Season 5
Anthony Hopkins said playing Hannibal Lector was easy. Simplest thing. Just make him polite, he said.
That’s kind of what Jesse Plemons did with this character Todd Alquist who shows up in Season 5.
I remember being much more horrified by his psychopathology than when watching it the second time around. This time, he just seems stupid. At the end of this long, really brilliant series, (recently named the #1 television series of the 20th Century by both critics and viewers), after nearly everyone is dead including his horrific family, he’s so stupid he doesn’t even seem to realize what has happened. His last line is cut off when Jesse wraps a chain around his neck and chokes him to death. His last line is, “Mr. White…” and you’re left with the distinct feeling that he was going to say, “Mr White, I think somebody did this on purpose.”
But I’ll get there. I think this season actually saw fewer deaths and murders than in the previous seasons, but I could be wrong.
Killing the entire crystal meth gang with Gustavo Salamanco and Gus Fring’s deaths does not end the problems for Mr. White and Jesse Pinkman.
The season opens in the German company Madrigal offices. We don’t know it, but Gus Fring has been working with Madrigal all along (much of this is learned in the follow up series “Better Call Saul.”). One of the executives in that company decides to kill himself using a portable CPR, before police can question him about his association with Gus Fring. Body Count = 225
Lydia, the American Madrigal employee who has been helping Gus send crystal meth to Germany — asks Mike to kill the 11 men who worked for the now dead Gus Fring. He refuses, so she asks another of the men named Chris to do the job instead. Chris kills one of the men named Chow and then invited Mike to talk about their predicament in an attempt to kill him next. But Mike suspects a set up, and kills Chris instead. Body Count – 227.
In the 3rd episode, Walter suggests using a Pest Removal company as a way of cooking their meth. This is the episode where the horrifying Todd becomes a character, although at first he doesn’t speak and seems kind of like an extra.
The 5th episode is the great train robbery and, at the end, one of the most horrific moments of the series was when Todd waves at a little boy who is riding his bike and then shoots him because he, Todd, had been told that there can be no witnesses. He had no feelings about killing a child and this act sets Jesse, who has great feelings about it, on a terrible spiral that will almost get him killed. Todd’s true psychopathic nature was revealed in that moment. It’s probably even more horrifying when they put the bike and the kid in the vat that dissolves everything to goo.
Body Count – 228.
Finally — it probably isn’t worth going over the plot points — Walter White shoots Mike and Mike dies by the river. One thing I’d probably need to look at again, is why Mike is able to anticipate and outsmart every single person on the show, except for the one who kills him.
Body Count – 229. R.I.P. Mike. But you’ll have 6 years of working coming up on Better Call Saul so it’s okay.
After not getting the names of the 9 or 10 remaining men that worked under Gus Fring from Mike, Walt goes to Lydia and gets the names. She gives him the 9 names and also proposes to work together to ship crystal meth to the Czech Republic. In this episode, Walter refuses to speak to Jesse because Jesse has quit the business. (The breakdown of Walter and Jesse’s relationship, which has always been a volatile one where they are constantly yelling at each other, has always been a little bit of a mystery to me. It may be a little forced, or it may be Walter’s pride, again, getting angry at Jesse for not seeing his greatness.) This is also the episode where Walt also hires the white supremacists — an interesting choice, given his descent into evil. He hires the white supremacists to kill all 10 men who used to work for Gus Fring.
Body Count – 239.
Declan (a drug dealer and cook who Lydia of the Madrigal company has been using) is asked by Lydia to hire Todd as their cook. The cook they use is lousy and makes a substandard product. While she’s hiding in the underground meth lab, the white supremacists come and massacre everyone in Declan’s gang. I counted ten bodies, but it was hard to be sure how many were killed by the White Supremacists.
Body Count – 249 (Mike)
In the scene in the desert, which has been called one of the greatest episodes of television, and the greatest episode of Breaking Bad, Walter and Jesse, who have been fighting badly, are handcuffed and put into different cars. They’re there in the first place because Walter hid all his money in six oil barrels and buried them in the desert. Hank was able to manipulate Jesse into pretending he was dead and sending a picture of the “dead” Jesse posed next to an open oil barrel of money. Walter, eager to protect his barrels of money, makes a very unwise decision to call the white supremacists he’s working with to come and kill the people trying to steal his money. But then, seeing it was Hank and Gomez, he calls it off and surrenders. Hank, also suffering from immense pride, puts Jesse in handcuffs in one car, and handcuffs Walter and puts him in another. But then the white supremacists show up, and they decide to kill Hank, Gomez and anyone else and take the money. Jesse hides under one car in a dirt depression, and Walter flings himself to the floor of the car he’s in. But Hank and Steve Gomez are caught in the open. Gomez is killed.
In the following episode, which is the other half of this long episode, they kill Hank. They bury Hank and Gomez and leave Walter in the desert with one barrel of his money. They take Jesse at Todd’s insistence that he needs him in order to learn how to cook meth. Jesse is enslaved.
Body count – 251. (Hank and Steve Gomez)
Walter has taken to hiding in Vermont and Jesse is a slave. He tries to escape and to punish him, the psycho Todd calmly kills a woman Jesse was in love with.
Body count – 252.
And then in the last episode, the finale, Walt “saves” Jesse by confronting the white supremacists who are now cooking “blue meth” with Todd and Jesse’s assistance. He has rigged an automatic in the truck of his car and triggers it by tackling Jesse and holding him to the ground. This kills 3 of the people in the gang, while “Uncle Jack” is still alive so that he can be killed by Walt. Todd was able to hide and is killed by Jesse with a chain around his neck. I think this is the 2nd time Jesse has killed anyone. Walt tells Jesse to go and Jesse leaves after they acknowledge each other’s presence with a nod — or maybe they’re acknowledging the hell that they’ve been through. Walter calls Lydia who is sick with a cold, but has actually been poisoned by Ricin. Finally, Walter dies after fondling some of the meth cooking equipment. He dies with a slight smile on his face. In “Better Call Saul” it’s confirmed that Lydia died in the hospital and Walt died in the meth lab. So 4 gang members, Todd, Lydia and Walter.
Final Body count = 259.
There are a few more deaths to come in the El Camino followup movie, which I think was a mistake and probably took away from some of the great moral center that Jesse (and Aaron Paul, as the actor) provided.
There is no one in this series, other than Jesse, who actually has a moral code that cannot be broken or bent. And it’s an interesting — a very interesting idea — that perhaps our morality is not as “solid” as we would normally attribute to ourselves. We come across this idea all the time, especially when you have to start asking yourself how did an entire country (Germany) decide that it was okay to exterminate an entire race, as well as dissidents, “dirty” nationalities like Roma people (Gypsies). And so on. This question has been one of the major dominant questions of the last 80 years or so, primarily because of the Holocaust. But you could go back much further to the colonial era and ask how do people set aside their morality in order to extinguish another race of people, or how to this day, there is this notion of “Southern Hospitality” or “Southern Charm” where the people of the south consider themselves to be so civilized and superior to others, while out back their men are whipping blacks or raping back women? Walter is the prime example of this moral slide, and the story is largely his — albeit within an even larger story between the Salamanca family, the cartel, and Gus Fring and his lover. And the series itself is somewhat guilty of moral relativity or moral praxis by focusing so much on the manufacture of meth but only periodically showing the devastation it causes. (And then it’s such a minor kind of devastation — like Jesse, Skinny Pete and Badger do lots and lots of meth, but they never seem to have much of an issue with it. About the most horrific depiction of meth use was the scene where the woman pushed an extraordinarily heavy ATM onto her boyfriend’s head which crushed it, and then she shot up. All this while a dirty child was in one of the other rooms, a child which Jesse saves.)
But with the exception of Jesse, everyone compromises themselves. The Walter White story started, more or less, when he gave up his shares of the Gray Matter company for $5,000 which then went on to become worth billions of dollars. Hank may be single minded in his determination to get the “bad guy,” but he also compromises himself practically every day when he laughs, for example, at the headless body of one of the drug workers or makes fun of “beaners” as he calls Mexicans. Skylar makes a decision to support her husband’s criminal behavior, and then begins laundering money for him. Her sister is a shoplifter who sees nothing wrong in giving a gift to Skylar that she has shoplifted. She is more offended by the fact that Skylar chose to return it, than by being caught stealing.
I think, also — this comes after some time thinking about it — Jesse is also the beating heart. He’s the human being. None of the others, including some really innocent people like Steve Gomez, or the father/air traffic controller who killed himself after letting two planes collide in the air — are really human in the way Jesse is and the way William Faulkner may have recognized.
Anyway, the series was brilliant. It deserves being ranked #1 of the 22st Century. I think if The Sopranos hadn’t start in 1999, it might have come down to those two being ranked #1. This series slowed, in my opinion, after Gus Fring was killed. But ending it there would not have been satisfying because we were following someone who was actually a smaller player than the people in that story.
The follow up “Better Call Saul” takes places prior to Jesse meeting Saul Goodman and after Saul escapes to a new identity in Nebraska. The overlap is very brief — I think there’s a scene where Jesse asks Kim if “Saul Goodman” is a good lawyer. She says, “He used to be,” and then leaves his life for the next six years. After she returns, the whole Walter White episode has come and gone.
The series is also notable for the fact that it only covered about a year and a half. Time was compressed in a way I haven’t seen in television.
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