Diary of a Breaking Bad virgin – In season 2, things are gettin’ weirder

While watching the first 10 episodes of Breaking Bad’s sophomore season, I went from being riveted by every episode and dying to see Walter White’s character evolve, to being entertained and yet frustrated by the we-should-cook/no-we-shouldn’t back and forth.

What also surprised me was that as Walt was afforded a glimmer of hope for a better future because his cancer treatment had shrunk his tumor by 80 percent, the good news seemed to have little impact on him because by that time he’d become hardened and unwilling to listen to reason.

With the time-sensitive compulsion to scrape together enough money to not only pay for his cancer treatment but to leave money for his family should he die relaxed in the aftermath of his optimistic diagnosis, I expected this would come as a relief to Walt. Only it didn’t, which seemed strange to me, as was his detachment from his wife Skyler, a detachment which Walt knows is driving her away from him, but he’s unwilling to acknowledge it.

In the episode “Over” (the 10th of the season), Walt’s house is infested with rot, clearly an analogy for so many things: Walt and Skyler’s marriage, Walt’s soul as he’d been adamant that Jesse threaten their dealers and the addicts who ripped them off (after being averse to and appalled by violence last season), as well as Walt’s relationship with his DEA brother-in-law Hank in that odd mano-a-mano scene where Walt insisted that Walter Jr. do several shots of tequila over Hank’s objections. Despite Walt’s apologies over the incident, the way in which he became obsessed with the rot and the manner in which he charged through the hardware store parking lot to confront two guys and menacingly growl, “Stay out of my territory,” clearly demonstrated that the Walter White of season one was gone, possibly forever.

The first nine episodes of this season provided ample reason for such a dramatic transformation. Take, for example, the “Grilled” episode where Tuco held Walt and Jesse hostage. Because of the title of the episode, I was petrified that something untoward was going to happen involving a grill. And even though that never happened, this tension-drenched episode, where the pregnant Skyler desperately plastered the area with “Missing” posters of a bald Walt, was gripping.

After that dramatic high point, things seemed to careen downhill as Jesse and Walt hatched a plan to not only explain Walt’s absence (the “fugue state,” accompanied by the naked guy in the grocery store antics) but to put distance between Jesse and any legal ramification from Hank discovering Jesse’s car at Tuco’s uncle’s house. It killed me that, after all Walt had put Skyler through, that he didn’t handle her “second cell phone” question well at all and that he failed to recognize that his deceit was harming his marriage.

Throughout the next handful of episodes, Jesse and Walt engaged in what I found to be an annoying little dance called, “Let’s cook!/No we’re done with that.” They were in a “we’re done with that” mode when Jesse, with no place to go and nowhere to park his RV, turned up at Walt’s even though Walt expressly told him they shouldn’t have contact. The two literally got into a fight and Jesse had a potentially lethal choke-hold on Walt when Jesse let him go. The violence seemed to fortify their working relationship (Jesse even referred to his partner by his first name instead of “Mr. White”) and they resumed their cooking operation and formed their own drug operation, which Walt wanted to resemble a Tuco-like empire. Walt was in charge of the cooking and Jesse would handle the dealers and be the heavy … that’s when the duo wasn’t kidnapping a criminal defense attorney or fretting about dying in the middle of the desert because their RV battery conked out. Seriously, yo, spring for some new wheels.

Walt’s decree that Jesse needed to let it be known that ripping off “Heisenberg” (Walt’s alias) had dangerous consequences led to the depressing “Peekaboo” episode where a gun-wielding Jesse spent a day trying to coerce two junkies — who left a filthy, extremely young child alone in a condemnable home — to reimburse Jesse for the crystal meth they stole from one of Jesse’s dealers. (The ATM-head crushing was almost as gross as the head-mounted-on-a-tortoise-which-then-exploded scene in the episode afterward.)

Questions which continue to rattle around in my head:

— What’s with that floating, battered, one-eyed stuffed animal and the plastic evidence bags lined up next to what appears to be Walt’s pool that have appeared intermittently in the episodes?

— Is Walt’s decision to emotionally ignore Skyler a by-product of his poor compartmentalizing skills, and will she retaliate by allowing herself to give in to a fling at the oddly named Beneke Fabricators with her boss Ted?

— When will Hank have his own “fugue state?”

— What led Jesse to abandon his art and become a drug dealer in the first place?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jul 29, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT