(A few weeks ago, I started these Breaking Bad recaps, and then fell a bit behind. Not one to give up without a fight, they’re still coming, just a tiny bit late. I’m going to dump a few of them today, so read them if you wish, and if you don’t watch Breaking Bad, turn off your computer and start it today)
Walt’s both too smart and too stupid for his own good in this episode. Walt is too smart for his own good when, tired of Jesse running errands with Mike, and wondering where this plan could leave him, he questions Jesse’s record of events the night he saved Mike. Perhaps, Walt theorizes, the whole night was a set up. Even Walt couldn’t imagine just how right he was. No matter, with no way to prove it, he just ends up alienating Jesse by pointing out how useless he is and attacking his already fragile self-confidence.
Walt proves to be too stupid for his own good when, after Jesse is unavailable to help clean up, he hires three Hispanic laundry workers to come into the methlab and clean. This is obviously a terrible idea, but Walt is pissed and to some degree, probably actually right about cleaning up being a two man job. That said, when an employee of Gus’s comes to take the women back to their home countries in South America, Walt is somehow shocked, as if he couldn’t predict something bad would come from allowing people to see a top secret meth lab. Walt feels awful about it, and tells Gus’s henchman to not blame the woman, but to blame him. The henchman assures Walt that Gus does.
Jesse, finally feeling good about himself, is helping Mike out. This is help Mike doesn’t really seem to want or need, but he understands why it has to be done. Out on the road with Mike, Jesse tries to use his familiarity with methheads figure out a shortcut to getting into the house of two methehads with Gus’s product. It partly works; he gets into the house, knocks one of the methheads out, but also ends up at gunpoint. Maybe Jesse is not entirely useless after all, and patience isn’t the only way.
Skyler gets her own Carmela Soprano type moment, albeit not nearly as bad. She knows what’s up, and she takes an active step towards leaving her family and state, driving out to the four corners, and tossing up a coin to see where she would head. Even though the coin came up with her leaving, she decided to stay. Sometimes you don’t realize what you want until you flip a coin and realize that you want the side you didn’t land on. Either way, Skyler’s now in. She’s certainly no Walt, but she’s not blind and she’s partially culpable. If Walt goes down, she’ll go down too. I’m not sure whether the criminal activity has turned a switch in her on that she didn’t know was there, or whether it’s due to love of her family, but there’s no way to now claim she was innocent.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 
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