The thing about doing these
Revisited posts is there’s a bizarre sense of melancholia in them. Things were simpler back then; Walt, Jesse,
and pretty much everyone in their radar wasn’t injured by the mayhem caused
over four seasons; and for the most part, Walt wasn’t a calculated killer. Of course the problem with the melancholia is
not that my thoughts are, “You remember when things were simpler?” but more
along the lines of, “You remember when Walt and Jesse had to dissolve a body
and keep someone else locked up with a bike chain?” Simpler times.
After this episode’s brief
opening to remind us, yes Walt had dirty sex with his wife at the end of the
pilot, we cut back half a day earlier when he was in a RV with two, excuse me,
one dead body and one person who didn’t quite die. After a brief pow-wow (and prevention of said
not quite dead Krazy-8’s escape from the RV) the next day, the two of them
figure out that Krazy-8 needs to be killed, while his cousin Emilio has to be
put through “chemical disincorporation”, i.e., dissolved in acid. Jesse gets saddled with the “chemical
disincorporation” part of the plan, while Walt has to kill Krazy-8. As the episode keeps going, both reach severe
obstacles to those goals.
Walt has killed another man
before, let alone someone he failed in mustard gassing, and is now strapped to
a bike chain and a pole in Jesse’s basement.
A lot of his time in this episode is trying to figure his way out of
killing Krazy-8, even positing reasoning with him as a business man (Jesse:
“Hey, if we let you go, you promise not to kill us and our entire families?”).
His plan for the time being is to toss the chained up drug dealer some water, a
sandwich, toilet paper, a bucket, and some hand soap. Its a short-term solution for a long-term
problem, one not made better by the fact he spends the rest of his time trying
to roll and light a joint (a rather funny piece of physical humor in
itself). He could deal with cooking meth
in an RV in the New Mexico desert, but murder (somewhat cold-blooded, somewhat
self-defensive) is another thing entirely.
Like I said earlier on, simpler times.
Jesse’s goal gets messy
(literally) due to Walt’s sloppy handling of things with Krazy-8 and everything
else. Certainly it doesn’t help that
Jesse isn’t too hot on melting a man down to gunk, but even more so when he
foregoes the plastic bins Walt suggests for the hydrochloric acid, and starts
melting him down in a bathtub. This
leads to probably one of the nastiest scenes TV has ever put into view, when
Walt discovers Jesse’s blunder too late, only to witness the floor above fall
out along with the meaty red remains of Emilio into the hallway. Despite it being as stomach churning as it
is, its also a surprisingly hilarious moment, if only because the comedy of
errors that had preceded it was bound to end in a horrible way, but I doubt
many viewers predicted it would be splattered all over Jesse’s floorboard.
And keep in mind, this does not
even include a growingly suspicious Skyler, who was already curious about her
husband’s trip through her back door (to coin a phrase), and after reverse
dialing a call Walt had with an “AT&T Rep” who was Jesse, confronts him
about the matter (during a sonogram appointment, no less) gets shot down quietly
by a still toked over Walt, who claims he bought pot from Jesse (A funny line
from Walt later on when asked why he said that: “It seemed better than saying I
was cooking meth and that I killed a man.”).
Things don’t get made any better by her visiting Jesse’s home while in
the middle of moving Emilio’s body out of the RV, and threatening to sick her
DEA agent brother in law Hank on him if he sold pot to her husband again. She just misses the fact there’s a wrapped up
dead body next to her by about ten feet, probably because of her awkward
handling with Jesse (“I’m Skyler White, yo.
My husband is Walter White, yo.”).
There’s a lot of big misses of disaster in this episode, but that Skyler
is aware of Jesse and Walt meeting up, is one issue that isn’t going away
easily.
“The Cat’s In the Bag” does a
hard thing for second episodes to do, which is not just be a recap of the pilot
episode’s themes and story, but still continue the story naturally. Instead of wrapping the pilot episode’s
events up into a bow and moving on, it’s clear the creative team of the show
wants to milk the possibilities of this duo’s handling of what happens
afterwards. By the end of the episode,
Skyler knows something’s wrong with Walt, Walt still has to deal with Krazy-8,
Emilio is now oozed over Jesse’s floor, and that doesn’t include the gas mask
they left behind in the desert, now discovered by kids. And to believe, THIS was all simpler times in
the Breaking Bad universe.
And now, some non-show spoilery notes:
--No Hank and Marie in this episode, and strangely, not
missed in this case.
--Lots of naked Bryan Cranston in this episode, and
surprisingly, less scary than with tightie-whities.
--Love how unconcerned the Native-American bulldozer worker seems
about the plight of the men and their RV.
--Funny note about Krazy-8: he was supposed to die in the
pilot, but was kept alive for this string of episodes, even though surviving a
mustard gassing seems not that pleasant of a death to escape.
--The Krazy-8 escape slash running into a tree was so darkly
funny.
--Love reading his myspace, ahem, I mean mySHOUT page and
his bio page, like education: J.P. Wynne High School, Devry University systems
management…The STREETS, YO!
--Oh man, melted Emilio is gonna be hard to get out of the
floorboards, let alone fix the hole the floor above them.
--“Oh shit.”
--“Yo, yo, yo, 1, 4,
8, 3, to the 3, to the 6, to the 9, representing the ABQ. What up, beeyotch?”
--“Is this going to be on the
murder?”
--“The hell is a MILF?”
--“What, you don’t like the
crust?”
-“I don’t suppose you could buy
two bins?”
--“Hey man, we flipped a
coin. We flipped a coin!”
--“So right now, what I need is
for you to climb down out of my ass. Can
you do that? Will you do that for me,
honey? Will you please, just this once,
get off my ass?”
--“Oh, thank you for this
opportunity. I always dreamt of, you
know, melting bodies.”
--“Well, hydrochloric acid won’t
eat through plastic. It will, however,
burn through metal, rock, glass, ceramic.
So there’s that.”
And to finish, some spoilers for
the rest of the series:
--Good to see Walt and Jesse
finally got the body dissolving thing down after this blunder.
--Sigh, I still miss the RV.
Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars
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