Breaking Bad Season 5, Episode 5: “Dead Freight”

“Yes, I have children, so what? You think because we’re both parents that I won’t let my partner do what’s necessary?” Walt asks this of Lydia near the middle of the episode, when Lydia is trying - once again - to talk her way out of being murdered by Mike. Lydia wants Walt to swear that she won’t be killed after she divulges how they can steal an “ocean” of methylamine, and tries to prey on Walt’s sympathies as a parent. Little do we realize how prophetic these words will be at the episode’s end, when Walt stands by and watches, to his horror, as a partner shoots dead a little boy, doing what’s “necessary,” for the episode’s thrilling heist to come off without a hitch.

Breaking Bad rarely deals with the larger ramifications of the exploits of Walt and company: we hardly ever see any of the customers that demand the supply of meth that Walt loves to provide. Sure, a couple of episodes a few seasons ago featured Wendy the prostitute, and Jesse had multiple encounters with an AA group full of recovering meth addicts, as well as a pair of active addicts and their neglected child in season two's "Peekaboo," and Walt is indirectly responsible for the midair plane collision that caps off that season, but for the most part, the show avoids dealing with the many innocent lives that are ended and/or ruined by the meth business. The closest it has come is to Brock’s poisoning last season, and even there, he recovered. Crimes have victims on this show, but these victims are often themselves criminals (Gale, Gus, the cousins, Krazy-8, Tuco, Victor, Tyrus, Tio, Don Eladio, etc.) or are law enforcers who to some extent know the risks (Hank’s wounding, Tortuga’s explosion). Most other victims have been victimized off-screen.* This changes in this episode, when Todd shoots the boy on the dirt bike after he witnesses the heist.


*Jane is one large exception; Walt watches her die rather than turn her over so that she doesn’t choke on her own vomit.

Here, finally, our characters are confronted with one of the more brutal realities that result from their endeavors. This is much worse than Jesse killing Gale, and even slightly worse than Walt poisoning Brock, and we can see it on Jesse’s and Walt’s faces even before Todd shoots the boy. They are in utter shock over how completely and totally they screwed up in allowing the boy to witness the heist, a shock which gives Todd time to do what neither of them would have done: shoot the boy dead before he can flee. It’s all the more tragic because one of the reasons they go to such lengths to siphon off the methylamine without alerting the train crew is to spare the crew’s life (in addition to not letting the authorities realize they’ve been robbed). As Mike says, “I have done this long enough to know that there are two kinds of heists: those where the guys get away with it, and those that leave witnesses.”

The heist itself is a tight piece of filmmaking. It has shades of the season premiere: the formation of the plan, the preparation that makes it possible, and then its execution. Once again, Jesse comes up with the crucial piece of the plan that makes it possible. Jesse is the man with the plan this season, it seems. And just as in the premiere, the shot of his revelation is framed in a way that evokes how Mike and Walt are Jesse’s two dads: Mike on one side, Walt on the other. Unlike in the premiere though, this time, Jesse only has to speak once in order to get Walt and Mike’s attention. And just as in the premiere, the plan is not without its snags. In addition to the unexpected witness, a good Samaritan speeds along the removal of the stalled truck from the train’s path, leading to some tense crosscutting where it does not seem possible that Jesse, Walt, and Todd will be able to disassemble the siphoning gear in time. They do, but Jesse is forced to lie down on the tracks and let the train pass overhead, while Todd must jump from the side of a moving car. And just like in the premiere, this close call is created by Walt’s tendency to overcompensate. In the premiere, he poured too much juice into the magnet and the truck tipped over; here, he attempts to siphon off as much methylamine as their buried container will hold, the train’s imminent departure be damned.

Nevertheless, they pull it off, and the euphoria of their success is palpable, aided in no small part by Jesse’s heartfelt “Yeah bitch!” It’s back-patting and laughter all around as Todd, Jesse, and Walt celebrate, until Walt shuts off the pump, and the three hear the sounds of the boy’s idling dirt bike, and one by one, all three turn to face him. The boy waves to them, and in a moment of incongruity that will make Todd’s next action even more ruthless, Todd waves back, steps forward, pulls out a gun and shoots the boy dead. The episode ends brilliantly with the rug getting pulled out from under everyone.

In other developments, Walt has indeed become a better actor, judging by the performance he puts on for Hank in order to bug Hank’s new office. A lot of what he was saying and the emotions he was feeling are probably true – Skyler doesn’t love Walt anymore, and Walt doesn’t know what to do about it -- later she’ll tell him “I’m not your wife. I’m your hostage” -- but he’s able to expertly use these feelings to manipulate Hank into doing precisely what he wants him to do: leave the room (and close the blinds to boot). Very crafty, Walt.

The bug Walt places in Hank’s office is also intriguing for its potential to serve multiple purposes. In the future, doubtless it will come in handy – what better way to stay a step ahead of the DEA? – but for the present, Mike, Walt, and Jesse intend to use it to put to rest the issue of what to do with Lydia: kill her for trying to scare them off with a GPS tracker, or believe her claims that she didn't it plant it herself? If Hank’s team put the tracker on the bottom of the methylamine barrel (rather than Lydia, as Mike suspects), Hank might not tell Lydia over the phone, but he’d probably check on it after the fact, and the bug would pick up that information. And indeed Hank does check, and Gomez knows nothing about it, which suggests Lydia put it there herself (much to Mike’s satisfaction, and much to Lydia’s panic). Luckily for Lydia, Hank inquires further, and discovers that the Houston office planted it. As its use in this scene illustrates, bugs can be a double-edged sword – it can misinform as much as it can inform. Were Hank to discover the bug in the future, he could use it to lead Walt right into a trap.

I enjoyed how Walt, Jesse, and Mike convened to discuss Lydia’s fate. Not only do they drag her to a derelict building and handcuff her to a table, but in the two conversations they have where they debate whether or not to kill her, they make only the most minimal gestures toward concealing their deliberation from her, standing only a few feet away and lowering their voices. Doing so removes Lydia’s objections from serious consideration, but does not prevent her from trying to sway them, and from freaking out over what she hears. It’s charming in its unprofessionalism, but also incredibly unnerving that they can so calmly discuss her fate right in front of her. It also results in some particularly choice dialogue, like when Mike dismisses Jesse’s concern that she sounds honest: “Everyone sounds like Meryl Streep with a gun to their head.” However, any sympathy Lydia earns in this scene is erased in the scene where she helps them plan the heist, as she’s incredulous when Jesse and Walt blanch at killing the train crew: “Give me a break! You guys were going to murder me. I thought you were professionals!” Even if she has a point, she's still being hypocritical: Lydia’s life is sacred, but if she must sacrifice two train conductors in the process of sparing herself with her plan, so be it. Again and again, she proves how right Mike is about her, but somehow she keeps managing to wriggle out of being killed.

Other thoughts:

- As much as the show deserves credit for finally having its characters confront the gut-churning immorality of what they’re doing, it was still a little bit of a cop-out to have the deed carried out by a minor character introduced only two episodes ago. Would it be as easy for us to enjoy Mike as a character if he were the one to have shot the boy instead of Todd? Rather than having to somehow cope with the difficulty of one of the characters we know and enjoy having shot the boy, we can just dismiss Todd as fundamentally immoral. Granted, this is probably the wisest choice if the writers want us to continue to find Mike sympathetic, and Walt probably isn't far gone enough yet to seriously consider murdering a child in cold blood (after all, he didn't actually kill Brock), but it still seemed a little pat.

- The cold open is wonderful. It serves to establish the kid on the bike as a character more than if he had just appeared out of nowhere at the end of the episode, and makes him seem somewhat sweet by having him search for a pet spider. It is also nicely enigmatic. I figured out how it would likely play into things once Mike described the difference between the two kinds of heists. However, I did not anticipate the poor kid getting killed.

 - Lots of performing going on in this episode: both Walt and Lydia each perform for Hank, and Mike’s go-to, redheaded confidence man Kuby performs for the train conductors.

- Lots of good Jesse material this episode. In addition to shouting “Yeah bitch!” at the heist’s conclusion, he also has a funny line when Mike tries to persuade Jesse and Walt that killing Lydia is for the best. Mike reveals that Lydia put a hit out on Mike, and Jesse responds by asking, “A hit? Like the mafia?”

- Landry’s murder streak continues. First, a stalker in Texas; now, a boy in New Mexico.

- This week in beautiful Breaking Bad shots: everything involving Walt, Mike, and Jesse scoping out the train tracks when considering the heist (see also the image at the top of this post). This imagery is straight out of a western, especially the shot of Walt and Mike standing above the tracks, silhouetted by the setting sun, with Walt wearing his Heisenberg hat.

- Skyler’s fears about someone approaching their house looking to kill Walt are well-founded, more so than Walt knows, considering that he was totally oblivious to how close the cousins came to killing him with an axe in his home.

- Boy, listing all of the criminals Walt has taken out over the course of the show makes him seem like more of a badass than I realized. Maybe there's more substance to his swagger after all.

- Good episode title. Sounds like something straight out of a 1940s detective novel.