Breaking Bad S5E9- Blood Money
Some spoilery thoughts below the cut
The second half of Breaking Bad’s final season opens with one of those shots that has almost become the shows trademarks, a wide shot revealing the alien environs to be a place we are all too familiar with.
A group of characters we don’t recognise skate around a swimming pool. Of course the wide shot reveals it to be the pool behind the White household, a pool that we have thus far seen full of everything from vomit and matches to aeroplane parts and a slightly roasted pink teddy bear.
Meanwhile we’re back with 52-year-old Walt and his beat up Volvo back at the house, which has been thoroughly stripped whilst dormant, and has Heisenberg daubed in big yellow graffiti on the wall.
It’s symbolism writ large, with the house appearing familiar yet run down on the outside, but empty and almost unrecognisable on the inside, save for the identity of its former inhabitant; we are shown a bearded Walt, in stained clothes, still known by his former neighbour, but definitely not the same man who worked two jobs to feed his family when we first met him.
This disconnect is returned to in what is the funniest scene of this episode, as a haunted Jesse Pinkman sits shellshocked on his sofa as Badger and Skinny Pete discuss Star Trek whilst sharing bong hits in the living room of his giant house.
It’s another classic scene where the outwardly vacuous drug addicts are shown to have hidden intellectual depths (compare with last year’s discovery that Pete appears to be a classically trained pianist) with a seemingly sound understanding of how teleportation works, and the ramifications that has on the human body.
Badger even has writerly ambitions, showing off a story he has written about a pie eating contest aboard USS Enterprise, with all the crews eating as many blueberry (not tula berry; that’s Voyager!) pies as possible. Eventually Chekov and Spock are the last two competitors left in the game, Spock having used his greater mind control powers to master his digestion, and Chekov having Scotty beam the pies out of his belly has soon as they enter. Eventually Scotty makes a mistake, and jettisons Chekov’s guts into space.
Just goes to show sometimes even if you stop at nothing to win, you end up with nothing inside.
