In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
There's a fly inside America's Meth Kitchen, and Walt goes (pretty rapidly) crazy trying to kill it. Yada yada, Walt doesn't have control over many aspects of his life right now, so he's trying to hold on tight to control over his lab, metaphor. After a night fly-hunting and going quickly mad, Jesse finds Walt the day having pressurized the lab and determined to get the fly before it contaminates their entire batch. So basically Walt and Jesse are locked in the lab, Walt tilting at windmills and Jesse yelling at him to get over it. In the course of events, Walt reflects upon how he got where he is, musing that he has lived too long, past the point where his family will miss him if he dies. He says the perfect time for him to have died would have been the night he met Mr. Margolis in the bar. Walt dances around telling Jesse the truth about Jane's death -- even offering an apology that Jesse fails to interpret correctly -- but ultimately doesn't spell it out. Jesse finally gets the fly, but obviously it's the rambling that was important. Great acting by Cranston and Paul (and directing by Rian Johnson), though I wonder if the conceit wasn't a little too manic to be as effective as it could've been. Also, Walt knows Jesse's skimming meth off the top, and despite Jesse's denials, Walt warns him that he won't be able to protect him if Gus finds out.
See what made the cut in this list of TV's 50 most shocking moments ever.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see which were the best and worst finales of 2010!
Want to immediately access TWoP content no matter where you are online? Download the free TWoP toolbar for your web browser. Already have a customized toolbar? Then just add our free toolbar app to get updated on our content as soon it's published.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Breaking Bad, Jesse and Jane made kind of an adorable couple, until they ruined each other with their drug addictions. Jane's dad tried to save her, but he got frustrated with her backsliding and drowned his sorrows at a bar, where he met Walt. By freaky TV coincidence, that was the same night Walt went to bring Jesse his half of the money, and he saw Jane choking on her own vomit and let her die. Also, Jesse's started skimming off the top of his and Walt's meth batches.
This week's cold open, while usually an intricate short film of (mostly) grim despair is instead a very brief series of microscopic close-ups of a housefly. Seriously, up close, those things are the grossest. As Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis could tell you. Also, there's a shot where it looks like the fly has giant buck teeth. That'll haunt me. Anyway, none of this makes sense, but it will in a few minutes.
Walt hasn't been getting much sleep lately, as the shot of him staring at the smoke detector on the ceiling at 2AM could tell you. So when the alarm rings at 6, it's a grim situation. Here's where I shout out the director of this episode, Rian Johnson, who has directed two of my favorite movies of the last ten years, Brick and The Brothers Bloom. There's a lot of brilliant directorly stuff in this episode, but with this part right here, Johnson really gets across that feeling where you're up for work and inhumanly tired. Walt's staring at the floor, willing himself to move, barely alive much less awake. I know that feeling. I hate that feeling.
Jesse arrives at El Pollo Laundro to find Walt vegged out in his car. (Another awesome directorly moment, as Jesse's on the far side of his car, then passes out of the frame and about a second and a half later is knocking on Walt's window. Time jumps like that when you're barely fighting off sleep.) Down in America's Meth Kitchen, Walt's cleaning equipment, prepping for the day's cook, while Jesse blabbers on about some Nat Geo thing he saw about dominant hyenas and the subordinates who have to lick their balls. Then he complains that they don't have any subordinates to make do the cleaning for them. Walt does his best not to engage him on any level. I love Jesse, but... yeah, for the best.
Later, Walt's checking the supply numbers against the output and muses aloud that they don't add up. Jesse tries to get him to blow it off, and when he can't he gently prods as to how far they're off. "It's not negligible," says Walt, which is probably the opposite of what Jesse was hoping. Around a quarter pound for this last batch. Jesse starts rattling off possible explanations. Spillage? Evaporation? Condensation? Each one gets dismissed by Walt. Then Jesse mentions the "vestiges," i.e. the gunk they scrape out of the tanks afterwards. At this, Walt grabs his clipboard and starts obsessing checking figures. He ignores Jesse -- who's all "Yup! That's it! That's gotta be it!" and the takes off for the night. Before he does, he asks Walt if he's feeling all right. Walt: "Yeah, why?" Jesse doesn't say, "Because you're behaving like Rain Man and A Beautiful Mind put together." He takes off. Walt's gonna stick around for a bit.
So with Jesse gone, and Walt obsessing over data, suddenly we're flitting around the back of Walt's head. Walt finally notices the fly when it grazes his ear, then settles upon the piece of paper he was looking it. Walt sizes it up, gets half a grin on his face in anticipation, and slams his hand down on the paper, all the way to the table, where it makes a loud CLANG. After a second, he lifts his hand, but there's no fly under it, dead or otherwise. Walt looks around and sees it on the workstation behind him. He turns back to his work, like he's going to fool the thing, and then round back on it, slamming his clipboard down with an even louder CLANG. Spoiler: everything in this lab, including Walt's clipboard, appears to be made of stainless steel, so this whole hour's worth of fly-swatting is very loud. Anyway, Walt misses again, so now he's on a hunt. With clipboard in hand, he stalks around the lab, swiping at the air, occasionally hitting precious lab equipment.
Already pretty frustrated, he sees the fly settle on the ceiling, well out of his reach. He looks at his clipboard like he's going to throw it at the fly, but he soon thinks better of it. That's good. I was worried Walt had really lost it just th-- ...oh. He's going to throw his shoe at it instead. Okay. After a couple unsuccessful attempts, Walt launches one that actually busts a light fixture (leaving one particularly gnarly chunk of light bulb hanging around on the lab floor). Oh, also, the shoe is now stuck in said fixture. So there's that. Walt climbs the stairs with a broom, but the shoe is just out of his reach. So he does the INCREDIBLY smart thing and steps out to the other side of the guard rail and starts swinging. He does actually knock the shoe down this way. But when he looks across the rail, he sees his sworn enemy, the fly, just hanging out. So he does the exact thing you're hoping he doesn't do: he takes a big swing at it with the broom, throwing his whole balance off, falling from the top walkway, BOUNCING OFF ONE OF THE VATS, and landing hard on the floor. I seriously thought he landed on that hunk of glass and severed his spine or something. Either way, he grounded for the moment. Which is when the fly decides to land on his glasses. That's a dick move, fly, but I have to respect it.
After the break, it's the morning, and Jesse shows up for work. He extinguishes a cig and notices one of the butts in his ash tray has lipstick on it. Which: I realize Jesse's a slob, but I kind of don't buy that he wouldn't have dumped out his car ash tray since before Jane died. It would have to be pretty overflowing at this point, right? Anyway, Jesse gets all sad-faced.
Down at the doorway to America's Meth Kitchen, Jesse unlocks the door, but when he goes to push it open, he hears a screaming burst of air, and it slams back shut on him. He tries it again, this time pushing harder as the air rushes out of the room like he's on an airplane or something. Indeed, Walt -- who's come bounding up the stairs, shouting for Jesse to shut the door -- says he created a "positive pressure" environment in the lab. What the hell for, you and/or Jesse may ask? Well, to prevent further "contamination." After Jesse adjusts his popping ears to the new pressure situation, he starts to worry about this "contamination" business. It doesn't sound good. "Shouldn't we be wearing masks?" he asks, with some urgency. But Walt says it's not like that and picks up a makeshift tool that looks like a giant ice scraper. Actually, it's a giant fly-swatter, and when Walt finally tells Jesse that their "contaminant" is a tiny little housefly, he's relieved, then annoyed, then slightly concerned for Walt's mental well-being. "I was thinking it was Ebola or something!" he protests. Walt scoffs at "Ebola," so Jesse's like, "Yeah! It's a DISEASE where your intestines sort of just slip right out of your butt! I saw it on The Discovery Channel" There are many reasons to love Aaron Paul, but at the top of that list has to be that he's able to deliver lines like that, where Jesse says something really stupid in a way he thinks is being really instructive. Walt's like, "I know what Ebola is, and you're an idiot." Walt has a point. Jesse, though, wonders who the real idiot is when Walt's chasing a fly around the lab with a homemade fly-swatter. Also a good point.
Walt argues his position on both ontological grounds (the fly shouldn't be there, thus "contamination" is accurate word use) and on the grounds that the purity of their meth is at stake. Jesse looks at the swatter and asks if it's Walt's "fly sabre." Heh. Nice. He also spots the band-aid on Walt's dome and asks if he hit his head very hard? Or perhaps sampled their product? Something to explain how crazypants he's acting right now? Walt starts to explain that in a "highly controlled environment" such as theirs, any contamination has the potential to... something-something. He trails off because the fly is in his sights. Jesse's like, "Seriously, but did you sleep? AT ALL? Because..."
A timer goes off on one of the vats of... meth juice or whatever. Walt says they're running out of time so "let's get started; the sooner we do it, the sooner we're done." Jesse's like, "Awesome!" and goes to get a bag of whatever to dump into the vat of stuff. (Oh, I know how to make meth. I am just being a responsible citizen by not telling you how it's done.) Anyway, Walt's like, "What do you think you're doing? THERE'S A FLY." Jesse looks at Walt like he's got 3.5 heads and tries to appeal to his meticulous nature, saying the timer went off, so it's time to make the donuts. Walt says the batch will be worthless unless they take care of "the contaminant." By the way, I hope you all are making the appropriate connections about contaminants and spoiling the whole batch with all the Jane remembrances we've been having this week. Come on, I can't do all the work for you. So they go back and forth on the subject for a while, until Jesse gives in and agrees to hunt for the damned fly already.
Or at least Jesse agrees to mill around while Walt hunts the fly. He does make a very good point in saying that they're cooking METH, which at its best is still a poison manufactured for burnouts who care about quality perhaps less than anybody else on the planet. But if you've been watching the show, you know how fiercely Walt holds on to the "pride of product" thing as one of his primary rationalizations, so that argument isn't going to hold much weight. So while Walt hunts, Jesse babbles about rat turds in hot dogs or whatever, while trying to surreptitiously mix some whatevers into the meth-y brew. I love the idea that Jesse is trying to work on the sly. Jesse bends down to pick up a bag, and when he gets back up, Walt's there, with his swatter weapon. This is all being presented like a horror movie, with Walt and his fly-swatter made of tape standing in for Jason Voorhees or whatever. He slams his hand down on the vat and proclaims there will be no cooking. "That's an order." Jesse reminds him they're 50-50 partners. Walt's retort to that is to WHAP him on the arm a couple times with the swatter. Which sounds a lot more powerful than I gave it credit for. Jesse jumps back and wails about his arm, but Walt alerts him to a more pressing matter: the fly has landed on Walt's forehead. Walt stands completely still, and you know what's coming. Even if this episode weren't already surrealistically comedic, this would be coming. Jesse gets his free shot at Walt, at Walt's own request. He takes the swatter from Walt, lights up like a Christmas tree and pledges to "make it count," then whales the holy hell out of Walt's head. Did he get the fly? Does it matter? Probably not to Jesse. Walt starts looking on the ground for a corpse, as Jesse is exasperated anew that it's still not over. He points to a dark speck on the floor under a table, but that turns out to be a raisin. Don't they all? Jesse says he "definitely got it," but he's soon distracted by Walt's buzzing nemesis. Jesse marvels in half-serious appreciation. "It's got some serious skills, yo."
Walt, still on the ground, sees that Jesse has at least acknowledged the fly issue, so he bottom-lines it for him, helpfully speaking in grave but less-crazy tones: "This fly is a major problem for us. It will ruin our batch. And we need to destroy it and every trace of it so we can cook. Failing that, we're dead. There is no more room for error. Not with these people." Despite how swiftly Walt goes nutty in this episode, it does effectively get across the point of just how frightened of Gus's organization Walt has become. Jesse, trying his best to meet Walt halfway, says they need to take care of the fly, but maybe first they should step out and get some air. You can tell this offends Walt to his core -- it does nothing to advance their plan of attack! -- but the thing we see, he and Jesse are ascending the stairs. Jesse pulls open the pressurized door, and as the air whistles past him, he steps out. Walt asks for Jesse's keys, just as a precaution, but the instant Jesse hands them over, Walt snatches them and slams the door shut. "If you're not gonna help me, stay out of my way!" Walt yells, in a positively Jack Bauer-ian way.
Jesse bounds into the main area of the laundry facility, yammering about needing an axe. Everybody pretty much ignores him, which is great. No idea whether Jesse is this frantic because he feels the meth needs to start cooking or just because Walt got one over on him. I'd suspect the latter, but he's been awfully concerned about the former this week. After screaming for "el axe-o," Jesse finds a supply closet and chooses his weapon: a sledgehammer. But then he spies the power grid and has a better (worse) idea. Suddenly, down in the lab, the lights go out, predictably just as Walt was about to take a really good swing at the fly. The auxiliary lights come on so we can see the mess Walt made with that errant swing. Walt checks the lab's internal power grid, and when that doesn't work, he turns to the door and sees Jesse's smirking face. "Need some juice?"
The commercial break has given Jesse time to go to the store for fly-killing supplies, like a proper fly-swatter. Walt sneers at the canisters of bug spray Jesse bought; they're trying to de-contaminate the lab, not contaminate it further. But when Jesse presents pheromone-enhanced glue strips, Walt signals his approval (he does so by declining to insult Jesse's intelligence for five seconds). Cut to the lab a short time later, festooned with flypaper strips hanging like party streamers. Between the steadily unraveling protagonist and all the flypaper, I can't help but think of that rather excellent movie Bug, which, if you haven't seen it, do so. Anyway, with the flypaper up, Jesse offers to pour Walt some coffee, since he's obviously been awake since the Eisenhower administration. He pours some out (from Gale's coffee contraption, aw) and then, when Walt's not looking, he pops about five Sominex in there. So Walt's either going to have to take a long overdue nap or, you know, die. Jesse hands the coffee over and dodges a possible suspicious look from Walt ... but it merely leads to a rare "thank you."
Changing the subject, Jesse starts talking about the time a possum got stuck in his aunt's house. And though he tells it in a very Jesse way ("Since when did they start calling them opossum? When I was growing up it was just possum. Opossum sounds Irish or something."), he manages to tell a rather sweet story about his poor aunt who kept insisting she heard it crawling under the floorboards, months after the creature got caught. She even gave it a name ("Scrabble"). "It got like that at the end," he says, pointedly. "Obsessive about stuff. Mad at stuff." Turns out Jesse's aunt had cancer that spread to her brain. On the bright side, the possum ranting got the family to take her to the doctor and find out what was wrong. She got treatment. "Meds so she wasn't stressing all the time. She was a lot better after that. A lot happier." Jesse looks right at Walt as he says these last two lines. The implication is pretty clear.
"Where the hell is he?" Walt grumbles as he stands up. You think he's ignoring Jesse, but then he turns back to him, saying he's been to his oncologist, just last week, and he's still in remission. Jesse's like, "Great!" and then begins coming up with other theories that would explain Walt's total crazitude.
The the show downshifts into the phase I'll call Drugged-Out Walt Starts Talking Crazy. Well, not crazy exactly. Regretfully. Mournfully. Like he's in a one-act play in which he commits suicide at the end. He continues on talking about his remission, how he's healthy, how his once limited life now appears to stretch on into infinity. He doesn't say this celebratorily. "I missed it," he says. "There was a perfect moment, and it passed me right by." The what now? Turns out, he's talking about dying. There was a perfect moment, after he'd made enough money to support Skyler and kids but before any of the bad shit about him came to light. The window was small, sure. He needed to see Holly born. Had to make sure the money was there. But he missed it. Waited too long. Waited til he went into remission and Skyler found out about the second cell phone. "I've lived too long," Walt muses, with perhaps the faintest trace of mirth. "You want them to miss you." At this point, he's not sure they will. Skyler, for one, refuses to understand why he did what he did. "I truly believe there exists some combination of words -- there must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this." Wow, is that ever Walt in a nutshell. The consummate chemist, confident in his science. Confident that the world operates according to hard and fast rules. The right combination will always get you the desired results. Unless there's a contamination, of course.
Walt keeps thinking about the optimum time for him to have died, and he lands on the night Jane died. Well, now Jesse's really interested. Walt elaborates: he had gone out to get diapers for the baby, and then stopped at a bar and ran into Jane's dad there. Though Walt didn't know it at the time. Walt, as he always does when faced with his actions on that night, calculates the odds. Astronomical, that chain of events. Again, Walter's worldview is fairly fascinating. I'm sure a big part of him honestly believes that the universe set in motion a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of events that led to an unforeseeable tragedy, i.e. Jane's death. He even muses out loud about how this all runs counter to how science has taught him the universe works, with all its chaos and colliding particles. See? It's even more amazing. The universe stopped obeying its own rules for one night, just to fuck with Walter.
Feeling the effects of the sleeping pills, Walt nearly passes out on the rolling staircase, but it... well, rolls. Jesse catches him before he tumbles over. "I should never have left home," Walt laments, now clearly fuzzy-headed. "I should have never gone to your house. Maybe things woulda..." He never fully finishes the thought. Not enough to admit to Jesse what he did. He remembers Skyler singing Holly a lullaby that night, before he left the house. "If I had only lived right up to that moment," he says. "Not one second more." He lifts his head to follow the buzzing of the fly across the room. "That would've been perfect."
A neat (if excessive) fly-eye view alerts us to the fact that Walt's tiny little white whale has landed on the ceiling. Walt and Jesse see it, and Walt says it's not coming down. "It must be Thailand hot up there," Jesse says, and it must like it that way. He waits a beat, then: "Thailand's hot, right?" Jesse's the greatest. Walt can barely stand up, and Jesse wheels him over a chair. "He's not coming down," Walt laments. "He's staying up there forever." At this point, Jesse feels enough sympathy for Walt that he wants to kill the fly, so Walt can get some sleep but also so Walt can have his peace of mind. So he grabs a ladder, places it atop two cabinets in a spectacularly unsafe fashion, and begins ascending. Walt slurs that he'll break his neck, but Jesse's filled with righteous purpose and a drive to get this shit over with already.
While Jesse swings wildly (with, it should be noted, Walt's makeshift swatter, not the store-bought one he brought), Walt holds the ladder's base steady. Then Walt says he's sorry. Sorry about Jane. Jesse looks down at him and says he is, too. "I mean I ..." Walt begins, and you really think he's about to come clean, but he just says again, "I'm very sorry." "It's not your fault," Jesse says, in a terrible moment of irony. He's says it's not his fault either, or even Jane's. "We are who we are," he says, laying down his particular theme for the season. He says the who of them, hooked on junk with a sack full of cash, would have come to a bad end one way or another anyway. Walt's nearly asleep, leaning on the cabinet below the ladder, but I really hope he's hearing this. "I miss her, though," Jesse says, as sincerely as he's said anything. "God, I do." He takes three more swings at the fly, nearly losing his balance in the process. Walt tells him to come down. "Let it go," he finally says, "we need to cook." What about the contamination? "It's all contaminated." Jesse agrees and descends the ladder. And as he does, he spots the fly resting on one of the steps. He stares at it, wide-eyed, for a moment, before slowly reaching into his pocket, pulling out a rolled-up newspaper, and like God intended, swatting the accursed fly with it. In slow motion, we see the fly corpse fall to the ground.
"AW YEAH!" is Jesse's adorable reaction. "Somebody got GOT, yo!" He asks Walt if he saw it, but Walt's finally asleep. I'd say he sleeps the sleep of the just, but... well, probably not. Jesse drags him by his feet -- like he's dragging a corpse -- and rolls him across the floor (he's still in the chair) and to the couch. He even sets his shoes on the ground for him. Adorable. And then he goes about cooking that day's meth batch. That is a warped little Betty Crocker fantasy right there.
The morning, Walt ventures back into the outdoors, this time less of an insomnia zombie. He checks with Jesse about the bins of meth and asks about the weight. Jesse tells him 202 and change, then quickly changes the subject to whether Walt is okay to drive home. He says he's fine. As they both reach their respective cars, Walt has to bring it up: "I couldn't chance saying it inside. For all I know they've got it wired for sound. That half a pound I said we're off by... I'm not accusing you... but if... you understand? If they ever found out?" Jesse, faced with this rare moment of kindness and concern from Walt, chooses to double down on being obstinate, says he didn't take shit. Walt looks down before hitting the bottom line: "I won't be able to protect you." And that's something. For all the berating and taking advantage and girlfriend-letting-die, Walt has always been in a position to control the amount of harm that would come to Jesse. Not anymore. Walt's not in control of much anymore. Jesse, again, opts for bluster, says no one's asking Walt to protect him. It's a lie, and you hope Jesse's realizes it before it's too late.
Back home, Walt is finally getting some sleep. Until he's not. He wakes up to a familiar sound. An awful, familiar sound. He stares up at the smoke alarm and it's blinking red light. It blinks, and blinks, and eventually, he sees the fly that's landed on it. That's okay, Walt, just count the heavy-handed metaphors backwards and you should be able to sleep again.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see which were the best and worst finales of 2010!
See what made the cut in this list of TV's 50 most shocking moments ever.
Want to immediately access TWoP content no matter where you are online? Download the free TWoP toolbar for your web browser. Already have a customized toolbar? Then just add our free toolbar app to get updated on our content as soon it's published.
Joe R thought the whole high-concept-ness of the episode was a little overplayed, but there was some great Walt/Jesse stuff in there. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.