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Walt’s increasing lack of humanity towards his fellow human beings has also been heavily foreshadowed this season – he, in all likelihood, sent three innocent cleaning ladies to their deaths by exposing them to the lab just to annoy Gus, and even in Face Off, he risks the life of his sweet, elderly neighbour (played by Vince Gilligan’s mother) by sending her into a house that may be booby-trapped, or filled with hitmen, or worse. Every time he’s tried to assert his authority he’s been swatted away like a fly.
House of cards season 4 episode 13 series#
Walt’s steadily been growing in status as a criminal throughout the series – largely by good fortune, but also due to some clever manoeuvring on his part and ability to think under pressure – but this season he’s been almost totally subjugated by Gus emasculated in other word. Not only in the sense that every season finale so far has seen him stooping lower – letting Jane die and causing the plane crash in season two, coercing Jesse into killing Gale at the end of season three – but also in the sense that season four and the series as a whole has clearly been building towards this. I was being facetious at the beginning of this review, but I really am so glad that my hunch about Walt proved to be correct, and not because I figured it out, but because it makes total sense for Walt to transcend another moral event horizon at the end of this season. And Face Off never stopped paying off, from its opening minutes to the final shot. There’s a real glee about the way Breaking Bad is plotted that is hard to articulate it’s this element of playfulness than means that its payoffs, when they come, are satisfying in a way that I’ve never experienced in a television show before. “Man, that’d be great… hey, what if it’s that that proves to be Gus’s downfall? What if…what if Walt uses Gus’s one emotional connection left against him to bring him down, once and for all?” “Guys… what if Hector blows up Gus with a bomb using his bell as the trigger?” “Oh yeah? Well how about if Gus manages to walk out of the blown up room, but before he keels over and dies, we see he’s only got half a f***ing face. You can almost hear the writers trying to top themselves with awesome shit, while remaining completely true to the characters and the show’s internal logic: “So I’ve been thinking…what if Gus had a partner killed by the cartel? That would explain why there’s bad blood between them.” “That’s good… what if the guy who killed him was Hector Salamanca, the wheelchair-bound, bell-ringing psycho who Walt and Jesse have already had a narrow escape from?” “Yeah, and imagine if Gus has been visiting him and torturing him for years, threatening to kill him but keeping him alive for his own amusement?” But there is something about the way this show is written, in the way that every episode, character arc, and season arc is layered with so much care and attention to detail, that it feels as if it is being written by people who are themselves huge fans of the show, people who enjoy being surprised by the characters as much as we do, rather than a bunch of sweating hacks in a windowless room in Hollywood, desperately trying to figure out how they’re going to eke out another 13 episodes from this premise (or, worse still, how they’re going to dig themselves out of a narrative hole of their own making).