Breaking Bad Review: “Rabid Dog” (Season 5, Episode 12)

From Jesse’s point-of-view, however, things are much more interesting, even if Jesse’s story too is one of transition rather than action. On his side of the story – which the episode returns to around the halfway mark – tension is diffused by the arrival of a new variable, Hank, to the situation. My initial reaction – recorded in my notes as a series of expletives, many reputations of the word YEAH in all caps, and copious amount of exclamation marks – was enthusiastic, to say the least, because if the scenario with Jesse and the gasoline had to be avoided, having the interruption occur because Hank has arrived to team-up with his former nemesis is one hell of a way to do it.

I would, in fact, put that sequence among the most satisfying this final season has delivered so far, not just because it is viscerally thrilling to have two opposing characters finally unite over their mutual hatred of Walter White, but because both Aaron Paul and Dean Norris are spectacular in selling every single note of that confrontation. Norris plays Hank as fully in control, knowing he has the biggest opportunity he will ever have to put Heisenberg down, and determined to not mess it up. Paul, meanwhile, is just an absolute emotional powerhouse, and no matter how much we may come to expect that from him, when he belts out lines like “He can’t keep getting away with this!” it is impossible not to be taken aback.

I think some of what follow Hank and Jesse’s team-up is a tad bit wonky; all the material with Jesse in the Shrader house and Hank and Gomez interviewing him on tape is well executed and acted – one of Paul’s greatest strengths, in addition to grief-filled outbursts, is playing Jesse in fish-out-of-water scenarios – but I also feel like it moves very fast, and that some narrative steps are glossed over in ways they maybe shouldn’t be. It probably isn’t essential to see the moment when Hank went to Gomez with this information, but it does feel like something that should have been there, given Gomez’s relative prominence as a supporting character; similarly, we don’t need to see Jesse go through his whole confession, but one has to imagine there are some stories in his statement that would shock the hell out of even Hank, who has put together many things about the Heisenberg case, but certainly would not know everything. For instance, I would think Hank and Gomez both would be fairly horrified to hear about how Jesse and Walt dismembered bodies and melted them into barrels with hydrofluoric acid, at least where the little kid from last season is concerned. It is entirely possible Jesse left some major things out, of course, but therein lies another problem – we do not know what Jesse did and did not tell them, nor how he told it, and given that that is almost sure to be important in the last four hours, it feel sloppy to skip past it in this hour.

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