Breaking Bad 5.10: Digging In Their Heels
And digging down in the dust. We're feeling dirty.
Warning: this is a recap. That means spoilers. This week’s installment: season 5, episode 10 — ‘Buried’.
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We open with a disconnected scene — disconnected from our primary cast, that is. The story flows straight on from last week’s midnight million dollar home delivery service, as an older gent discovers a few bundles of cash outside and follows these breadcrumbs to the big pile of dough in Jesse’s crashed car. The disconnect comes from allowing us to see the ever heightening escapades of our ‘heroes’ through fresh eyes. It’s a chance to consider Pinkman’s emotionally comatose charity dash out of the context of five seasons of misery. These people we’re watching each week are insane and scary. Carol’s driveway orange drop last week was another great instance — if you didn’t willingly allow Walter White into your house each week as we viewers do, having him show up would be a terrifying prospect.
Breaking Bad’s occasional outsider experience — those periphery characters that allow us to see the intense ridiculousness in Walt’s frequent tighty-whitey runs or Saul’s three-in-one hairstyle — have only sporadically run up against the run-around of the key cast (take last season’s innocent motorcross kid as a devastating example). But now that Hank and Marie know the full extent of Walt and Skyler’s deception, that new gaze, that side-lined character that assists us in seeing things clearly, comes from within the ensemble. Not only are they staring aghast at the murderous mayhem the Whites continually find themselves in, they’re staring at family.
The whole show seems to have pivoted on its axis, shifted the game board and adjusted its mirrors in one subtle move. Oh. This is undoubtedly the show about a heroic well-meaning officer of the law, his dedicated wife, and the sudden misery that enters their lives through the knowledge that their closest family consists of two conniving, desperate, unrepentant criminals. Yikes.
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BREAKING BAD: SKYLER
When we all sit down on Tuesday mornings and update our YouTube journaling of Walter’s moral disintegration, perhaps we should take a cue or two from Marie and Skyler. Is the best way to accumulate guilt, horror and realisation in one tense scene to simply list in reverse chronological order every horrible thing that’s happened to you in the last year while your sibling sobs beside you? Yes, yes it is. The break up of these sisters was devastating. Also, well slapped, Marie. Seems like emotional sucker-punches run in the Schrader marriage.
“Sometimes I get so sad in this life I lead, that I just want to take my two children, and my many, many millions of dirty dollars, and do whatever I want for the rest of my life because I’m hugely rich.”
Skyler’s two scenes (one a piece with each Schrader) were her best moments in the series to date, and Anna Gunn’s mostly silent performances were fantastic. Suddenly, what seems like lazy whimsy on the writers’ behalf (that season 2 moment of Skyler flipping a coin on state lines to determine her future always struck me as a repeat of what was going on in the writer’s room regarding her character development) crystallizes into skeezy complicity. Skyler may have been afraid of Walt from time to time, but she never shirked from managing the money, and she never ran or spoke up. Skyler picked sides long ago.
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BREAKING GOOD: HANK
And poor Hank is only just realising. Does Hank consider for one second that Skyler was not a 24/7 prisoner and may have actually had a little something to do with laundering all that drug cash? No, he does not. He gives his sister-in-law a hug. What a guy.
Skyler accuses Hank of caring more about taking down Heisenberg than he does about her family’s future, and it’s a great display of how, this season, the needs and wants of each character can run so parallel and yet be so fractured. From a purely objective standpoint, the best thing for those kids is probably to have their Dad in jail and to live with their well-meaning and capable aunt and uncle. Hank’s right on the money. For Skyler, well, she’s never really surfaced from the pool she submerged herself in earlier. She’s still helping Walt wash the money clean, she still seems to believe there’s a chance for a family to exist at the end of all this. You can (finally) understand why Skyler would react the way she does, but it’s surprisingly touching to see things from Hank’s end.
“See my bottom teeth? I learnt this one from Walt. Nothing more serious than a bottom row of teeth on a bald man.”
Going back to the first season, it’s brilliant to rewatch the way that Walt shirks and shies from every gruff and exuberant burp of a heckle that issues from Hank. Breaking Bad began as the stitched-up falling down of a bullied man, and one of Walt’s biggest bullies seemed to be Hank. The last two episodes have swivelled that sympathetic line, until Hank’s become a simple sad man with a sad cause to accomplish. Never has anyone half-heartedly chuckled like Hank does when he goes to see Jesse in that interrogation room. Here’s hoping Hank gets back his heart as he goes about the last case of his career.
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BREAKING EVEN: WALT
Walt spends the episode digging a hole, in full resplendent Breaking Bad-style montage, complete with a GPS-POV shot, just in case you thought this was some other drama in its final few hours that would spend minutes on a montage of a person digging a hole. With this half-season seemingly sticking to roughly twenty-four hours per episode, it makes sense that Walt may have minimal opportunities to confront anyone: how many times a day do you bare your bottom teeth and deliver the blandest-sounding yet scariest-inflected threats imaginable? “I’ll send you to Belize!” he says to Saul, sounding like he’s going to banish his lawyer without supper, but probably mentally recontriangulating the knot of Saul’s tie for maximum scientifically-sound strangling power.
Smart enough to outwit drug cartels and the DEA. Never smart enough to bring a hat.
Walt also pulls out that classic hen-pecked husband move when he arrives home bloody and covered in dirt and gives Skylar the silent treatment until he collapses into a nap. Is Walt pulling the cancer card on his wife to engender sympathy? Was it simple sun-stroke? Should we thank Vince Gilligan for sparing us a real-time cinematic exploration of Walt napping on the bathroom tiles?
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BREAKING OUT: TODD
Todd’s back! Hi Todd, you fucking psychopath! Lydia enlists Todd and his redneck crew to take out the meth making-competition, putting her in charge of the entire New Mexico/Eastern European meth trade, with weird, polite and extremely deadly Todd at her right side. Todd probably went home after this massacre and ate some Spaghetti-Os, the fucking creep.
Way to help a lady through the corpses, Todd. Grandma Saracen would be proud.
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NEXT WEEK
Some of them are lying, some of them are telling the truth. But they’re all… BREAKING BAD.
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Matt Roden helps kids tell stories by day at the Sydney Story Factory, and by night helps adults admit to stupidity by co-running Confession Booth and TOD Talks. He is 2SER’s resident TV critic — each Tuesday morning at 8.20am — and his illustration and design work can be seen here.