’s just going to move to Oregon or something.

But Walt grabs his shoulders (Jesse: “What are you doing?”) and starts giving him a motivational speech. Last episode, Jesse was so reluctant to try to do the cook on his own - but he responded well when Walt told him he could do it. That’s what works on Jesse, he’s realized: teacher mode, encouraging him, making him think this is a tough, worthy challenge but a thing he can do. Today is the first day of the rest of Jesse’s life, he says - but will it be a life of fear, of never thinking he can do things or believing in himself?

“I don’t know!” Jesse says, defensively.

“Listen. These things, we need them. And only you can get them for us.”

It’s not only Jesse who can get them, of course. It’s just a shopping list; it’s not like Walt couldn’t buy these things, probably more easily than Jesse could if anything (as a chemist he would probably kind of have a better idea how to obtain all these chemicals and equipment that Jesse is clearly completely unfamiliar with, right?). Walt is saying this to make Jesse feel special and needed and important, so that he will stick with him and they can keep doing this.

He does, in a sense, need Jesse: he’s unlikely to get lucky again with such a convenient partner for the drug trade. Which is not a real need, of course; he could let Jesse go and simply quit and take Elliott’s job offer like he’s always been able to since episode five. But Walt is happy and confident right now in a way he hasn’t been since the series began. He doesn’t want to lose that. And so, he’s going for pushing the right emotional buttons to coax Jesse into staying and going along with his plan. He probably doesn’t think of it as manipulating him, exactly - but that’s what it is.

Originally, when Walt took up cooking with Jesse, he blackmailed him into working with him; now he’s found another way to keep him on his side - one that’s a lot more effective and functional, and probably feels less sinister. I’m sure Walt thinks of it as just a good kind of encouragement for a student who needs some coaxing. Whether it actually is, though, is another matter entirely.

Baby shower

Walt Jr. films a baby shower video at the White house, where an enthusiastic Marie asserts that twenty years from now when Holly (who Marie insistently wants to name Esmeralda) watches the video her Aunt Marie will look exactly the same - a joke, of course, but definitely a tongue-in-cheek expression of Marie’s genuine vanity. She also tells Walt Jr. to turn the camera around to show 'Esmeralda’ her older brother, only to be scandalized that he has it pointed “right up the nose” and quickly force him to turn it back to her instead - projecting a bit of that vanity onto him, too, even though he clearly couldn’t care less.

When Walt is asked to say hello to his daugher on camera, he hesitates. By the time Holly sees this video, he fully believes he will be dead (unlike Skyler’s relentless need to stay optimistic), and she’ll never have known him; this will be one of his only chances to speak to his daughter. He tells her he’s very proud of her, thinks about her all the time, and to always remember she has a family who loves her - things he imagines he’d want to say to her every day of her life, that he won’t have the chance to tell her. It’s starkly different in tone from the rest of this video, bordering on awkward, but he means it. And… while he can’t actually say it, part of what he means by always remember you have a family who loves you is that he hopes he’ll have left a bunch of money behind that she’ll reap the benefits of, even if she’ll never know what he did to get it.

Skyler unwraps presents. Hank and Marie have inexplicably given them a white gold baby tiara (but Marie makes it pretty obvious this present was all her). Skyler awkwardly tries to act impressed - “You spent too much on this! You shouldn’t have! You really, really shouldn’t.” As a present it’s ridiculous - something likely very expensive, tacky, and with no practical use whatsoever. But Marie is the sort of person who gets excited about status symbols, things that she thinks project wealth and class, so this is exactly the sort of thing she would legitimately appreciate and be into. Skyler doesn’t want to offend her, so she feigns excitement and gratitude, while internally horrified at the thought that Marie spent that much money, money that they could actually use, on something like this.

Meanwhile, Hank, tired of watching the unwrapping of endless presents, takes Walt aside and asks if he’s got anything stronger than beer. As they sit together over drinks he brings out fancy cigars, but falters when he realizes it might be insensitive to Walt’s cancer; Walt, however, asks to try one himself. “I’ve already got lung cancer.”

Walt notices the cigars are Cuban and comments that he’s pretty sure they’re illegal. Hank chuckles; “Yeah, well, sometimes forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest, doesn’t it?”

That rings interestingly true to Walt right now, in his current stage of embracing criminality. Hank isn’t such a diehard stickler for the law either, when it comes right down to it, and in this moment he dares to feel a sense of kinship with him on it. He muses casually about how we draw that line, what’s legal and what’s illegal - alcohol used to be illegal too, after all. Who knows what’ll be legal next year?

…By which Hank thinks he means pot, of course. But Hank, DEA agent and all, is not as willing to go there as Walt perhaps dared to hope for a moment. What, cocaine? Heroin? “I’m just saying it’s arbitrary,” Walt says after a pause, guard back up a little. Hank says a lot of guys in lockup talk like that - and sometimes it goes the other way, too, with things being legal that shouldn’t be. “I mean, friggin’ meth used to be legal.” Used to be sold over the counter at pharmacies! “Thank God they came to their senses on that one, huh?”

After a moment, Walt says, “Yeah.” Not quite the validation that he wanted. Hank absolutely wouldn’t take kindly to Walt’s new business, cigars or no. But he won’t let that stop him.

In the evening, when everyone’s gone, he’s already making plans for how he’s going to make four pounds of meth for Tuco. He tells Skyler he’s been thinking about what she said about alternative medicine at the doctor’s visit. She quickly tells him not to worry, that she’s not going to talk about that anymore - she picked up what the doctor was putting down, and she always knew it was the sort of thing Walt would scorn, after all. But Walt says no, maybe there is something to it. Skyler’s brow furrows; I love how obvious it is that she would have thought Hell would freeze over before Walt would say that. (Bringing it up at the doctor’s office was a hopeful grasp for the doctor to maybe agree it could be a good idea, which would probably have been the only way she figured Walt might have agreed to try anything like that.)

He shows her a website about a Navajo sweat lodge healing ceremony that’s supposed to be good for the lungs; he’d drive up on Friday and come back on Sunday. “I’m not saying that I believe in it, but it might be an experience.”

Really, of course, Walt is planning to spend the weekend with Jesse cooking up a new batch of meth. And Skyler is all for Walt wanting to try it after all, as he’d predicted. Everything is going according to plan.

(Tuco explicitly wanted the four pounds by next Friday; possibly he just meant Friday next week, and not the actual next Friday, which would have been the one Walt’s planning to head out on.)

The heist

Presumably the next day, Walt looks through what Jesse has gathered in his garage, makes sure to praise him for getting the correct things (Jesse affirms his praise, Damn straight, talks about how it was hard to get, successfully feeling like he did a good job - he got exactly what Walt said to get, too, eager to prove himself after the bathtub incident in episode two).

One problem, though: he did not manage to procure methylamine. He couldn’t just buy that like the rest of this stuff - the only real way to get it is to steal it from a locked-down chemical supply place south of town. (Get ready for methylamine to be the writers’ go-to supply problem in the series from here; I don’t know how accurate that is to real-life methamphetamine synthesis, but for the purposes of the narrative, it’s the one ingredient of the new cook that is singularly problematic to obtain.)

Not willing to leave it there (he wanted to do a good job!), he did find some guys who’d be willing to steal it for them - but they wanted $10,000 for it, and by this point, after buying everything else, Jesse didn’t have enough money left to pay them. What Jesse is presumably after here is just for Walt to give him some more money from his own share to pay the thieves - they must surely have enough, after the Tuco deal, and both he and Walt talk about it in terms of how much money he has, not how much they have collectively. (Really, surely the supplies shouldn’t all be bought out of Jesse’s share anyway, so Walt owes him at least half the cost, right? Maybe Walt already gave him extra money for half of what he estimated it would cost, but I’m not super convinced.)

But Walt’s not thrilled about the prospect. It’s a lot of money, and it’s involving more people who could be a risk. Who knows how competent these thieves are, or if they might get caught and point the police towards them? He asks Jesse about the chemical facility - and then notices an old Etch-a-Sketch in a box on a shelf behind Jesse. He picks it up, shakes it for the familiar sound of the powder inside, and smiles. “So why don’t we just steal it ourselves?” He waits for the inevitable how, and then smugly presents the toy. “With this.”

Walt takes great pleasure in explaining his plan to Jesse - the powder inside the Etch-a-Sketch, thermite, is a substance that was used in World War II to destroy otherwise indestructible weapons, because it burns unusually hot, allowing it to melt through several inches of metal. Using his chemistry genius to do something like this and sneak in to steal the methylamine themselves sounds exciting, like another challenge for him to solve with his intellect - certainly more exciting than paying some criminals ten thousand dollars.

For the break-in, Walt buys hilarious knitted ski masks with colorful pom-poms on them for them to wear for concealment; “It was all they had.” (Jesse: “Then you go to another store! If this is all they had, you’re in the wrong place!”) When a guard who was meant to leave stays to go to the bathroom, Jesse, thinking quickly, comes up with tying a rope around the port-a-potty, trapping the guard inside to give them more time (once again Jesse is actually pretty creative and ingenious with plans). They manage to get inside, but not without setting off loud, ringing alarms, and there are no simple gallon jugs of methylamine to grab - they’re forced to carry an entire barrel that they can only barely lift together.

All in all, it’s all pretty goofy and not exactly smooth sailing - they’re clearly not competent supercriminals - but by a combination of quick thinking and luck, they do manage it, successfully making it home with a full barrel of the methylamine without being seen or followed. And as a side-effect of being forced to take way more methylamine than they expected, they now have much more than they need. This should last them a good long while.

The tiara

Skyler heads to the jewelry store to discreetly return the baby tiara in the hope of getting something more useful for the money, only to be detained at the store as the manager recognizes that it’s stolen and calls the police. She tries to tell them it was really a gift from her baby shower (she indicates her visibly pregnant belly to help her case), but when the manager asks who gave it to her, Skyler refuses to implicate her sister and just says she doesn’t have to tell him that.

The manager, unimpressed, tells her she can talk to the police, and he’ll tell them his daughter-in-law saw a tall blonde woman with it who disappeared when her back was turned - which must be a lie to whatever degree, given Marie is decidedly not blonde. Skyler, distraught, counters by threatening to talk to the news about how they illegally detained an innocent pregnant woman in a dank storeroom (“This is my office!” protests the manager), then dramatically fakes going into labor until they figure this is more trouble than it’s worth and let her go. Damn, Skyler.

As soon as she’s out, she leaves a pointed message on Marie’s answering machine. Marie dodges all of Skyler’s attempts to contact her, though, until finally Skyler manages to corner her at another jewelry store to confront her about it - and about the efforts to avoid her, including sneaking out the back when Skyler came to her office. Marie scoffs, claiming she was just going to lunch; “Skyler, what are you, the paranoid police?”

Rather than chasing after Marie’s obvious avoidance, Skyler moves on to the bit about how she was accused of shoplifting the tiara at the store. Marie immediately seizes upon what she was doing at the store, and taking offense at Skyler trying to return the tiara, dodging the shoplifting bit. Skyler doesn’t take the bait and just asks what is wrong with her, why she would do such a thing. (Skyler never exactly expresses surprise at the notion she might have shoplifted it at all; I suspect she’s well aware this is a habit of Marie’s from when they were younger, and she’d merely assumed Marie wouldn’t give expensive shoplifted jewelry to someone else as a gift.) At which Marie just shrugs, claiming she has no idea what Skyler is talking about, and awkwardly sticks to that bizarre claim until Skyler gives up and leaves.

I find this reaction fascinating and revealing. Marie isn’t really trying to convince Skyler she didn’t steal it here. She isn’t trying to fake being the kind of upset that any regular person would be at being wrongly accused of stealing, or suggesting alternative explanations (unlike how she explained away the sneaking out of her office), or even precisely stating she didn’t do it. She’s just weirdly refusing to acknowledge it, because the thing Marie really can’t deal with is not precisely being caught, but the idea of herself having to actually confront it. Marie’s kleptomania is directed toward stealing things that feed her vanity and lofty self-image, but being a kleptomaniac and having to steal them itself clashes terribly with that self-image in a way she can’t reconcile - so she doesn’t. She has a firm mental barrier in place where she just refuses to examine or confront her shoplifting habit at all, and the defense she employs when Skyler tries to force the issue is just this flimsy, transparent refusal to even acknowledge the accusation until Skyler gives up.

And Skyler is loyal to her sister. She’s deeply angry and frustrated, but she’s not going to report her, or let the store report her, or tell Hank about it. I’m going to want to bring this up again later.

Open house

As Walt and Jesse prepare to head out to the desert to do the cook, the RV is again refusing to start, like it was early in episode two (setup!). Like back then, the two of them are frustrated and hostile at each other, but this time they’re a bit more functional about it; Walt lets Jesse try it when he asks, and when Jesse does get it to start and gloats a bit (“Eat it, okay? I’m the king!”) Walt says, “Yeah, okay”, choosing to just let Jesse have this one.

Only then there’s a worrying sound. The engine’s shot; the RV’s just not going anywhere right now. Instead, they’re going to have to cook in Jesse’s basement.

They bicker a bit more over maneuvering the heavy barrel down the stairs, but successfully get it there and upright. Walt asks about the real estate agent, whom Jesse had completely forgotten about; as he prepares to call her, he says, “Good call, yo,” swallowing his pride to acknowledge that Walt may have saved both their skins there. For better or worse, our duo are figuring out how to get along and work together as partners.

Unfortunately, though, the real estate agent is already there, phone left ringing in the car as she puts up an “Open house” sign. They go ahead with the cook despite not getting an answer, which seems unwise, but I suppose they don’t have a lot of time or options, and probably they figured leaving a message on the answering machine would be enough - they hadn’t guessed she was already here. Walt’s upped the ante for the cook yet again - they’re making four and a half pounds, not just four. With the amount of methylamine they have, they’ll be able to do that much every week for the foreseeable future.

“How long is that gonna be?” Jesse asks, thinking of the cancer. “I mean, in your situation? How much cash do you need?”

“More.” This is a very telling answer - Walt’s first thought isn’t some goal, some purpose he wants more money for (pay for the cancer treatment, for his children’s college…), but just the kneejerk impulse for more. The idea of scaling up their production like this is not really about having enough cash for anything in particular, but about the thrill he gets out of it. But it does put into his head that he should try to come up with a figure, some rationally justified target to go for.

Jesse doesn’t question it, though - or at least he has no time to, because that’s when they hear people: a bunch of potential buyers are here to check out the house. After a goofy comedic sequence where they awkwardly try to keep doing the cook and just keep people from coming into the basement (“It’s occupied!”), Jesse finally just orders everybody out, yelling that the house is not for sale. This whole bit is pretty silly, and there’s no real reason Jesse didn’t just immediately walk out to cancel the open house when they realized people were there (maybe he was still holding on to the hope of selling the house, but he easily could have just canceled this open house without deciding not to sell the house if he really wanted to, so that doesn’t seem terribly convincing), but on the other hand this was hilarious, so I’ll allow it.

Walt finally returns home after they’ve finished the cook, collapsing onto a sofa after a tense and exhausting couple of days. Skyler collapses as well after getting him a glass of orange juice; she’s also had a pretty exhausting weekend. Walt asks if she’s okay, and she tells him about the shoplifted tiara, that she nearly got arrested trying to return it, that Marie refuses to acknowledge or apologize for it, that she doesn’t know what to do.

“People sometimes do things for their families,” Walt suggests after a long moment. He, after all, also committed a theft this weekend, so he can’t help but feel vaguely defensive at Skyler’s indignation. And what he’d like to tell Skyler about why he did it is that he did it for the family. Technically maybe Marie did, too; maybe she just really wanted to give them something nice, whether they technically wished for it or not, the way Walt hopes to earn them a bunch of money even if they probably wouldn’t precisely approve of how he’s doing it?

Skyler gives him a baffled look. “People sometimes do things for their families? And what, that justifies stealing?”

“Well…”

“Wow. That must’ve been some sweat lodge. Are you even listening to the words coming out of your mouth?”

Skyler is not having any of his little justification, especially as a response to Marie’s behaviour, and it makes Walt self-conscious. He asks what she’d do if it were him. Would she divorce him, turn him in?

“You don’t want to find out,” she says after a pause, moving closer; he smiles, and she does too, and they kiss. She looked a little suspicious of this weird line of questioning there, but for the moment, they were just talking about Marie, and there’s no real reason to think it wasn’t just an idle hypothetical from a husband just back from a weird mind-expanding experience.

The biggest overarching theme of this episode, I think, is that Walt, Skyler, Hank and Marie all find themselves confronting criminality in different ways here, and we get an interesting, revealing look at their relationships to the concept. Walt is becoming ever more comfortable with his own, embracing and finding a thrill in applying his intellect toward criminal purposes, even when it’s not even necessary or the wisest choice. Hank casually comes to a party with illegal cigars - an illustration of the same hypocrisy that led him to overlook Walt’s pot-smoking while arresting Hugo, this silent implicit assumption that yeah, it’s illegal but they’re not real criminals. Marie’s shoplifting habit is picked back up on after first being shown in “…and the Bag’s in the River”, giving a glimpse into the way that she simply mentally refuses to even acknowledge that she’s engaging in criminal behaviour at all. And Skyler is scandalized by Marie’s actions and Walt’s tentative testing of the waters - but she still covers for Marie at the store, and when she finds herself accused, rather than betraying Marie despite her anger with her, she turns to lies and blackmail in her desperation, and is actually pretty good at it, thinking on her feet and successfully wriggling out of it despite her obvious distress. All of this is pretty relevant to their characters in the seasons to come.

But also - Walt really is already kidding himself about doing it for the family, and his actions in this episode have demonstrated that over and over, making it decidedly hollow and ironic when he invokes it as an excuse here. The choices he has been making here are, again and again, to push harder to earn more faster and do the risky thing that might get him caught or injured but is personally satisfying to him, despite that what’d be best for his family would be to play it safe the moment he could cover the cancer treatment. The idea of doing it for his family makes him feel good about doing it - but that’s not why he promised way more meth than he needed to Tuco, or why he wanted to personally steal the methylamine, or why he just wants more.

Tuco’s rage

Walt and Jesse bring 4.6 pounds of meth to Tuco at the junkyard (once again Walt pushed a bit further, to do just a little more than planned). Tuco complains that the meth is blue in color - a result of the new cooking process, Walt assures him, but it’s every bit as pure. (I’m not convinced this makes much sense in real life, though I’m no chemist, but the show will make repeated good use of their particular meth being identifiable because it’s blue, so I’m happy to suspend disbelief. Let’s imagine it’s structural coloring, like the wings of a morpho butterfly - rather than containing some kind of blue chemical, which’d contradict the idea it’s still just as pure, something about the crystal structure is such that it causes interference with light that results in it appearing blue.)

After trying it, Tuco is thrilled, whatever the color. He compliments Walt, says he’s all right. Tuco’s men hand them the money originally agreed on plus extra for the extra 0.6 pounds. “We’re gonna make a lot of money together,” Tuco says, smiling.

“Just remember who you’re working for,” adds one of Tuco’s men, No-Doze - trying to keep them in check, make sure they don’t get cocky and still respect Tuco as their boss. And… Tuco flies into a rage. “Like they don’t already know that? Are you saying that they’re stupid?” Or, if not, that he’s stupid? Why’s he speaking for him, like he can’t speak for himself?

Walt suggests they all just relax. And after a laugh, and repeating, “I’m relaxed,” Tuco without warning knocks No-Doze down and begins to beat the shit out of him as Walt and Jesse watch in horror. Tuco proudly shows off his bloodied fist, then leaves them with a laugh and a “Next week.”

Walt and Jesse are left staring after him, with a cold reminder that regardless of them learning to work better together and having the materials to make and sell a lot of meth without the previous bottlenecks, they are currently tied to a ticking time bomb. Tuco is violently unstable and completely unpredictable, and there is no way to be sure to stay on his good side - and they’ve committed to selling him four pounds of meth a week for the foreseeable future. (Once again, Jesse was entirely right to be angry about Walt making a commitment to Tuco.)

We could see this in Tuco already last episode - he waved off Jesse’s meth being a little light of a pound, but then got really threatening at, of all things, Skinny trying to assure Jesse that Tuco was good for the money. It’s a deeply strange, unexpected thing for him to take issue with - and yet there is definitely a coherent common element there and here. Tuco hates to have anyone else try to back him up, and I think it’s essentially rooted in Tuco having this warped self-image where he wants to imagine more or less at all times that the notion of anyone defying or distrusting him is simply absurd. And when people try to vouch for him or remind people they’re working for him, it implicitly suggests his position isn’t completely secure after all, that they think there was some kind of chance the other person didn’t trust him or didn’t regard him unquestioningly as the boss, and that really drives Tuco mad.

Just the same, though, it’s a backwards logic that’s unintuitive to puzzle out and pretty detached from reality, and who knows what else might set him off; there’s no way to just figure him out and be safe from there. That unpredictability, I think, is what makes Tuco a great villain for this point in the series. He’s pretty lightweight in terms of character depth, but he’s a credible threat and his presence easily creates tension. We, and Walt and Jesse, simply have no idea what Tuco might do next, no reliable way to steer clear of angering him, and that’s pretty scary, especially for a high school teacher who only just started to fancy himself a criminal and his former student who already got put in the hospital by Tuco once. Walt thought that blowing up Tuco’s heartquarters had him tamed - but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re trapped in the lion’s den now, with no easy way out. And that’s the ominous note on which we end the first season.

Famously, season one was originally meant to be longer, and Jesse was meant to die at the end of it (this would be a very different show if that had happened), but the 2008 writers’ strike cut it short here. As a result, this definitely doesn’t feel all that much like a season finale, in terms of structure and overall stakes (ironically less so than “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, which did have a pretty season finale feel to it), but it does work better as such than it could have, I think - it does in its way mark the end of an era and beginning of a new one as we’ve made our way through the rocky beginning stages of Walt and Jesse’s working relationship, done a big heist for materials, and established the iconic blue meth, while demonstrating the presence of a larger threat going into the next season.

Even so, I think this is my least favorite episode of the season, at least on measures other than humour (it is pretty hilarious, and definitely stands with “Cat’s in the Bag…” as one of the show’s funnier episodes - I prefer the latter myself because its humour is darker and interplays in a more fun way with the sheer fucked-up awfulness of what’s going on, but that’s more a matter of taste, and the goofy ski masks are definitely pretty iconic). Ultimately as an individual episode it’s just a bit scattered and silly overall, compared to most of the rest of the show; I found myself making more nitpicks here than for any of the previous ones, and there aren’t quite any really standout memorable bits aside from the purely comedic.

That said, there’s still some good and important stuff going on here for the overall arc of the show - the exploration of what criminality means for all four of Walt/Skyler/Hank/Marie, Walt’s power trip as he begins to embrace how much he enjoys this for its own sake even if he still justifies it with his family, “How much cash do you need?” “More” - and very significantly, Walt figuring out how to manipulate Jesse.

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