Breaking Bad 5×12 – Rabid Dog Recap

“Alone he stands” could have been the subtitle of this episode. Anything else but this passage of Walt sat alone at the pool side of the motel can describe precisely what the character is going through. Little by little, this big powerful man who has the world at his feet is going deeper and deeper into loneliness while his empire is crumbling. Yes, Walter White slowly but exquisitely losing the game…

Thanks to the flash forward we saw a couple of episodes ago, we know that Walter’s house didn’t burn. So it’s not surprising to find it still standing when Walter comes back home at the beginning of the house. What it’s surprising is to find it empty. No trace of Jessie nowhere. Why didn’t he finish what he started? Why didn’t he set the house on fire? The dual between the teacher and the student seems to be postponed for now.

Instead, same old same old Walter is making everything to hide the situation to his wife and son by covering as much as he can the smell of fuel in the house before Skylar comes back. Unfortunately it’s too persistent so he is telling them a lie. Bryan Cranston has always been fantastic in this show but he’s even better now playing a desperate man whose world is crumbling. As usual Walter finds a little crazy story to tell to his family, his son still believing it.

The smell being too important – and also because he fears Jessie will come back – Walter decides that the whole family should go to a motel. Skylar, of course, doesn’t believe in her husband’s lies especially after she saw him meeting Saul in a car on the motel parking lot. She knows something wrong is coming. She feels the whole game changed and that now she has to protect her children not only from Jessie or the cop but also from Walter. Even if it means she has to follow Walt.  Everything is different now: the dangerous man, the one everyone is fearing, the big boss isn’t Walter anymore….but Jessie.

Especially now that he is working with Hank. As they say: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Nobody would have imagined that one day Hank the cop and Jessie the drug dealer would work together. But everything is possible on TV, isn’t it? Indeed, we discover that if Jessie didn’t burn the White’s house, it wasn’t because of a lack of courage or a sign of weakness…. it was because Hank arrived and stopped him. The two men whose lives were so different are now becoming allies as they were both manipulated by Walter.

The fact Jessie is spending the night at Hank’s house emphasizes the idea he crosses the barrier and joins the other side. It’s incredible how little details can mean a lot of things. As Jessie wakes up at Hank’s house he notices some family pictures involving Walter and suddenly it hits him. Now, Jessie understands the horrible situation Hank stands in.

At the same time, Hank understands Jessie’s situation. I think he feels he’s not a bad guy just a lost boy who ended on the wrong side of the barrier.

So now the two of them are trying to trust each other – and considering the past they have together it’s not that easy – but they both have the same goal: they want their revenge upon Walter. And if they want to have it, they need each other. Jessie can’t act alone as he can lose it and maybe be trapped by Walter as he did it several times in the past. While the police has a big problem: technically they have no physical proves that Walter is Heisenberg and so behind the whole meth traffic. They need some proves.

Hopefully for them, Walter called Jessie to meet him so they can solve the whole problem; certainly Walt hopes to manipulate him again. So Walter proposes him to meet in a public place so none of them can do something like killing the other one as there will be a lot of people. For Hank it’s a good plan, as he suggests to put a mic under Jessie’s shirt to record their conversation and get some confessions.

Unfortunately, Jessie is too emotionally damaged especially since he understood how much he had been manipulated in the past. So now he is scared. As soon as he saw Walt sat on a bench, he noticed another man looking like him a few meters away. That’s it, for him it’s a trap – actually we discover later that this man was just waiting for his daughter. Instead of meeting him, Jessie walks to a paid phone and calls him. He definitely over between the two of them, whatever he can say, Walter won’t be able to change Jessie’s big desire of revenge. By poisoning Brock, he crossed the line.

The plan being a failure, Hank is angry thinking it was going to be over today. But soon, Jessie admits he has another plan. They’ll catch him but not this way and considering Aaron Paul’s acting in this scene… it’s going to be big.