Breaking Bad Recap: Walter White, the Human Cancer

Breaking Bad Recap: Walter White, the Human Cancer

Photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC

Breaking Bad Recap: Walter White, the Human Cancer

Photo: Ursula Coyote/AMC

The premise of Breaking Bad has always been built around bombshells: the many terrible things Walter White has secretly done right beneath the noses of his loved ones, and the devastation we knew would ensue when they finally stumbled across them. That's the dread enjoyment of these final episodes: sitting back in your easy chair and watching them explode.

And perhaps the genius of the show is how much it feels like both a controlled demolition and walking through a minefield: the growing tension that you're surrounded by explosives and have absolutely no idea how or when they're going to go off, coupled with the the certainty that each one is going to go off at exactly the right time. The most recent episode, appropriately titled "Buried," is not only about hiding explosive secrets, it's also about acknowledging how painful they can be to unearth–the cost of taking things out of the ground and holding them up to the light.

Now that Walt has finally revealed himself to Hank and the garage door opens up again, the big question is what other detonations it's going to trigger. There's a moment where Walt and Hank stand across from each other on the driveway, staring each other down like it's high noon. The moment the garage door closes over Hank again, they make a frantic grab for the metaphorical remote control–which is to say they both race to call Skyler, who has had so little power over her own life for the past several seasons that she might as well be the yellow remote control car zipping around in the background.

Hank proves faster on the draw, and when he meets Skyler at a local restaurant, he immediately envelops her in a hug. The look on her face is a combination of relief and guilt—relief, because after the gaslighting to end all gaslightings, someone finally understands why she seemingly acted like such a jerk to her terminally ill husband. And guilt, because she no longer feels like she fully deserves his sympathy. "I don't even know if you know the full extent of what he's done," Hank says, unaware that he doesn't know the full extent of what Skyler has done. When she hears Hank call Walt an “animal” and a “monster,” you can see the subtle reaction in her eyes: What does that make her, as the woman who not only failed to turn him in but helped launder his blood money?

Skyler White, you see, is suffering from Stage IV Walt. He's not a man so much as he is a human cancer, one whose corruption spreads inside you so slowly that by the time you're able to diagnose the problem, there's no neat or simple way to cut it out. That's the evil genius of it all: Slowly, insidiously, he makes you so complicit in his crimes that reporting them would hurt you almost as much as it hurts him. “You're done being his victim,” says Hank, as he quickly turns on a recorder and asks Skyler to give up everything she knows, not realizing that she isn't just a damsel in distress waiting for a white knight to come along and save her–she's a co-conspirator. Simple surgery isn't a treatment option anymore, just a naive oversimplification of a problem that is far more complex and invasive.

It's possible that even Skyler doesn't realize exactly how compromised she is until she sees her sister's reaction, and it's not a sympathetic one. The instant where Marie slaps Skyler is a thunderclap, the detonation of another bomb, a schism that separates everything about Skyler's character into what happened before and what happened after.

The children have become a sort of barometer of moral decline on the show, the canaries that everyone is forever trying to rescue from the coal mine of Walter White. When Skyler first learned the truth, that was her immediate reaction: to take the children out of the house. It's Hank's first reaction too, though he wants to "protect" Skyler as well. It's only once Marie learns about the length and depth of Skyler's involvement that things change, and she starts to treat her sister the same way that Skyler once treated Walt: as someone too corrupted to be trusted with their own children. Now Skyler is the danger. But by grabbing baby Holly and trying to make a run for it–literally threatening to take away her family–Marie actually makes the decision a great deal simpler for Skyler. Suddenly that "family before morality" rationale, the same one that helped create Heisenberg, is making a lot more sense to her.

Consider what is arguably the most defining thematic moment in the series, Walter White's soliloquy on fear: "I have spent my whole life scared, frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen, 50 years I spent like that. Finding myself awake at three in the morning. But you know what? Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. What I came to realize is that fear, that's the worst of it."

Skyler has lived in this exact hellish limbo of fear for almost as long as we've known her: first, afraid to know the truth, then afraid to speak it, then–as she became more and more complicit–afraid of what would happen if people found out. Perhaps this is Skyler White's diagnosis moment. Perhaps this is the moment when she stops feeling afraid, as Walt did during his transformation, and becomes something else.


There's something different in Walt's eyes when he finally offers to give himself up and Skyler demurs, saying, "Maybe our best move here is to stay quiet." Is it a look of relief? Pride? Maybe, but something else too: satisfaction. He always wanted Skyler back, and now he has her–not just as an unwilling captive, but truly remade in his image. You can almost hear him to saying it in his head to Hank: "I win."

But for all his self-righteousness, Hank very quickly realizes that he's compromised too. When Marie she insists that he turn Walt in, he lays it out for her: the day he admits the truth to the DEA is the last day of his career. “I'm going to have to walk in there, look those people in the eye and admit the person I've been chasing the last year is my own brother-in-law. It's over for me.” Not to mention the fact that his entire recovery after the shooting was directly funded by drug money. In the end, he decides to keep the secret for a just a little while longer–because he needs more evidence, of course. (Call it Stage I Walt.)

Elsewhere, Lydia arrives at the secret desert meth lab of Walt's successors to address their unacceptable drop in quality, post-Heisenberg. The sub-par meth-cooking tough guys are pretty dismissive of the single mom as she struggles to walk through the sand in her Louboutins. At least, until the Aryan enforcers she hired to clean house come and blow them away. Todd is with them, naturally, and like Lydia he's another example of the sort of villainy that Breaking Bad does so well: the kind that doesn't look like a villain. The kind that covers their ears and closes their eyes while their hired killers commit mass murder. The kind that calls you "ma'am" and holds your hand while they're walking you through the carnage of their murder victims. On this show, evil wears khaki.

And then there's Jesse. Poor Jesse, who is still so consumed with guilt over the death of a little boy unlucky enough to witness their drug shenanigans that he actually crashes his car into a playground (symbolism!). And that's where we find him, spinning himself slowly in circles on a merry-go-round painted green–Walt's color, and the color of greed. How many times has Walt done horrifying things to him and convinced him to do horrifying things out of greed and self-interest, only to rationalize it away and talk him into yet another atrocity? How many times does Jesse really want to go around and around on Walt's ride?

From what we've seen so far this season, the answer may finally be zero. Then again, the man heading into the interrogation room to try and talk him into flipping is Hank, the man Jesse hates with a fury worthy of Hector Salamanca. But whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they now have an awful lot in common, and might be each other's best and final hope at whatever passes for salvation on this show.

Meanwhile, Walt buries his money in the desert, and buys a lottery ticket with the numbers from the GPS coordinates of the location, an act that feels appropriate since "winning" the meth game has made him and his family about as happy as most lottery winners: not at all.

Read our previous episode recap: "Blood Money"