Among other things, the video charts Walter’s shifting emotional state during the season, eliminates any concern viewers might have about character inconsistency, explains what happened with Jesse’s cigarette pack, and pinpoints what is very likely the exact moment when Walter decided to poison Brock, the son of Jesse’s girlfriend Andrea, with leaves or berries taken from a lily of the valley plant in his backyard. Take a look, then join me in the Letters section for a discussion of the plausibility of the filmmaker’s theory. What do you think? Case closed? Or still open?

First, the business with the ricin. When Jesse dumped his pack out on the sidewalk in front of the hospital and figured the boy had ingested the ricin he’d been smuggling for weeks but couldn’t bring himself to use on Gus, I thought maybe it just was a horrible accident — that maybe Brock filched a smoke, as curious boys sometimes do, and picked the absolute wrong one to experiment with. But Brock is probably too young for that — six, according to the “Breaking Bad” wiki entry on Andrea — and the cigarette pack time line established in subsequent scenes would seem to rule that out anyway.

During the scene where Jesse storms over to Walt’s house and threatens to kill him, something happened to me that almost never happens during a super-intense “Breaking Bad” scene: I started to zone out a bit and wonder about what the writers were trying to do rather than what was happening in the scene. Nothing that either character said made much sense given what we know about them and their world.

Why would Jesse think that Walter White, even at his most unhinged, would poison a child, or use poison against Jesse or anyone Jesse knew? Walt is desperate — scared of losing his job, and of being killed, and seeing his family killed — but he’s a father of two, and in general just not the sort of guy who would do something like that.  I think that Jesse, even at his most furious and sad, would realize that. He might come up with some other cockamamie reason to blame Walt – for example, he might accuse him of using the poison to try to kill Gus or one of Gus’ men, but so sloppily that an innocent child died instead — but I can’t buy that he’d seriously think Walt would kill a six year old boy “to get back at me, because I’m helping Gus… [to rip] my heart out before you’re dead and gone.”

Another thing: Yes, Walt’s improvised theory about Gus somehow engineering the poisoning to provoke Jesse into killing Walt fit with Walt’s long history of improvising b.s. theories to talk people out of murdering him. But Walt himself seemed to legitimately believe his theory about Gus. He argued that Gus employs children as meth sellers and apparently had murdered Andreas 10-year old kid brother, Tomás (see season three’s “Half-Measures“), and that it wasn’t unthinkable that a man who’s “OK with using children” would come up with such a diabolical scenario.

The most truthful and fascinating part of that exchange was Walt’s statement that Gus “has cameras everywhere” and knows everything. This is demonstrably true — and if he had cameras in Walt’s and/or Jesse’s house that we never saw being installed, or if he had the ability to hear what Walt and Jesse talked about during smoke breaks at the laundry plant, he could have known about their plot to poison him, which would explain why he served Jesse from a common food pot when he came over for dinner.

But Gus is also smart and leaves little to chance. His master plans are fiendish and flamboyantly theatrical — the mass poisoning of his cartel enemies two weeks ago might have been the show’s most satisfying demonstration of this — but they always take the form of a trap that leaves the trapped persons little option but to behave as Gus expects them to behave, to revert to type and seal their own doom as a result. He rarely lets pride dictate his in-the-moment choices. He’s a chess master, always thinking about his end game. (Look at how he handled Jesse at the hospital. He went there determined to force Jesse to return to work immediately, and then when he realized Jesse wouldn’t budge, told him to come back in a week.)

Walt’s theory about Gus’ participation in the poisoning didn’t track because it doesn’t seem like something Gus would do. The killing of Andrea’s kid brother was a delayed response to another crime, and it was a very definite action with its own reasons and goals. The poisoning as envisioned by Walt was more vague, the sort of thing a coldblooded but inexperienced loose cannon might come up with. With some exceptions, “Breaking Bad” doesn’t ask us to believe that characters will suddenly act against their nature. It’s set in a heightened and somewhat metaphorical universe, but on its own terms the plotting usually makes sense because it proceeds from psychology.

All of which leads me to believe that any vagueness or absurdity related to the poisoning of Brock will be explained soon, in a way that’s true to “Breaking Bad” — a show that ultimately gives us a rational explanation for everything.

Consider the parking garage scene at the end of this episode. While I found it a bit hard to believe that Walt would be able to find a rooftop spot that gave him a clear and precise view of Gus’ rigged-to-explode car — what if Gus’ men had parked on a side or a floor of the garage that could not be seen from an available rooftop? –  I found the rest of the scene quite credible. I read some complaints last night that Gus’ sudden decision not to get in his car was too mysterious — that it made him seem like too much the arch-criminal, feeling bad stirrings in The Force and acting on them.

But those complaints are shortsighted. His behavior here was classic Gus, totally consistent with what we know about him.

Why was Gus at the hospital? Because Jesse demanded it, with a stubbornness that he had never expressed to Gus before. It seems quite plausible that Gus would leave his conversation with Jesse pondering the circumstances that led up to it. Maybe as he made his way back to the car he thought something like, “Why did Jesse insist that I come here?  He’s never disrespected my authority so flagrantly before. Maybe he made me come here so that he could kill me. And since the car was left unattended, a person — for example Jesse’s partner Walt, a brilliant chemist and tinkerer — could easily accomplish that with a bomb.” When he surveyed the skyline around the garage, I don’t think he knew where Walt was, or that he was even looking for any one person in particular, or that he knew there was a bomb in his car. I think he just wanted to see if it was possible to monitor what was happening in the garage from somewhere else downtown. Once he realized that it was in fact possible, he turned around and walked out. It doesn’t matter if suspected car bomb, a sniper attack or some other threat. He just thought there was something fishy about the entire meeting, and that it was better not to hang around in the garage any longer.

Which bring us back to the poison. It’s really not like “Breaking Bad” to fudge things so blatantly and hope nobody in the audience questions it, so I have to assume they’ll eventually clean up any lingering confusion. To that end, here are a couple of points to consider as we head into the season finale next week:

(1) Although Jesse assumed the poison was ricin, there was no objective corroboration of that in the episode, and in fact the writers took pains to establish in two separate scenes that Jesse was not allowed past the admission desk because he wasn’t related to Andrea or Brock. Maybe the poison was something other than ricin, or maybe it wasn’t poison at all. And maybe Jesse, a criminal with a powerful sense of guilt and a tendency to reflexively beat himself up over his failures, jumped to the conclusion that it was the ricin from the cigarette. Alternately:

(2) Maybe somebody did use the ricin in the cigarette to poison Brock, but wasn’t Gus. Maybe it was Gus’ minion Tyrus. He neither likes nor respects Jesse, and he often finds himself serving as a metaphoric janitor on the show, cleaning up messes created by the ego clashes of Walt, Jesse and Gus. Who did Gus say would clean the lab while Jesse stayed at the hospital with Andrea and Brock? Tyrus. When Walt was lying on the floor trying to talk Jesse out of shooting him, he said in passing, “You don’t think it’s possible that Tyrus lifted the cigarette out of your locker?” I think it’s very possible.

Tyrus strikes me as another Gus in the making, icy and smart. He’s working for an organization with, er, a high turnover rate. Why wouldn’t he try to come up with a bloody way to hasten a promotion?

Two more things, then I’ll shut up.

First, it seems increasingly clear that the “German multinational whatever” that’s bankrolling Gus’ operation is being set up as Gus and Jesse’s adversary in the fifth and final season. Although I fully expect Gus to be killed next week — I have no inside information, just a feeling — the conglomerate sounds like “the guy behind the guy behind the guy” that many crime thriller heroes must ultimately confront.

Second, I want to highlight the idea that Hank isn’t blissfully ignorant of the possibility that Walt is Heisenberg, but is in fact banking on it, and is trying to rope Walt via the law enforcement version of a long con.

A commenter last week got into this, and if Salon’s maddeningly complex technical upgrade hadn’t lost or hid part of the Letters section, I’d quote it here and link to it. (Hopefully we’ll get all that stuff figured out soon; be patient.) If you’re the person who left that comment, I wish you’d try to remember what you said and quote in the Letters section below, because it’s fascinating and I want us to talk about it.

I love the idea of Hank playing Inspector Porfiry Petrovich to Walt’s intellectually arrogant Raskolnikov. I wouldn’t put it past this show to set Hank up as a guy who habitually fails to see what’s right in front of him, only to reveal later that he was just playing dumb all along. “Breaking Bad” is filled with characters who do slightly mystifying things for reasons that are explained in detail later, after they’ve gotten what they wanted.

Oh, wait a second, it’s not in my head … the DVR just went off “pause” in the next room. Excuse me while I turn it off.

There. Much better.

What can you say about this episode except ”bravo”? We can argue the choices on a granular level in the Letter section — and I’m sure we will — but really, I’m having a hard time finding things to nitpick in this episode. By the standards of this series’ heightened, pulpy reality, everything worked, and every piece fit.

I didn’t care for the way Walter got out of the trip to the industrial laundry by intentionally missing the turn and then swerving his vehicle into the path of an oncoming car, injuring himself and his DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank. As I’ve indicated in previous recaps, I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that any other character would believe any lie that Walter White tells, or any “accident” that he contrives to get out of trouble, because he just seems like the worst liar on the planet — Nathan Thurm-level bad. And yet the sequence worked on its own terms, which were blackly comedic. That’s the vein in which “Breaking Bad” often operates — a vein that also runs through horror and film noir, two genres that this series regularly invokes.

Black comedy makes outwardly ludicrous plot twists feel hilarious, organic and necessary. The black comedy in this episode — and in season four as a whole — made a couple of the show’s more ridiculous flourishes play brilliantly. One is the conundrum of Walt being asked to chauffeur his DEA agent brother-in-law on unauthorized stakeouts (which was Coen brothers-level crazy). The other is Skyler making an unauthorized withdrawal from the cash stored under the house in order to pay off her ex-lover’s tax debts and shield their own ill-gotten gains from government scrutiny. The chain of bad decisions and “acts of god” – as Saul’s muscle later described Ted’s collision with the kitchen counter — that flowed from these two aspects had a bouncy Rube Goldberg inevitability, rather like the strings of horrible misfortunes that befell the miscreants and plotters in the Coens’ “Blood Simple,” ”Fargo” and “Burn After Reading.” When the already beaten-up Walt walked into Hank’s hospital room with that white bandage on his nose, I just started laughing.  It was film noir comedy — the comedy of karmic payback.

I ragged on Skyler’s unauthorized withdrawal last week, but I hereby withdraw my objections. Her financial improvisation was stupid, and implausible from both characterizaation and plot standpoints. (Skyler had been so risk-averse up till then, always a voice of caution, and suddenly she’s pulling over $600,000 in cash from under the floorboard and passing it through Saul, who never said a word about it to Walt?) 

But it was all worth it to set up that great moment where Walt realized there wasn’t enough money to pay for the family’s relocation, and Skyler arrived at the exact moment that he realized it and tried to explain why she did it, and Walt realized they were trapped and doomed, and he started to laugh. Ah-HA-HA-HaHHHH! I also loved the way this scene was filmed. The shot-reverse shot pattern of Skyler looking down on Walt and Walt looking up at Skyler suggested a conversation between a man being buried alive and the person who was about to start shoveling dirt onto him.  As Skyler wept and Walt cackled, I heard two statements echoing in my head. One was the phrase, “Communication is the key to a good marriage.” The other was Albert Brooks’ rant to Julie Hagerty in “Lost in America” about the importance of the nest egg.

So where are we now? Hank is targeted for death. Mike is out of the picture — either dead or so badly wounded that he can’t be of much service to Gus, which forces Jesse to step in as head chef. Gus is stronger than ever after eliminating most of his major enemies and manuevering a new chemist — the now-swaggeringly confident Jesse — into Walt’s old spot. Tyrus, whose smug silence I loathe nearly as much as Walt’s arrogance, is poised to become the new Mike, provided Gus doesn’t press Jesse into that job, too. Skyler, Walt and their kids are screwed. The only option left at this point is probably real witness location, not the illegal, underground variety that Saul’s buddy the vacuum cleaner salesman is selling.

“Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan has said that he enjoys having his staff write the show into corners and write their way out again. This might be the tightest narrative corner in the show’s history. Short of painting a new door on one of the walls, Bugs Bunny-style, I don’t see how they can extricate the White-Schrader family. Next week can’t come soon enough.

What did you think?

By the end of the tenth episode of the show’s fourth season, all Gus’ enemies were dead — the victims of poisoning, a method of murder that “Breaking Bad” had threatened to inflict on one character or another (Gus included!) since season two.

The tipoff of a coming storm came when Gus stood at the edge of Don Eladio’s swimming pool — the same one where he’d seen his first cook murdered twenty years earlier — and subtly popped a small capsule. My first thought was, “Oh, dear. Will ‘Breaking Bad’ pull a bad television trick and give a major character some sort of debilitating medical condition that we’ve never heard about until now, and maybe kill him off with a heart attack?” My second thought, moments later, was, “This is part of a master plan. Gus is smarter than any of these people, and he will emerge victorious.” The second scenario came true. The pill was an emetic that allowed Gus to swallow the same poison that killed most of his enemies. (The scene of Gus forcing himself to throw up the poison in a bathroom was spot-on; it was shot in a way that suggested a religious ritual, a touch that connected it with Gus’ preparation of food in the dinner with Jesse and his meticulous donning and doffing of a jumpsuit in the murder sequence from “Box Cutter.“)

My favorite touch in this lengthy, brilliant sequence was the moment when Don Eladio tried to get Jesse to participate in the toast, and Gus politely excused him from it on grounds that he was a recovering addict and he wanted him to stay sharp so that he could cook more meth. As I’ve written previously, this is one of the keys to Gus’ continued success as an outwardly legitimate businessman and secret drug lord. He lies all the time, in large ways and small, but the lies are always wrapped around truth. There was genuine empathy in Gus’ intervention; I got the sense that on some level he respected Jesse’s newfound sobriety and wanted to encourage it. But of course what was really happening in that moment was pure mercenary cleverness: Gus wanted to keep Jesse alive because he was too valuable to sacrifice. He’d  already thought of exactly how to accomplish that goal, in a way that would not arouse the suspicion of Don Eladio, a prideful businessman like Gus. And he’d considered all the angles before bringing Jesse to Mexico, and paved the way for it so meticulously that nobody else in the organization — Mike included — could deduce where this entire thread was going to end up.

This is a pattern with Gus. Like so many great leaders, he has a talent for making people feel as though they’re extraordinarily important individuals who are right at the center of a drama when in fact they are peripheral players. Over the last few episodes we’ve been encouraged to think that Gus’ interest in Jesse was all about Jesse, and Jesse’s importance to the organization; but while this was partly true, it turned out that Gus’s interest in the young man was also part of a larger plan to preserve his own business and neutralize a rival. In retrospect we now realize that Gus never had any intention of installing Jesse as a cartel chef in Mexico, or making peace with Don Eladio. Accidentally or on purpose, the entire arc of Jesse’s character during the middle part of this season — being attached to Mike as a trainee bagman/enforcer, and being split off from Walt and groomed as a protege in whom Gus saw “great things”, and the intense early sequence in this week’s episode where Jesse took control of the cartel’s lab and successfully cooked his first solo batch — was all leading to that moment by the side of the pool, when Don Eladio offered Jesse a drink and Gus declined it for him. Jesse was but one pawn on a chessboard. Gus is the Bobby Fischer of drug violence.

Hell, let’s just say it: Gustavo “Gus” Fring is one of the greatest characters in the history of TV crime dramas, as great as Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Al Swearengen and Mags Bennett (“Justified”). And yes, he’s the equal of Walter White — as psychologically rich and in some ways more fascinating, because he’s so more closed off and mysterious. Walt is emotionally transparent to us even when he’s hiding things from other characters. But Gus remains a question mark even though he seems to know himself better than anyone else on “Breaking Bad,” with the possible exception of Mike. Even if he’d been played by some other actor he would have been fascinating. But Giancarlo Esposito, with his haunted eyes and droopy-faced, Chuck Jones reactions, gives Gus an almost Shakespearean richness. I could picture this character sitting across a table from Macbeth or Shylock and having plenty to talk about.

The show is rife with images of surveillance but has never really teased them out; I wonder if Gus got the idea for the poison by visually or aurally surveilling Walt and Jesse? (A friend points out that this was a different poison than the ricin preferred by Walt, which takes up to 48 hours to work.) Perhaps when Jesse went over to his house that night, poisoned cigarette at the ready, Gus chose to serve food cooked in a common pot because he already knew he was being targeted. Or maybe great criminal minds think alike.

Will Gus survive until the end of the season, though? The episode’s climax suggested that he might have been critically wounded, or at least incapacitated for a while, by the poison. I hope (and suspect) that we haven’t seen the last of him. I hope we haven’t seen the last of Mike, either, but I’m less certain of this. “Breaking Bad” has expended a great deal of energy on Mike and Jesse’s mentor/pupil or surrogate father/son relationship, and the last few episodes have been centered on images of Jesse stepping up and becoming a vibrant, confident person for the first time since we met him. This seems like the dramatically right time to start phasing Mike out, and maybe Gus as well. The moment when Jesse took control of the cartel’s lab — even cutting down Don Eladio’s chef with his favorite epithet, “bitch” — felt like the culmination of a long, strange journey from snarling whippersnapper to legitimate badass, but I suspect the real payoff will happen next week, when we find out what became of Gus and Mike, Jesse’s bosses, as he helped them escape the compound. It’s not insignificant that in previous episodes, Jesse has often been pictured as a passenger in somebody else’s vehicle, but at the end of “Salud,” he had to get behind the wheel and drive.

If Gus and Mike get taken out of the picture by injury, death or prison, who will be left to run Gus’ organization? Presumably either Tyrus, Jesse or both. I get the feeling we’re headed in that direction. It would be richly ironic and very funny if, at the end of “Breaking Bad,” Jesse ended up as as Walter White’s boss.

The rest of the episode was mostly strong, but its other subplots couldn’t help but be overshadowed by the action in Mexico.

Walt’s tearful confession of helplessness to his son, Walter Jr., was one of Bryan Cranston’s best moments as an actor (and one of RJ Mitte’s as well). It also confirmed that “Breaking Bad” excels at staging dramatic scenes in which characters speak with naked honestly about themselves while engaged in deep deception. (Walt’s confession was about a gambling incident that didn’t actually happen, but it was really about all the choices he’s made since the series began — choices that alienated him from his wife and children even though they were made in their name.) I love the subtle parallels between Walt. Jr. and Jesse — two sons forced to care for helpless father figures, and to grow up as a result. This is the striving son/bad daddy season of “Breaking Bad,” isn’t it?

The subplot with Skyler secretly giving over $600,00 to Ted to help him settle his IRS debts, however, was just dumb. I didn’t believe that she would do something that impulsive and risky, I didn’t believe that even a game-for-anything sleazebag like Saul would take part it in it, and I didn’t believe that Ted, dense though he obviously is, would accept it without at least making a few phone calls to check it out. The whole thread was an embarrassment to the series. The less said about it, the better.

What did you think?

The rest of the episode was written, directed and acted in the same spirit. It was terse but never felt rushed. Not a scene, line or frame was wasted. And throughout, there were little stylistic flourishes that linked the episode’s main story to the teaser, particularly the shots with foreground elements in focus and the background blurry (the cactus framing Walt’s vehicle as he and Hank drove; the flower in Skyler’s office at the car wash). The script, by Moira Walley-Beckett and Thomas Schnauz, was a model of classical structure. A leads to B leads inevitably to C, yet always leaves room (in next week’s episode, or in the season finale, or perhaps in the fifth and last season) for some presumably horrendous final reckoning.

For instance, Walt’s off-the-books surveillance adventures with his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank lead to Walt’s discovery that Tyrus is tailing him, which leads to Walt calling the cops on Tyrus, which sets up that great scene where it seems as though Walt expects to be thanked for tipping off Mike about the possible raid on the processing plant and instead gets reamed out for calling the cops on Tyrus, and is warned that if anything like that every happens again, he’ll end up in a barrel of acid. Walt’s rounds with Hank also lead to him filching the bug and putting it on Jesse’s car, which in turn sets up that powerful final confrontation: Walt haranguing Jesse for not using the poisoned cigarette to kill Gus, and then lying about not having the opportunity — a lie Walter exposed because he’d put the tracer on Jesse’s car. This leads to Jesse’s realizing he’s been suveilled by Walt (“Two hours … and 18 minutes“) and touches off their fight — a mano-a-mano that ranks with the Captain vs. Dan Dority in Season 3 of “Deadwood” and Tony vs. Ralphie in Season 4 of “The Sopranos,” even though the combatants were unskilled and the fight itself was more pathetic than horrifying.

By the end, all the questions posed by the opening teaser were answered, including whether anyone died (no), whose blood dripped on the floor (Walt’s) and who broke Walt’s glasses (Jesse).

Skyler’s phone call to Walt informing him that he could “quit” his “second job” set up a similarly complex line of action. Skyler called to tell Walt that because the car wash is doing so well, he could quit his “second job,” which is to say his first job, cooking crystal meth. That scene set up the montage of Skyler artificially inflating the car wash’s receipts by ringing up nonexistent purchases — a scene capped by the arrival of her ex-boss and one-time extramarital fling, Ted, who asks Skyler to help him with an IRS audit. Realizing that her name is on the books and that she could be interrogated and implicated in a back taxes investigation — which in turn could expose the White family’s money laundering and drug manufacturing — Skyler gets dolled up and pretends to be a ditz who doesn’t understand the tax code. (I like when Anna Gunn gets to show us Skyler’s actressy side, as in the scene earlier in the season where she plays the mommy-in-distress card to talk a locksmith into letting her enter Walt’s condo.) Skyler’s gambit a) temporarily takes some of the IRS heat off Ted, b) makes Skyler even more acutely aware of the dangerous game she and Walt are playing, and c) sets up an inevitable and almost certainly disastrous reappearance later in the series by Ted, who took Skyler’s  improvisation for granted, and seemed awfully blasé about Skyler’s plea that he settle the company’s tax bill.

For all its breadth and concision, though, I came away from this episode thinking mainly about Walt and Jesse — specifically Jesse in relation to Walt.

Jesse has grown apart from the man who was, in the first three seasons, a kind of screwed-up alternate father to him; in the middle part of the season, we saw Gus try to drive a wedge between Walt and Jesse (it appears that he succeeded, though the separation probably would have happened eventually).

More striking still is Jesse’s growing cyncism, resilience and sense of self-worth, and determination to act in his own rational (often cold) self-interest.

Consider this terrific scene between Jesse and Mike, which occurs while Jesse is cleaning trace chemicals off the warehouse floor in anticipation of a DEA raid:

Jesse: “Well, is he gonna kill him?”

Mike: “Is who gonna kill who?”

Jesse: “Gus. Is he gonna kill Mr. White’s brother-in-law? I mean, he’s the reason for all this here, right? ‘Cause it’s only logical for him to … off the dude. A-hole DEA agent poking around in your junk. Who needs that, right? Makes sense to get rid of him … for good. But … kill a cop … I don’t know. Could look suspicious if the dude who’s investigating this suddenly up and dies. And there’s Mr. White, who would be even more apeshit if you had family getting murdered. He’d never cook for Gus again. I guess there’s a lotta angles to … consider.”

Mike: “If something were to happen to the man, would you have a problem with that?”

Jesse: “Who really cares what I think?”

Five or six episodes ago, Jesse would never have talked to Mike that way — in a calm, insinuating tone, laying out relevant facts in language that suggested an internal monologue that might occur inside Mike’s head, subtly steering Mike (and by extension Gus) toward the correct conclusion, which was to leave Hank alone for fear of guaranteeing law enforcement scrutiny and losing their chief cook, Walt.  (Screenwriting cause-and-effect came into play here, too; Jesse’s statements to Mike surely led Gus to ask himself, What would we do if Walt decided to stop cooking for us?, which led in turn to the dinner between Gus and Jesse at which Gus proposed sending Jesse to Mexico.)

The Jesse-Mike scene in “Bug” is pivotal. It shows Jesse behaving not like an employee or a scared kid, but like a leader — surveying a situation, visualizing a possible outcome, then making it happen by saying the right things to the right person at the right time.

Jesse would never have been capable of such behavior at the start of Season 4. He showed tremendous confidence in the Mike/Jesse warehouse scene, and even more in the subsequent scene where he visited Gus at his home (an act which in itself took major cojones) and to his surprise, found Gus proposing that he go to Mexico and teach the rival cartel how to cook Gus’ recipe as a peace offering.

For me, the two most interesting aspects of the Gus/Jesse dinner were the shot of Jesse realizing they’d be eating from a common pot, which meant he could not poison Gus, and the moment when it became clear that Jesse wasn’t going to reject Gus’ offer.

Gus: “Can you produce his formula alone? Without any help?”

Jesse: “No.” (Pause.) “Why?”

Jesse’s subsequent recap of the conversation to Walt was an exercise in roundabout confession. He was basically telling Walt that he was going to Mexico, and asking for Walt’s help in learning the formula before he went. But he phrased it in terms of how much he didn’t know, why it was a bad idea, etc. Ultimately he wasn’t asking Walt to shoot the idea down; he was asking Walt to help him learn what he needed to know in order to do the job well. “Mr. White, I need your help,” he said. “Maybe you could coach me.” (A side note: Have you noticed that whenever Aaron Paul delivers a long and complicated monologue, the filmmakers always stay on Jesse as long as possible, never cutting away unless they absolutely have to?  It’s a sign of respect.)

Even though Jesse emphatically told Gus, “You kill Mr. White, you’re gonna have to kill me, too,” that’s not where their scene ended. It ended with Gus telling Jesse, “I need you to help prevent an all-out war. Now … Answer the question.” The episode’s director, Terry McDonough, ended the scene on a closeup of Jesse thinking about it, then cut to black before he could answer.

But it seemed obvious that even before Walt barged into his house and provoked their fight, Jesse was already leaning toward saying yes. Walt’s steamroller boorishness and secret surveillance just made the “yes” emphatic, and put the heat of anger behind it.

That reaction shot of Jesse glancing at Gus’ stewpot is significant. Jesse seemed more relieved than panicked. I don’t think he went to Gus’ house with the intention of poisoning him. I think he went there looking for reasons not to.

From the instant Walt pressed Jesse into committing another killing on his behalf, I never believed Jesse would go through with it, not because he wasn’t capable of murder (clearly he was, and is) but because he is a different person now than he was at the end of last season.

He sees through Walt’s manipulations and understands that Walt is a raging narcissist. He’s starting to think not about what’s best for their partnership, but what’s best for Jesse.

What’s best for Jesse is to become a head chef like Walt, even if means exposing his scientific ignorance to the cartel, and even if accepting Gus’ offer seals Walt’s downfall, or his doom.

That closing shot of Walt leaving Jesse’s house — hunched over in pain, diminished at the far end of a wide frame — suggested the final exit of a man who had been defeated not just physically, but psychologically. So long, Daddy. Junior doesn’t need you anymore. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.