“Crawl Space,” while not an airtight episode by any stretch, is probably the best example of everything Breaking Bad has been capable of up to this point in its run. What this show does well, what it has always done well and what it does exceptionally well in this outing, is building continuous tension on an episode-by-episode basis, and then exploding that tension quickly and ferociously. I can’t think of any other show on TV right now that is telling such a focused, tightly knit story from episode to episode, one which leaves so little time for diversions and gets down to brass tacks in every single episode. There are no extraneous side stories or characters on this show; everything, right down from the acting to the editing and sound design, serves the story in a way that provides for a constant but almost inconceivable ratcheting up of tension.
A lot of people were complaining about the languid pace of season four up until about “Hermanos,” but it is now apparent that that this year’s seeming lifelessness – a quality which is admittedly pronounced, at least when compared to the breakneck, visceral intensity of nearly all of season three – had a purpose after all. Breaking Bad has an uncanny way of not letting the audience fully grasp just how much shit these characters have gotten themselves into until it’s much too late for them to extract themselves from those shitty situations; at least not without doing great harm to themselves and the people around them. This show, in ways unlike any other show out there, effectively conveys both a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the relentless kineticism of its narrative, and a helplessness to overpower the all-consuming sense of doom which paints that narrative. These qualities pervade nearly every frame of Breaking Bad, to such a degree that watching the show at its tensest moments is almost suffocating.
None of this is new. This sort of nihilistic suffocation has been around since somewhere near the middle of the first season, and there have been explosive moments on Breaking Bad throughout its entire run. But each new one consistently feels more unexpected and world-transforming than the last, because Vince Gilligan and his writers are astoundingly good at carrying tension through multiple episodes, building that tension to its snapping point, and then going beyond anything the audience was expecting to put the characters deeper and deeper into a seemingly inescapable situation. It’s almost like the writers are daring themselves to sensibly – but not without logical harm done – get Walt out of what they’ve gotten him into. Somehow, it all works. They haven’t failed yet.
I’m going to smooth over a lot of summary here. Last week’s cliffhanger is resolved surprisingly easily; Jesse takes Gus and Mike to a paramedic tent at the lab, where Gus is quickly patched up and Mike, whose injuries are more serious, is left alone to mend (“This man pays my salary,” a paramedic explains to Jesse when Jesse asks why they aren’t paying more attention to the bleeding Mike). As Gus and Jesse make the trek back to New Mexico, Jesse reiterates his support for Walt, even after all their differences. “You got a problem,” he tells Gus, if Gus expects him to cook with the knowledge that Walt is going to be killed.
Back at the New Mexico lab, after having been gone for a few days, Walt notices that someone else has been cooking while he was away. He deduces it was Jesse, and realizes that Gus is in the final steps of his replacement process; if Jesse doesn’t protect Walt, Walt is dead, and he knows it. Thus begins a series of events that eventually takes Walt to Jesse’s house to plead with his former partner to continue espousing his worth to Gus. Gus doesn’t like Walt interfering with Jesse, who he now sees as his partner, not Walt’s. So Gus takes Walt out to the desert and fires him from his cooking job, while simultaneously presenting his plan to kill Hank. If Walter interferes with that, Gus says, he and his family will be dead.
Now, as for those final ten minutes: Breaking Bad has always been able to pull things off stylistically that no other show would even dare to attempt, but the details in these final scenes are some of the most indelible this series has provided. Walt’s demented cackling over the relentless phone-ringing, his helpless scream (a scream that felt like it had been coming for three and a half seasons), the slow dolly out from the hallway as Skylar approaches the phone, dreading what will be said on the other end; it was all staged and executed perfectly, in a fashion so harrowing and unnerving that it could have been a scene in a horror film. And the visionary final shot is as thematically dense as it is beautiful: We see Walt directly below us, cobwebbed, hysterical and framed through the cellar door in what could very well be his grave, lying on the crawl space floor as the camera creeps upward. The laughing slowly softens, the walls shake, the soundtrack drones lowly, and we cut to black.
It's a remarkable ending that is as hauntingly unexpected as it is fitting. Once again, it is obvious now that the season has been building to this one breaking point. A good way to look as this is to, as stupid as it may sound, imagine Breaking Bad as the dramatic-television equivalent of Jenga. At the beginning of each season, we start with a full tower (or relatively full, I suppose, as season begins with our characters worse off than the last season’s beginning), and as we gradually remove block after block, the tower becomes less and less steady. The tower always falls; we know this, it is inevitable. It simply a matter of when. And this is why what the writers of Breaking Bad have done to condition us is so goddamn brilliant: the show’s unpredictability has itself become its only predictable aspect. And this is why the last ten minutes of “Crawl Space” are not only the greatest ten minutes Breaking Bad has so far produced, but also the greatest ten minutes of TV I’ve seen in quite some time. Gilligan has been building (or perhaps “destructing” is the better word) toward this all season. We knew the breakdown would happen. We just didn’t know when. It happened in “Crawl Space,” and the most beautiful thing about it was that it felt not simply like the apex of a season, but the apex of a series. And the best part is, we still have two episodes left in this season that are chock-full of potential for further game-changing apexes. That Gilligan is able to reliably produce these moments, time after time, without fail, bodes well as we push into the final stretch.
A-
Other thoughts:
· I didn’t mention anything about the Ted/Skylar subplot because, frankly, it seemed a bit more disconnected than usual from the main action, at least until the final moments. The whole Huell/Redhead house invasion scene felt a bit awkward and flat, but then again, that was probably the point. It’ll be interesting to see where the Ted storyline goes from here. I mean, presumably he’s dead, but we never really heard definitively, so who knows? Point is, unfortunately for Walt and Skylar, the check to the IRS in the mail. It doesn’t look like they’ll be getting that money back anytime soon.
· Shot of the week (besides the final one, because that’s too easy): the long shot of Walt kneeling before Gus in the desert as a cloud passes. You never see a shot held that long on TV. Simply incredible.
· Gus’s pronunciation of the words “I will kill your infant daughter” was one of the most quietly menacing moments I’ve ever seen on this show.
· “What did you expect, Hadji’s Quick Vanish?”
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