No one ever expects the 12 year-old on the bike to be the shooter. Well, now I will. I knew it was a set-up but I was waiting for the ball to drop and the dude to get popped. That was pretty harsh.
This is one of those episodes that reminds me of the saying, "always darkest before the dawn". Except that this whole series is kind darkest before the dawn. It just keeps building and building and we've had this foreshadowing of an explosion at the White residence. Now with the drug deal on the line and the baby trying to come early, Walt can not make a right decision.
Meanwhile, Jesse has just tried heroine for the first time and Jane has relapsed. When Walt comes by for the product, he can't rouse either of them, though to be fair, he only tried to wake Jesse. Jesse who is conscious just long enough to tell Walt the meth is under the sink.
I know that this show is not glorifying drug use, even though one of the main characters is an addict. I recently heard an article which mentioned the leads in this show as anti-heroes. Until that interview, I had only thought of them as flawed, or perhaps even very flawed, heroes. You like Walt. You like Jesse. They have good reasons for what they do, at least in their minds, and they do try to do the right thing by their family and friends. But when Jesse tells Jane to leave so he can smoke some meth, you just know that she is going to lapse and that he only has it in him to try and send her away once. That's when I got the whole anti-hero bit. He's not just a guy with an addiction problem who wants to make some money, he's an addict that wants to make more money so he can do more drugs so he can make more money so he can more drugs. And if he gets to the fuck the hot girl from next door and gets he in on his little game, then all the better. You probably can't see the frown on my face, but it's there. What was once empathy with an occasional bit of sympathy is now antipathy towards Jesse. And I don't even know how I feel about Walt, who has been more than a bit mercenary as of late. Don't think that I'm complaining. This is riveting television. The acting and writing are good enough that I want to see the outcome. If they give me even a glimpse of the possibility of redemption for these characters, I will be hooked for the run of the show.
Episode 12:
Oh Walter, what have you become? I wonder about moral relativism and psychopaths. If they don't know that they are doing anything bad and no one else is involved, are they really doing something bad? What if there is someone else involved, but it's not something they're doing that hurts the other person, but a lack of doing something? What if we're not talk about a psychopath but a regular person who has lost sight of right and wrong? What if that person realizes that their inaction is tantamount to homicide if the situation were different? Unless the very start of the next episode shows a drastic change of situation, Walt has slipped over to the dark side and has embraced it completely.
Episode 13:
Lies. Lies and propaganda. To think that it all unraveled over one little question while under general anesthesia. For all of Walt's book smarts, he certainly lacks some common sense and is greatly short on his supply of wisdom. Sure, he didn't think that he was going to live long enough to have to worry about any of his lies coming back to haunt him, but when he found out that his cancer was in remission, he should have worried a little more on covering his ass. One call to his mom and a nicely worded email to Gretchen and he might have made it out of this season with a family living at the same house as him.
Now I'm sure about the causal relationship between Walt's inaction the previous episode and the mid-air collision this episode, but I'm thinking that he has a fair amount of the moral blame on his shoulders. Of course, you have got to be wondering what the guys at air traffic control were thinking, just letting Q come back to work as if everything were okay, simply because he said he couldn't be by himself any longer. Not to mention that some of the blame will surely fall on Q himself. I'm not absolving Jesse in this either, since he is the enabler in Jane's relapse When Jesse finds out about Walt's inaction, he will likely try to kill Walt.
This season did not end in a happy place for anyone, certainly not us viewers.
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