Breaking Bad 5.13: Brain Splat
Blood on the floor and bullets in the air. Yep, this is pretty tense.
Warning: this is a recap. That means spoilers. This week’s installment: season 5, episode 13 — ‘To’hajiilee’.
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Is there anything more satisfying than Mousetrap? I don’t think my brother and I ever finished a game when we were young. We’d set up the contraption, roll the dice twice, and then throw it all in and submit to call of the crank. Watching that marble hit the stick to tumble the diver set off the trap – perfection.
These last few episodes, so derided by myself (believe me, the editors cut most of the repetitious complaining I do about the show’s slack pacing), in retrospect feel like those early circles around the board. I thought it was all a game, our characters taking turns collecting small pieces of cardboard cheese, when really there was a looming structure of cogs and ramps and rubber bands, just waiting to snap and drop a truck full of machine-gun-toting Nazis into the mix.
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BREAKING BAD: HANK
Will we retire the phrase “breaking bad” after this show? Almost no one in this country had ever used it before the show started, and now I feel like it’s a phrase Tony Abbot would employ to describe himself after a particularly strenuous jog. I only ask because after this episode ended, my brain said to my conscience (sure), “geez, Hank is breaking bad-ass!” — and I want to never find myself in that situation again.
“This is your brain on drugs. And then off drugs while you go to rehab after your girlfriend dies, and then on again after you kill a dweeb, and then off… Anyway, it’s Pinkman’s dumb brain.”
Hank leaned on Huell for Walter White’s cash stash deets, and then caught Walt on tape copping to at least three murders. How? With creative photo cropping! #trickyouintoadmittingcrimestergram. I bet he used the Hudson filter to get the perfect death glow on Jesse, and then Mayfair to make that barrel of money look all the more enticing/burnable/artisanal.
Anyway, after pranking Walt into a confession and tailing him to the middle of the desert, Hank cuffs his brother in law and calls Marie for a tearful and cheerful “it’s over”, which is obviously the signal for that bunch of Nazis to arrive with machine guns. Slow mo shoot-out Hank — make some Vines! Or a farewell Snapchat for your wife!
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BREAKING GOOD: WALT
Is there any better way to redeem your irredeemable lead character than having him stand next to Nazis? After weighing up the options, as presented by both the tiny floating skeez and the moral vortex that sit upon each of his shoulders (lawyer and wife respectively), Walt did indeed call his most promising student, Todd the fucking psychopath, and have a hit placed on Jesse. By Nazis. Those ol’, reliable, dog-on-a-leash Nazis. Now that’s a handshake you can trust!
“Maybe if I magnetise these bullets? I could dig for iron ore…? Come on science, don’t fail me now!”
I have a horrible premonition of Walt, Jesse and Hank surviving this shoot out, and then being held hostage by the White Supremacists. Walt will take the fall and let the other two escape. Like some despicably warped Sydney Carton, Walt will buy back our love with the loss of his own life, giving Hank the family he always wanted, and Jesse the chance to start again. And then I remember that Walt has to go off somewhere and grow a beard and some more hair, put on a dirty rag shirt, and go pick up that poison he forgot to pack when he moved house. Because of flash-forwards. (I am not good at guessing the direction of this show.)
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BREAKING EVEN: HUELL
Breaking Bad, with its cavalcade of scalps and pates, must be a phrenologists dream come true. What can we learn from the parade of cranial moonscapes on display? What curvature of the skull denotes the moral murkiness in which Walt, Hank, Mike, Jesse (for a while), Gus, Hector, and the twins all reside? Even Saul’s sweep-to-the-side has unravelled to disclosed the terrain of another troublemaker. And then there is Huell, the strangest of them all.
What happened to your head, Huell? What happened?
“When I was little, my cousin stole my cheeseburger, and he never did tell me where he hid it. Coincidentally, that was the exact same day I became stupid, and my head became the most incredible shape the world had ever seen.”
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BREAKING OUT: NAZIS
Elmore Leonard passed away a couple of weeks ago — and although Justified is the official televised offspring of that man’s output, Breaking Bad sure owes him a debt or two. Any time a murdering meth-trade Nazi talks about the swindling that goes on in the farmed salmon trade, pour out a little drink for Dutch, the writer who made chatty crooks an art form.
“You have to admit, what he’s saying seems ironically out of character.”
The last wildcard in a stacked deck, these be-swastika’d mad men must surely be the most broken of all the bad. I have no idea how this is all going to shake out. Maybe, probably, not all that nicely…
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NEXT WEEK ON BREAKING BAD
Some of them are shooting, some of them are getting shot. 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.