Breaking Bad Season Five Episode Eleven Review
If you are not up to date with "Breaking Bad" do not read this. I am warning you now. If you continue major spoilers will follow. For anyone who has ever doubted the extent of Walter White's manipulation what I'm shore will become known simply as "The Confession" scene laid bare what this man is truly all about. Walt is a cold, ruthless, and extremely calculating narcissist and everyone is fair game when it comes to his survival. Once again give the writers at "Breaking Bad" all the credit in the world for truly understanding the character that they have in Walter White and showing us how he is truly a mad genus who has no emotional center.
Hank and Marie's reaction to watching the confession was some of the most brilliantly restrained acting in recent memory. Where the shocked, angry, or just downright scared of their once seemingly innocent brother in law. "Breaking Bad" may have started as the story of a seemingly hapless individual who was going to turn to a life of crime for altruistic reasons but over the course of time we realized that this man has always been narcissistic sociopath who was simply biding his time. Better writers then me have raised that point but I would like to say that this last episode of the show did an excellent job of bringing Walter's manipulation to the forefront.
In this episode besides brilliantly begin able to turn the tables on his DEA brother in law Hank, we see Walter use different types of emotional manipulation to twist the people in his life to his will. He brilliantly and shamefully tells his son that his cancer has come back only to keep him from going to visit his uncle and aunt, he gets Skyler to go along with his confession tape, he has Saul Goodman eating out of his hand, and of course he gets called out by Jesse about his very nature and in a second when you think that this man whom we once thought to be a decent human being (how wrong we were) was going to admit the truth to Jesse for once he pushes Jesse further over the edge.
Everything seems to be once again going in Walter's favor and that is certainly no accident. Then those brilliant writers give us Jesse making the connection that Walter turned him against Gus and poisoned Brock. How refreshing is it to see Jesse react the way a person in this situation would most likely react to this news and go on a one man rampage ending with him about to burn down Walter's house and not so metaphorically burn down Walter's empire. It is episodes like this that make "Breaking Bad" continually stand out from the pack and rise above pretty much everything else on television. Well done indeed.
By Matthew Giordano
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