Each season of Breaking
Bad has ended with a showdown between Walt and one of his various male
rivals, all promising the most inevitable and gut-wrenching showdown of them
all: Walt versus Hank, his D.E.A. agent brother-in-law. Tonight, Breaking
Bad made good on that promise.
A buyout from the meth business has not made Walt a more
honest man. He’s up to his old tricks,
lying about his cancer and about Mike’s murder at the conclusion of season
five. But while Walt has descended
further into a life corrupted by his own hubris and endless capacity for
dissembling, Hank has remained the moral center of their story. For all his
dishonesty, Walt cannot lie to Hank, and Hank cannot stop himself from throwing
the truth back into Walt’s face. In the
conclusion of Blood Money, Hank lays
bare the full list of Walt’s crimes, none of which Walt is able to dispute. Stripped
bare of the lies, Walt pivots between his two remaining defenses: portraying
himself as a doomed, helpless cancer patient, or as the powerful and
unpredictable criminal we know him to be.
To no one’s surprise, he settles on the latter, setting into motion the
showdown we’ve been waiting for five seasons.
Breaking Bad, for
all its badassery, is not an action-packed thriller, at least not most of the
time. Usually, its installments are
character-driven slow-burns, where, between sequences of action, we sit with
the characters and ruminate on the moral depravity of their universe along with
them. Blood Money didn’t stray far from this pattern. This was the Breaking Bad we’ve been waiting for, as moody, dark, and well-paced
as any episode before it, and I’m absolutely up for seven more episodes just
like it.
Oh, and as a postscript, Walt’s going to use the ricin to
poison Jesse in an act of revenge. You heard
it here first, folks.
In the comments below, tell us what you thought of tonight’s
episode, who you think is going to get ricin-ed (we swear that’s a word) and be
sure to follow us on twitter at @bandlhatemovies.
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