Okay, so this week on Breaking Bad, Jesse went to Mexico to teach the drug cartel there how to make their special formula, Skyler arranges to hand a large sum of money to her former employer so he can pay the IRS what he owes them so he won't be arrested---because if he doesn't pay the money, the IRS will investigate Skyler, too, and discover Walt's criminal enterprise. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!
Walt's son, after the Dodge his father bought him, is disappointed with the PT Cruiser he got for his birthday.
Walt is very sad about his fight with Jesse.
Jesse finds out that the Mexican cartel expects to KEEP him there to work in their lab permanently.
Walt fought with Jesse because he wanted Jesse to murder Gus because he thinks Gus will kill him at the first opportunity. Jesse is becoming the mature, responsible one and Walt is going downhill. He's really not doing much. Going to work, coming home, wondering if he's going to be killed, screwing things up for himself and his employer.
Why would anyone want to be involved in that sort of thing?
You know what it's like? It's like Planet of the Apes.
Planet of the Apes was about a planet where apes act like people and people act like apes. When it became a TV series in the '70s, and when Tim Burton did his remake, they removed that element. The people could talk, too. They became peasants being oppressed by their simian overlords. By making the people talk, they scrapped the whole premise.
The premise of Breaking Bad was that you had a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher who becomes a bigshot drug producer. He's out of his element, but he's far more intelligent than the people he's dealing with.
Now----now----
Now it's more like the John Frankenheimer movie, Seconds.
Seconds was about a shadowy organization that gives a middle aged businessman a chance to start over. They fake his death, give him extensive plastic surgery to make him look like a young Rock Hudson, and they send him out to start an exciting new life. But...the guy quickly slips back into the same rut he was in to begin with.
Maybe that's what's happened here.
Walter is pretty much back where he started, going to work every day, getting no respect from the people around him. His exciting new life as a criminal has led to this. He's making a fortune that he can't spend anyway, he gets beaten up a couple of times, but he's back working nine to five.
Skyler has arranged to give her previous employer the money to pay off the IRS, but the idiot buys a new Mercedes, plans to restart his business and imagines he can hire a lawyer and renegotiate the deal with the IRS. Skyler is frightened. If he doesn't pay what he owes, he'll get her sent away to prison. So she goes. She tries to explain to him that he has to pay the money. He dismisses her. And she tells him where the money came from.
And in the promo for next weeks episode, the guy tells Skyler he doesn't want the money. And, now that he's facing prosecution for tax evasion, he can tell the IRS what he knows about Skyler to stay out of prison!
So what will happen? Will Walt have to kill him? He might want to kill the guy since he had been sleeping with his wife.
They're making the guy into a complete idiot. He won't listen. He doesn't comprehend the gravity of the situation no matter how plainly and directly Skyler explains it. It's like they're setting it up the audience will want him die.
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