Breaking Bad S06E03 Review: "Confessions"
"Christ. Some people are immune to good advice." --Saul Goodman
In the past few weeks, the AMC channel has been circulating a teaser for Breaking Bad's final season. It's just a montage of beautiful desert vistas, overlaid by the sultry gravel of Bryan Cranston's voice as he recites Shelley's famous poem about King Ozymandias and his fallen empire. This creates an appropriate sense of foreboding as to the direction the show will take in its last episodes. The invocation of Shelley's poem reminded me of another famous poem that was name-dropped near the end of The Sopranos' run: Bill Yeats' "The Second Coming," with its ominous prediction that "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." Over the years, Walter White has unknowingly (or uncaringly) built his Heisenbergian castle on a mound of quicksand. And now, with the end so clearly in sight, things are beginning to fall apart very quickly indeed.
In terms of the plot's seasonal arc this year, the aptly-titled "Confessions" is the springboard that will launch us into the terrible, violent endgame the Breaking Bad writers have implicitly promised us since day one of Walter's journey. In these 45 minutes of surrenders and confessions, lies are swept away and replaced with ugly truths, along with all the misery and confrontation those revelations entail. In my last review, I talked a lot about the excuses characters come up with for their actions, and how weak those excuses are when the light of truth is mercilessly shed on them. In this episode, we see how these people react when the excuses they've been resting comfortably on for so long are ripped away from beneath them.
There are a lot of confessions made in this episode, but two of them stick out as especially compelling. The first confession is...well, "confession" isn't even the word for it, because Walter's convincing monologue into a video camera, in which he implicates Hank as the real Heisenberg and paints himself as a helpless accomplice, is a crock of shit. This five-minute video, played out in its entirety to Marie and Hank himself, is like the Sistine Chapel of bullshit. With this surprising move, Walt does two things: gains enough leverage over Hank to keep the Schraders quiet for now, and demonstrates exactly how far the truth can be twisted when all you have to go on is circumstantial evidence.
The other big confession is one that Breaking Bad viewers have been speculating about for two years. It's really more of a revelation on Jesse's part than a revealing confession on Saul's. Jesse almost gets out of the ABQ cleanly and without a trace, but when he realizes Saul's muscle Huell lifted his dimebag out of his jacket without Jesse even noticing, he quickly connects the dots and realizes that Walter used the same trick to convince Jesse that Gus Fring, not Walt, had poisoned the child Brock. I think it's safe to say that the Walt-Jesse bromance is over. And we don't need a frenetic scene of Jesse breaking into Walt's house with a jerrycan of gasoline to know it.
There was so much more going on in this episode than those two confessions, but there's not much else that has the same impact and long-term implications. In keeping with my observations about the sheer number of callbacks and references to earlier events that the writers packed into this season, there are a few more to point out. The most obvious one is Walt's confession video, which recalls his frantic video in the opening scene of the pilot, even beginning with him stating his name and address. The major difference of the two being that in the first video, Walt says, "This is not an admission of guilt," and in the second: "This is my confession."
There are also explicit references made to last year's train heist, Hank and Jesse's tumultuous relationship, and of course, Huell's surprisingly light fingers. Even Drew Sharp's tarantula shows up for a brief cameo, crawling around by Jesse's feet while he and Saul wait to meet Walt in the desert. Also, Marie is now insistently calling Walt Jr. "Flynn." She doesn't want to be reminded of the boy's monstruous father. Speaking of Flynn, he's gotta start figuring things out sometime, right? I get the sense that big things are in store for him soon.
Written by Modern Sin