Rolling right along now, here's an on time instalment that carries over quite nicely from last week's entry in a way that I didn't ultimately plan, much in the same way that following up "Lost" with a parallel narratives episode of "Malcolm in the Middle" was also unintentional. I could have deleted all of that, I suppose, and presented myself as an evil genius the likes of which are written about in today's entry. But this blog and its author are firm believers in journalistic transparency.
After the break: All I can say is that this episode just flat out
Breaking Bad, "One Minute"
First aired on AMC Sunday, May 2, 2010
“Your meth is good, Jesse. As good as mine.” – Walter White
On the morning of St. Patrick’s Day 2008, 15-year-old me
headed to the hospital for a routine tonsillectomy. It wasn’t a particularly
arduous procedure, but I did have to stay at the hospital for most of the day.
So I brought along a DVD of “The Office,” a show that I had been particularly
missing during the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, to help pass the
time.
One of the nurses saw me watching it on the bedside TV and
mentioned to my mom and I that she was a fan of the show as well. She then told
us about a hilarious new show that she and her husband had been watching
recently, a show whose short first season had just ended eight days earlier.
“It’s called “Breaking Bad”. Have you seen it?” she asked.
Neither my mom nor I had ever heard of it. Who would have,
really? AMC had only recently started to make a name for itself the summer
before with “Mad Men”. It wasn’t until the cable channel was airing both that
show and “Breaking Bad” that they established their reputation of “Oh it’s an
AMC show, it’ll be the best thing ever” (“The Killing” would go on to ruin that
a few years later, but I digress). “Breaking Bad”...I remember not even really
grammatically understanding the title at the time. Those two words didn’t seem
to belong together.
“It’s so funny," the nurse continued. "It’s about this high school chemistry
teacher who finds out he has cancer, so he quits his job and starts making
crystal meth to support his family.”
This didn’t seem all that funny to me. But I laughed anyway,
and not even just to be polite. I legitimately had never heard a more
ridiculous sounding premise for a show before.
I sat on this information until late 2011 when the acclaim
from my favourite critics finally got me to sit down and watch the first four seasons
of what was being called one of the greatest dramas in the history of
television. And after watching the third season’s seventh episode, a
heart-stopping hour named for (among other reasons) the amount of time the
mysterious caller warns Hank he has to escape the onslaught of The Cousins, I
had only one question on my mind:
“If that nurse is still watching the show (and I really hope
she is), what in the hell was her reaction to that, two seasons after
describing “Breaking Bad” to me as the most hilarious show ever?”
As great as that scene is, I’m almost tempted to just gloss
over it, because I think people forget how good the episode is as a whole. In
discussing the best TV of 2010, “One Minute” is about as sexy a choice as you
can make because of how mind-blowing that aforementioned final scene is. And
it’s crazy suspenseful, even knowing what’s about to happen. Being able to hold
up is so important to me in the television that I watch. As much as I was
mesmerized in the hour by the dream-like quality of “The Crash,” arguably this
year’s strangest episode of “Mad Men,” that’s just not going to play again for
me. Knowing that crazy “Grandma Ida” breaking in to Don’s apartment and
terrorizing the kids will not end in a triumphantly heroic if somewhat scary
moment for Sally Draper completely eliminates all the enjoyment I got out of
those scenes, which was me sitting on my couch and saying, “What in the hell is
going on here, and more importantly, what in the hell is about to happen
here?”
There are odd TV moments where every time I watch them, I
think that maybe, just maybe, the scene will play out differently this time.
Though not on this list, one of my favourite episodes of “Freaks and Geeks” is
“Looks and Books” where Sam Weir buys the horrifying powder blue “Parisian
night suit” and wears it to school to try and be cool. Of course everybody
laughs at him and he tries to bolt for the exit before the bell rings, only to
be caught by the school secretary and told he can’t leave. Every god damn time
I watch that episode, in which I am so completely mortified and embarrassed for
the character, all I want is for Sam to just run out of the school anyway.
“Maybe this time he’ll do it!” I say, getting my hopes up. And each time he
goes to class where his teacher tells him that we should all be proud to be
homos.
Now obviously I’m aware that if he got away with that, the
episode would have no point and be far more boring. But I care about Sam as a
character, just as I care about Hank Schrader as a character. And the way that
final scene builds the tension and really drives home how terrifying the
situation is, I still found myself being afraid that Hank was gonna die this
time. WHICH IS CRAZY. I’VE SEEN THIS EPISODE AND I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. HE DOESN’T
DIE. But that’s just how good of a climax the shootout is: it plays by no
conventional rules of TV and that makes it, as a result, eternally suspenseful.
Okay, we good? Good. So let’s build to that wonderful finale
by examining the 40 minutes that make it possible.
One minute, sixty seconds...no matter what you call it,
that’s an awfully short amount of time. But for the characters on “Breaking
Bad,” that seems to be the amount of time in which the biggest and most
critical decisions are either made or not made. Of course, no one realizes
this. A minute is meaningless considering how long your life is on average,
right? When Skyler shows up at Walt’s apartment and asks, “Got a minute?” we
know that expression will not be the beginning of the most serious and
important conversation the two of them will ever have. It turns out though that
it is a conversation about destroying evidence in relation to a crime,
which is kind of important if “the great Heisenberg” (as Jesse will later call
Walt sarcastically) wants to remain the meth king of the Southwest and not
behind bars for the rest of his life. “Got a minute?” Of course, who doesn’t?
Well that’s exactly the problem. We all have a minute. All of us have that
small of an amount of time to screw things up royally in ways that will affect
all the minutes to follow.
At the episode’s start, Hank shows up at Jesse’s house and
beats the crap out of him for calling his house and terrorizing his family. As
a result, Hank is suspended from work and Jesse presses charges against him. Though
he takes gratification in that brief, minute long moment of beating Jessie to a
pulp, all of the repercussions that come as a result arrive slowly in the
following days. It’s just one shameful moment after another in which he is
forced to realize that as cool and powerful as he felt in the moment, he
couldn’t have behaved more irresponsibly. He realizes it when he has to relive
the encounter by giving a statement to the police, when he gets suspended and has
to turn in his badge and gun, and when he has to pack up his desk and walk out
of the DEA office past all of his colleagues who know what he’s done. Just when
you think Hank Schrader has never been a smaller man, stepping in to the
elevator greeted by his wife while looking devastated, the elevator door closes
and we immediately cut inside to Hank sobbing on Marie’s shoulder. When they
arrive at the ground floor, the sobbing is done and Hank is cool again.
It’s just the beginning of a humbling hour for just about
every character on this show. Whether its characters that are downright awful
and even monstrous (Walt, occasionally Saul), or characters who are inherently
good who let the darkness envelop them sometimes (Hank, Jesse, Skyler,
Marie...actually, probably everybody except Walt and occasionally Saul), it’s
almost never not gratifying to see characters forced to admit they’re not what
they think they are. Hank, for example, is not someone I would necessarily call
instinctively cocky or egotistical – but he does have moments like in the pilot
episode when everyone at Walt and Skyler’s barbecue is impressed while watching
the news report of Hank’s drug bust, and Walter Jr. is all excited about
wanting to go on a ride-along, where Hank can’t help but take advantage of the
attention he’s getting and how cool his nephew thinks he is. “One Minute” makes
it clear that “the cool cop who arrests dangerous drug dealers with no fear” is
a costume he’s worn so much that it’s become like the haunted mask in the
“Goosebumps” books – Hank has worn it so many times that not only can he not
get it off anymore, it has basically become him. Seeing that all shatter into
pieces for him all at once is devastating to him – as he later tells Marie in a
quiet, powerfully heartbreaking scene, “I guess I’m not the man I thought I was.”
It’s also the lynchpin that makes his actions in the final scene believable.
With no confidence left and not being sure of anything he thought he knew about
himself, Dean Norris absolutely sells the idea that the mystery call warning
him of The Cousins would throw Hank off so completely that he would have zero
idea of what to do and would simply sit in a panicked state waiting for his
downfall rather than just driving off as fast as he can. Fantastic work by Dean
Norris and Betsy Brandt, who are easily the MVPs of the episode.
There’s another side to that coin, though. What does Hank’s
attack mean for the victim? Jesse falls into that “ultimately good yet falls
off the horse” category and as the show has become the story of this good guy
trying to stop himself from doing terrible things, we definitely feel for him
the most when he has to confront his worst qualities. Jesse is just as
impulsive and irrational on a regular basis as Hank is when he attacks him, and
sometimes you gotta get the shit kicked out of you to figure out what’s what.
Eventually that is, as for now he has to inform Walt (in a stunning monologue
that Aaron Paul is completely committed to, not even blinking) just how badly
he’s going to make Hank pay for what he did to him. It’s another one of those
“made in a minute” decisions that had Jesse not been confined to a hospital bed
covered in bruises, could have been a truly terrible one that ruined not just
his life, but those of his “business associates” (if we can call them that in
this seedy world of crime).
Regardless, though, Jesse is more or less just talking out
of his ass. Like Hank, he’s trying to save a little face and remain the tough
guy/badass he thinks he is (I love that when he finishes that speech, Saul’s response
is basically a Dr. Evil-style “Riiiiiiiiiiight”). Because you know what? Jesse
Pinkman is just a cuddly teddy bear. He’d never hurt a fly, except for that one
episode where he did nothing but try to kill a fly. He was never going to go
ruin the lives of Hank and his family because he cares enough about the people
in his life. In particular, he cares about the man who does not really seem to
care about him.
Oh, Walter White. What a horrible bastard you are in this
episode. With his transformation from Mr. Chips into Scarface well underway at
this point, it is remarkably disgusting that a lot of the dramatic stakes in
this episode hinge on the idea that Walt will have to admit that someone else
is his equal in order to stop a bad thing from happening. The way he so
dismissively tells Jesse that his meth is good, basically rushing through the
sentence so he can start pretending he never said it, is so evil and so well
played by Bryan Cranston (it is a testament to his skills as an actor, thrice
rewarded with an Emmy for this role, that I never thought of Walter White when
watching Hal do his goofy bowling superstitions in the “Malcolm in the Middle”
episode I wrote about last week). And of course, it’s not to make Jesse feel
better about himself in the immediate aftermath of Walt being cursed out by Jesse
(rightfully) for being the cause of every bad thing that has happened in
Jesse’s life since the two met. It’s so that Jesse will come back to work in
the superlab, replacing Gale as his right hand man and thus preventing Gus from
putting a bullet between Walt’s eyes just as soon as Gale learns the recipe for
Heisenberg’s infamous blue meth. And of course, the easiest way for Walt to get
rid of Gale (at least in his own mind) is to make him think he’s making
mistakes and ruining their batches. Sure, why not? Not only will that get Jesse
back in the lab and lower his chances of being murdered, he’ll get to call up
Gus and gleefully inform him of how much better he is at this than Gale will
ever be.
Walt even agrees to make Jesse his – gulp – partner in the
operation, and not just his assistant or number two or any other demeaning
title. The way Walt uses Jesse as his puppet in this episode is so brilliantly
reprehensible: when he learns that Jesse has dropped the charges against Hank,
Walt breathes the heaviest sigh of relief. But it’s not because his
brother-in-law will not be sued or because he’s proud of his young protégé for
taking the high road. It’s because he is so glad that even the smallest connection
between his family and his life of crime has been severed. Heisenberg roams
free for another day. He is just the WORST.
Everyone needs a reality check once in a while. It just so
happens that in “One Minute,” everyone seems to get or pretend to get theirs’
at the same time. That might actually be the scariest thing about the idea that
everyone has a minute to screw something up – what happens when everyone’s
minute comes simultaneously, and no one – not even Saul Goodman – can be there
to bail you out of trouble?
Next week: Rest in peace, Steve Ryan.
