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selenak: (Money by Distempera)
[personal profile] selenak
With the complete show in mind, which means:

When Hank in his first conscious scene after his shooting tells his family plus Steve Gomez that he got a warning phone call a minute before he was attacked, you can see both Walt and Skyler realize the implication at the same time. Well, Skyler as opposed to Walt doesn't know about Gus or who he is, but she gets the principle of the thing. And then Walt realizes that Skyler realized, and hastily exits. And then we have ths scene in Walt's car outside the hospital, to which Skyler follows him:

W (immediately after she enters): Skyler, I swear, I had nothing to do with...
S (cutting the protestations off): Are we safe?
W: Absolutely!
S (softer): Are you safe?
W (taking that in): Yes.

Through the show, there was that expectation/fear that one or both of the White children would die as the ultimate karmic punishment for Walt's actions, and also because Walt's "I'm doing this for my family" self justification basically set up the destruction of his family. Which did happen, but not through the death of a child, and I think that was the better choice. (BTW Hank's death in late s5 isn't the destruction of the family, either, all the preceding events and actions contributed to it, but it seals it.) Of course Walt's assurance that the family is safe was always an illusion even in the physical sense - any of them could have been killed at any point before Hank died - but the emotional wreckage ever worsened, with Hank's near-death and recovery mid s3 paradoxically the point of maximum emotional closeness the White-Schrader-Clan was ever going to reach. They're all, including Walt, sincerely rooting for Hank's recovery. Walt and Skyler don't pretend to have a truce, they actually do. And yet this is also where one of the biggest seeds of destruction is sown because this is when Skyler, who up to this point was guilty only of not reporting Walt's activities after having figured out the truth, makes her first step towards aiding and abetting when it becomes clear that the insurance will never cover the amount of physical therapy Hank would need. The scene where Skyler comes up with the Walt-made-money-via-gambling-and-we-can-now-give-it-to-you explanation on the spot is so amazingly layered. Not least because of the way Bryan Cranston plays Walt's reaction. He's riveted, lending forward at the same moment Marie does when Skyler tells her tale (which she does with all the dramatic build up of a frustrated writer, covering not just the reason why they can provide money for Hank's therapy but also providing reasons for their entire enstragement), and looks at Skyler with a mixture of awe and being turned on. Parallels to early s4, when this gambling story is told to Hank and Junior/Flynn as well: then, Walt's practiced variations of "I'm sorry" to the family are and aren't simultanously sincerely meant apologies to Skyler; in the s3 scene when Skyler first invents the story and by telling it to her sister contributes her first damaging big lie, she also simultanously does and doesn't forgive Walt, or rather, tells him she understands now why he did what he did. Her whole introduction of the story, the "I did not understand then, but I understand now" is directed at Walt, not Marie. There is a whole running thread to the show, if you like, of Walt and Skyler simultanously lying on one level and telling the truth on another, until the crescendo of Ozymandias with its two phone calls, its opening flashback scene (Walt lies to Skyler about where he is and what he's doing, and is still so inexperienced and bad a liar that he needs to practice before hand; but as they continue to talk, the affection expressed is strong and real) and its brutal climax (the phonecall that on one level is meant to exonorate her to the cops, i.e. a lie, but on the other hand those vicious emotions it contains, the whole "you never appreciated me enough etc" are real and true).

In the next episode, The Fly, Walt has another truth/lie combination scene, with Jesse, that throws its shadows back and forwards through the entire show. When he tells him about meeting Jane's father, Donald Margolis, he says "he told me to never give up on family, and I followed his advice, I didn't", it is literally nothing but the truth and yet a devastating lie, because Jesse can't but take it to mean Walt's literal family - Skyler, Holly and Junior, about whom Walt was talking earlier, when in reality what Walt describes as not giving up on family refers to Jesse himself, and to his action of going back to Jesse's house and to let Jane die in her own vomit. Similarly, the closest thing Walt does to a confession before Ozymandias, where the emotions behind the truth telling are the exact opposite, the "I'm sorry about Jane" is on one level sincere and on another, again, a lie, because he knows he's asking for absolution for something he has no wish to honestly confess. The whole scene is despite Jesse's short interruptions one long monologue which you really need a fantastic actor to sell, and it's one of Bryan Cranston's best on the show. Walt, exhausted by insomnia and very shortly before a breakdown, is on the one hand raw and open but on the other manages to hold on to that last level of deception. Thusly, I think his statement - or rather, thought process verbalized, the attempt to figure out when he should have died - is 95% real. There is no conscious deception involved at all when he says "I've lived too long" and arrives at the conclusion that the perfect point for him to die would have been just before he left the house to bring Jesse his money, while he was listening to Skyler singing to Holly (and it's only then a first time watcher realises what the opening image of the episode, a fly in gigantic close up while a disembodied female voice sings a lullabye, was about). At that moment, he does mean it. But the rest of the time, when he's not driven to a breakdown by insomnia? Then he very much wants to live, no matter at whose expense, and that makes this confession another lie/truth. Incidentally, the reasons Walt gives to Jesse for choosing this moment culminate in "you don't want them to just remember you, you want them to love you when they remember", and that, imo, feeds into the debate about the show's ending, i.e. whether Walt dying on his own terms was narratively just. Yes, he could score a couple of victories in that last episode. But the people who once loved him - who included Hank and Marie, who very much saw Walt as a brother before finding out the truth, but the most crucial ones were always Junior/Flynn, Skyler and Jesse - had that love twisted into hate by Walt's own actions, and even if that love is still there in addition to the hate, it will never be free of horror and self loathing besides, also caused by Walt.

S3 is also arguably Jesse at his darkest, which is an odd thing to say since s4 and s5 are far worse towards Jesse. I mean: as far as his own actions are concerned, not what's done to him. Your mileage may differ, but when rewatching it struck me that if it's Walt's ego (and greed) that makes him return to cooking in s3 even after fully realizing his meth producing career has cost him his family already, for Jesse it's a mixture of self punishing nihilism and greed as well. I've always seen Jesse using the NA meetings to find meth customers (and bringing in Badger and Skinny Pete for good measure to help him with that) as his worst action (leaving always aside the big one of producing meth to begin with), because it's premeditated, not spontanous, not in any way suggested by anyone else (neither Walt nor Gus nor Mike nor anyone else even know Jesse is doing that), goes on for weeks and preys on people at their most vulnerable. But what I had misremembered before my rewatch was the timing. I had thought it happened earlier in the season, when Jesse was still cooking on his own, i.e. that it was his way of finding customers. Instead, as my rewatch reminded me, it happens after Jesse has joined Walt in the superlab and has started to work for Gus. I.e. even from a completely pragmatic pov, leaving the moral of meth producing aside, there is no economic need for Jesse to do this. An earlier scene where he indignantly complains to Walt that both of them - i.e. the producers - get only a tiny smidgeon of the meth profit whereas Gus gets the whole, which Walt is aware of but at the time, distracted by Hank being shot and his emotional struggle with Skyler, doesn't mind as much - works as a satire of capitalism much as Jesse's complaint about life in corporate business in his NA group does. But it also underscores that before Gale's death (after which I don't think we see Jesse invested in the profits anymore), Jesse has his share of the greed that infects most of the main characters at different points.

Hank's (correct) self-blame for having beaten up Jesse mid s3, refusal to rationalize it the way Marie suggests and statement that "this is not what the job is; this is not who I'm supposed to be" make for a big contrast to Hank's much harder attitude re: Jesse in late s5, when he's willing to risk Jesse getting killed if that means trapping Walt, and I think the difference is not just that Hank in s3 has been guilty of an action re: Jesse whereas Hank in s5 has not, but also that the Hank who makes the cold "which kid? You mean the junkie who etc." statement to Steve Gomez has just heard a resumé that would have included not only Walt's various crimes, with and without Jesse as an participant, but also Jesse's individual actions.

I hasten to add that none of this means that the torture and emotional horror awaiting for Jesse was in any way deserved, or that he was less of a victim, or that he didn't have a keen sense of right or wrong. (Walt I think drained the last of his bad conscience after The Fly; Jesse's, by contrast, grew and grew.) Just that he, too, was "breaking bad" during the course of the show, and s3 is, as I said, Jesse's darkest point as far as his own choices were concerned.

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