Breaking Half: "Say My Name"

Left to right: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and Jonathan Banks

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.

*Note: Originally published on August 27, 2012

Season 5, Episode 7

"Say My Name"

*Note: This is a tribute video to the character Mike through scenes compiled from over the series and set to the song "Like Mike"

“If you leave, you get nothing!”

-Walter (Bryan Cranston)

Just like in "Face Off" where Walter (Bryan Cranston) declared that he won, he has once again outdone himself. After telling a competitor to join him in distributing the meth in favor of freeing Mike (Jonathan Banks) and Jesse (Aaron Paul) from their duties, he must get about setting up his own empire. He insults Jesse for being a former addict in hopes of getting him back, but no luck. He replaces Jesse with Todd (Jesse Plemons), who is very dim when it comes to cooking. He also hides supplies at Skylar's (Anna Gunn) car wash to keep Hank (Dean Norris) and the D.E.A.  (lead by Steven Michael Quezada) agents off the scent. The D.E.A. are on the lam, interrogating Mike's house and finally pinning evidence on his lawyer, who Mike has been using to pay his men in prison to be quiet. With the lawyer now in jail, Mike considers leaving town to avoid getting caught further in the web of corruption. He has Walter retrieve some supplies that he left in a parked car and brings it to him, only to have Walter shoot Mike over some paranoia. However, this is not without a farewell that states that if Walter hadn't killed Gus (Giancarlo Esposito), things would be a lot nicer. Indeed they would be.

Rating: 4 out of 5

MVP: Mike

It is the point in the show where we say goodbye to the remaining man who had an idea of how to operate things. Mike was a former cop and he used his skills to work around the system. Here, he manages to tidy everything up, but not before Walter screws it up. Now we have many things to be concerned about. Will the men in prison squeal on the operation now that there is no cash intake? Mike was really the glue in tonight's episode, if just because we cannot help now but feel like Walter is completely screwed and has no discernible way of continuing a legitimate operation. After all, he is the cook, not the distributor, which has now been given to a competitor that he claims is like a little league team playing the New York Yankees. Ouch.

Best scene: There has been consistent suspicion in the season that someone important was going to die. Many penned Jesse, as the whole Jesse James allegory that ran for a few episodes seemed a little on the nose. However, when Walter finally kills Mike (which even then some consider ambiguous to if he's dead), it creates an emotionally personal moment that justifies everything. Mike comes clean about how Walter ruined everything in the meth business because of greed. His insistence on killing Mike because he wouldn't give the names of the men in prison when Lydia (Laura Fraser) could have easily given him the information. It makes the death more tragic to know it was killed over something as futile as that.

Now we're at a crossroads. Will Walter attempt to redeem himself by giving up, or is his quest to create an empire business going to eventually kill him? Will the men in prison talk and ruin Walter's career? With Jesse about to bail, is it possible that we'll discover that Walter poisoned Brock (Ian Posada) and make for the eventual showdown? How long will Todd stick around, and will they be killing more children any time soon? We have one more episode this year to go, and I'm sure we'll have some idea of what the future will look like come the closing credits next week.

Come back tomorrow when we recap "Gliding Overall"