Breaking Bad’s first season predated the current era of Vulture recaps, but with the final episode of prequel/sequel series Better Call Saul now in the books, Vulture is taking the opportunity to return to the very beginning of the Heisenberg saga and give this 2008 season the in-depth episodic analysis it deserves.
The first shot of “… And the Bag’s in the River” is a floor’s-eye view of Walter White swiping up a layer of blood and guts, the start of a gruesome cleanup job after Jesse’s dissolved Emilio in his ceramic bathtub. Shooting up through a transparent floor may seem like a needlessly fancy piece of stylization, but the arclike movement of Walt’s hands unmistakably resembles the swish of windshield wipers. Two weeks after quitting his second job, Walt is now back at the car wash, doing exactly the type of shit work that his boss Bogdan would make him do when he was short on “car-wash professionals.” At the car wash, Walt could tolerate being behind the register, but the grunt work of being on his hands and knees, polishing Chad’s hubcaps, was more humiliation than he could take.
Meet the new job. Same as the old.
But this episode of Breaking Bad has deeper connections in mind. As Walt picks through the rancid slush of ruptured organs and bone fragments, his mind trails off to happier times, as he and an as-yet-unnamed scientist inventory the chemistry that makes up the human body. Hydrogen (63 percent), oxygen (26 percent), and carbon (9 percent) take up most of the space, along with nitrogen (1.25 percent) and other trace elements, but Walt notes that they’re “.111958 percent shy” of 100. “There’s got to be more to a human being than that,” he says in the past, just as he’s flushing a bucket of Emilio pieces down the toilet in the present. Scientists tend not to be moved by spiritual or metaphysical answers to practical questions — when his colleague talks of “the soul,” he scoffs — but Walt is not so cold (yet) as to regard humans as a mere assemblage of molecules. He’ll have to confront the significance of taking a life directly.
Frankly, flashbacks are an unnecessary artistic garnish on a scenario that’s potent enough without it. The heart of “… And the Bag’s in the River” is Walt squaring up to the task he’d been avoiding: He needs to do something about Krazy-8. It’s becoming clearer and clearer by the hour that Krazy-8 is going to survive the chemical attack on his lungs, and that there’s no future in keeping him in the basement and feeding him crustless meat sandwiches like a rabid house pet. The additional problem for Walt is that Krazy-8 has sized him up perfectly: “You hope I’ll make it easy and just drop dead, don’t you?” he says. “But I won’t. So either kill me or let me go. You don’t have it in you, Walter.” That last part sends a chill down Walt’s spine, because now his captive knows his name. And that he’s a high-school teacher. And that his son is disabled. Jesse has a big mouth.
Deprived of any other means of attack, Krazy-8 directs his aim at Walt’s psyche, which is fragile to the point of defenselessness. The trick is that everything he says is true: Walt is not cut out for this line of work. Jesse’s loose lips are a bigger long-term problem for Walt than he is. Walt is not the type of monster to kill a person in cold blood, so he’s going to have to let him go. The long night of the soul that Krazy-8 (real name: Domingo) and Walt share together is like the scorpion and the frog, with the meth dealer who nearly shot Walt in the head working hard to convince him that they’ll go their separate ways if he releases him. Because even guys who have their necks shackled to a pole in a basement by a bike lock are capable of listening to reason. It’s in their “mutual interest” to go their separate ways.
Walt is at a point in his life where he’s extremely receptive to Krazy-8’s argument. In fact, he tells him as much. (“I sure as hell am looking for any reason not to [kill you]. Sell me.”) In one absurd scene, Walt even composes a pros-and-cons list on his lap while taking a dump. The reasons not to kill Krazy-8 are numerous, connected to morality and Judeo-Christian principles, but the single reason for killing him is most persuasive: “He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go.” But Krazy-8 happens to catch Walt in the right mood, as the only receptive audience to his most intimate thoughts and feelings. Walt and Skyler are on the outs, and Jesse wants nothing to do with him until he follows through on the results of their “sacred” coin flip. Krazy-8 should charge five cents like Lucy in Peanuts. The doctor is in.
The long conversation between Walt and Krazy-8 is beautifully scripted by Vince Gilligan and performed by both actors, particularly Max Arciniega as Krazy-8, who humanizes the character legitimately, not just deceptively. While Krazy-8 wants to ingratiate himself to Walt in order to stay alive, there’s no reason to believe that he’s lying about his past or presenting any kind of false front to Walt. He’s been in the business long enough to where killing a person may not be as daunting a prospect as it seems to Walt, but he’s also having to do the same mental calculations that Walt was doing on the can. He just reached the conclusion that if Walt lets him go, he’s going to kill him. There’s a good rationale for that decision, too, in case anyone wants to accuse Krazy-8 of not listening to reason.
It wouldn’t be unfair to accuse the show of cheating a little to maintain sympathy for Walt by making his choice simple. Earlier in the evening, Walt collapses after a coughing fit, shattering the plate that he was bringing Krazy-8 for dinner. Later, as he’s on the verge of letting his captive go, Walt discovers that a glass shard is missing from the plate. That makes the moral equation much easier for Walt: It’s kill or be killed again, just like it was in the RV. But one unlisted reason not to kill is that it’s hard. The body does not want to die. Krazy-8 survived the poison gas and he fights Walt’s efforts to strangle him with a bike rack, swiping backwards with the glass shard with the rhythm of a mechanical arm. When Walt needs to leverage his body against the pole to keep the pressure on Krazy-8’s neck, he takes a couple of stabs in the leg.
And when it’s over, Walt apologizes. He got into the meth business with the arrogant thought that he would do better than the Captain Cooks of the world, burnouts like Jesse who lack his expertise and deliver inferior product. Now he has two bodies on his conscience after the first batch. It does not speak well of his damaged soul to say that his next killing will likely be easier.
Acids and Bases
• The titles of the second and third episodes go together: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” That’s a piece of dialogue from one of the great New York movies, 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, a noir starring Burt Lancaster as a powerful, Walter Winchell–like gossip columnist and Tony Curtis as a press agent trying to curry favor with him. The film is loaded with memorable pieces of semi-nonsensical dialogue like that. Perhaps the most famous: “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”
• Put a pin in Marie’s kleptomania. Stealing a pair of shoes seems like only the beginning, though it should be noted that it speaks to a certain vanity on her part. She hates the sensible shoes she leaves behind.
• As Marie breaks the law, she’s calling her husband mid-bust to persuade him to scare Walter Jr. straight on smoking pot, not knowing that Skyler was referring to her husband in that scenario. The scene that follows, at the Crossroads Motel (a.k.a. “the Crystal Palace”), paints Hank in an exceptionally unflattering light, as a bullying lawman who’s content with harassing and humiliating an addict just to make a point about pot as a “gateway drug.”
• Funny line from Krazy-8 about his dad’s obsession with upselling protections in his furniture store: “You ask him for a glass of water, he’d tell you you need an extended warranty on the ice.”
• A subtle moment from Bryan Cranston when he learns about the missing piece from the dinner plate. When he mutters, “Don’t do this. Why are you doing this?,” he’s ostensibly cursing Krazy-8 for taking the glass. But in Cranston’s reading, it’s more like he’s cursing fate itself for forcing him into action.
• Hank has a strong read on what went down in the desert and some compelling evidence in the bag of Walt’s pristine crystal and the gas mask he left behind. Game on!
