Breaking Bad Final Season Premiere Review: "Blood Money"
"Sorry to say, kid, you're still gonna be a couple miracles short of sainthood." -Saul Goodman
Here we go.
According to Wikipedia, blood money is "money or some sort of compensation paid by an offender (usually a murderer) or his family group to the family or kin group of the victim." Reading this, it seems to be pretty clear that the title of Breaking Bad's eighth-to-last episode refers to the $5 million buyout Jesse Pinkman tries to give to the families of deceased Mike Ehrmantraut and Drew Sharp. There's a lot going on in the episode, but much of the plot is driven by Jesse's desperate impulse to get that blood
money to people who actually deserve some measure of happiness. In other words, anyone but himself.But before I dive into the episode proper, let's look at that title and break it down into its constituent parts. Can we? It seems easy enough. "Blood." "Money." Problem is, for our 'heroes' Walter and Jesse, those two components inevitably go hand-in-hand. They are inseparable.
As such, that money is the last connection Jesse has to his life as a meth cook, and he's decided he needs it as far away from him as possible. So, being unable to give the cash to the families of his and Walter's past victims, the last we see of Jesse this episode is him literally giving it away to anyone, everyone, and no one, throwing fat stacks out his car window onto people's lawns like the morning paper.
What surprised me most about this premiere was not how much happened during its runtime, but how differently the show itself seems to regard its characters. The atmosphere has shifted from the balls-out maniacal desperation of the last season, to one expressing a profound melancholy; loss; regret; and a hint of guilty nostalgia. The ambient score has mostly been reduced to subtle drone, with rolling waves of dissonant noise washing out the background of almost every scene. After five seasons of gradually escalating intensity, the entire world of Breaking Bad now feels utterly shellshocked.
Nowhere is this bleak attitude reflected more than in the opening scene, another flashforward that shows a 52-year-old Walt showing up at his federally-condemned house to pick up the ever-present vial of ricin he left in the wall socket last episode. I could write 1500 words on this brilliant sequence alone, but suffice it to say the scene adequately sets the tone for the following 45 minutes.
The main story picks up right where it left off, with Hank finally finishing his epic revelatory dump and coming out of the bathroom to knowingly confront his greatest enemy for the first time. Hank's not stupid; he's not gonna come out swinging and tackle Walter into the family pool right then and there. He's gonna scoop up the damning Whitman book, drive as fast as he can away from the White home, have another panic attack of course, and get to work setting up a private workspace in his garage where he can review all his old files of Heisenberg and finally put the pieces of his upturned life together. The accompanying montage, in which he pores over every detail of the last five seasons in light of his recent revelation, is one of the series' best; my favorite shot is of him reviewing the blurry CCTV footage of Walt and Jesse stealing a barrel of chemicals from a warehouse, which happened way back in season 1. It's the most traumatic, painful walk down Memory Lane ever put on the small screen, and it's completely thrilling.
Hank's obsessive nature serves as an intriguing, if extreme, complement to Walt's own OCD tendencies, which took a backseat to his ego last season but are now back in full force as he vainly tries to auto-correct his life in his twilight years. He worries over the arrangement of car scents at the car wash, he tries to learn all his employees' names (and remember their birthdays!), and he's seemingly more honest and open with Skyler than we've ever seen him. Has Walter White finally broken free of the poisonous menace of Heisenberg?
To answer that question, we first need to turn our attention to Jesse. When we first check in with him, he's zoned out in his threadbare house, being forced to listen to a truly epic exchange between burnout buddies Badger and Skinny Pete debating the finer points of Star Trek physics. Now that he's out of the game, this is what Jesse's life has become. He's so traumatized by all that's happened to him and all the unforgivable sins he's committed that he can't move on. The guilt is weighing down on him so heavily it's literally pinned his ass to the ground. Reluctantly, he stands, leaving Pete and Badger to see if he can lighten the load a little, taking the blood money with him to Saul Goodman's.
A worried Saul, after denying Jesse the chance to give the money away, calls on Walter to intervene. In their only interaction of the episode, Walt and Jesse meet up and have a conversation that reveals the fundamental differences in their approach to dealing with all the terrible things they've done. Jesse can't get past the hard facts. He's a liar. A killer. And when Walt tries to shrug off these truths, Jesse confronts him openly about the fate of Mike Ehrmantraut--a man Walter killed for literally no reason.
And Walt speaks his first bald-faced lie of the episode: "I did not kill Mike." And there we have it. Walter White free at last from Heisenberg? Not a chance. Walt deals with the past in a very different way from Jesse. He ignores it, he pretends to forget it, and most importantly, he tries to warp and manipulate it, twisting it to serve his own sick image of himself as a fundamentally decent human being. Even if he's being honest with his family, he's never, ever stopped lying to himself.
But wait. We've already seen the big reveal. When Saul called Walt ten minutes earlier, Walt was in the hospital, receiving a chemo drip. A few minutes after he leaves Jesse's house, we see him run from the family dinner into the bathroom, where he pulls out a bottle of pills and vomits into the toilet. The cancer is back. (Did it ever really leave?) And more significantly: once again, Walt's hiding it from his family. He's never stopped lying to anyone. Heisenberg is alive and well, folks. And I'm honestly starting to doubt anything can change that.
Not even Hank finding out. Not even Walt finding out that Hank has found out. Yes, it seems that despite the newfound melancholic atmosphere, Breaking Bad hasn't lost its breakneck pacing. By episode's end, Walt heads over to the Schrader garage and casually confronts Hank about the GPS bug Hank planted on his car. Without a word, Hank closes the garage door, leaving the two men in silence and darkness. They're gonna need some privacy.
There's not much to say about those closing minutes, really. I mean, that final scene was five seasons in the making. And boy, did it deliver on that half-decade-long promise. From Hank's initial explosive reaction to Walt's final, menacing closing line, the whole sequence was nothing less than perfect. It was certainly a fitting end to an enthralling game-changer of an episode, one that promises a wildly unpredictable, blissfully apocalyptic final season.