Breaking Bad Review: “Ozymandias” (Season 5 Episode 14)

His first target is Jesse. Deep down, I think Walt probably knows that it is his actions, not Jesse’s, that have led them to this awful place, but that is a truth Walt cannot currently process. So he blames Jesse for all of this, for driving him and Hank to this awful point of no return, and tells Jack to kill the young man he once regarded – up until very, very recently, in fact – as a surrogate son. He gives away Jesse’s position, watches as Jack puts a gun to his protégée’s head, and does not even protest when Todd requests to first torture Jesse for information. And even that is not enough. Walt needs to stick the knife in further, needs to make Jesse feel as much pain as he currently feels, because that is what we do when we project – we lash out until others are brought into the same orbit of suffering we feel we inhabit. For Walt, that means filling Jesse with the emotions associated with losing a loved one, and so he reveals, in the cruelest terms possible, the true terms of Jane’s untimely death.

“I watched Jane die. I was there, and I watched her die. I watched her overdose, and choke to death. I could have saved her. But I didn’t.”

I have written many times this season of moments Breaking Bad viewers have been waiting years to see, moments that come with enormous expectations and yet are somehow realized in ways that land with tremendous impact. The past five episodes have been full of moments like these, but Walt revealing the circumstances of Jane’s death tops them all. It is a piece of the narrative we all knew would have to come out before the end, and yet I still did not expect Walt himself to be the one to reveal it, to look Jesse in the eye and recount the crime not as a confession, but as a vicious verbal attack. It is both narratively satisfying and emotionally heart-wrenching – focusing on Aaron Paul’s eyes in that scene will inevitably bring the viewer to the brink of tears – and while I expected that revelation, whenever it came out, to be a big moment for Jesse, it ultimately says more about Walt and his current mental state. Again, this is all about projection – Walt does not hate Jesse so much as he hates himself (as late as last week’s episode, he wanted Jesse to have a quick, quiet, and painless death), and the volume of that hatred is such that when he turns it outward, it stings more sharply than we could anticipate.

But Walt’s most terrifyingly harsh verbal assault is still yet to come, as the encounter with his immediate family back at the White house pushes him even further into despair. The man we see in that scene is neither Walter White nor Heisenberg, but some confused, grotesque combination of the two, flitting back and forth between loving and domineering personalities as he tries to get his family to come with him. The dormant humanity shaken forth by Hank’s death desperately wants his family to join him, to love him, to trust him, to see him as better than he currently sees himself, while the evil, criminal side of his mind simply wishes for them to follow his orders blindly. He shouts at Walter Jr. and grapples violently with Skyler, and Cranston plays those moments so precisely that what are on the surface brutal, inhumane actions are made to look vulnerable, scared, and sincerely distressed. Whatever Walter White is in this moment, he is still human, and it is those traces of genuine emotional craving that make his actions so terrifying to watch.

Walt does not, of course, get his family back, nor will he ever, as is made clear as plainly as possible when Skyler attempts to fight him off with a knife, or Walter Jr. calls the police, both seeing this man only as a criminal. And that, to Walt, may be even more damning than Hank’s death. He is so desperate to gain their approval in that scene, I believe, because he wants to be reassured that there is more left inside than the villain he sensed at the moment of Hank’s murder. Walt saw himself for what he truly is out in the desert, but if his family can still feel love for him, then perhaps he can move forward. When it is made clear that they see what he sees, and cannot give the love he requires to be reassured, he lashes even more callously than before.

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