Breaking Bad: "Cornered"

Season 4, Episode 6

What’s eating Walter White?

 “I am not in danger Skyler; I am the danger.”

-Walt

“Someone has to protect this family from the man that protects this family”

-Skyler

Reaching back to last season, one of the more interesting wells that the show keeps coming back to is the fact that Walt is never quite as bad-ass as he seems. Sure, he’s done some bad ass things during his run as a major player in the meth business, but despite all these actions, he’s still an insecure, pathetic man, who continually has to remind himself and those around him of his own importance. While most of this talk mounts up to nothing more than delusions of bullshit, at times he is right about things revolving around him, thought it’s rarely for the right reasons.

Take his early morning confrontation with Skyler, when, after she attempts to get him to go to the police out of concern for his and the family’s safety, Walter bristles and goes on an long and self-important tirade about how he is “the danger” and how “the whole thing, it’s all about” him. He expresses similar thoughts to Jesse, who finally shows up to work after all that time he’s spent off with Mike, and during a long-winded argument meant to convince Jesse that he’s being played against Walt, he hits on something: Jesse’s heroic act last week must have been a set-up. Jesse dismisses the idea as well as Walt, and the wedge between them that Walt warned him about continues to grow.

The thing is, in both of these confrontations, he’s more or less right. With Skyler, he’s right, he is in the danger; but he’s not dangerous to other people so much as he is to his own family. Walt clearly likes living out this alternate identity he’s made for himself with “Heisenberg”, but the identity is a false one, and it leads Walt into a lot of blind spots. The largest one right now is in regards to his personal power; he may think that he can keep his family safe, mostly through leveraging his own self importance. But as he should have learned (and perhaps did) from his little stunt with Gus’ cleaning ladies, he may be entirely safe from harm, but those that he drags into his fights certainly aren’t.

His proclamations to Jesse were just a guess, but that doesn’t stop it from being right. How does that old saying go? “It’s not paranoia if someone’s really after you”? Something like that. And that’s the heart of Walt’s problems with those around him. So filled is he with self-importance, which in turn gives way to his paranoia, that he jumps at every shadow, and those around him have eventually learned to treat it all as bullshit. Yet this has creating a trap for all those involved; if they brush every one of Walt’s warnings aside, they’ll fail to see the actual danger coming up behind them. Walt used to be the most dangerous when he made mistakes, when he was wrong; now it appears that the real danger comes in Walt being right.

As a title alone, “Cornered” came off as pretty stupid, or at least it did to me in the week leading up to the episode. Usually such a title – which one usually finds on lesser shows than this one – tends to indicate that the main character is stuck deep in some shit and that the audience will be privy to watching their fight-or-flight response unfold, usually with the choice being “fight”. And considering that Walt’s been cornered for most of the season, and we’ve seen his various, pathetic attempts at “fighting”, I was worried that this episode might be covering some similar ground for us as the audience.

But the show has long-since grown past the point where the focus is squarely on Walt. The show has managed to pull the other supporting characters into much stronger roles, to the point where tonight’s episode was at least as much about Jesse and Skyler as it was about Walt, if not more so. This episode was about how the two of them react to being cornered by Walt’s bullheaded foolishness.

Skyler, who apparently embodies the “flight” part of that equation, takes off after her argument with Walt, after seeing his dangerous side, the side she asked to see when she required that he not hold back any more secrets.  Though her excitement last week with the drug/money laundering business seemed to be setting Skyler up for disappointment, it’s the reveal of Walt’s true self that really caused Skyler to freak. So she takes off to the Four Corners (and here the episode’s title takes on a different, more acceptable meaning), and subjects herself to the saddest coin-flip ever to determine her fate. Yet though the coin lands within the Colorado boundary twice, and though it might be the smart choice, Skyler chooses instead to stay, in order to protect her family. (And was she just going to leave Jr. behind with Walt, or what?) Though she may have ultimately chosen to “fight”, Skyler’s choice still doesn’t stop her from being cornered by Walt’s decisions. Sometimes the morally right choice isn’t the correct one to make.

Jesse meanwhile goes straight to the “fight” response to get out from under Walt’s cloud of destruction, and though it provided temporary relief, it might ultimately land him in even bigger trouble later on. After actively distancing himself from Walt, and fighting to land some more side jobs with Mike, Jesse once again proves himself by refusing to sit in the car and wait for some drug thieves to rear their head. He instead becomes proactive, and tricks the meth heads into letting him into the house, thus allowing Mike to come around back and gain the advantage. This time his heroics aren’t part of some set-up, and the respect he earns from Mike and Gus is real. But whatever new opportunities this respect leads to, the advantages can’t outweigh the danger and trouble they will inevitable lead Jesse towards.

While Walt’s pompous personality may drive those around him to make precarious decisions, perhaps the biggest problem to them all is Walt’s heavy sense of denial. Though the sniveling assessments that Bogdan throws at Walt when then latter comes to pick up the keys to the carwash may be true, Walt refuses to listen. All he hears is the anger boiling in his veins, and as pithy retribution, he forces Bogdan to leave his first dollar at the car wash, “as is”. Yet Walt soon takes that dollar and uses it to buy a Coca-Cola, the most ubiquitous drink in the entire world, thus easily giving up that symbol of power that he put so much effort into keeping just to stroke his own ego.

The message is clear: eventually somebody above us will take our money, our power from us, sometimes without us realizing that they’re doing it. If only Walt would take down his blinders, he could see that.

Quotes, Etc:

“She gave me a hard time when we settled on price.” “We’re all on the same page, Bogdan.”

“I think if you’re going to buy me off, buy me off.”

“Is there something about you I don’t know? Are you a former Navy SEAL? Do you need to have your hand registered as lethal weapons?”

“Maybe what you don’t know about meth heads – or maybe you do – is that they’re kinda unpredictable.”

“Guess we’ll go with Plan A then.”

Considering that it didn’t break, that must have been one sturdy bong that Jesse used to knock out that meth head.

“I missed that one, I’m sure it was good.”

“I promise to always go the speed limit. Or below…way below.”