We are exactly a year away from the showdown foretold in the season-opening flash forward.
Walt is convinced that he’s on top of the world. Gus is dead, the profits from the new cartel’s first meth cook are burning a hole in his pocket, and it’s his fifty-first birthday!
Meanwhile, Walt’s long-suffering wife Skyler is feeling anything but celebratory. She has to be goaded into rearranging Walt’s birthday bacon to spell out his age, as per family tradition. We already know that this time next year, Walt will be arranging his own damned bacon.
Even as her mental health deteriorates, Skyler is becoming a credible antagonist to Walt. Episode 4 widens the field in the speculative game of: Who’s going to bring Walt down?
Having moved back into the house earlier this season, Walt continues to push Skyler towards her absolute breaking point through a combination of thoughtlessness and sadism.
In an impulsive birthday gesture, Walt ditches his minivan and leases a pair of muscle cars for himself and Walt, Jr. If it were anybody else, you’d call it a midlife crisis, but in Walt’s case that’s far too optimistic.
In so doing, he simultaneously challenges Skyler’s authority as the family’s Criminal Comptroller and undermines her as a parent. Skyler nixed Walt’s fancy car purchase once before because the ostentatious ride clashed with their humble carwash cover story and because she didn’t want Walt buying their son’s affections.
Walt thinks Skyler’s too depressed to object, but he’s wrong. Instead of confronting him, Skyler schemes to get the kids out of the house. She wades into the swimming pool during Walt’s birthday party, in an apparent suicidal gesture, but not before she asked Marie to take the kids, ostensibly to give her and Walt time alone to work on their marriage.
Skyler had floated the idea of sending Walt, Jr. to boarding school, but Walt scornfully dismissed her concerns. He, for one, can’t see why the home of the meth king of the southwest would be anything less than a salutary environment to raise children.
Walt confronts Skyler about the pool incident. She has defied him, and he’s furious. Skyler admits she’s a coward. “I can’t even keep you out of my bed,” she says, delivering the episode’s most devastating line. Skyler knows she’s trapped in her marriage and in Walt’s business, but she holds out hope of saving her kids if she can just hang on long enough for Walt to die of cancer.
Skyler tells Walt she’s biding her time, waiting for the cancer to come back and kill him. From here on in, every cigarette we see her smoking is an act of symbolic violence. Maybe Skyler will graduate to more immediate means of destruction, now that Walt has upped the ante.
By drawing battle lines over the kids, Walt may have finally awakened Skyler from her depressive stupor. As we watch her chain smoking in Walt’s general direction, wishing him dead, we wonder what she’s really capable of.
Meanwhile, Jesse’s up to something. He gives Walt a fancy watch for his birthday. Walt is delighted. He takes the gift as proof that he’s won Jesse back for good. He even mentions Jesse’s gift to Skyler as proof that he can win anyone over, even someone who recently threatened to kill him.
It’s not clear what Jesse’s thinking. We saw that he was deeply shaken by Walt’s veiled threat in the final scene of last week’s show. Now he’s all smiles, but the lingering camera makes it clear: there’s something sinister about that watch.
In the final scene, we hear extra-loud ticking as the camera zooms in on the watch face. One way or another, Walt is running out of time.
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