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Ugh. Okay, so Walt has barely made it off of Hank’s cul-de-sac before Hank is on the phone with Skyler. They schedule an immediate meet-up at a diner (where else, on this show?), where Skyler is scared shitless, and when Hank tries to barrel her over into putting her story on tape so he can quickly get Walt locked up, Skyler starts freaking out about getting a lawyer and bolts. Things manage to go oven worse when Marie comes by the house to talk. After surmising that Skyler knew the truth about Walt since before Hank was shot, she slaps her sister across the face and then tries to take baby Holly away. Hank stops her and they leave Skyler to figure her shit out in private.
Meanwhile, Walt is freaking out, thinking that Skyler just went right to Hank and told him everything. First order of business is to get Saul’s guys to round up the money. They probably pocket a few stacks for themselves and then load the rest into barrels, which Walt then drives out to the desert and buries. He then commits the coordinates of the location to a lottery ticket, which he later magnets to his fridge, where no one will ever figure it out ever I bet.
Once home, he heads straight for the shower, but between the stress of Skyler asking a billion questions, the heat stroke he probably suffered in the desert, and all that cancer (oh, yeah, Hank told Skyler about the cancer), he passes out. Some hours later, he wakes up to Skyler doting on him. He tells her he knows she probably ratted him out to Hank; he’ll turn himself in, if only she’ll promise not to give up the money, to pass it on to this kids, so this whole endeavor won’t be for nothing. Now, last we checked in with Skyler’s emotions, the only thing she wanted was to be out. But now, she knows that Walt can’t go down without the money going away. So suddenly she cares about the money again, and she starts advising Walt to keep quiet, since Hank doesn’t have very much in the way of real evidence, or else he wouldn’t have been grilling her so hard. I’ll probably work this out more in the recap, but for now, this feels like a major selling out of the Skyler character for plot purposes.
The other uncomfortable realization is that Walt can’t go down without Jesse going down too. After his nighttime money-tossing escapade, Jesse crashes his car and ends up drifting listlessly on a merry-go-round. By episode’s end, he’s been brought in for questioning (where’d all that money come from, etc.), and Hank sees an opportunity to lean on him to get to Walt.
Meanwhile, in Lydia Rodart-Quayle news, she gets taken out to the desert (blindfolded) to get a look at Declan’s meth operation, which is well below the Heisenberg standard, but Declan simply doesn’t give a fuck. Heisenberg’s stuff is off the market, so the meth-heads will buy what they’re offered. This isn’t good enough for Lydia nor her Czech backers, so she settles herself into a nice, quiet corner while Todd, Todd’s uncle, and Todd’s uncle’s gang members massacre Declan and his crew. Guys, is Todd going to end up being this season’s Big Bad?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: Lydia tried unsuccessfully to lure Walt back into the business, and Hank and Walt put all their awful cards on the table.
Oh, lest we forget, Jesse went driving around some run-down neighborhoods chucking stacks of cash onto people’s lawns. The cold open, in fact, shows us an old man living in one of those beat-up houses, who looks like the scary (but not scary at all! Just in a fight with his son!) old man from Home Alone. He gets in his truck to head out somewhere -- Tupperware party? Fantasy football draft? -- when he spots something in the driveway. If you guessed it was a stack of Jesse’s cash, congratulations… you just watched the previouslies like the rest of us. So the old man picks up the money, and then spots another stack a few steps away. Given his age and beard situation, I'm holding out hope that he’ll start hopping around like an old-timey prospector, but no. He just follows the money, stack by stack.
Here’s where I think he gets greedy and crosses the street to pick up more money. Clearly, that money was supposed to be spread around to everybody, sir. Way to be a money hog. He follows the money trail off the road and into a playground, where the lights of an immobilized car are heralding bad news for the driver, who is obviously Jesse. As the old man investigates, we see the car came to a low-impact halt. Upon even closer observation, we see Jesse -- mobile, if barely -- lying down on the merry-go-round, listlessly turning himself in circles. He’s really wringing this depressed-millionaire thing for all it’s worth, huh?
Credits. Elements.
Back to the cul-de-sac where we left off last week. Remember that yellow RC car the kid on Hank’s street is playing with? Still there. After the events of Dirt Bike Kid, any shots of children playing are going to seem ominous. We’re looking from the outside at Hank’s garage door, while Hank and Walt finish up their altercation from the premiere, which makes it two straight episodes where we pick up right where we left off the episode before… only outside a door. Anyway, the garage opens and out stalks Walt, looking angry and also a little concerned. He and Hank have a kind of Old West staredown, and then Hank hits the automatic door-closer, at which point Walt is free to freak out and scramble to his car. After somehow once again avoiding running over the little kid’s race car, Walt backs up and only makes it a few feet before he stops to dial's Skyler digits. Poor Mariano at the car wash gets hollered at to make Skyler get on the phone with him, but apparently she’s on the other line. Walt looks in his rearview and sees Hank in his driveway on his phone, and it dawns on Walt who Skyler must be talking to. So he blazes a trail down the street and it’s onto Plan B.
Back at the car wash, we see a shaken Skyler on the phone, barely responding to Hank, staring at her vibrating cell. But by the time Walt screeches into the car wash parking lot, she’s already gone.
Somewhere across town, Skyler enters a diner looking like she’s going to fall apart if someone so much as looks at her. There are so many tchotchkes on the walls, you guys, and I have decided that they represent Skyler’s cluttered psyche. She’s there to meet Hank, who calls to her from across the diner. My initial worry is that he’s going to be angry/horrified at her or, worse, that he’ll assume she knows nothing and have his illusions come crashing down. But he’s a better cop than that. He’s already put together the pieces about Skyler’s breakdown, the pool party “incident,” et cetera. So when he wordlessly embraces her, it’s with a decent amount of knowledge about what she knows. Skyler can’t seem to process this reaction, nor relax for more than a few seconds.
As their conversation ("conversation," really, since Hank is doing all the talking) continues, Hank assures her that her days of being Walt’s victim are over. He’s going to take that son of a bitch down. The tragic thing is that the Skyler of last season really needed this intervention. The Skyler of right now seems to have arrived at a place of relative calm and peace. He tells her that they will take her and the kids back to his house, where they will be safe. The first sentence she’s able to croak out is a half-formed thought about whether Marie knows yet. Hank says no, they can get to that later.
He then barrels forward, making a tactical error, if an understandable one. He pulls out a voice recorder and asks Skyler to just tell him the whole story -- everything she knows. This way, they can build enough of a case that they can arrest Walt ASAP. For one thing, he’s asking Skyler to basically confess all the worst secrets of her life in a crowded diner with cow skulls on the walls. He also doesn’t know just how guilty she feels -- both justifiably and not -- about what her family life has become. He needed to play this much slower and more carefully, but it’s tough to blame him for wanting to get it the heck over with. He even blurts to Skyler about how Walt intends to run out the clock, what with his cancer being back and all. Skyler is, of course, rocked by this revelation and moreover, she clearly blanching at the idea of putting her story on tape. Despite Hank’s many assurances that he’s going to protect her, she doesn’t want to go on the record.
Hank’s other big mistake is that he lets his Ahab shine through a bit too clearly, with lots of talk about Walt dying before Hank can take him down. So as much as Hank assures her that his top priority is to protect her, she can tell that his top priority is taking down Walt. She’s a means to an end. Shakily, she asks him if she should get a lawyer. He’s confused by this, and he gives her the classic cop’s case for why lawyers muck everything up and that they’re for guilty people and that she should trust that he has her best interests at heart. I think even he believes that’s true ("No one is more important to me than your sister," he says, with complete, teary-eyed honesty), but he’s certainly not being honest with her about how much she could be on the hook for. She’s right to want a lawyer. He’s right to want her statement before a lawyer can halt the process. They’re at an impasse. "It’s in your best interest," he tells her, "to get out there and show the world you have nothing to hide." I think it’s that "show the world" stuff that really freaks her out. With a statement out of the question for the moment, he instead says they should go pick up the kids, go back to his and Marie’s house, and then help each other "put that animal away." Skyler’s just scared out of her mind right now and when he gets up to lead her out, she asks him if she’s under arrest. At first, it seems like an extension of her worst-case-scenario fears -- that the day Walt got found out, she figured she’d be arrested too. But as Skyler keeps repeating it, "Am I under arrest?" over and over, louder and louder, it seems more and more like a defensive tactic. "Am I under arrest?! AM I UNDER ARREST?!" She’s not, of course, which means Hank can’t take her anywhere she doesn’t want to go. So she bolts out of the diner, breaking down in tears.
After the break, the comedy duo of Huell and Kuby show up at Walt and Skyler’s storage unit. You know, the one with the giant cube of money that Skyler has to spray for silverfish because apparently all of your stacks of cash are just CRAWLING with silverfish. They take turns marveling at the sheer amount of money, and then Huell -- unable to resist -- flops back-first onto the stack. Just try to imagine the dollar amount that would support a man of his size. Kuby gets all schoolmarm about how they have a job to do, but Huell eventually convinces him that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, so the redhead's soon on his back too. The cube barely moves. Huell’s like, "The Mexican border, all I’m saying." Red reminds him that Walt was able to take out 10 guys in prison in a matter of minutes. So, like, no.
Back at Better Call Saul, Walt is freaking out that he wasn’t able to get to Skyler before Hank did. Saul, meanwhile, is leaving voice mail messages for Jesse, telling him to get rid of his money somehow (uh: done), because "the monkey is in the banana patch." Also, I should note that Saul is wearing a very Marie ensemble of a purple shirt and a purple tie. Walt gets a call from Skyler, but Saul strenuously objects to him picking it up in case Hank’s got a wire tap. In fact, he gets Walt to take the battery out of his phone entirely. Saul tries to calm Walt down by saying that Skyler ultimately can’t give Hank anything more than hearsay about everything except the money and they’re currently taking care of the latter thing. But Walt objects to Saul categorizing this development as "nothing." Saul then verrrrrry gingerly broaches the subject of perhaps Walt sending Hank… away. "On a trip to… Belize?" Walt initially doesn’t get it. Saul, looking directly at the floor: "You know… where Mike went." Once Walt gets it, he is adamant: "Hank is FAMILY. Understand that?" Saul stammers his way out of the hole he just dug for himself, but it’s pretty funny watching Walt be this aghast at the idea that he resort to murder (and yet also interesting that taking out Hank is, at present, out of the question for him). "Send him to Belize," Walt says in exasperation. "I’ll send YOU to Belize."
Huell interrupts things with word that they’re back with the money. It’s in the back of a van, separated into about a half-dozen open plastic barrels. The tops are off, says Kuby, because he figures Walt would want to check to make sure it’s all there. Indeed, Walt inspects the cash and declares it "close enough," and between that and the look Huell and Kuby shoot each other, I’d guess they’ll be enjoying a few more steak dinners in the weeks and months to come. I like that Walt is just resigned to the idea that there’s gonna be some grift. It’s the grease on the wheels of the criminal industry. The guys offer to help Walt on the other end of the trip, lugging the barrels and such, but he turns them down. No use hiding money if these two lugs are gonna know where it is. He instead fills up a sack with cash, hands it to Saul and tells him to take his cut and the rest is Walt’s as "insurance." He then instructs Saul to find Jesse, and he’s off.
Cut to the blistering heat of the desert, where Walt is driving his van full of cash. He goes off-road, headed for the dusty isolation. He then grabs a pick and a shovel and gets to the business of digging a hole big enough to accommodate those six giant barrels. Walt, at least take off the Members Only jacket -- Jesus Christ.
Back home, Skyler is still vainly trying to reach Saul, while Holly plays in her pen. Skyler nearly yelps at a knock at the door. It’s Marie, and she’s pretty clearly not going anywhere. Skyler lets her in, but only her. No Hank, who is waiting outside. Marie’s face is full of concern, but unlike Hank, she doesn’t lead with a hug. They end up in the bedroom, where Marie waits for Skyler to form the words. In the vacuum, of course, Marie keeps talking. She can’t believe this could possibly be true. Skyler just affirms the story with her tears. Of course, Marie’s task isn’t quite so pleasant. She wants to know how long Skyler has known. I think ultimately Marie knows where this will end up, but she needs to believe in her sister for a few more minutes, so she backs her way through the timeline. Before the pool? Before Gus Fring? The money Walt made "gambling"? The cover story? That was Skyler’s cover story, remember, and her most active moment of participation in Walt’s operations. Marie knows it, now. Knows how much effort went into coming up with that story. And then it hits her: Skyler has known since before Hank got shot.
Skyler, in tears, finally turns to her sister. All she can manage is, "I am so sorry." At this, Marie slaps her -- HARD. She then makes plain what at this point Skyler may not have even realized herself: "You won’t talk to Hank because you think he’s going to get away with this." At this, Marie storms out. While Skyler tries to recover, we hear baby Holly crying in the distance. Skyler follows her out and sees that, yep, Marie is trying to leave with Holly since this sweet child can’t possibly spend another day in this house of lies. As I said this week, it should not be underestimated how much Hank and Marie’s stewardship of the White kids will play into this. They can’t possibly allow these children they cared for to be in a drug lord’s home. So anyway, Skyler and Marie struggle over Holly and it’s very loud and very tense and poor Holly is just waiting to be dropped, but thankfully Hank shows up in time to defuse the situation. He orders Marie to leave Holly here, with Skyler. Marie walks out in a daze and Skyler, comforting Holly, glares at Hank until he leaves. She locks the door behind her. Maybe this tipped the scales for Skyler. Maybe she realized that no matter what, if Walt goes down, she’s going to lose her kids. Out in the car, Marie turns to Hank and tells him, begs him, “You have to get him.”
After the break, Walt is still in the desert, still digging. The jacket's off now, and he's got some kind of bandana covering his head, but he's still in sleeves. I guess you’re balancing body temp issues with sun-exposure issues, but either way, I’m sweating vicariously. This continues well into the night, when Walt is finally able to unload his barrels and then begin the work of burying them. When THAT is finally done, he pulls out a GPS locator, devises his current coordinates, commits said coordinates to memory and then promptly smashes the unit with a rock.
Cut to Walt back at home, where he has committed those memorized coordinates to a lottery ticket and magnetted it to the fridge. I can’t possibly see how that doesn’t end in disaster, but a tip of the hat for being clever, I suppose. From down the hallway, Skyler hears Walt and calls out to him. There is an ocean of mistrust between them at the moment, with Walt assuming she went running to Hank and spilled the whole story. He just kind of trudges past her, into the bedroom and then into the bathroom, where he proceeds to run the shower and start disrobing. Skyler, meanwhile, intuits that he buried the money and then stresses that she told Hank nothing. Like a good wife waiting for her drug-lord husband to tell her she did a good job. Oh, Skyler. Walt strips into those signature tighty-whities we’ve all grown to dread, but before things can get any nakeder, he passes right the hell out, falling face-first onto the bathroom floor.
We time-lapse to the morning, where we see that Skyler has put a blanket on Walt, a Band-Aid on his cuts and is working his forehead with a cool cloth. Just tending to her man. She’s Team Walt for sure by now. He wakes up and is informed that he was out for five hours. I guess she couldn’t well take him to the hospital and open him up to any kind of official inquiry. Her first question is about the cancer. Is it back? Is this the end? "Does that make you happy?" he asks. "I can’t remember the last time I was happy," she says. He tells her that he knows she made a deal with Hank and since this is the end for him, that’s fine. He says he will confess on one condition: that she keeps the money. She never gives it up. She passes it on to their kids. I wonder how that would possibly work. After Walt turns himself in, all their current assets will be seized, the car wash will become the government’s car wash. They’ll be broke, probably end up living with Hank and Marie (if Marie can abide it). Even if she can manage to dig up the money, she won’t be able to use it in any real way, not right under Hank’s nose. She’d have to end up moving the kids elsewhere, then returning for the money, all while somehow not arousing suspicion as the wife of a notorious drug lord. So… this isn’t going to work. There’s no way this ends without Skyler losing everything, money-wise. This is a pipe dream, and maybe it’s important to her to indulge Walt’s pipe dream. Or maybe it’s important to her to keep her own dream alive, however distorted it’s become, and try to ride out these accusations together. However unlikely it seems, if they can keep Hank from ever getting proof, the money, the house and the kids all stay put. They lose Hank and Marie, but maybe they’ve lost them already? I’m just trying to work through Skyler’s thought processes here, because the upshot is that Skyler has now decided to go back on everything she said she wanted -- the end of Walt; the end of living with the drug business -- and is throwing in with Walt for real. They’ll stonewall Hank together. Oh, she says it nicer. "Maybe our best move here is to stay quiet." But the implication is real. She’s cast her lot.
IN OTHER NEWS: Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is being driven out to the desert, blindfolded. She’s here to inspect the meth operation that is being run by Declan, Walt’s competitor from last season who has now inherited the meth business in New Mexico. Given Lydia’s stated dissatisfactions with the quality of the meth, she obviously wants to see what the problem is. Declan, as you can imagine, isn’t exactly welcoming, but she says there’s a $50 million shortfall and you can’t much argue with that. So he leads her into their subterranean lab -- a bus buried in the desert with nominal ventilation. Clearly, the connections with Walt’s original, RV-centric business are intention. This is rudimentary. This is amateur hour. And Lydia sees it right away.
It’s filthy, for one thing. "Do you seriously think this is up to the standards of your predecessor?" Declan is at least honest enough to lay his cards on the table: Heisenberg is out of the game, so his standards no longer apply. His meth is the only game in town and his customers are still buying. But apparently the Czech Republic is used to a higher standard of product, because Lydia says this is unacceptable for her overseas business. "I cannot move what this person is making if it is substandard, and it is. It just is." She then apologizes to the cook who is, like, right there. Declan says she couldn’t get Heisenberg to come back, so why are they even arguing? Lydia wants him to use Todd, who at least learned from Walt and whose first two cooks were at 74%. Declan’s like, "Yeah and his third cook he started a fire." More importantly, Declan wants to work with guys he trusts, not Todd who he doesn’t. "I really wish you’d given him a chance," she says softly, and checks her watch. At this, Declan’s crony back up top says they have "a problem." He leaves Lydia down below, where she checks her phone and seems to pointedly NOT send a message. There’s muffled talking up top, and Lydia crouches down in a corner, so you kind of know what’s coming. Before long, machine-gun shots are rattling off, enough that there are shells dropping through the ventilation and into the bus, at Lydia’s feet.
It’s over quickly, and soon the lid to the RV is opened and a voice calls out, "Ma’am? You okay?" It’s freaking Todd. She’s skittish as all hell, of course, and hesitates to even respond until she’s sure it’s safe. He pulls her up, but at the last minute, she says she doesn’t want to see anything. So he has her close her eyes and guides her as they walk past a field of slain drug dealers. Looks like Todd’s uncle and his men have become the muscle in this particular operation. Todd’s uncle can’t believe this tiptoe-past-the-tulips routine, but whatever… she’s the boss. We see one man still crawling around -- Declan. Todd’s uncle wastes no time and calls out, “Fire in the hole!” before shooting him dead. Lydia jumps, but keeps moving. Todd doesn’t seem overly burdened with conscience, as you can imagine. Todd’s uncle’s men then begin rounding up the equipment.
After the break, we’re at home with the Schraders. Did I mention last week about Marie’s purple teakettle? My current favorite inanimate object in all of television. I hope it becomes important to the resolution of the season. Anyway, Hank’s home from work yet again, poring over his papers. Gingerly, she asks him if he’s going to the office today. She begs him to take the case against Walt in to his co-workers and superiors. He’s got enough to at least get the whole muscle of the D.E.A. behind this investigation. But Hank has his reasons for delaying. He tells Marie that the moment he brings the case in is the moment his career will end. He can’t go in and admit that this kingpin he’s been chasing, that they’ve all been chasing, has been under his nose this whole time. His brother-in-law, of all people. At least if he can put the whole thing together and catch Walt, he’ll be able to do that on his way out. Marie brings up another angle, though: what if they catch Walt before Hank does? And then his inaction starts to look like complicity. He has to do it.
So Hank heads in to work, looking uncomfortable as all hell. He winds his way to his office and sits in the dark for a moment, collecting himself. Agent Gomes shows up with a welcome back and an agenda for today. Hank tells him to block off some time for a conference call with Ramie for, you know, "reasons." Gomie sets out to do just that BUT FIRST did he hear the one about how Jesse Pinkman got hauled in for questioning after hurling stacks of money from a giant duffel bag filled with more money out the window? Hilarious, right?
Cut to Jesse, silent and nearly catatonic per usual, being interrogated by two giant asshole cops who are being all sarcastic and banter-y with each other. Like they’re so much better than Jesse. These two can go to hell. He’s clearly pissing them off by being an utter brick wall. None of their intimidation tactics work, but they seem content to wait him out. From outside, Hank kind of taps on the window and calls the detectives out. He tells them that he’s got a history with Jesse, and he thinks Jesse can be of help to him on another investigation. He says he thinks their personal animosity might be able to jar something loose, and then he can get both of their investigations some traction. Win-win, right? The detectives go for it and head off to take a break. Hank then looks in at Jesse, clearly thinking that this is his angle. And it reminds me that just as much as Walt’s end will inevitably take Skyler down with him, it’s going to take Jesse down too.
Joe R is working on a purple-purple color theory that ties Marie and Saul together. He can be reached for lavish praise and nothing but at joseph.reid21@gmail.com.
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