The theme of this episode is Ego and Alter Ego.
We open with a meeting in the desert between Walt and Declan, the meth lord of Phoenix. Declan shows up expecting to purchase the full thousand gallons of methylamine that Mike promised him. Instead, Walt announces that Mike is retiring and offers to let Declan buy out Mike’s share of the partnership in the blue meth cartel.
It’s a classic Old West showdown, and Walt’s bravado carries the day. Before he closes the deal, Walt makes Declan call him Heisenberg. Normally the point of a criminal alias is to prevent your associates from knowing who you are, but Walt insists on taking credit for cooking blue meth and killing Gus Fring.
After the deal in the desert, Walt tries to entice Jesse back into the partnership. Jesse walks away from his $5 million payday in a winningly low-key fashion.
When emotional manipulation fails, Walt threatens to cut Jesse out of his share of the methylamine heist.
“It’s on you,” Jesse says with a grin that’s slightly manical, as if he’s surprised to hear himself passing up $5 million, and equally surprised by how good that feels. Five million dollars is a lot of money, but breaking free of Walter White is priceless.
With Jesse gone, Walt starts teaching Todd to cook. Todd’s voluminous note-taking made me wonder about those prison connections he’s always bragging about. Walt survived his showdown with Declan because he’s the only man who can cook blue meth. A lot of people would pay dearly for Todd’s notebook. Once the formula gets out, the man becomes irrelevant.
Walt prides himself on his rationality. He justifies each of his murders as an isolated means to an end, each compelled by circumstances. In Walt’s mind, these killings don’t really count because they’re part of his parallel criminal life. He created Heisenberg to do all the things he wanted to do, but never let himself do as a high school chemistry teacher. When Walt does horrible things, they’re not on him, they’re on Heisenberg. It’s not him, it’s just a role he’s playing.
In this episode, some of the last remaining barriers between Walt and Heisenberg begin to disintegrate. Heisenberg was created to rise above all the petty hangups that held Walt back in civilian life. This works in short bursts. Heisenberg will put everything on the line, because he’s a dying man with nothing to lose. Walt taps into that energy even though he now believes he has a bright future ahead of him. However, Walt’s pettiness is starting to bubble up through the cracks in Heisenberg’s facade.
Heisenberg is an idealized version of Walter White, but of course, Walter White’s idealized version of himself is as screwed up as he is. Walt imagines that his former life was disappointing because he wasn’t arrogant and ruthless enough, so he constructed an alter ego to remedy those perceived deficiencies. Of course, we know that Walt fell short of his potential because he was already too much like Heisenberg. He didn’t walk away from Grey Matter because he was too patient and reasonable.
As Mike prepares to skip town, one step ahead of the DEA, Walt volunteers to drop off the “go bag” Mike stashed at the airport. Walt intends to use the bag of money and passports as leverage to get Mike to reveal the names of the nine guys on his payroll. We know Walt anticipates a confrontation because he immediately steals the gun out of Mike’s go bag.
Walt makes a feeble attempt to get the names out of Mike, but he scarcely resists when Mike grabs the bag out of his hand. The two get into a shouting match because Walt deems Mike insufficiently grateful. Mike loses his temper and accuses Walt of destroying Gus Fring’s meth operation out of ego. If Walt had known his place, Mike says, none of this would have happened. Quaking with rage, Walt goes back to his car, gets the gun, and shoots Mike.
This is the first time we’ve seen Walt kill someone for hurting his feelings. Walt has always been prone to lash out at perceived slights. Until now, he had some residual straight-life aversion to lethal violence.
As Mike is dying, Walt apologizes, saying that he could have gotten the names from Lydia. He’s trying to convince Mike that he shot him to get the names. But we’ve just seen this isn’t true. Walt let Mike get back in his car after Mike refused to give up the names. If he’d really come to extort the names, he wouldn’t have shot Mike as he was leaving. Walt’s not really apologizing, he’s bullshitting a dying man. Walt doesn’t want to admit to himself that he’s losing his vaunted self-control.
Now that Walt has sunk to killing out of spite, everyone around him is in even greater danger.
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