Walter forces his way back into the family home, but his relationship with Skyler is as strained as ever. Meanwhile, Hank struggles with his resurgent PTSD.

This is a rather infamous episode among the Breaking Bad fandom, but I was thoroughly engaged from start to finish. Characters are at their most interesting when they have to make a choice, and this installment is nothing but that. Each choice reveals to the audience what our characters value the most, allowing us to understand them that little bit more.

Walt’s decision is to move back into his house and dare Skyler to do anything about it. Rewatching this scene, I was surprised by how tense it was – it might even rival the conversation with Krazy-8 back in …And the Bag’s in the River (Series 1, Episode 3). I love how both Skyler and Walt are “performing” throughout their confrontation, with different tactics for each phase of the argument:

1. Walt tells Skyler that he does not agree to a divorce and he’s returned home for good. Skyler says that she will call the police, and has to follow through when Walt says he doesn’t care: “This family is everything to me. Without it, I have nothing to lose.”1I may be reading too much into this, but I understood this line as a threat of violence – either Walter is going to hurt himself, or he is considering family annihilation as a potential option. It might be an empty threat, but it is still a threat.
2. Walt Jr. comes home from school. Skyler tries to remove him from this difficult situation, but Walt sees him as a potential ally – he makes and shares a grilled cheese with him, ensuring that his son will see the police entering the property.
3. The police arrive. This infuriates Walt Jr. and Skyler is now unable to tell the officers that her husband is a drug dealer without her son finding out. Walt tries to portray himself as a misunderstood father, making a point of picking up and comforting his daughter Holly in front of the cops.

Eventually, the officers leave and Skyler has to accept that Walter is back at home. Some people might interpret this as a triumphant moment for Walt, but we get a lingering reaction shot showing that he is worried about Skyler’s response – he still wants the approval of his wife, and getting into the house was a means to that end.

We will examine Skyler’s motivations later, but first we need to discuss the choices made by Hank and Jesse in this episode. Hank is struggling with the unrealistic expectations of his profession. He is expected to return to work at El Paso2Hank was offered a promotion in Breakage (Series 2, Episode 5) to Albuquerque Liaison, Tri-state Border Interdiction Task Force – he would have kept his old position, but it is the kind of promotion that brings a lot of prestige. but cannot ask for help with the traumatic events he’s witnessed – the shootout with Tuco, the severed head, the IED that killed his colleagues. Since seeking therapy would jeopardise his career, Hank decides to bury his anxiety under aggression. He picks a fight at a bar, failing to identify himself as a cop until he has slammed one man’s head into the counter and pummelled the other over and over again. Hank’s PTSD hasn’t factored into the story for a while, but I like that it has been reintroduced – it shows how Walt isn’t the only one resorting to domination in order to protect their patriarchial self-image.

By way of contrast, Jesse’s problem isn’t anxiety or rejection but complete emptiness. In what might be the most emotionally deft subplot of the show so far, we keep cutting back to Jesse, alone and unwilling to talk to anyone. On three separate occasions, we see him dial Jane’s number so he can listen to her voice. These scenes don’t feel repetitive but instead highlight just how meaningless Jesse’s life has become. As such, when he decides to cook meth again, it isn’t so much a choice as an act of surrender – his drug lab is the only thing he has left.

As for Skyler, we are told her motivations when she revisits the divorce attorney – “I don’t want my son to find out that his father is a criminal”. Crucially, she doesn’t mention any concern for her husband’s well-being – Skyler considers the marriage to be over, even if Walt thinks he can repair it. In the last review, I said that Walter desperately wanted to reconcile his new-found wealth with the admiration of his family. The writers introduced this idea in Phoenix (Series 2, Episode 12) and it is reinforced in this episode, with Walt showing Skyler his illegal earnings and pleading with her to accept the money.

Skyler ultimately decides to have an affair with her boss Ted, and Gunn deserves recognition for how good her acting is here. Her character doesn’t say much in the last quarter of the show, forcing us to rely on Gunn’s facial expressions and posture to understand how Skyler is feeling. Some “fans” of Breaking Bad decided to interpret Skyler’s affair as proof that she was manipulative and ungrateful, but that is not my conclusion. When she returns home after sleeping with Ted, Skyler seems initially hesitant to tell Walt what she has done – having an affair was a way to reclaim some agency, not something that her husband necessarily needed to know about.

Personally, I think Skyler only told Walt because he decided to act like nothing had changed, that he could just go back to his old life as a family man, inviting Louis over for dinner and talking about the importance of honesty. Walter may want to regain Skyler’s approval, but the way he goes about it suggests he does not respect her very much.

Odds and Ends

• We learn two important things about the Mexican criminals:
  1. They are responsible for decapitating Tortuga3Always nice to see Danny Trejo again. back in Negro y Azul (Series 2, Episode 7) and placing his head on a tortoise.
  2. They are cousins of Tuco Salamanca and the reason they temporarily spared Walt is because Gus works for the same cartel as them.
• It’s a small thing, but it really annoys me that Slovis used a yellow filter for the meeting between Gus and the cartel members. This scene takes place in the United States and other segments with the Mexican criminals don’t have this filter, so why use this technique at all?

Please use spoiler tags in the comments, as some Avocadians are watching Breaking Bad for the first time