5.3 Hazard Pay Splendid snarky work from comment man/woman there, and while I suspect he was being a tiny bit facetious, he’s right – Walt is, probably for the first time in the series, unquestionably the out-and-out villain of the story. We got a little taste of what this last series, when the icy veneer of Gus was defrosted and humanized by his backstory just as Walt was metaphorically killing younglings – but this is the real deal now. No-one is scarier than Walt. So who is to be Walt’s main antagonist in this half-series of Breaking Bad? On the basis of the first two episodes and Hazard Pay, it’s beginning to look a lot like Mike. Or were they? Walt did seemed to be nit-picking with some of the issues he had with Saul’s potential cooking venues, and Saul’s frustration at him (“You can’t head to CostCo and pick up a couple of de-humidifiers?”) seemed well justified – although there was a nice moment where his sheepish attempts to sell the Lazer Bowl venue to Walt and Jesse, where the fateful plan to dispatch Gale was feverishly hatched by the three of them, was unceremoniously shot down. In the end, Walt’s plan worked out just fine, as they have had a habit of doing recently, and also resulted in a gorgeously directed cooking sequence so woozily seductive that it almost makes the meth business attractive enough to make the the bike-lock stranglings and box-cutter throat slicings all worth it. Despite that, all the smoke and mirrors still seemed a little unnecessary, when the other venues remain probably a little less risky overall. And it isn’t enough for Mike either, who isn’t afraid to unload some uncomfortable truths to Walt at the most inopportune time – while a huge pile of cash is on the table. After revealing the administration costs of the new business, Mike drops the bombshell that’s been lingering since a typically tense and funny opening scene – his ‘guys’, 11 incarcerated men who have had their ‘hazard pay’ suspended by the DEA, are going to have to be cut in on their earnings from now on to stop them from breaking. Despite previously promising him he can handle the business side of things (while simultaneously telling Saul otherwise), Walt immediately objects, going so far as to slam his hand down on his share before Mike can grab it. It’s only when Poor Jesse selflessly offers up some of his that Walt relents, but not before Mike gets in a final body blow: “Just because you killed Jesse James, doesn’t make you Jesse James.” Ouch. It’s the words that Mike pointedly doesn’t say – “The coward Robert Ford…” – that ring loudest here, and it’s likely what leads to Walt’s chilling final scene with Jesse, where he heavily intimates that Mike is stepping, potentially fatally, out of line. He just questioned Walt’s balls. Never question Walt’s balls. And this is why Mike is an interesting rival for Walt – it’s a battle of two alpha males, both committing to opposing, competing disciplines of masculinity. To Mike, being a tough guy is done according to the old school: sticking to a code, being professional, having your word and your balls and breaking them for nobody (I know these recaps are increasingly balls-heavy, but so is the show dammit so bear with me). We saw this in evidence in the opening scene, where Mike’s word in and of itself was enough to stop a potential squealer from squealing. Let’s not forget that the entire premise of Breaking Bad is essentially a revenge of the nerd on an epic scale; a put-upon schmoe labelled as a test-tube loving dweeb his whole life uses his potential death sentence to become the ultimate in tough guys: a gangster kingpin. It’s all about proving how much of a badass he is: this means more to him than money, more than family, anything. It’s his revenge on the world that mistreated him for 50 years. It’s about proving that Walter White is a man to be reckoned with. As a quick aside, it’s interesting how Breaking Bad has, along with the other big ‘quality’ TV shows of the past decade – Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, even Lost at a push – male protagonists who on the surface are hardcore alpha males, but beneath the veneer are big tortured mushes of insecurities, flaws and daddy issues. Before shows like these came along and changed the television game, Mike would probably have been the main character in Breaking Bad, not Walt, and as great as he is the show as a whole would have beeen far less interesting. Vince Gilligan, David Chase, Matthew Weiner etc all realized that tough guys have far less interesting dramatic potential that guys who are pretending to be tough. That said, the arrival of half-pest-controller, half-burglar Todd, who handily points out and disables a nanny-cam set up in the would-be meth lab, seems to interest the talent-spotter in Walt, who unironically gives him the whole ‘What’s-your-name-kid’ routine. Todd certainly interests me, as he is played by Jesse Plemons, a fantastic actor who should be familiar to all Friday Night Lights fans as that guy…what’s his name? Lance? Elsewhere, Skylar is finally melting down, telling Marie to shut up about whatever she was taking about while she attempts to arrange salad leaves into a smiley face and forget about the sociopathic murderer who has just forcibly moved himself back into her bedroom, then adding a few hundred ‘shut-ups’ more for good measure. Hazard Pay was maybe my favourite Breaking Bad so far of this new batch because the molasses-black humour that has become a trademark was at its strongest and most subtle: Walt’s get-out-of-jail manoeuvre to Marie, where he blames Skylar’s erratic behaviour on her own infidelity was so perversely twisted that it couldn’t help but elicit chuckles and a shake of the head from me; ditto his attempts to appear kind and empathetic to Jesse while secretly manipulating him into dumping his girlfriend, before brutally cutting him off when he tried to discuss it with him after Mike’s scathing put-down. It seems the more reprehensible and outrageous Walt’s behaviour gets, the funnier it gets. I can’t help but keep going back to the scene in the crawl space at the end of (erm) Crawl Space, where we saw the anguished screams of Walt, at his lowest ebb, turning imperceptibly into huge, cackling guffaws. Thinking back, Walt hasn’t been the same since that moment – perhaps that’s when the absurdity of his situation finally dawned on him. He’s a meth lord, for God’s sake. His life’s a joke, and with his crazy schemes and ironic revenges, he’s beginning to treat it as such. However, for Walt, one thing is for certain: it’ll only stay funny if he gets the last laugh. Follow Paul Martinovic on Twitter, or for more babble, check out his blog here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
