In the final installment of this half-season, Walt temporarily gains the upper hand by and branches out into a lucrative side venture.
The episode opens with a close-up of a fly, a harbinger of death, grooming itself. The camera pulls back to show Walt staring intently at the fly on a lamp in his Vamonos Pest office. Todd comes in and announces that the “car has been dealt with” and suggests they get on with doing that other thing. Walt agrees. The camera zooms in on a pest control poster of flies, which it says are found in wet and slimy areas. They’re about to dissolve Mike’s body in acid.
As Walt and Todd are poised to dispose of Mike’s remains, Jesse storms in and demands to speak to Walt in private. Walt tells Jesse that Mike’s gone, implying that Mike escaped as planned, while Mike’s body is sitting in the trunk. Jesse asks what they’re going to do about Mike’s unpaid guys. Walt sneers at Jesse for suggesting that he has any further role to play now that he’s left the syndicate. “I’m the only vote,” Walt reminds him, “I’ll handle it.” Jesse turns to leave and the garage door drops like a curtain, leaving us alone with Walt.
Walt goes to get the names of Mike’s guys from Lydia. She’s initially reluctant to give them up because she realizes that once she divulges that information, she’s just another loose end for Walt to eliminate. So she pitches him a business opportunity instead: Exporting Blue Sky meth to the Czech Republic. Walt agrees, and she hands over the names. We later see that she calculated correctly, because Walt brought a vial of ricin to the meeting. In attempting to tie up loose ends, Walt has created yet another entanglement for himself.
Names in hand, Walt meets with Todd’s uncle and his neo-Nazi gang member cronies to arrange a 10-person hit in three separate prisons in under two minutes. The denouement is a riveting montage that cuts back and forth between the slaughter behind bars and Walt waiting in his kitchen, watching the dials on his expensive watch. It’s a clear homage to the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone liquidates his enemies to consolidate his control over the family.
Walt enjoys a brief flush of success as the undisputed meth king. Like the ship in the Walt Whitman poem, Walt is gliding over all, oblivious to the many deaths that lie ahead:
GLIDING o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul – not life alone,
Death, many deaths I’ll sing.
One night, Skyler takes Walt out to a storage locker to show him the giant pile of cash that has accumulated over the last three months. She points out that they have more money than they can launder, much less spend.
Walt claims he’s out. Given his unwavering embrace of his Heisenberg identity in the last episode, there’s a lot of narrative work to be done to make us believe that he’s even halfway serious. The writers have already made it clear that nobody really gets out, but we’re meant to take Walt’s pronouncement as more than a lie to placate Skyler. Skyler knows better than to trust Walt, but when he says “I’m out,” she studies his face and believes him. It’s probably not the whole truth, but it’s not the pure bullshit we’ve come to expect from Walt.
The half-season finale is a rapid-fire litany of reasons why Walt might be ready to give up his empire. The writers don’t pull it off completely, but they make a pretty good case.
Besides, it’s time for a change. So far, we’ve been watching Walt’s moral decay. Now that he’s covered up the murder of a child, killed his own partner in a fit of pique, and ordered wholesale massacre, Walt can’t really sink much lower. Maybe in the second half of the final season, we’ll get to see whether he can rise again. (Hint: no.)
Walt’s getting tired of the game. Having murdered Mike and alienated Jesse, Walt no longer has a discerning audience for his criminal and chemical exploits. Walt and Mike clashed constantly, but the insecure chemist craved the grizzled ex cop’s approval. For all their bickering, Walt respects Jesse’s intellect and ingenuity. It’s no fun to show off for the dead-eyed, obsequious Todd.
Even the thrill of playing Heisenberg is waning for Walt. He zones out during his meeting the prison gang, musing about the ur-source of bad hotel art, instead of focusing on the details of the upcoming hit on Mike’s guys. Is this a sign of a stealthily growing brain tumor? Or a sign of that Walt’s caper has devolved into a day job?
After a scan at the cancer clinic, Walt washes up in the men’s room. (Walt spends a lot of time washing in this episode.) As he reaches for a towel, the towel dispenser catches his eye. It’s the towel dispenser he smashed in a previous season upon learning that he wasn’t about to die after all. Walt chose to cook meth assuming that his death was imminent. He was furious when the doctor gave him “good” news, because that meant he was trapped in a life of crime.
A year later, Walt seems almost amused as he stares at the dented dispenser. He could be reflecting on the irony that he wanted to die a year ago; or maybe on the irony that if he had died a year ago, a lot of other people would still be alive. Maybe he’s thinking about the dent in light of some new news about his condition. Is his cancer back? He only just had the scan, but the doctor could have filled him in on the results of a previous test.
The cancer will come back. Vince Gilligan has said that there would be no miracle cure for Walt. The repeated shots of Walt’s naked and vulnerable head remind us that he’s living on borrowed time. We saw him popping pills and coughing in the season flash-forward sequence.
This episode also lays out the many obstacles to Walt escaping from his life of crime.
In the episode’s final scene, Hank discovers the critical piece of evidence tying Walt to the murdered chemist Gale Boetticher – the copy of the Walt Whitman book inscribed to “W.W.” from “G.B.” Hank discovers the book by chance on the toilet at Walt’s house. Some viewers have suggested that this is just a coincidence and that Walter’s former business partner, Gretchen Black gave the book to Walt, but the inscription is written in meticulous block caps that match the handwriting in Gale’s seized notebooks.
As you’ve probably read, Hank finds the book in Walt’s john. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a man as meticulous and paranoid as Walt would keep Gale’s book lying around in his bathroom. This plot feels less ad hoc than it might otherwise because the writers took care to foreshadow the book, floating around unsecured, earlier this season.
If Hank decides to risk everything to go after Walt, he’ll have to start nearly from scratch. All Mike’s guys were slaughtered before they could make plea deals, so there’s very little evidence tying Walt to Gale. Jesse knows the truth, but he’s unlikely to cooperate with Hank because Hank nearly beat him to death earlier in the series. However, Hank already suspects Lydia, and she’s one of the last living links to Walt. Nervous Lydia would happily flip on Walt if she thought she could get a good deal from the DEA.
Declan the Meth Lord of Phoenix presents another obstacle to Walt’s successful retirement. Declan agreed to distribute Walt’s product. Declan’s expecting the proceeds of 1000 gallons of methylamine, but Walt has been shipping a lot of the cook to the Czech Republic. If Walt wants to quit, he’s going to have to answer to Declan, not only for not quitting, but also for the missing methylamine.
A final potential obstacle is Jesse. Jesse knows that Walt killed the ten guys in jail, and he’s terrified that he’ll be next. Walt stops by Jesse’s house, ostensibly to visit and reminisce about old times, but he’s clearly there to deliver a message. As Walt turns to leave he says, “I left something for you.”
Jesse finds two duffle bags on his porch. He peeks inside like he’s expecting a bomb, but instead he finds the cash Walt had refused to pay him for the methylamine heist. He drags the bags inside and sinks to the floor, weeping. Jesse reaches back and grabs a gun, which he bats across the floor away from himself.
So, where did Jesse get the gun? We know he didn’t pick it up off the floor because we can see the floor before he sinks down. It must have come out of his pocket. The question is, when did he put it in? We don’t see the gun come out of the duffle bag, but it looks like the automatic pistol that Walt took from Mike as he was dying.
I went back and checked the gun in this scene against the gun in Mike’s death scene. The two pistols are both automatics, but they aren’t the same gun. The weapon Jesse produces is very boxy with a square nose and no visible hammer. The gun Walt takes from Mike has a prominent hammer and possibly some kind of sight on the nose.
It wasn’t Mike’s gun. Jesse still doesn’t know. Who knows what he’ll do when he finds out?
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