Br Ba S5 E13: To’hajiilee

There’s one good thing about missing the latest Breaking Bad while we were on vacation: I don’t have to wait a full week to see who is left standing after that heart-stopping desert shoot-out.  

Setting the heart of “To’hajiilee” in the desolation of the New Mexico desert mirrored the fact that this episode stripped the series back to its primary elements: Walt, Jesse and Hank facing down one another with guns and handcuffs over barrels of meth money. I could see it coming that Hank and Gomie would not get away with reading Walt his rights and then taking him away. This is a show that has repeatedly solved one confrontation by inciting another one. One crisis ends and a worse crisis begins. Enter the neo Nazis.

So DEA agents and men with swastika tattoos fire large guns and we see the cruel cut to black with the words “Produced by Vince Gilligan” without knowing who will survive. I have a bad feeling Hank will not be getting out alive because the tone of his phone call to Marie really seemed like a last goodbye.

The lead up to the confrontation, with Walt speeding down the highway in a rage and panic, was breathtaking. In one phone call, he admits every murder he committed in a neat litany that sums up the series. After all that, the jig is up and the feds have the goods on him. What finally did Heisenberg in (at least til the Aryans showed) was his arrogance and greed. He was shocked that someone would be smarter than him and discover the coordinates to the buried money and appalled that someone would take his hard earned cash.

The other elemental clash here was the confrontation between Walt and Jesse. Yet again, Aaron Paul turns in a devastating performance, the look in his eyes when he sees Walt communicating volumes. He looked to me as if he were finally realizing just what it meant to really defeat Walt. Under all the hate Jesse justifiably harbors for Mr. White, he still looks up to him in a twisted way and is shocked to see him in handcuffs and Jesse looks almost like he’s still that student who doesn’t want to let his former teacher catch him at misbehaving.

That all ends with Walt, his father figure, whispering “Coward,” as if to a son who disappointed him, followed by a well-deserved shower of spit from Jesse. The man deserves every bit of spittle.

Well, now I need a defribrillator to restart my heart from that gun battle. Until the next review, have an A-1 day!