It is then that Skyler’s plan becomes clear: She didn’t want to kill herself, but instead wanted to make herself seem fragile so there is a decent excuse to move the kids away from Walt, even for a day or two. Following this, Walt confronts his wife and all the emotion, the insecurity and the fear comes pouring out of Skyler, while Walt’s domination and manipulation totally undermines her.
It is a deeply unsettling scene. Anna Gunn is finally given a lengthy scene to stick her teeth into after having only a few lines over the past three episodes and proves that her Emmy nomination isn’t for nothing. She is absolutely terrific, displaying a mix of fake confidence and foot stamping authority as a mask for her inner terror. Her fear hasn’t all this time been about her own safety but her children’s. So much so that she brings an ultimatum: If the drug dealing continues, then the kids will not live around that environment and her goal now is to push them further and further away.
But then Walt confronts her, asking “what’s the plan?” She says she would hurt herself in order to convince Hank and Marie that they need more time, that they are struggling and the kids need more time away. Walt’s response: It would only show that she is struggling and he would have her committed.
This is the point where it really hurts. That is how far he would go to protect himself. We remember that Walt’s initial plan was to protect his family, but it has now gone beyond that. It is now clear that Walt is engaged in a thoroughly selfish act.
Skyler continues with her rebuttals, that she could convince people that he beats her due to her affair, that she could send Walt Jr. away to school in Arizona. All are thrown back in her face as Walt forces her to accept that there is no logical way out, that she is in fact trapped in a situation with the only solution being that she rats everyone out. As this goes on, Skyler is broken down emotionally and her terror is palpable.
“I can’t go to the police, I can’t stop laundering your money, I can’t keep you out of this house, I can’t even keep you out of my bed,” she says. The only thing she can do is wait, to wait for him to die of cancer. His death is her only escape. She is caught in a vicious trap, where everyone is now against her and although she is holding the moral high ground, her standing is slowly sinking. There are only dark times ahead for the characters of Breaking Bad.
Although the main highlights of the show were reserved for the relationship between Walt and Skyler, there were also other pieces of intricate plot development elsewhere. Laura Fraser returns as Lydia, the Madrigal employee who is feeding the methylamine to Walt, Jesse, and Mike’s operation. She is taken by surprise when Hank turns up at her office and arrests her warehouse floor manager, who has taken the fall for stealing the integral chemical for Gus Fring’s meth operation.
Her nervousness increases exponentially as she fears that the DEA is on to her. This fear is only heightened when she and Jesse find a tracker on the bottom of a methylamine tank that he needs transport back to Albuquerque (a nifty piece of detective work from The Playlist tells us that Lydia lives in Houston, Texas and not ABQ). Jesse is all for believing that they need to find a new supplier, but Mike isn’t so convinced.
His knowledge of Lydia, with her ability to connive and get what she wants, puts him in serious doubt. He believes she planted the device in order to get herself out of the game and thereby breaking her promise. He wants to kill her, but Jesse rebukes. Walt’s only response is that “nothing stops this train.” Where that leaves Lydia is, for now, unclear, but the writers are promising that the next episode and the remaining hours to come will deliver on the promised bloodbath.
Breaking Bad kept itself neatly subdued this week, allowing for the inner turmoil of its leads to be the ‘violence’ we’ve been promised. Rian Johnson has proven once again that he is a great storyteller for this world and understands the characters as well as the writers do. Overall, a terrific episode.