The second episode of Breaking Bad Season 5 opens in a gleaming industrial food lab where an imperious man in a blue suit is tasting sauces in front of a team of nervous white coated food scientists. The head scientist explains, in German, that his chemistry hotshots have figured out how to replace most of the honey in their honey mustard sauce with high fructose corn syrup – so we know these guys are evil. The food lab looks a lot like the gleaming meth labs we’ve already seen. They’re using science to hook people on lucrative products. Big Food and Big Meth can work together because they operate on the same amoral, technocratic code.
As usual, just as Walt is preparing to launch his next brilliant scheme, the world turns out to be a lot more complicated and dangerous than he expects. The DEA is breathing down the neck of Madrigal, the German conglomerate that backed Gus Fring’s meth operation. The chairman of the board tries to blame the head of the restaurant division, the steely sauce-taster, who has conveniently (and spectacularly) committed suicide.
Madrigal’s corporate board is doing damage control by cooperating with the DEA. The bones of Gus’s meth operation are about to be laid bare, but our anti-hero is blissfully oblivious.
Meanwhile, Walt is working furiously to draw his key allies back into the fold. This episode is about persuasion, interrogation, and leverage. My esteemed colleagues on the Orange Couch read this episode as being about the impossibility of tying up loose ends, which it certainly is.
Walt reels Jesse back in by pretending to help him find and destroy the ricin cigarette, which Walt has actually stashed behind an electrical plate at his house. Jesse is beside himself, imagining how the errant cigarette could hurt an innocent person. Jesse’s anguish contrasts Walt’s indifference over hurting anyone, including Jesse’s de facto step son, Brock, in the last season.
Once Walt’s decoy cigarette is plucked from Jesse’s Roomba and destroyed, Jesse is overcome with guilt because he nearly shot Walt thinking Walt had poisoned Brock with ricin. Again, we see that Jesse is still capable of remorse while Walt shows none, even though he did poison Brock with something else. Walt uses Jesse’s guilt as emotional leverage to get his young partner to cook again.
Walt brings Mike back in by offering him a one third share in their new meth partnership. Mike initially turns him down flat, saying, “You’re a time bomb.”
Luckily for Walt, Mike needs money because the DEA is closing in on all his associates and freezing their assets. When the Fring meth empire collapsed, Mike was confident that his guys wouldn’t flip because Fring paid them lavishly to guarantee their silence. He dismisses Lydia, the henchwoman from Madrigal, when she hints that he ought to kill all ten guys on the payroll that she knows of. “I’d love your input on this,” she in perfect corporate-speak, as she asks Mike to kill his entire crew. (This conversation implies that Madrigal doesn’t yet know about Walt and Jesse. That’s a plot point ot watch out for in future episodes.)
When Mike learns that the DEA has seized his crew’s assets, he knows he can’t count on them anymore.
Walt also tries to win back Skyler’s affections. He doesn’t respect her, but he knows he needs her. She’s a much better natural criminal than he is and he’s counting on her to cover for him. Skyler is in bed, too depressed to move. Walt tries to console her, saying, “When we do what we do for good reasons, we’ve got nothing to worry about.” This is, of course, a fallacy, the kind of sloppy thinking that the old Walt would never endorse. Doing things for good reasons is no guarantee of good results. Besides which, most people wouldn’t consider “So I can be the Meth King of the Southwest” as a good reason. Maybe it’s just another one of Walt’s abusive mind games, or maybe he believes his own bullshit. Either way, it’s ominous.
“There’s no better reason than family,” Walt says. We know that Walt is long past caring about his family.
Ironically, in their idiosyncratic ways, Mike and Jesse care a lot about family. Their affection is all the more poignant because, unlike Walt, they’re not just using family to bolster a white-picket-fence image. In this episode, Vince Gilligan beats us over the head with Mike’s love for his granddaughter. We see her drawings on his fridge and we watch him delight in letting her win at Hungry, Hungry Hippos.
That’s a critical plot point because Mike indicated his willingness to skip town ahead of the police in the last episode. He doesn’t care about money for himself. Mike needs only enough cash for baggy clothes, diner food, and his blood pressure meds. Killing the remaining 8 guys from his payroll would be difficult but doable for a black ops master like Mike, and if anyone could disappear without a trace, it’s him. But, as DEA Agent Hank senses in the masterful interrogation scene, Mike’s granddaughter is a rare point of leverage over the grizzled ex-cop. Hank tells Mike that if he flips first, his granddaughter might get to keep some of that money. Mike’s no rat, so, he needs another way to replenish the trust fund. That’s partly why he goes back to Walt and Jesse, knowing full well that this alliance is trouble. I might return to the question of Mike’s motives in a follow-up post.
This episode decisively refutes Walt’s pretense of cooking out of altruism or self-preservation. He started cooking to set his family up when he thought he was dying of cancer. Once he was in, he had to keep cooking and killing to stay one step ahead of Gus Fring. Now, he’s in remission and Gus is dead. Walt is broke, but this episode reminds us that he and Skyler still have the car wash, which they own free and clear, so they’re not destitute. He tells Saul he’s $40,000 in debt, to Jesse – who would gladly eat the $40,000 to get out of cooking. From this point onwards, Walt has no excuse.
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