Episode Report Card Joe R: A | 623 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Look On My Works And Despair
By Joe R | Season 5 | Episode 14 | Aired on 09.15.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So there is first the small matter of that shootout. Gomez is dead. Hank's been shot in the leg. Jesse is nowhere to be found. And Walt is still handcuffed inside the car. Uncle Jack's gang advances on Hank, and Walt pleads with them for Hank's life. They can't strike up some kind of don't-ask-don't-tell deal or something! Walt's got $80 million to make it worth their while! Instead, Uncle Jack executes Hank (good night, grumpy prince) and then takes Walt's money for good measure. Walt is momentarily broken by Hank's murder, but to his great credit, he recovers in time to accept Jack's pittance of one barrel and also point out that Jesse's been hiding under the car the whole time. Todd convinces Jack to let him torture Jesse for information before they kill him (fucking Todd), and I guess Walt decides to give Todd a head start on that, since he gratuitously tells Jesse that he watched Jane die and didn't save her. So consider that particular loose end tied. Todd eventually takes Jesse back to the hangar/lab, chains him to a tether, and forces him to cook, under threat of harm to Andrea and Brock.
Walt manages to make it out of the desert with his money, but in the meantime, Marie goes to the car wash and informs Skyler that Hank has arrested Walt, so it's time to give this whole Lady Macbeth thing up. The first step of which is to tell Flynn the truth. He takes it ... poorly. When Skyler and Flynn return home, they find Walt frantically packing for a quick getaway. Flynn just wants answers, but Skyler's questions are more pointed: how is Walt here? What happened to Hank? Walt's non-answers are enough to confirm for Skyler that Hank is dead. At this, she brandishes a knife at Walt and tells him to leave, alone. This leads to a struggle, something of a brawl, with Flynn getting in the middle of things, and Skyler slashing Walt's hand open. Ultimately, the knife goes flying, and Flynn calls the police, siding with his mother FOR FUCKING ONCE. So Walt's reaction is to take baby Holly and go on the run. Skyler fucking flips.
Later that night, the police (plus Marie) are all over the house when Walt calls. When Skyler just asks for the baby, Walt angrily tells her this is all her fault for butting in where she doesn't belong. He alludes to a skewed version of history, where he was the only perpetrator and Skyler was threatened into silence. So basically, he wants the police to hear him as he exonerates her. By episode's end, Walt drops Holly off at a local fire house, then steps into Saul's friend's Van of Identity Fraud, preparing to flee and start anew. And alone. TWO MORE!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: Are you fucking kidding me?
If you thought we were going to pick up things where we left off last week in mid-shootout, you obviously don’t know this show very well. Not before the elliptical cold open! Instead what we get is a flashback to the events of the very first episode. The look and feel of it is so well-studied, in fact, that I would have bought it as a deleted scene. Moving off of Jesse’s observation last week that Walt buried his money in the exact spot in the desert where they had their first cook, this is a flashback to that first cook. So did this initial experience with the meth trade have such sentimental value for Walt that he decided to keep his money there? Well, kinda.
After some familiar Walt/Jesse bickering (one’s a fastidious teacher! The other’s an impatient and vulgar teen! Can they make it work? Tune in every week!) Walt changes from his cooking smock into his button-down/no-pants look that those old posters were so enamored with. He walks up the rocks and rehearses the phone call he’s going to make to Skyler, explaining his absence. When he does call, Skyler is hard at work packaging her eBay art for shipping. Walt’s rehearsed story -- that he has to work late at the car wash for freaking Bogdan -- goes over like literally no big thing. Skyler has no reason at this point to be even a little suspicious. Skyler actually makes an idle threat about how Bogdan better not keep him too late and piss her off. I guess it’s not foreshadowing if it’s written after the fact, right? Speaking of post-shadowing, Walt and Skyler discuss "Holly" as the possible name for a baby girl. And much like Sammy’s mom (as imagined by Vicky) in Reality Bites feels about P-FLAG, Walt is beginning to like the sound of that. Next, Skyler and Walt make plans for the upcoming weekend and are in general a very loving, supportive and pleasant couple. And Walt is lying through his teeth to her, probably not for the first time ever but certainly for the first time this seriously. Here’s Zero Hour for when it all started to go bad. Once the phone call is over, Walt smiles at a job well done, but the smile fades, maybe because he knows something’s begun.
Before our eyes, Walt fades out, as do Jesse and the RV. Time has taken them away and run them through a gauntlet the likes of which none of us could have predicted. Only the desert remains. The desert and the elements. Credits and elements.