Breaking Bad Season 4
Mar. 26th, 2012 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBefore I finally got my hand on the s4 dvds, I rewatched an s2 episode, Four Days Out, and this reminded me of how I love the use of colour in this show. Because the visual contrast was striking and going with the narrative content; the yellow and orange desert colours in Four Days Out (not that the show ever pretends what the characters do is warm and fuzzy or excusable, but from their own pov, this is a point of bonding, revealing of truths, establishing trust even), the stark red and blue of the superlab (and elsewhere, but it's especially glaring in the season opener where a good deal of the story takes place), primarly colours that never mix in said lab, with a sense of disconnection and isolation. Come the season finale, though, we're in for an interesting mixture of both colour schemes; not quite in the desert yellow and orange, nor stuck with the primary colours any longer.
All of which to say that I hope they got some sort of award for their cinematography (or whatever the English word for the tv equivalent is) in addition to the acting and writing.
Mind you, what's perhaps the hardest trick to pull off is how the show manages to keep its sense of humour going along with the ghastly goings on it describes. Given how really good it is to tear your heart out, the sense of humour is necessary to keep it from being an unbearable gloomfest, but quite how the writers manage that, I don't know, though I am in awe. Early case in point: Skyler making Walt practice the fake gambling confession to Marie, Hank and Junior. This manages to be both hilarious and a great character scene for Skyler and Walt and their marriage, as well as making several long term narrative points. When Walter goes from the scripted "I'm terribly, terribly ashamed" to saying "I'm sorry. So sorry" , hereveals a disturbing resemblance to the Tenth Doctor uses the fake confession to make a real confession of repentance... or is he? Skyler can't be sure any more than the audience is. Because Walt, when he tries and has everything at stake, has become that good a liar, which will be important in the last two episodes. And in the middle of the season, we have the scene where Walt, full of painkillers and alcohol, about to pass out and thus no longer capable of lying, apologizes to Walt Jr. who puts him to bed - for missing Junior's birthday, we think, until he calls him "Jesse". A fact Walt Jr. doesn't miss but doesn't comment on; the next day, a sober Walt is ashamed of that moment and apologizes (again) to his son, saying he doesn't want Junior to remember him "like that", to which his son replies that this would not be a bad memory, because Walt had been real then, not fake as he was for most of the last year. (I.e. the four seasons of the show.) It was a truthful moment for Walt - and yet not, because Junior had no way of knowing what the apology actually was about.
The clash of how Walt perceives himself, want sto see himself, and the reality has never been more glaring than for most of this season, which is a downward spiral for Walt. He starts out confident that the death of Gale has given him the upper hand again, summed up by his telling Gus he knows Gus can't kill him now because he needs Walter to cook meth, and can't kill Jesse because Walter won't stand for it. What Gus does in return - the casual killing of a henchman, and yet a very clinical gesture, very much the opposite of Tucco beating his henchman to death in front of Jesse and Walt at the end of s1/start of s2 - is interpreted by Jesse to mean "I can't kill you, but I can make your life hell", and as it turns out, Jesse's interpretation was dead on. Gus proceeds to make Walt's life hell.
By the time we're into the last third of the season, there is an episode teaser scene where Walt tells a fellow cancer patient that he, Walt, is in control of his own life and has been since getting the cancer news - followed immediately by the scene where Walt does his daily due as a wage slave, supervised by Gus' cameras everywhere. It's an obvious irony, but true: Walt at that point is exactly where he was in the pilot, stuck in a job full of daily humiliation where nobody respects him, with the only difference that what he did in the pilot to earn his living didn't damage other people. The appeal of the meth-producing life far beyond the financial benefits for him were the adrenaline thrill, the knowledge of being the smartest person in the room, able to outwit gangsters, admired by Jesse as the embodiment of every student he never was able to get through as a chemistry teacher. But in Gus he has met someone probably smarter and more capable than himself. Walt makes one clumsy attempt early on to win Mike from Gus as an ally and is completely rebuffed by Mike; Gus successfully (and it has to be said with a good deal of help by Walt's own behaviour) manages to drive a wedge between Walt and Jesse and (except for one crucial bit, more about this later) manages to win over Jesse. Walt is unable to communicate, let alone convince, anyone from Mike to Tyrus to Gus himself, while his few encounters with Jesse grow ever more disastrous in what the two of them convey, or don't, to each other (it's significant we don't get the annual Walt and Jesse locked up in a room episode this season), and by the time Walt is literally brought in with the trash to the laundry where he works and is only kept alive because of Jesse, his humiliation, failure and powerlessness is complete, and for added kicks, the man who keeps telling himself he did all this for his family has to hear Gus casually threatening to murder the lot of them.
But of course, the season doesn't end there. And because this is Breaking Bad, the audience on the one hand gets what a season-long humiliation of the main character and disruption of the main relationship has been building up to, but on the other hand gets it with a twist: Walt is at last able to outthink and outplan Gus and get rid of him for good. He's able to win allies and communicate again, with a man who can't talk anymore no less, Don Hector Salamanca who got Walt nearly killed twice in the past. And, most crucially, he's able to win Jesse back, and it's team White and Pinkman against Overlords Inc again, giving us more scenes of the two of them together in the last two episodes than they had the entire season. But the way Walt accomplishes this includes the use of a child (who could have easily died, as could Walt's old neighbour whom he used in a different context), and at this point, this doesn't even phase him anymore. It includes a lie that, like the truth about Jane, is bound to backfire on him irrevocably if Jesse finds out. Incidentally, what the whole thing reminded me of was a classic novella by Friedrich Dürrematt, Der Richter und sein Henker, wherein the way one of the main characters is at last able to bring down the other after a life time of trying in vain to prove the massive crimes the later committed is to frame his opponent for a murder he didn't committ (and thus had no way to plan an alibi or getaway for).
Now Jesse at that point might have helped Walt anyway; we can't know for sure, but Jesse had watched how Mike was being treated (or not), he refused to budge from his no-killing-of-Mr.White stand and knew Gus would respond to that sooner or later, and hearing from Saul that Gus had threatened Walt's family beyond Hank honestly shocked him. But "maybe" wasn't something Walt was willing to risk, and Walt had good reason to remember how Jesse last season had responded to Gus' henchman's use of Tomas. So the final revelation of the season was, too me, one that worked. (The show also gave the audience a fair clue by the fact that we see Walt tense but composed and waiting, with his turning of the gun being as much welcome to him as Skyler's coin throws earler the season were to her, until the gun points at a plant, and then, once Jesse arrives, Walt acting all paranoid and shoot-out expecting the way he wasn't before when he actually was waiting for an executioner to arrive - acting being the crucial word. Walt's entire speech to Jesse about why Gus, not he, had to be the one poisoning Brock sounds absolutely sincere, but so did his "I'm sorry" to Skyler during the rehearsal of the gambling confession. As I said: Walt has become an expert liar, not least because much of the time, he's also lying to himself and using emotional truths while doing so. In his mind, Gus certainly was to blame - it was Gus' fault for taking Jesse away to begin with. And thus Gus joins Jane in the hereafter as an example of why you do not take Jesse away from Walter White. (Though in fairness Walt had plenty of other reasons for wanting him dead, the most urgent and immediate one being the threat to Hank and the rest of his family, and the long term one of knowing Gus would kill him sooner or later.)
Speaking of Gus, the character got an excellent last season. I appreciate that we got to know some of what made him tick (yellow coloured flashbacks ahoy - why it that from Alias onwards every show seems to set flashbacks in a Spanish-speaking country in yellow?) , but only some, and most of the whys and wherefores of Gus remained a mystery. He was definitely the most competent and smart overlord ever to grace the Breaking Bad screen; at the same time, this was the perfect time to kill off the character. If he'd remained alive another season, he'd outlived his welcome as far as yours truly was concerned.
You know who'd be just as good in the Evil Overlord business if she set her mind to it? Skyler. Not that she doesn't have weaknesses herself. But while I had assumed from the end of last season that this season would be about Skyler's corruption and had wondered how this would play out differently from what we had already seen with Walt (because they share the flaw of control issues and micromanagment, and the instinct to compartmentalize, see Skyler switching off the tv in the last season finale as to not to hear the unpleasant news she by then knew were connected to the money she lived from), but the show did something more complicated. Skyler's rationalizing at first - deciding to forgive Walt because by asking for the money for Hank and Marie, she understands his original motivation, seeing Walt as someone trapped in the drug world and seeing their car wash not just as a good money laundrying way but something that could give Walt an "exit strategy" from the drug business, thus missing the point that it's stopped being about the money in the sense of money for the family a long time ago. But when Walt makes his "I am evil, hear me roar" speech of hurt male pride, she actually listens to what was beneath that. And I think this is when it becomes clear to Skyler that Walt is not a good man led astray, and that this whole thing couldn't just get him killed but their family as well. However, and that contributes to making her an interesting and layered character in her own right, she doesn't take the get the hell out of there option fate presents to her repeatedly. For several reasons; because, as she tells Walt, "someone has to protect this family from the man protecting this family", because she is a pragmatist and they still need the money, and because she still has feelings for Walt. She's also, like Walt, a perfectionist who can't stand sloppy work, hence the car war not a video game hall as Saul had suggested last season, and the car war as an actual running business bought for a reasonable price. But Skyler, too, is caught up in the spiral of consequences; her helping Ted out with the books last season makes Ted being audited this season a danger, and her attempt to fix this ends up making things even worse. (Even though the way she played the auditor was a great impromptu performance - Skyler, too, is a terrific liar, and she knows how to use bias held against her in her favour - but she's very aware all it gets her is a brief respite.) Presumably the unlaundered money used to pay Ted's debts will cause even more trouble next season, having done its work this season in preventing the getaway solution Walt was first going for.
When I compare the scenes in s1 dealing with Marie stealing things, which seemed just an attempt to add some quirk and didn't really fit with the rest, to how Marie stealing things is used this season, I'm in writerly awe again. This time, we see it, and the fantasy stories she tells, as her direly needed escape from the hellish situation at home, where Hank takes out his misery and temporarily crippled state on her, and you just have to love her and want to hug her as she spins story after story in ever different houses, and then goes resolvedly home for more horribleness. And not so coincidentally, the first time Hank stops being a jerk is when he gets her phonecall from the police station; I think that's when it dawns on him something has to change, even before he gets back into detecting via reading Gale's file. As frenchani said, Hank is the closest thing the show has to a hero, so making his reaction to nearly dying and emerging from getting shot in a crippled state frustrated, petty, even cruel is a believable way to keep him flawed and human instead of perfect. However, eventually pull out of his misery he does, and that's when we see again that Hank is really brilliant at his job. Tracing Gale back to Gus is superb detective work, and I do hope the manner of Gus' death validates Hank with his colleagues. I also find it interesting that Walt, while still feeing he has to compete for the alpha position in the family with Hank (silly Walt, Skyler is the alpha in this family, and you know it), as can be seen in his rattling off mineral data in the scene with Hank and Junior, also is still sincerely attached to him. His horrified reaction to Gus' zeroing in on Hank is one of those times in the season where you can be sure Walt is absolutely sincere. He does believe what he says: that Hank is a good man who does not deserve to die.
(Then again, to misquote a famous SF film, who does? Walt's eroding ethics system by now is at a state where pretty much everyone except the people he cares for is expendable.)
Jesse's reaction to having killed Gale being a slow burn melt down, as opposed to the immediate breakdown fanfic predicted, made for harrowing scenes and some magnificent acting by Aaron Paul. It also made the the detoriation of his and Walt's relationship even before Gus and Mike start their gambit believable, as Walt after his initial concern (and bafflement at Jesse's non-visible reaction in the season opener) basically chooses to ignore Jesse falling apart in front of him; well, he complains to Saul about it, but it doesn't seem to occur to him to intervene until Mike does it. Mike makes for an obvious replacement father figure; even tempered, allows Jesse to feel useful and heroic but not (additionally) guilty, even has the casual kind gestures like offering food that can make a difference. However, Mike the Cleaner to me always feels like a guest star from a Quentin Tarantino film amidst all the other fully realised, messy characters, and I'm not sure whether or not that's intentional. He's gangster movie type "cool", but while there was that one short scene showing him with a grandchild, you still can't imagine him having problems of his own, an interior life beyond the job. Well, maybe you can, but I can't. I'm not sure Jesse does. Then again, he doesn't need to. Mike's a reliable pole to cling to in the swamp, until Mike gets shot and serves as an illustration that in the end, if you work for Gustavo, only one life is deemed worth saving, and that's Gustavo's.
(On a Doylist plane, taking Mike out of comission was of course a great way to allow him surviving the season finale, which he'd have died in had he not been severely wounded several episodes earlier.)
Mind you, I think the whole seeing-something-in-Jesse ploy became genuine for both Mike and Gus beyond the primary use against Walt around mid season. From Gus' pov, it's simple: he needs a reliable meth cook loyal to him in order not to depend on Walt anymore; whether this is Gale or a Jesse who evidently is more than the useless junkie Gus initially regarded him as isn't that important. But Walt being Walt of course on the one hand is smart enough to immediately deduce what their plan was and on the other hand ego-tastic and humanly clueless enough to tell Jesse in the worst way possible while ignoring he's just been asked for help. The whole scene made me cring, not in a badly written but all too well written way. With Jesse I had the impression that basically, he wanted to believe they saw something in him while having his doubts (and not just because Walt voiced them) through the season. But the very quality they fakely or sincerely praised him for, loyalty, as well as a still not destroyed capacity to care for other people makes him hold to his refusal to do this one last thing, agree to Walt's death. And the realisation of this in the desert is what in turn revives Walt at his lowest point and allows him to start at last turning the tables on Gus.
All this being said: the show is still careful not to portray Jesse as a saint somehow caught up in an unsavory business. If he's damaged, he's also damaging. See also: Badger and Skinny Pete taking meth again because they had the bad luck to encounter Jesse in the throes of post-killing nihilism. Jesse's capacity to care for people is a bit larger than Walt's, but if you think about it, not that much. Or rather: his greater moral awareness of just what their profession makes him (showcase scene in point: his speech at the AA meeting) doesn't stop him from continuing in it. At this point I do think Jesse might make it out of the show alive (as opposed to Walt), but what I hope for him isn't some getaway to a peaceful island with a couple of millions (if anything, Jesse ranting against "acceptance" proves my point), but a few years of prison. If he could atone in a way meaningful to him, he might be able to start a new life, but not otherwise.
In conclusion: another brilliant season. But I do hope the next one will give us more Jesse and Walter scenes again, especially if it should end in Jesse killing Walter (which is one though not the only one plausible ending). Also, I want a scene with both of Walt's sons, Walter Jr. and Jesse, in it, and Junior spilling the beans. And some way for Marie and Hank to have a happy ending, though given that once Walt's meth career comes to light, which inevitably means the cops will also figure out where the money for Hank's recovery treatment came from, that's going to be hard.
All of which to say that I hope they got some sort of award for their cinematography (or whatever the English word for the tv equivalent is) in addition to the acting and writing.
Mind you, what's perhaps the hardest trick to pull off is how the show manages to keep its sense of humour going along with the ghastly goings on it describes. Given how really good it is to tear your heart out, the sense of humour is necessary to keep it from being an unbearable gloomfest, but quite how the writers manage that, I don't know, though I am in awe. Early case in point: Skyler making Walt practice the fake gambling confession to Marie, Hank and Junior. This manages to be both hilarious and a great character scene for Skyler and Walt and their marriage, as well as making several long term narrative points. When Walter goes from the scripted "I'm terribly, terribly ashamed" to saying "I'm sorry. So sorry" , he
The clash of how Walt perceives himself, want sto see himself, and the reality has never been more glaring than for most of this season, which is a downward spiral for Walt. He starts out confident that the death of Gale has given him the upper hand again, summed up by his telling Gus he knows Gus can't kill him now because he needs Walter to cook meth, and can't kill Jesse because Walter won't stand for it. What Gus does in return - the casual killing of a henchman, and yet a very clinical gesture, very much the opposite of Tucco beating his henchman to death in front of Jesse and Walt at the end of s1/start of s2 - is interpreted by Jesse to mean "I can't kill you, but I can make your life hell", and as it turns out, Jesse's interpretation was dead on. Gus proceeds to make Walt's life hell.
By the time we're into the last third of the season, there is an episode teaser scene where Walt tells a fellow cancer patient that he, Walt, is in control of his own life and has been since getting the cancer news - followed immediately by the scene where Walt does his daily due as a wage slave, supervised by Gus' cameras everywhere. It's an obvious irony, but true: Walt at that point is exactly where he was in the pilot, stuck in a job full of daily humiliation where nobody respects him, with the only difference that what he did in the pilot to earn his living didn't damage other people. The appeal of the meth-producing life far beyond the financial benefits for him were the adrenaline thrill, the knowledge of being the smartest person in the room, able to outwit gangsters, admired by Jesse as the embodiment of every student he never was able to get through as a chemistry teacher. But in Gus he has met someone probably smarter and more capable than himself. Walt makes one clumsy attempt early on to win Mike from Gus as an ally and is completely rebuffed by Mike; Gus successfully (and it has to be said with a good deal of help by Walt's own behaviour) manages to drive a wedge between Walt and Jesse and (except for one crucial bit, more about this later) manages to win over Jesse. Walt is unable to communicate, let alone convince, anyone from Mike to Tyrus to Gus himself, while his few encounters with Jesse grow ever more disastrous in what the two of them convey, or don't, to each other (it's significant we don't get the annual Walt and Jesse locked up in a room episode this season), and by the time Walt is literally brought in with the trash to the laundry where he works and is only kept alive because of Jesse, his humiliation, failure and powerlessness is complete, and for added kicks, the man who keeps telling himself he did all this for his family has to hear Gus casually threatening to murder the lot of them.
But of course, the season doesn't end there. And because this is Breaking Bad, the audience on the one hand gets what a season-long humiliation of the main character and disruption of the main relationship has been building up to, but on the other hand gets it with a twist: Walt is at last able to outthink and outplan Gus and get rid of him for good. He's able to win allies and communicate again, with a man who can't talk anymore no less, Don Hector Salamanca who got Walt nearly killed twice in the past. And, most crucially, he's able to win Jesse back, and it's team White and Pinkman against Overlords Inc again, giving us more scenes of the two of them together in the last two episodes than they had the entire season. But the way Walt accomplishes this includes the use of a child (who could have easily died, as could Walt's old neighbour whom he used in a different context), and at this point, this doesn't even phase him anymore. It includes a lie that, like the truth about Jane, is bound to backfire on him irrevocably if Jesse finds out. Incidentally, what the whole thing reminded me of was a classic novella by Friedrich Dürrematt, Der Richter und sein Henker, wherein the way one of the main characters is at last able to bring down the other after a life time of trying in vain to prove the massive crimes the later committed is to frame his opponent for a murder he didn't committ (and thus had no way to plan an alibi or getaway for).
Now Jesse at that point might have helped Walt anyway; we can't know for sure, but Jesse had watched how Mike was being treated (or not), he refused to budge from his no-killing-of-Mr.White stand and knew Gus would respond to that sooner or later, and hearing from Saul that Gus had threatened Walt's family beyond Hank honestly shocked him. But "maybe" wasn't something Walt was willing to risk, and Walt had good reason to remember how Jesse last season had responded to Gus' henchman's use of Tomas. So the final revelation of the season was, too me, one that worked. (The show also gave the audience a fair clue by the fact that we see Walt tense but composed and waiting, with his turning of the gun being as much welcome to him as Skyler's coin throws earler the season were to her, until the gun points at a plant, and then, once Jesse arrives, Walt acting all paranoid and shoot-out expecting the way he wasn't before when he actually was waiting for an executioner to arrive - acting being the crucial word. Walt's entire speech to Jesse about why Gus, not he, had to be the one poisoning Brock sounds absolutely sincere, but so did his "I'm sorry" to Skyler during the rehearsal of the gambling confession. As I said: Walt has become an expert liar, not least because much of the time, he's also lying to himself and using emotional truths while doing so. In his mind, Gus certainly was to blame - it was Gus' fault for taking Jesse away to begin with. And thus Gus joins Jane in the hereafter as an example of why you do not take Jesse away from Walter White. (Though in fairness Walt had plenty of other reasons for wanting him dead, the most urgent and immediate one being the threat to Hank and the rest of his family, and the long term one of knowing Gus would kill him sooner or later.)
Speaking of Gus, the character got an excellent last season. I appreciate that we got to know some of what made him tick (yellow coloured flashbacks ahoy - why it that from Alias onwards every show seems to set flashbacks in a Spanish-speaking country in yellow?) , but only some, and most of the whys and wherefores of Gus remained a mystery. He was definitely the most competent and smart overlord ever to grace the Breaking Bad screen; at the same time, this was the perfect time to kill off the character. If he'd remained alive another season, he'd outlived his welcome as far as yours truly was concerned.
You know who'd be just as good in the Evil Overlord business if she set her mind to it? Skyler. Not that she doesn't have weaknesses herself. But while I had assumed from the end of last season that this season would be about Skyler's corruption and had wondered how this would play out differently from what we had already seen with Walt (because they share the flaw of control issues and micromanagment, and the instinct to compartmentalize, see Skyler switching off the tv in the last season finale as to not to hear the unpleasant news she by then knew were connected to the money she lived from), but the show did something more complicated. Skyler's rationalizing at first - deciding to forgive Walt because by asking for the money for Hank and Marie, she understands his original motivation, seeing Walt as someone trapped in the drug world and seeing their car wash not just as a good money laundrying way but something that could give Walt an "exit strategy" from the drug business, thus missing the point that it's stopped being about the money in the sense of money for the family a long time ago. But when Walt makes his "I am evil, hear me roar" speech of hurt male pride, she actually listens to what was beneath that. And I think this is when it becomes clear to Skyler that Walt is not a good man led astray, and that this whole thing couldn't just get him killed but their family as well. However, and that contributes to making her an interesting and layered character in her own right, she doesn't take the get the hell out of there option fate presents to her repeatedly. For several reasons; because, as she tells Walt, "someone has to protect this family from the man protecting this family", because she is a pragmatist and they still need the money, and because she still has feelings for Walt. She's also, like Walt, a perfectionist who can't stand sloppy work, hence the car war not a video game hall as Saul had suggested last season, and the car war as an actual running business bought for a reasonable price. But Skyler, too, is caught up in the spiral of consequences; her helping Ted out with the books last season makes Ted being audited this season a danger, and her attempt to fix this ends up making things even worse. (Even though the way she played the auditor was a great impromptu performance - Skyler, too, is a terrific liar, and she knows how to use bias held against her in her favour - but she's very aware all it gets her is a brief respite.) Presumably the unlaundered money used to pay Ted's debts will cause even more trouble next season, having done its work this season in preventing the getaway solution Walt was first going for.
When I compare the scenes in s1 dealing with Marie stealing things, which seemed just an attempt to add some quirk and didn't really fit with the rest, to how Marie stealing things is used this season, I'm in writerly awe again. This time, we see it, and the fantasy stories she tells, as her direly needed escape from the hellish situation at home, where Hank takes out his misery and temporarily crippled state on her, and you just have to love her and want to hug her as she spins story after story in ever different houses, and then goes resolvedly home for more horribleness. And not so coincidentally, the first time Hank stops being a jerk is when he gets her phonecall from the police station; I think that's when it dawns on him something has to change, even before he gets back into detecting via reading Gale's file. As frenchani said, Hank is the closest thing the show has to a hero, so making his reaction to nearly dying and emerging from getting shot in a crippled state frustrated, petty, even cruel is a believable way to keep him flawed and human instead of perfect. However, eventually pull out of his misery he does, and that's when we see again that Hank is really brilliant at his job. Tracing Gale back to Gus is superb detective work, and I do hope the manner of Gus' death validates Hank with his colleagues. I also find it interesting that Walt, while still feeing he has to compete for the alpha position in the family with Hank (silly Walt, Skyler is the alpha in this family, and you know it), as can be seen in his rattling off mineral data in the scene with Hank and Junior, also is still sincerely attached to him. His horrified reaction to Gus' zeroing in on Hank is one of those times in the season where you can be sure Walt is absolutely sincere. He does believe what he says: that Hank is a good man who does not deserve to die.
(Then again, to misquote a famous SF film, who does? Walt's eroding ethics system by now is at a state where pretty much everyone except the people he cares for is expendable.)
Jesse's reaction to having killed Gale being a slow burn melt down, as opposed to the immediate breakdown fanfic predicted, made for harrowing scenes and some magnificent acting by Aaron Paul. It also made the the detoriation of his and Walt's relationship even before Gus and Mike start their gambit believable, as Walt after his initial concern (and bafflement at Jesse's non-visible reaction in the season opener) basically chooses to ignore Jesse falling apart in front of him; well, he complains to Saul about it, but it doesn't seem to occur to him to intervene until Mike does it. Mike makes for an obvious replacement father figure; even tempered, allows Jesse to feel useful and heroic but not (additionally) guilty, even has the casual kind gestures like offering food that can make a difference. However, Mike the Cleaner to me always feels like a guest star from a Quentin Tarantino film amidst all the other fully realised, messy characters, and I'm not sure whether or not that's intentional. He's gangster movie type "cool", but while there was that one short scene showing him with a grandchild, you still can't imagine him having problems of his own, an interior life beyond the job. Well, maybe you can, but I can't. I'm not sure Jesse does. Then again, he doesn't need to. Mike's a reliable pole to cling to in the swamp, until Mike gets shot and serves as an illustration that in the end, if you work for Gustavo, only one life is deemed worth saving, and that's Gustavo's.
(On a Doylist plane, taking Mike out of comission was of course a great way to allow him surviving the season finale, which he'd have died in had he not been severely wounded several episodes earlier.)
Mind you, I think the whole seeing-something-in-Jesse ploy became genuine for both Mike and Gus beyond the primary use against Walt around mid season. From Gus' pov, it's simple: he needs a reliable meth cook loyal to him in order not to depend on Walt anymore; whether this is Gale or a Jesse who evidently is more than the useless junkie Gus initially regarded him as isn't that important. But Walt being Walt of course on the one hand is smart enough to immediately deduce what their plan was and on the other hand ego-tastic and humanly clueless enough to tell Jesse in the worst way possible while ignoring he's just been asked for help. The whole scene made me cring, not in a badly written but all too well written way. With Jesse I had the impression that basically, he wanted to believe they saw something in him while having his doubts (and not just because Walt voiced them) through the season. But the very quality they fakely or sincerely praised him for, loyalty, as well as a still not destroyed capacity to care for other people makes him hold to his refusal to do this one last thing, agree to Walt's death. And the realisation of this in the desert is what in turn revives Walt at his lowest point and allows him to start at last turning the tables on Gus.
All this being said: the show is still careful not to portray Jesse as a saint somehow caught up in an unsavory business. If he's damaged, he's also damaging. See also: Badger and Skinny Pete taking meth again because they had the bad luck to encounter Jesse in the throes of post-killing nihilism. Jesse's capacity to care for people is a bit larger than Walt's, but if you think about it, not that much. Or rather: his greater moral awareness of just what their profession makes him (showcase scene in point: his speech at the AA meeting) doesn't stop him from continuing in it. At this point I do think Jesse might make it out of the show alive (as opposed to Walt), but what I hope for him isn't some getaway to a peaceful island with a couple of millions (if anything, Jesse ranting against "acceptance" proves my point), but a few years of prison. If he could atone in a way meaningful to him, he might be able to start a new life, but not otherwise.
In conclusion: another brilliant season. But I do hope the next one will give us more Jesse and Walter scenes again, especially if it should end in Jesse killing Walter (which is one though not the only one plausible ending). Also, I want a scene with both of Walt's sons, Walter Jr. and Jesse, in it, and Junior spilling the beans. And some way for Marie and Hank to have a happy ending, though given that once Walt's meth career comes to light, which inevitably means the cops will also figure out where the money for Hank's recovery treatment came from, that's going to be hard.
