Breaking Bad ended Season 4 with a bang, both literally and figuratively, and gave us a very satisfying end to the back and forth between Walt and Gus. This season’s premiere ‘Live Free or Die,’ while good, was a definite letdown, especially after such an epic setup as ‘Face Off.’ There were some positives, but the whole episode left me feeling more than a bit unsatisfied.
Walt and Jesse travel down to grab Mike after Gus went bang in order to find out where Gus had the tapes that the cameras all fed to. After a tense back and forth, they surmise that they need to somehow get rid of the data that Gus kept on his laptop in his office. Mike, the career criminal, and Walt, the mastermind, banter about incendiary devices and explosives while Jesse, in a really funny bit of business, keeps chiming in about magnets. GENIUS!
They head to a junkyard to MacGyver together a super-powered electromagnet hidden in the back of a U-Haul truck that they hope will wipe the memory on the laptop clean once activated outside the wall of the evidence room the laptop is kept in. It works, or at least that is what Walt says.
The B-plot involves Skylar having to confront the NOT dead Beneke. When Saul explains to her, in a way that only Bob Odenkirk can do, that Beneke is not, as we all thought, dead, the gamut of emotions that run through Skylar’s eyes is like an entire year of Lee Strausberg Master Classes rolled together in a few seconds. Seeing Beneke in his hospital bed, pleading with Skylar to leave him alone for the sake of his family, was a defining moment for Skyler as a character in the series final season. While her role has expanded, she is now as feared as Walt in the eyes of others, something that she may have wished against, but seems to take a little shining to.
The positives in this Season 5 premiere come mostly in the form of individual scenes. There’s the tense standoff between Mike, Jesse, and Walt; the junkyard scenes; Bald Beneke pleading for his life from a hospital bed. These are all great scenes individually, but the strength of each just went on to showcase how the episode as a whole faltered: there is no consistent flow amongst them.
I also take a bit of an issue with how Walt is being characterized by some critics as being akin to Tony Montana from Scarface (a comparison I find interesting only in that we saw Steven Bauer last season). Walt has become the King by taking out Gus. He is now the cold and calculating leader that can influence people with only a few words of insistence that things are the way they are because he says they are, but for me, that’s where the comparison ends.
Tony Montana was a product of his surroundings long before he got involved in the business that led to his downfall and death. He was a person who, while cunning, was more reactive than proactive and logical.
Walt, even at his most irrational and emotion-filled moments, has always kept a logical side to himself. The plotting against Gus had been brewing for a long time, little by little, just as every scheme or plan that Walt hatches has.
I’m hoping the rest of Breaking Bad: Season 5 gives us a little more in the way of the structure and fluidity that made us fall in love with the show in the first place. I would hate for the final season of such a groundbreaking show mar its reputation by trying to cram too much into each scene instead of building mini-arcs that converge to a satisfying summer 2013 finale.
– James Zappie
