A hundred and two today. Twenty percent chance of rain later on in the week. Good times.
My wife had jury duty yesterday and ended up in the first row of a panel being considered for a murder trial. That sounds cool, but we have plans next week that would have been negatively impacted if she were sequestered. After voir dire, she was not among those picked. An interesting day nevertheless.
I managed 1200 words on the new project this morning. I won’t get anything done on it next week so I have to make hay while the sun shines. And the sun has been doing a lot of that lately, believe me. Actually, I make most of my hay before the sun shines, but that’s neither here nor there. Whatever that means.
At some point on Breaking Bad, Walt transitioned from being an anti-hero to being an out and out bad man. It’s easy for us to rationalize why he got into this business and sure, he may be trapped in it now, but a guy with his financial resources should be able to take a powder. Saul even offered him the services of a disappearer a while back. He got greedy and obsessed. He’s actually not very likable any more. On the other hand, Jesse, the junkie loser, has become somewhat more sympathetic. Once Mike and Gus treated him with some respect, he grew up a little.
Skyler has morphed into the role of the wife of the crime kingpin pretty well. She knows how to talk about business on the phone without giving away any details, she spends her days ringing up dozens of fake cash register receipts to account for their income, and she understands what it means that her old boss, swindler Ted, is being audited. At first she plans to just cut him loose, but then she realizes that if Ted goes down, her name is on a lot of that paperwork. She comes up with a brilliant solution: she marches into Ted’s audit dressed up and acting like a blonde bimbo. She fawns all over Ted and tells the auditor that nothing flashed red on her Quicken so everything must have been all right. “Do you guys use Quicken? It’s like having a calculator right on your computer!”
The auditor is stupefied. How did you get this job, he asks. What are your qualifications? “I’ve always been naturally good with numbers,” Skyler responds. As she explains to Ted later, ignorance of the law does not equate to criminality. It equates to ignorance.” All the auditor can do is shake his head and hope that she isn’t doing the books for any other business. That doesn’t get Ted completely out of trouble—he still owes back taxes and penalties—but he’s not likely to go to jail. Except he’s flat broke. He can’t sell the Beamer because he’s driving a little junk heap. So will Skyler some how find a way to pay off his debt to keep her and Walt away from the IRS’s nose? How could that work? No way Ted could come up with nearly a million bucks.
Meanwhile, Hank’s dogged persistence is keeping everyone floundering around trying to stay afloat. He identifies Gus’s storage facility and chicken farm as a possible place where covert activity might be happening (a guy this clean has to be dirty, he explains). Walt stalls Hank for a day or two, giving Mike and Jesse time to clean the place out. But the cartel is watching and shoots one of their helpers right in front of Jesse, who freezes. Mike tackles him and drags him to safety. “Next time don’t stand there like an idiot. Move your feet and so forth.” Gus defuses the situation by walking out into the field with his arms stretched wide as bullets ping off the ground around him, an act Jesse describes as “that Terminator shit.” The cartel needs Gus and his distribution channels.
Jesse has a ton of questions, so Mike tells him to go ask Gus, which he does. He still has the poison cigarette, but since the meal Gus cooks (“whatever the hell this is,” Jesse says) is all in one pot, so he can’t poison it without killing himself. Before Jesse asks any questions, Gus has one: can Jesse cook Walter’s formula without any help. Alone. Jesse interprets this as meaning that Gus wants to kill Walt, and he goes ballistic. “You kill Mr. White and you have to kill me, too.” That’s not what I asked, Gus continues. I need you to help me prevent an all-out war with the cartel.
Mike and Jesse bring the dead helper to the lab. “Should I even ask?” Walt says. “I wouldn’t,” Mike responds. “Is this going to be a regular thing? Meth cooking and corpse disposal?”
Later, Jesse summons Walt and what follows is like a carefully staged two-man one-act play. Jesse’s apartment has track lighting so there is a spotlight effect. Jesse tells Walt that Gus wants to send him to Mexico to show the cartel how to cook the blue meth. They want half of Gus’s operation and Walter’s formula. Jesse hopes Walt will coach him, because he’s in deep trouble if he gets down there and the cartel chemists ask him chemical questions. “What if the equipment is in Mexican instead of English?”
Walt doesn’t care about that—all he cares is that Jesse didn’t kill Gus. He knows this because he put Hank’s tracker on Jesse’s car and knows he was at Gus’s house for over two hours. “You killed me is what you’ve done. You signed my death warrant.” And, for the nth time, the two get into it, except this time it is the brawl to end all brawls. Finally Jesse gets the upper hand after pummeling Walt. “Can you walk? Then get out of here and never come back.”
This Goldman guy has it in for Brenda bad on The Closer. After Gavin pulls off a wonderful coup by getting a directed verdict from the judge dismissing the lawsuit (after chewing Brenda out for not notifying him of an in-custody death of a suspect), Goldman goes back to the drawing board and puts together a file box containing Brenda’s greatest hits. All the cases we’ve seen over the years where she used dubious tactics that led to a suspect’s death. This time he’s going to federal court to demonstrate a past practice and pattern of denying suspects their constitutional privilege of a fair trial, a civil rights violation. He’s suing her, the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles, but his goal is to put an end to Brenda and all her work. When Brenda asks why he’s doing this, if they’ve met in the past, he says, “No. I am the conscience of the justice system, which as far as you’re concerned makes me nearly a perfect stranger.” Troubled times ahead—and the mole is still passing information along to Goldman, almost in real time. Provenza took credit for leading the team through the first crisis. “Don’t worry. We’ll have another crisis soon enough and I’ll lead us through that one, too.” Challenge accepted, apparently.
Brenda had a near-death experience herself, and it was Buzz who came to her rescue. The deputy sheriff who searched a suspect missed a gun the guy had stuffed into his crotch and when it seemed like he was cornered he pulled the gun out and was going to shoot her when she came back to the interrogation room. Buzz saw this on the monitors and grabbed her at the last moment. Then Brenda gets Buzz to lie about who was in the squad room at the time because she needs Tao to look for fingerprints at a crime scene and can’t wait for him to be questioned by FID. I’m not sure why that scene had to take place, because Raydor gave Brenda 72 hours to try to continue her investigation, since a cop had been murdered. Provenza’s reaction when he heard was exasperation: They’re going to make a new rule about searching suspects. Mark my words. Gabriel responds, “If there are people getting into the building with weapons, maybe they should make a new rule.”
The case of the week involved two deputy sheriffs deputies who wanted to be part of an FBI task force looking into the thefts of high-end cars, but they’d been turned down. They took it upon themselves to work the case and found where the cars were being stored before being shipped overseas, but one of them was killed in the process. But their information is useful and Brenda’s team follows two more suspects to the shipping terminal where they figure out who the ringleader is. Brenda sneaks up on him in bare feet and puts a gun to his neck. “Sir, I’ve had a very bad day. I’m anxious, I’m stressed, I’m a little shaky.” The guy drops his weapon post-haste.
They’ve done a good job of softening Captain Raydor, who will helm the spinoff that will take over when The Closer ends this season. She’s still not nearly as likable as Brenda, though, so she has a tough road ahead of her. I liked the scene where she heard Brenda say, “You know the justice system works pretty well until someone starts thinking they’re smarter than the sheriff’s office, the FBI and the entire LAPD. Do you see what happens when someone throws away the rule book? People die.” Raydor looks over at Fritz and says, “Do you think she’s conscious of what she’s saying? Someone might want to play back this part of the interview when she gets home tonight.”
I wonder who the mole is. There are no obvious candidates. Pope?
