I watched it but wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. It’s interesting,I don’t want to say more.
I really don’t mind a spoiler.
I have no cable so I have no idea until Tuesday and I hate to wait.
“You can check out any time you like,” those poet-philosophers the Eagles once observed. “But you can never leave.”
Walt opened Sunday night’s penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” by trying to check out. If he removed himself from what was left of his bloody world, he figured with more than a hint of desperation, maybe the handful of survivors – notably his wife, son and daughter – could stay survived.
Over the course of 75 minutes, alas, he came to realize the Eagles were right.
Saul’s guy, the man who creates new identities for people who have worn out their old one, moved Walt to the coldest, remotest cabin at the far end of HellandGone, New Hampshire. He had no phone, Internet or television. He had a wood stove, a month’s worth of canned goods and a winter’s worth of snow.
Oh yeah, and his cough was getting worse. “One of these times when you come here,” he told Saul’s guy on his once-a-month supply drop, “I’m going to be dead.”
Not so fast.
By episode’s end, Walt decided to bolt from New Hampshire because, for the same reasons he had explained to Saul in the episode’s first few minutes.
“What I do is for my family,” Walt said, reiterating a theme he believes. “I will kill Jack and his crew, get my money back and give it to my children. Only then am I finished.”
He wanted to kill Jack, we will remember, because last week Jack killed Hank, who was family, and also took six of the seven barrels Walt had stuffed with cash, about $69 million.
This revenge fantasy notwithstanding, Sunday’s episode dialed way back on the bloody violence that marked the last couple of weeks.
There was only one murder, though it was colder than dry ice.
Jesse, we will remember, had been shackled by Psycho Todd last week with the idea that he would be kept alive just long enough to cook the rest of the crew’s meth.
This Sunday, we saw Todd, Uncle Jack and the boys entertaining themselves by watching the confession tape that Jesse made for Hank.
It was not a good character reference for Todd, and Uncle Jack wanted to kill Jesse immediately. But Todd, who in the true spirit of sociopathy puts business first, sold Jack again on the argument that Jesse was temporarily worth more alive.
With Walt gone, no one can cook meth like Jesse.
Without a lot else to do in the cage where he was shackled, Jesse eventually used a paper clip to pick his cuffs and sneak out.
Unfortunately, he only got as far as the fence. Jesse, it seems, couldn’t even check out.
Presumably to discourage future escape attempts, Todd, Jack and the crew bound and gagged Jesse and drove him to his old girlfriend Andrea’s house.
Todd knocked on the door and politely invited her to come see Jesse in their truck.
Once she was close to enough to see Jesse, and therefore for Jesse to see her, Todd shot her.
Everyone in “Breaking Bad,” it seems, understands that the best way to hurt a guy is to shoot his family and friends.
So that was the last we saw of Jesse heading into next week’s series finale.
Skyler, meanwhile, got hauled in front of the feds, who asked her if she understood what they wanted.
“I understand I’m in terrible trouble,” she said. “You will use everything in your power against me and my children if I don’t give you Walt. But I can’t. I don’t know where he is.”
Saul had predicted to Walt that the feds would institute RICO proceedings against Skyler. So even if she eventually got off on grounds of not knowing anything, she would lose the house and everything else, and it would be at least 18 months before it was over.
Saul apparently had a point. The house was being auctioned off. Skyler, we learned from Saul’s guy on his monthly dropoff visit to Walt, was working part-time as a taxi dispatcher.
She wasn’t in jail, which was good, but back when she was still in the house, she got a visit from Psycho Todd and the crew, who made it clear that if she breathed a word about Lydia to the feds, it would be very bad for the children.
“You don’t want us coming back” is how Todd phrased it.
Todd subsequently had a coffee-shop meeting with Lydia, at which she told him his assurances about Skyler’s silence were insufficient and they would have to temporarily terminate their partnership.
Todd knew the magic words to reel her back in, however. He told her the last batch of meth was 92% pure and had its blue tint back.
“That’s Heisenberg level,” she said, repeating the 92% figure over and over.
As a small sidelight here, Uncle Jack and the boys were teasing Todd about being sweet on Lydia.
Making a play for her, they suggested, was about as smart as Jesse trying to escape.
We mention this because this arguably was Sunday’s comic relief scene. Beyond the teasing, Uncle Jack also quoted a Woody Allen movie, saying he could understand Todd being attracted to Lydia because “the heart wants what the heart wants.”
That Todd. What a romantic.
In any case, Sunday’s episode was primarily spent positioning the chess pieces on the board for the finale – and that meant most of the focus fell on Walt, who after five seasons will doubtless be at the center of whatever goes down.
At the beginning of the episode, Walt tried to talk Saul, who was also getting a new identity, into joining him in the plan to wipe out Jack’s crew and reclaim those other six barrels of his money.
Saul, for the first time, said no and meant it.
“I’m out,” he said. “Best case scenario, three months from now I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. I’m just another [guy] with a job and three pairs of Dockers.”
When Walt tried to intimidate him, Walt broke down in a coughing fit that effectively spoiled the intimidation.
But after many weeks alone in the New Hampshire cabin – How alone? He offered Saul’s guy $10,000 to stay and keep him company for two hours – Walt finally bundled up $100,000 and lurched eight miles down a frozen road to the nearest tiny town. His plan was to send it to a friend of Junior’s, then have Junior retrieve it so he and Skyler could use it and the feds would never know they had it.
When Walt phoned Junior from a pay phone at a bar to tell him about the plan, Junior screamed that Walt had killed Uncle Hank and he didn’t want anything from him.
“Why are you alive?” yelled Junior. “Why aren’t you dead?”
Okay, that didn’t go so well. So next Walt called the DEA and asked to speak to the person in charge of the Walter White investigation. He didn’t say anything, but left the phone off the hook so the call could be traced.
In the final scene, the local cops approached the bar. They didn’t see what viewers saw, which was an empty glass saying Walt had left.
No surprise there. Viewers will remember that in the first scene of these Final Eight episodes, Walt drove up to his old house, now with a fence around it.
By keeping this next-to-last episode for the most part eerily calm, creator Vince Gilligan wisely left most of the major pieces on the board for next week’s conclusion.
The final season has established that there are people out there, notably Uncle Jack, Psycho Todd and their crew, who are arguably more immoral than Walt, Jesse, Skyler or any of our old friends.
That gives no clues, however, about where the scales of justice will land and whom they will crush.
So is there a chance they will one day write of Walt’s death that he passed away peacefully at home with his loved ones by his side?
Oh, sure, it’s possible.
Let’s ask the Eagles.