I Can't Possibly Be Wrong All the Time

Way late to the party, my wife and I just finished watching an excellent season of television. The Second Season of Breaking Bad.

Just like my last series of posts covering Season One Breaking Bad, this series is going to contain spoilery details for Season Two. If you haven’t watched the show but for some reason you want to read my blog, do yourself a favor, go to Netflix right now, and get caught up.

I have not seen any later seasons of Breaking Bad (although I do know some details… just getting GIFs and JPEGs for these posts is fraught with peril) so please don’t reveal any future plot points or spoilers should you choose to comment. Please.

This post is going to be a quick (relatively speaking) high level overview of the season. I’ll be talking about characters and other topics in a future post.

Season Two Recap, Yo.

• Walt and Jesse get abducted by Tuco, who has inadvertently killed an associate via a brutal beating.
• Tuco’s uncle, the wheelchair-bound nonverbal bell ringing Tio, nearly gets Walt and Jesse killed when he sees them trying to poison a meal for Tuco with ricin.

• Hank kills Tuco in a shootout.
• Walt covers his absence by pretending to be caught up in an amnesia fugue state, Jesse gets Wendy the junkie prostitute to be his alibi.

• Walt finds himself getting the passive aggressive cold shoulder from Skyler when he can’t adequately expain away her suspicions that he has a second cell phone. Jesse’s parents evict him from his aunt’s house, and has to break in to his own RV for shelter, via a port-a-potty.
• Hank has been promoted for bringing down Tuco and is assigned to participate in a task force in El Paso, but Hank has been strongly affected by his brush with death and is having PTSD panic attacks.
• With funds grudgingly supplied by Walt, Jesse rents an apartment from the lovely artist Jane Margolis, who is willing to overlook credit and background checks.

• Walt convinces Jesse to try and build his own drug distribution network. This operation works well enough, until Skinny Pete has an ounce of the premium blue meth taken from him by a pair of junkies.

• Gretchen Schwartz discovers that Walt has been lying to Skyler about the Schwartzes giving him money for chemo.
• Walt insists Jesse recover either the stolen meth or the money. Like Tuco would.
• Jesse tries to recover the money from the junkie “Spooge”, bonds with Spooge’s young son.
• Spooge ends up with a crushed head from a stolen ATM, courtesy of calling his woman a skank one too many times. Jesse ensures Spooge’s son does not see this.
• Skyler gets a job back at her previous place of employment, Baneke Manufacturing. Ted Baneke is really happy to see her.
• In El Paso, Hank is not fitting in. His tour on the El Paso task force ends when the operation he is part of includes a severed head and an exploding tortoise.

• Badger gets busted and calls Saul “Better Call Saul” Goodman. A criminal lawyer. A Criminal. Lawyer.
• Walt counsels Hank about his fears, which gets Hank back on the case and all over the Badger bust in the hopes of nailing Heisenberg.
• Walt and Jesse engage with Saul, who arranges for an ex-con to pose as Heisenberg so Badger can get a plea-bargain.
• Walt pressures Jesse into a multi-day meth cooking marathon. Jesse misses out on going with Jane to see a Georgia O’Keefe museum, Walt lies to Skyler about going to see his mom.
• The cooking session nearly ends disastrously with a dead battery and a ruined gas generator. Walt saves the day with science. (But not by building a robot.)
• Walt expects bad news after his MRI, but he’s in remission. Which pisses him off. He figured he was out and done. Walt totally becomes Heisenberg with Hank over a bottle of tequila during the unwanted celebratory party.

• Walt begins to do construction under the house. He claims there’s rot.
• Jesse and Jane argue about their relationship after Jesse meets Jane’s father, Donald. Jane becomes Apology Girl.
• Walt becomes creepy and threatening when he identifies someone else getting meth supplies at the home improvement store.
• Jesse’s friend Combo gets killed. Jesse’s drug employees bail on Jesse and Jane falls off the sobriety wagon comforting Jesse.

• Saul sets up a meeting for Walt with mild mannered druglord Gus, the owner of the Pollos Hermanos chain of restaurants.
• In order to make a 1.2 million dollar deal with Gus, Walt misses the birth of his daughter.
• Walt is unwilling to give Jesse his half of the funds all at once, since he’s afraid Jesse will do something unbelievably stupid.
• Jane’s father Donald discovers that Jane is back on heroin and demands she go to rehab. She delays it for a day, long enough to blackmail Walt into bringing over Jesse’s half of the money. The two of them vow to get clean, but use up their remaining heroin.
• Walt has a drink with Donald in a nearby bar, which motivates him to head back to Jesse’s to try and resolve their issues.
• Jesse and Jane are strung out on heroin. While trying to rouse Jesse, Hank dislodges Jane who chokes on her vomit.
• Walt lets her die.

• Walt has Saul send over Mike Ehrmantraut, a fixer, to handle things over at Jesse’s. Walt later finds Jesse in an addict flop and gets him into rehab.
• Walt is being prepped for surgery to remove the tumor in his lung and he is heavily medicated. When Skyler asks about his cell phone, he asks “which one?” Now she knows.
• 7 weeks later, when Walt has nearly fully recovered, Skyler reveals that she has uncovered a preponderance of evidence contradicting his lies and demands he vacate the house during that weekend. She leaves him alone.
• Donald Margolis, still affected by the death of his daughter Jane but returning to his job as an air traffic controller, is responsible for a mid-air collision that rains debris down on Walt’s neighborhood.

Boom.

Okay, I tried to touch on the season’s highlights without going into excessive detail. In the next post, I’ll be talking more in-depth about things, about characters and their growth, etc. I’ll definitely talk about a pink stuffed animal. (I might even make predictions.) This season was twice as long as Season One, but about four times as much stuff happens. I’ll try not to be too long winded, yo.

Images are obviously from AMC’s Breaking Bad. 

I make no claim to any of the artwork obviously, but I do make some claim to the text of this posting. So there.

© Patrick Sponaugle 2013 Some Rights Reserved