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| Left to right: Krysten Ritter and Aaron Paul |
Are you tired of long, tedious accounts of Breaking Bad episode recaps? Then look no further than Breaking Half: a weekly column that takes the good and bad from each week's episode of Breaking Bad and dilutes it down to the core necessities. Each Monday, Breaking Half will attempt to take a few key moments from the episode and boil it down to one juicy paragraph.
Season 3, Episode 11
"Abiquiu"
"If you're going to launder money, Walt, at least do it right."
-Skyler (Anna Gunn)
With Hank (Dean Norris) now in treatment, Walter (Bryan Cranston) continues about his job of cooking. He still thinks that Jesse (Aaron Paul) is stealing from him. The reality is that Jesse is trying to sell it to rehab patients, but they aren't buying. There he meets Andrea (Emily Rios), a single mother with a son named Brock (Ian Posada). He begins to fall for her, even if she tends to have some addiction problems. Walter consults Saul (Bob Odenkirk) after Skyler (Anna Gunn) confronts him on how he handles his money. He needs to launder in order to avoid suspicion. What he does get is an option to either go with Saul and take a laser tag vicinity where Saul has accomplices, or go with Skyler, who wants him to launder at a car wash, which seems more logical. Things keep going and soon Skyler plans to be Walter's accomplice at the car wash in order to make it seem plausible. Jesse attempts to talk to Andrea's kid brother Tomas (Angelo Martinez) about buying meth, but fails miserably. Walter goes to a dinner with Gus (Giancarlo Esposito), where they talk about being friends and partners, as Gus wants the best for his employee.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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| Left to right: Anna Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, and Bryan Cranston |
While Saul may have the best lines of the episode, it is Skyler who is controlling Walter's fate at this point. As an accountant, she uses her knowledge in order to persuade Walter into doing what she wants with the laundering business. She does it smoothly and almost rivals Walter for smoothest criminal in the series. While Saul still brings up great points against the car wash, it is Skyler's eventual insistence to go for it with logical reasoning that makes her performance subtle yet full of amazing details that suggest that she has finally given up on a life of good and just wants to be happy with her husband by doing illegal things.
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| Cranston |
Best scene: In the continuing journey of discovering who this Gus character is, we get a different side to him. We have seen the business man side and even the drug kingpin side that kills off his enemies. Now, we see the home of Gus, and it is unnerving, as if he's going to hurt you at any moment. When sitting down, the two men are alone, away from the world and any way of recording evidence of their activities. Gus continues to spill advice about being a great person for doing the job in order to provide for his family. He is a very economic man and despite doing something really dangerous and illegal, it is unnerving to see his ethics out on display. In fact, he almost seems enviable by how confident he is. In a sense, this is who Walter wants to be, and that is what makes Gus all the more intriguing.
Come back tomorrow when we recap "Half Measures"
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