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| Left to right: Mark Margolis and Giancarlo Esposito |
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 4, Episode 11
"Crawl Space"
"If you try to interfere, this becomes a much
simpler matter. I will kill your wife. I will kill
your son. I will kill your infant daughter."
-Gus (Giancarlo Esposito)
After Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) gets treatment in Mexico, he and Jesse (Aaron Paul) head back to America, leaving Mike (Jonathan Banks) behind to recover. Gus insists that Jesse is now capable of cooking by himself, though Jesse refuses to if he kills Walter (Bryan Cranston). Meanwhile, Hank (Dean Norris) is wanting to go on a stakeout to the laundry facility to have a look around. Walter nervously tries to avoid it before turning the simple situation into a car crash that reveals their operation. Hank no longer can use Walter for joyrides. Meanwhile, Skyler (Anna Gunn) is trying to talk Ted (Christopher Cousins) into writing a check for all of the money that he owes her, including money he spent on a car since he refuses to use it for its initial purpose. She consults Saul (Bob Odenkirk), who sends Kuby (Bill Burr) and Huell (Lavell Crawford) to bully him into giving the money. Ted tries to escape, only to slip on a carpet and slide head first into a table where he is presumed dead. Luckily the check was in the mail at the time. Gus intimidates Tio (Mark Margolis) by saying that his whole family is dead and that Jesse killed his relative Joaquin. Walter begins to freak out when he notices that Jesse is cooking without him. He is consulted by Gus and tells him that Walter's use is over and that if he interferes, his family will end up dead. Walter tries to convince Saul to help him enter the Witness Protection Program, but first he needs money. As he searches the crawl space in his house, he notices that a lot of it is missing. It turns out that Skyler used it to pay off Ted.
Rating: 5 out of 5
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| Bryan Cranston |
Is this the end of Walter's reign of meth-making terror? Jesse is now cooking on his own and Gus is threatening to kill him off. Even Skyler is starting to use his money to keep things in check. He has no control over being the head honcho anymore. This is about the rapid decline into nothingness and what a great performance it was to see Walter start off the episode confident and end up in a crawl space where he is laughing hysterically. This is a man that could probably die and not give a damn now. Everything he has worked for is falling apart. Even the simple act of laughing hysterically in a pile of dirt under the house is profound and haunting, largely thanks to a brilliant performance. Still, with two more episodes this season, how will the Walter who now has nothing going for him survive?
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| Anna Gunn |
Best scene: Please, just take some time to admire the Dave Porter score that is "Crawl Space." The aggressive shifts from silence to heart beating tension to aggression is just amazing. Add on top of it the potential end of Walter's entire life, and it makes for one of the most memorably haunting episodes in not only the show's history, but in TV's entire landscape. He may die now that he has no plan, but all he can do is laugh it off. We don't know why, but it is so unnerving, especially if you add the reveals and Porter's brilliant score. Even the final shot in which the camera pulls out to make the crawl space look like a photograph is just phenomenal. If Breaking Bad is great at one thing, it is making iconic shots, and this final scene is the centerpiece to it all.
Come back tomorrow when we recap "End Times"
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