(Spoilers)
Matt Zoller Seitz is so wrong, here:
Was this a perfect season? No, not remotely; in fact, in retrospect I think it was too long, stretching maybe nine or 10 episodes’ worth of plot over 13 episodes, and indulging in some flourishes that were only acceptable if you viewed them through the prism of individual characters’ apparently boundless stupidity — for example, Skyler’s impulsive decision to give her former employer nearly $700,000 to pay back taxes without consulting her husband first, a twist that set up that great finale of “Crawl Space” but also made an otherwise intelligent character look like a dope.
This is the second time Zoller Seitz has complained that Skyler White’s decision to pay off her former boss’s six-figure tax debt is implausible. Actually, Skyler’s decision was smart. She acted decisively, but not impulsively. The writers meticulously laid out the evidence that made her decision seem sound and psychologically natural for her character.
We’ve known for a long time that Skyler is the accountant who signed off on the books after her ex-boss (and ex-lover), Ted, embezzled a lot of money from the his own firm. When Ted comes under the scrutiny of the criminal investigation division of the IRS, they are both in the crosshairs.
As Skyler explains to Ted, the IRS has the power to probe finances of everyone connected with the company’s books, including hers.
Skyler and Walt have recently purchased a car wash to launder Walt’s meth cooking money. Skyler is in charge of running the car wash and laundering the money. We have seen that she is very rational and thorough when it comes to covering her tracks.
When the IRS inspector arrives to grill her and Ted, Skyler dupes the inspector. She plays dumb and convinces him that she was just a spectacularly incompetent bookkeeper, not a tax cheat.
Miraculously, the IRS gives Ted an out: Pay your back taxes and penalties, and we’ll call it even. If Ted doesn’t pay what he owes, the criminal investigation will continue, the ruse will come to light, and Ted will go to jail, as might Skyler for signing off on his bad books.
Skyler believes, quite reasonably, that if the IRS CID starts investigating her, they will uncover the money laundering operation and Walt’s massive undeclared meth income. It wouldn’t take an forensic accounting genius to see something amiss: An unemployed accountant and an unemployed high school teacher somehow managed to buy a car wash outright.
Ted won’t pay. Skyler assumes that’s because he can’t pay and arranges for her lawyer, Saul Goodman, to trick Ted into accepting the money under the guise of a fictitious inheritance from a long lost relative.
At this point, Skyler literally has more money than she knows what to do with, much more than she can launder through the car wash in the foreseeable future. This is a problem. We see her sighing when the office safe gets too full to hold all the bills. She knows that letting implausibly large piles of cash stack up in your home or business is potentially incriminating.
Walt has told Skyler that he’s making millions and millions of dollars a year, and she assumes this will continue.
Saul is comfortable dealing in large volumes of black market cash. If you think about it, bailing out Ted turns out to be a good way to clear some of the potentially incriminating cash backlog.
Sure, Saul might tell Walt, but so what? At least Saul’s not going to tell the IRS.
It wouldn’t exactly make Walt’s day to find out that his wife paid her ex-lover’s tax debt, but he’s a rational guy. He doesn’t want to go to jail any more than Skyler does.
As it turns out, Walt gets fired and the money supply is cut off. In an ironic twist, Ted dies in a freak accident after his check has been FedExed to the IRS, making the payout seem doubly unneccessary. But Skyler couldn’t have known any of that.
Paying off Ted’s tax debt was a perfectly sensible solution to a very serious problem. The Breaking Bad writers had to pull out all the storytelling stops to make such a good decision turn out so badly.
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