Breaking Bad Season 2 Episode 4: Down
May. 4th, 2019 12:44 pmAnd we're back to the bear in this episode. Someone in a hazmat suit pulls the bear out of the pool, and evidence bags in, and the long line of evidence bags ends with Walt's glasses. Now we know something bad happened, and Walt has to deal with it.
Walt and Jesse are arguing secretly about cooking again. Walt gives Jesse some money, but he doesn't stick by the 50/50 split. Walt leaves before he responds to the idea that it was his fault, since he had the idea to work with Tuco.
Walt making breakfast for Walt Jr and Jr mocking his cooking actually hurts. It's such a normal family scene, and such a clear callback to the first scene of the series, before this all started. It also feels like Walt is genuinely trying to make up for things, instead of just deflecting suspicion, which makes it even worse, because it reminds us that he can be a good person.
And then things start going downhill, when Walt starts making excuses about his phone, and Skyler realizes they're bullshit
Jesse's life goes even further downhill, when his parents drag him to their lawyer's office, and evict him. It's an extremely impersonal thing to do; they have the lawyer do it, reading from the legal document, instead of speaking to him in any way, much less as his parents. WHile it might be true that they can't stop Jesse from ruining his life, it's still obvious that their primary concern is saving themselves and their image, and their primary issue with this is how it reflects on them.
Jesse's mother isn;t interested in having a dialogue with him at all, and she's already written him off. Jeese points out that he looked after his aunt when she was dying, which helps establish Jesse as capable of responsibility, and when given the right tools, better at it than his parents. I just hate Jesse's parents, tbh.
Now, Walt finds out that Walt Jr is going by Flynn to his friends. He's trying to distance himself from his father, and Walt didn't know precisely because of that distance.
Skyler rejects Walt's omelets. She's not interested in his family bonding right now.
Jesse turns to Walt, and Walt assumes that Jesse smoked all the money. Everyone Jesse can turn to assumes he's not worth helping.
Jesse goes to live with one of his friends. Said friend has a kid, a townhouse/apartment, and a wife. His friend has grown up, while Jesse is still stuck in highschool in a lot of ways.
Jesse, with nowhere to stay and his bike gone, tries to break into the storage lot to stay in the RV, and falls through a port-a-potty. It could be a joke, but then we see Jesse crying himself to sleep in the RV, and it's really not.
Walt takes Flynn out to teach him how to drive, which is a very stereotypical father/son activity, and then he hears that Flynn's friend Lewis has been teaching him, and he's being replaced.
Walt tells Flynn to not set limits for himself, ignoring that those limits are part of his disability.
This is rare as one of the few scenes in the series where Walt genuinely admits wrongdoing. It's not perfect, but he admits he's treated skyler poorly and been emotionally unavailable, and he tries. And then when Skyler doesn't talk to him, he turns around completely and gets angry at her for thinking he's "up to something", because he expected just trying to fix everything, and when it doesn't he got angry.
When Skyler basically makes an ultimatium for Walt to tell her, he refuses to. He's put the drug making, and therefore protecting his family in abstract, over his actual family relationships. He says "do you know what I do for this family?" when Skyler drives away, but the thing is, he's just refused to tell her what he does (or thinks he does) for them.
Walt takes everything out on Jesse, not thinking that, unlike everyone else he deals with, Jesse isn't going to ignore the social strictures about not beating him up. After that, they jsut sort of lie there, united in the fact that both of them are on the downswing. This scene is also the first time that we really see how cruel Walt can be to Jesse. Even if Walt is right to not give up the money because Jesse already lost his 50 percent, Walt goes too far by specifically attacking everything Jesse is already fucked up about. He does give Jesse the money in the end, so he;s still capable of stepping back right now.
The episode ends with SKyler sitting in her car, about to light up a cigarette. She sees another woman looking at her disapprovingly since she's pregnant, hesitates, and lights up anyways. Skyler is being lead into a dark place right now, and, like Walt's actions, it could have a trickle-down effect on innocents.