"Breaking Bad" Spoiled Bastard. Ep. 10: "Fly."
Does this man look sane?
This is a Spoiled Bastard. It contains spoilers. That's the point.
FYI: The Bastard Machine is on Facebook, minus the ignorant trolls. Also, Twitter, where there's a mixture of news, insight and snark.
Few series are in such command of all the ingredients that go into greatness as "Breaking Bad," and in "Fly" the series managed to tap into some of the brilliant Season 1 tenseness and the hitting-on-all-cylinders minutia of Season 2 to complete an episode as powerfully minimalist as any the series as ever produced. With "Fly," Season 3 now has its polar opposite poster episodes for how to portray what you're capable of. In "One Minute," creator Vince Gilligan and his superb writing staff were able to deliver a purple bruise of an episode that culminated in a wild, bloody parking lot shoot out with The Cousins and Hank. In "Fly," Gilligan and company crafted what was essentially Walt's finite intellectual implosion, a kind of minor stroke that stopped his blinders-on rationality right in its tracks.
Throughout its run "Breaking Bad" has been able to shift gears as radically and deftly as "The Sopranos," a series that despite all of its critical acclaim is barely credited with that particular kind of genius (probably because some of those shifts so utterly upset a certain subset of the fan base who thought the show was about the mob when it was actually about Tony's inner demons as played out through his immediate family, not the Family). In any case, "Fly" is reminiscent of any number of "Breaking Bad" episodes where Gilligan slows the action down (exponentially, in some cases) and focuses on small, important moments. In this episode, an examination of Walt's interior worries, the execution was brilliant. Obviously it was a visual thing of beauty, from the multiple POV camera work to the rush of color and wonderful use of sound; the intersection of humor with pathos -- these elements becoming so standardized in their consistency that it's almost unnecessary to point them out. But no, the work that really stood out in "Fly" was the writing and the pacing.
By the time Walt first encounters the fly - he's distracted by the total amount of the meth output being off (thanks to Jesse's skimming) -- he's already at a tipping point in his brain. (How the last minute comes directly back to Jesse's skimming is so snap perfect after what proceeds it that all you can do is applaud; not forgetting the strands is fine writing.) Anyway, the point is that it's not the fly. It's Walt's brain. He can't sleep. He comes to the superlab in a bother. It's his subconscious, knocking loudly. The fly at first looks to be a metaphor before we come to view it as real, once Jesse gets in on the hunt. And though it's not a literal metaphor for Walt's cancer or his nagging guilt about how his best laid plans have come undone, it's still a fly in the ointment of sorts, "a contaminant" that sets Walt off on his interior world of wonder about how everything he wanted for his family is now tainted. You can't kill the fly - you can't uncontaminate the imperfection that so nags at Walt, a die-hard perfectionist, from inside.
The burden of a great television series is that there are no shortcuts. In the first season of "The Wire," McNulty and crew didn't just get the wire. They had to jump through legal hoops - all the proof you need to clone a pager, for example. Prezbo didn't just magically come up with how to break the pager codes. He worked at it. And explaining them wasn't easy. But in those - and many other instances - "The Wire" did just that: explain. In detail. No corner cut. Boring? Sure, if you're easily bored or watching the wrong show. Any other show - "Law & Order" or similar middling crap - just has that stuff materialize. Great shows don't. And just as the initial episodes of Season 3 of "Breaking Bad" dealt with so much emotional fall out (and plenty of people thought the early episodes were too slow), so too does Walt's intellectual and moral fallibility need to be scrutinized. The guy who's capable of essentially taking back his home and family by force - even holding his baby while the cops talk with Skyler about her complaint against him -- can't just suddenly be an ass. He can't flip that switch and sustain it. He's not wired that way. And in "Fly," we saw a crack begin.
Hit the link for more:
I think we needed to see this episode because Walt has always been a man aware of consequence. His turn toward immorality (an audacious concept I've written about many times and talked in depth about with Gilligan on a podcast.) must have ramifications - at least mentally. And we've seen bits of it. But in "Fly," the writers let it seep out. Where there's smoke, there's fire, right? And Walt stares up at the blinking smoke detector, unable to sleep, his mind grinding on. Something's wrong. At work, down in the superlab, his emotionless life of being a cog in the machine (they didn't show those images of people punching a clock for nothing, you know), begins to show. Walt started this entire idea of his - making meth - to provide for his family. And where is he now? Soaking in the mundanity of mass produced meth. "Vestiges," Walt says, thinking not about leftover meth gunk but about what's imprinted on the brain of a "normal" man who breaks bad. "Mr. White? Are you OK?" No, he's not, Jesse. "There's been a contamination." Indeed there has. Walt realizes, as a perfectionist, that what he planned to do has gone wrong. This meltdown of his leads to him opening up his psyche. There has to be perfection, he tells Jesse. You have to prevent the contaminant. "Failing that, we're dead. There is no room for error."
This is where the episode took a superb little turn. Jesse had been the comic foil to Walt's sleep and guilt-induced weirdness, which is now being accelerated by the fact Jesse puts sleeping pills in Walt's coffee. But Jesse begins to think that maybe Walt is worrying about death (or as Jesse sees it, perhaps the cancer has spread to Walt's brain). Jesse's heartfelt story about his aunt becoming "obsessive and mad" - out of character for her - led to her cancer discovery. But Walt assures Jesse he's been to the oncologist (just last week in fact) and the cancer is in remission. His next words are that there's "no end in sight" and Jesse takes that to be Walt's relative cancer-free prognosis on staying alive. But what Walt really means is that by living, he's outgrown the usefulness of his original plan. Now he's punching a clock, probably for longer than he wishes, and that his "perfect moment" to get out has passed. "None of this makes any sense" if he doesn't leave enough for Skyler and the family, Walt says. But the circumstances of life didn't work out - there was no perfection. Now there's no end in sight to a plan that makes no sense. That's enough to bring down anyone, but certainly the sleep-guilt-and-drug-induced Walt. I like how Jesse's dumping of the pills into Walt's coffee accelerates and expands Walt's descent, to the point he begins talking about Jane (this not long after Jesse sees her lipstick print on a cigarette in his car ashtray) and Jane's father. Right when you're thinking this fugue state interior meltdown is just a way to reveal the crushing effect on Walt, Jesse has tipped the scales further and we now have more plot movement. Walt's woozy apology about Jane falls just short of revealing that Walt was responsible - a fantastically tense combination in that scene of not wanting Walt to let it slip and not wanting Jesse to slip off the ladder. Unbelievably great work there.
Now what? With Walt finally zonked out and Jesse producing the cook, things are seemingly back to normal. In the waning moments of "Fly," Walt hints that he knows Jesse skimmed the meth and that he can't protect him if things go sideways. It may have seemed that not much happened in "Fly," but it certainly did. How Walt and Jesse move forward in the last three episodes will have ramifications that were made more resonant with this hour.
| May 25 2010 at 02:53 PM
more