‘Breaking Bad’ recap: The pride of Walter White

In the final season of “Breaking Bad,” it almost seems as if Vince Gilligan and his writers are going out of their way to show us how smug and repugnant a triumphant Walter White would be. Here’s a man who has no natural enemies now that Mike’s grudgingly working with him but seems intent on making everybody in his life into an enemy, just from being a jerk to them.

Walter’s acting worse and worse, committing greater and greater sins, and he seems pretty sure of himself. I have a friend who’s watching the show almost solely to see how Walter gets his comeuppance now, and he’s terrified one’s not coming. Even if that opening scene for the whole season (with Walter, a year from now, scared for his life in a Denny’s) wasn’t indication enough, just the way he’s acting has to be a major sign that his fall is about to come. What’s that thing they always say about pride going before something?

Here’s another sign: In “Hazard Pay,” everything goes well for a change. Walter, Jesse, and Mike come up with a new location to cook in. The money starts rolling in. Mike finds a way to keep “his guys” on the payroll, so they won’t give up the information that would take everybody down. Walter even comes up with a lie that placates Marie so she won’t start asking Skyler questions that probe too deeply.

Even Walter’s craziest plan, which involves paying off an exterminator (whose employees include Jesse Plemons of “Friday Night Lights” fame) to let him and Jesse cook in the houses they’ve bug-bombed, comes off without a hitch. (This sequence is vividly reminiscent of an episode of “The X-Files,” on which Gilligan worked before this series. In that one, “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” an old scientist used the cover of pest extermination to artificially inseminate unsuspecting women.) It’s an episode where the fates finally smile on Walter White, and while that’s almost chilling to see at this point in the series, it’s also not something you’d expect to see continue.

Take, for instance, that last scene, where Walter, chagrined at having to pay up so much of his cut to Mike’s imprisoned “guys,” has a talk with Jesse mentioning the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, in which the former flies too close to the sun and plummets into the ocean to his death, the wax holding his feathery wings together having melted. Walter is using the myth to discuss hubris and over-ambition, and it’s not immediately clear whether he’s threatening Jesse or trying to turn him against Mike. (I lean toward the latter but have heard convincing arguments for the former.) Walter agreed to let Mike run the business end of their enterprise, but he’s frustrated by how little money he’s getting out of it, compared to what he was getting under Gus. Jesse tries to explain that the two are owners now. It might start slowly, but they’ll eventually get back to where they were and make an even bigger cut than before. Gus had carefully built an operation designed to maximize his profits, and they can do that, too. It’ll just be hard work.

But Walter no longer wants to do hard work. He wants what he wants, and he wants it now. He’s had a taste of riches and the good life, and he lacks the patience needed to get back to that place, even if he’s still easily clearing $100,000 with each new cook. You could make an argument that his impatience is driven by a recurrence of his cancer, since we never did find out the result of his diagnosis in convincing fashion last season, but it’s so obvious to me that this is driven by the central anger that’s always driven Walter, the sense that he’s owed something by a world that spent so long not recognizing his genius. The blue meth is a great product, and he wants the big payoff immediately. The irony, of course, is delicious. Walter’s going to lecture Jesse about hubris? That’s awfully rich, coming from a man who can’t seem to contain the darkness increasingly seeping into his bloodstream.

The other great thing about this season is how it’s making sure to show us the long-term effects of Walter’s operation on those around him. Where Jesse is almost awed by the man, to the point where he breaks things off with his girlfriend because Walter seems to be pushing him in that direction in a deeply personal conversation during their cook, and where Mike is holding Walter at a gruff distance, Skyler seems to be shattering in slow motion, like a windshield with a single chip that slowly spreads outward. When Marie reminds her that Walter’s 51st birthday is coming (marking this episode as roughly one year after the pilot and one year from the season’s opening scene), she falls almost into catatonia, then starts smoking, even as Marie keeps talking away. It’s the smoking that shocks Marie. This isn’t her sister. What’s going on? And then Anna Gunn unleashes an amazing performance, screaming “Shut up!” over and over at her on-screen sister, terrifying Marie into silence. She’s coming apart at the seams, but nobody else seems to see it because they assume with her recovering husband and thriving business that she has it great.

Walter, realizing that if Marie pushes too much further, she’ll break through the wall Skyler has built up around herself and reveal everything, decides to tell another of his long series of lies. He tells Marie that Skyler and Ted had an affair, that she’s incredibly broken up because Ted’s now in a hospital bed. And while, yes, Skyler and Ted slept together, it was while Walt and Skyler were separated, and it certainly wasn’t to the level that Walt implies here. Yet he has to keep lying to keep himself protected, even if those lies seem to be always designed to paint himself as the one, true man and everybody around him as weak and hurtful. Walter White has so bought into the myth of his own greatness that even the stories he tells reinforce that image. Yet if any of these people tug at any one of them just hard enough, the whole edifice will come tumbling down. Walter White is the very definition of having feet of clay.

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