Breaking Bad Season 5, Episode 8: “Gliding Over All”

“Gliding Over All” is a fairly calm and quiet episode to close out this half of the final season of the series. Overall, I found it somewhat lackluster, and while still a good hour of television, probably the weakest of the 8 episodes to air thus far. Given that we’re only halfway through this final season, I suppose I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up for a suspenseful climax like those Breaking Bad usually accomplishes. However, even by the standards of a typical episode of this show, this particular episode seems to coast along with very little eventful happening, outside of some developments near the end. But then again, perhaps that’s part of the point.


This episode is primarily concerned with Walt expanding his empire, as evidenced by the lengthy montage sequence near the middle of the episode (which could have been replaced by a title reading, “Time Passes” without doing the episode much harm). This montage sequence had some nice visuals, and the song accompanying it has some exquisitely appropriate lyrics, but I found it overlong and repetitive. And perhaps this was also a part of the point. If I’m slightly bored with what we’re seeing, perhaps it is somewhat easier to relate to the moments of Walt’s discontent, visible midway through the sequence, as he sighs, sits in his empty, darkened living room, and has an apparently sleepless night. The emptiness Walt feels is made more emphatic shortly afterward, when Skyler comes home from Hank and Marie's to find Walt sitting by the pool, blankly staring into it. Apparently empire building is not as exciting or fulfilling as Walt thought it would be. All of this serves as motivation for Walt to get out of the meth business, telling Skyler he’s done so near the end of the episode. However, I remain skeptical that he’s given into Skyler and truly gotten out. The montage sequence shows us that he’s not happy, and Skyler shows us (and Walt) that he’s made enough money when she reveals the storage locker where she’s been stashing it all, but could he really extricate himself so easily? After all, the business (or empire) he’s built relies on him as its linchpin, just as he’s always wanted (and moreover, this is not the kind of show that would skip over so much juicy and hassle-raising dramatic material that would come from Walt telling Lydia, Declan and company that he’s quitting). Walt’s become such a good actor that he could simply be lying to Skyler to give her some peace and to restore his family. Regardless of whether or not he's actually left yet, the ramifications of his desire to get out will doubtlessly be taken up in the second half of the season next year.

That being said, the episode has a couple of nice scenes that pull off some sleight of hand restricted narration, where a seemingly innocuous scene is retrospectively made more intriguing by a revelation at the end. The first is Walt’s meeting with Lydia. Walt goes to retrieve the names of Mike’s nine guys in prison. At first, Lydia hesitates to give Walt the names, out of fear that she’ll immediately become a liability once she tells Walt what she knows. Walt responds with sarcasm (in a wonderfully incredulous line reading by Bryan Cranston): “So you put that list in my hands, and in your mind, I immediately just murder you. Just right here in this restaurant, in this public place, immediately.” Despite Walt’s protests, however, at the end of the scene, he lifts his Heisenberg hat off the table to reveal the vial of ricin poison he had stashed away earlier this season. It seems murdering Lydia was not entirely out of the question (and he had opportunity as well: twice Lydia bends down to her bag to retrieve and then replace a pen, taking her eyes off the table and Walt). I see two possible reasons Walt decided not to poison Lydia. The first is that she cooperated with him and gave him the names – perhaps he only intended to poison her if she proved stubborn. The other, more chilling possibility is that he only stayed his hand because she offered him a lucrative business proposition: expanding his market to the Czech Republic. Had she not done that, perhaps Walt would have poisoned her. Given Walt’s behavior this season, the latter seems especially probable.

The second scene that prominently restricts our knowledge is when Walt visits Jesse at Jesse’s house. After coldly boxing out Jesse at the start of the episode, when Jesse shows concern for the nine guys in prison who know too much about Gus’s operation, Jesse realizes Walt has written him out of the picture. Thus he’s surprised and concerned to find Walt on his doorstep three months later. He spies Walt out the window, pauses to consider why Walt might be paying him a visit, walks off screen for a moment, and then reenters to answer the door. Walt and Jesse reminisce for a few minutes before things become awkward and Walt leaves, telling Jesse somewhat cryptically that he’s left something for him: two black duffel bags are resting on Jesse’s doorstep. As Walt gets in his car and drives away, Jesse gingerly opens the bags to find the $5 million Walt owes Jesse for Jesse’s share of the methylamine. Panting with relief, Jesse brings the bags into his house, sags to the floor, and then removes from the waist of his pants the object he walked offscreen to retrieve at the start of the scene: a small pistol, which he slides across the floor.

Looking at the scene a second time, Jesse’s face is not just registering awkwardness throughout; he’s also displaying extreme wariness and anxiety over the purpose of Walt’s visit (especially when Walt agrees to come inside). He’s clearly considering the possibility that Walt has come there to kill him. From Jesse’s perspective, it’s not an unlikely possibility: Jesse knows better than anyone what Walt’s capable of, of how ruthless he can be, and he’s started to catch on to Walt’s manipulativeness. Overall, the scene is enriched by the retrospective knowledge that Jesse has a gun because it grants more meaning to Jesse’s reactions to Walt. For instance, Jesse’s gingerness with the duffel bags retrospectively appears to be a product of his thinking they might be booby-trapped. Additionally, it also allows us to better see Walt’s behavior through Jesse’s eyes: when Walt starts to reminisce, Jesse might think it is because Walt wants to have one more nice moment with Jesse before he kills him, or because he wants to lower Jesse’s guard. From Walt's perspective, perhaps he realizes how badly he’s damaged his relationship with the person who should be his closest ally – after all, he is finally giving Jesse the money he’s owed.

This is the first episode where I really started to believe that Walt’s ruthlessness has become one of his fundamental dispositions. The reveal of the ricin in the Lydia scene contributes to this change in perception, but his behavior in the scene where Todd’s uncle discusses the plan to kill all of Mike’s guys was an even more powerful one for me in this regard. His steely resolve and his total disinterest in the details of their machinations didn’t seem a put on, or an attempt at manipulating them. He simply didn’t care how they did it, but that it got done, and that they did it the way he told them to do it. Perhaps the thing that really got to me was the way he insisted they kill everyone all within a two-minute window even after Todd’s uncle tells him it’s impossible. In the past, when someone would tell Walt that something couldn’t be done, Walt would bargain and reason with the contrary party, or he’d throw a temper tantrum (witness his shooting Mike last week). Here, he simply stares at them with dead eyes and tells them to figure it out. A part of his behavior here stems from his having the money and the power in this situation, but this is the first time where it seemed to me that Walt wasn’t in over his head, or playing the Heisenberg role with too much swagger and bravado (as with his negotiation with Declan last episode). Here, it really seemed to me that Walt the family man is a put-on, and that he’s actually become this ruthless drug lord. Really, this is nothing new; it’s a transformation that’s central to the show, and one we’ve seen Walt go through over the course of these past 4 and half seasons. There certainly have been many other times in which Walt has shown himself to be ruthless, calculating, and immoral. However, in this moment, it seemed less like he was playing a role and more like this is who he is now. Walt’s apology to Mike after he shoots him at the end of the last episode might be the last we ever see of the pre-cancer Walter White.

And finally, there’s a big shift in knowledge at the episode’s conclusion: Hank finally has the epiphany we’ve been waiting for all this time, when he figures out that Walt is the meth cook he’s been chasing. The evidence that makes all of the pieces fall into place: The book of Walt Whitman poetry Gale gave Walt as a gift, complete with a signed inscription on the inside cover, reading, “To my other favorite W.W. It’s an honour working with you. Fondly G.B.” The look on Hank’s face is marvelous as he connects the dots, and suddenly sees the pattern in Walt’s somewhat strange behavior over these past four seasons. Even though the revelation is somewhat coincidental – Hank just happens to pick up that book, and just happens to flip to the inscription – it’s still a wonderful touch that it came not from any of Hank’s detective work, but from his association with Walt as a part of his family, because it provides maximum shock value for Hank (I wish I could see his behavior once he leaves the bathroom. Although given the way this show tends to work, it’s not out of the question that next half-season could start with such a scene). I’m glad the show dealt with this plot development now, when there’s room to develop it, rather than two or three episodes before the series’ conclusion (or worse yet, if they never let Hank find out the truth, or if he only found out retrospectively). Having Hank pursue Walt and build up a case will doubtlessly make the last 8 episodes next year that much more suspenseful. It was a nice conclusion to an otherwise slow hour of television.

Other thoughts:

- More evidence that Todd’s a sociopath – he seems to have absolutely no problem with disposing of the body of a guy who used to be his boss only a few days ago. Walt’s lack of alarm over Todd’s malleability is a pretty big blind spot. He’s surrounding himself with dubious allies (ahem, Lydia), and cutting ties with the people he can actually trust, like Jesse. My reaction to Walt’s dismissal of Jesse at the start of the episode was to call Walt a dumbass. Shades of Scarface here.

- Speaking of shades of other movies, the murder montage reminded me of the famous baptism massacre from The Godfather. Except unlike Michael Corleone, Walt has no need to create an alibi, so he simply starts his stopwatch and waits for a phone call in his dining room.

- I enjoyed how Walt’s receiving the news that his murders have been carried out contrasts with his playing with his daughter in the next scene. It really drives home how much of an act his doddering father routine is (also nice was having the local news reporting the murder of the prisoners on the television in the background).

- Another nice stylistic touch: the cut from Walt bending over to set down his drink at Hank and Marie’s to him sitting back up in his meth-cooking hazard suit.

- Holy shit, that’s a big pile of money.

- The episode does a nice job of showing the White family order restored: Walt and Hank talk with one another at the same time that Marie and Skyler talk with one another, and the resulting blend of pleasant chatter creates semblance of normalcy, starkly contrasting the celebration of Walt’s birthday earlier in the season. Skyler’s now a happy participant, as opposed to a suicide case.

- I got a kick out of Gale’s British English spelling of “honour.” The writers really loved this character, as they’re still cramming in telltale signs of his idiosyncrasy years after he’s died.