This week’s episode opens in a vast, empty grassland. A slight preteen boy on a dirt bike pauses to scoop up a tarantula with his bare hands and deposit the hairy specimen in a glass jar, which he slips into his jean jacket before speeding away.
According to the Rules of Drama, if you see a gun on the mantle in Act 1, it must go off by the final act. Likewise, if you see a spider in a glass jar in the breast pocket of a motorcyclist, nothing good will come of it. Helmet or no helmet, this kid’s luck is about to run out.
In this episode, we learn that Lydia the Methylamine Mole of Madrigal Automotive didn’t plant the GPS tracker on the methylamine barrel after all. In the last episode, Mike jumped to the conclusion that Lydia installed a decoy device as a ruse to avoid turning over the precursor chemical she promised to the Three Amigos
Mike’s a genius, but he’s not always right. One of the central messages of Breaking Bad is that being a genius is no substitute for being lucky, being wise, or most importantly, being willing to listen. Nobody ever has all the answers.
Lydia is proven innocent because Walt has bugged Hank’s swanky new office at DEA headquarters. On the bugged line, an inept g-man confesses that he put transponders on all the methylamine barrels in Madrigal’s Houston warehouse, putting the entire stock effectively off limits.
Lydia convinces the Three Amigos (Walt, Mike, and Jesse) to spare her life in exchange for a big methlamine score. The Houston barrels are off limits, but she knows that a train bearing a tanker of methylamine is passing through a dead zone near ABQ on Wednesday, en route to a Madrigal pesticide plant. She urges the amigos to rob the train. It’s risky, but they have little choice. They’re running out of precursor, and they’ve got to keep cooking to pay Mike’s legacy guys.
Mike thinks they’re going to have to kill the engineer and the conductor in order to pull off the heist. In Mike’s vast criminal experience, there are two kinds of hijackings: Those that succeed and those that leave witnesses. Jesse has a kinder, gentler plan for a witness-free methylamine score. The plan is to block the track, siphon off some methylamine from the stopped train, and pump the tanker full of water to hide the missing weight. If all goes well, a chemical supply house in China will be blamed for selling watered-down methlamine.
During the heist, Walt nearly gets Jesse and Todd the exterminator killed or busted because he refuses to stop siphoning when Mike tells him the train is about to start moving unexpectedly. Despite Walt’s rigidity, disaster is averted, until the crew realizes the kid with the spider has been watching the whole caper. Before Walt or Jesse can react, Todd pulls a gun and shoots the kid. I guess he wasn’t an undercover cop after all.
The murder is all the more horrifying because it is at once premediated and gratuitous. A little kid doesn’t know a methylamine heist from a hydrolic fracking operation. So what if he saw a bunch of grimy grownups with hoses in the desert? Walt and Jesse, who have actually raised kids, know this – as evidenced by their decision to smile and wave and play this off like it’s no big deal. Todd smiles too, until he pulls the pistol. (As Mike told Lydia, in one of the episode’s best lines, “It’s a pistol not a ‘gun,’ I expect precision.”)
Breaking Bad is drawing some interesting contrasts between parents and non-parents this season. It’s common in fiction for childless women to be portrayed as inherently dangerous, alienated, or unnatural in virtue of their lack off offspring. It’s rare to see a young man cast as dangerous for being childless. But that seems to be what Vince Gilligan did with Todd. As fathers, Walt and Jesse, knew how to defuse an unexpected encounter with a curious boy, but the non-father reflexively resorted to unspeakable brutality.
Many less-sympathetic characters are anchored to the moral world by parenthood (Lydia) or grandparenthood (Mike). Jesse’s recovery from addiction and subsequent moral growth hinged on his now-severed ties to his girlfriend and stepson. In this season, Walt pushed Jesse towards the dark side by sabotaging Jesse’s nascent family.
Breaking Bad isn’t simplistically implying that being a parent makes you a good person. Sometimes the parent-child bond drives people to selfishly put their own children ahead of everyone else. Walt initially felt entitled to cook meth to provide for his children. Now that ruse has fallen away and he’s using his kids as an excuse to stoke his own ego. In this episode, Skyler selfishly recommits herself to Walt’s life of crime in exchange for his promise to keep their kids away from the house. The irony is that when everyone feels entitled to do whatever they want to protect their kids, no one’s kids are safe.
Speaking of unexpected revelations: Hank is baby-hungry. He and Marie are watching Walt’s infant daughter, Holly, and teen son, Walt, Jr., while their parents ostensibly work on their marriage. Hank cradles Holly and says jokingly, “She’s my little girl and I’m not giving her back.”
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