‘Breaking Bad’: Layered. Like nachos.

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If you didn’t catch Sunday’s “Breaking Bad,” you only missed the following: a severed human head on the back of a turtle, an explosion that blew the leg off of a DEA agent, Skyler starting a new job alongside a man with whom she has a history, a new narcocorrido music video starring Bryan Cranston and the band Los Cuates de Sinaloa, and signs of a new love interest for Jesse.

That was about it.

In the end I just shook my head and wondered: How many other current TV shows manage to pack so much into so little time? I could only think of one, and it takes place on an island … that moves … through time … or something.

While the concept here is far more grounded, the drama that unfolded Sunday was equally edge-of-your-seat, especially a scene in the desert that was about the most horrifying thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It happened like this:

First, Hank (Dean Norris) caught an odd sight through his binoculars – in the far distance, the head of a police informant appeared to be crawling slowly along the ground (yes, just his head). Hank and the rest of his drug task force jumped into their trucks and sped closer. And then they were upon it. The severed head of Tortuga (“turtle,” in Spanish), who’d earlier informed them of a major drug deal that was to occur, was being carried on the back of a giant tortoise. Also on the turtle’s shell were the words, “Hola DEA.”

Hank tried not to vomit, retreating to a car to catch his breath.

And then, boom.

The turtle and the human head exploded. Yes, exploded. Rigged by the drug cartel that had offed Tortuga, the explosion rattled the earth, apparently killing some members of Hank’s team and dismembering others. He was suddenly applying a tourniquet to someone’s thigh; the rest of the man’s leg lay in the dirt nearby. This was utter chaos.

But perhaps even more shocking was how we came to smile again less than 10 minutes later. Jesse (Aaron Paul) was in his apartment, trying desperately to make a good impression on his cute neighbor/landlord Jane (Krysten Ritter). He was failing, of course. But even still, she reached over and held his hand. Credits. Black. Wow.

I think Jesse (Aaron Paul) may have said it best when talking to his underlings about their ever-expanding drug business. “Layered. Like nachos,” he told them, and that could also be said for what’s happening on this series.

Some more thoughts about Sunday’s episode:

-- It’s official: the writers of “Breaking Bad” love to blow things up, and I wonder if this is where we’re headed regarding the pink teddy bear. Remember how in Season 1, Walt blew the car engine of that annoying lawyer who was always on his Bluetooth? And then how he blew out the windows of Tuco’s pad? Now this. Oh, and two of Sunday’s scenes coincidentally took place at the National Atomic Museum. And Walt’s drug-dealing alias, “Heisenberg,” was also the name of a German scientist who reportedly worked on developing an atomic bomb for the Nazis. These clues lead me to believe that we may be in for another big explosion. Such an event would explain how that teddy bear that the show keeps teasing us with could end up in a pool with half of its body charred and its eye blown off. The show’s last teddy bear tease showed a man in a protective suit placing it with other evidence beside the pool. So my money is on an explosion of some sort. Anybody have a different guess?

-- I suppose because we see Walt lying to Skyler (Anna Gunn) all the time, it sure is fun whenever Skyler does the same thing to him. Or when we see that she isn’t so squeaky clean. On Sunday, she returned to work as an accountant at a company where she worked four years ago. The man who hired her back is a guy named Ted (Christopher Cousins), who apparently got drunk at a party and came onto her, prompting a surprised Marie to ask Skyler, “Is Mr. Grabby Hands still there?” It was somewhat implied that the incident led Skyler to quit the gig, but then later we discovered the excuse Skyler gave to Walt as to why she’d quit in the first place: welding fumes. Exactly why she withheld from Walt the whole truth about what happened between her and Ted remains to be seen. And now Mr. Grabby Hands is divorced and asking Skyler to lunch. And so it begins?

-- The “What does a blowfish do?” pep talk that Walt gave Jesse was priceless, as was the transition from Jesse talking to Jane about his great new flatscreen to them sitting in his living room, staring at the blank screen as his satellite system endlessly searched for a signal. These comedic moments continue to prevail, sprinkling much-needed levity between the more intense happenings.

-- Jesse really needs to go to the Gap. I mean really: How big do those sweaters need to get?

-- Credit writer Vince Gilligan and music supervisor Thomas Golubic for the show’s opening, a narcocorrido music video starring Cranston and the band Los Cuates de Sinaloa. Gilligan was doing research into the drug trade along the U.S.-Mexico border when he became aware of these Mexican “drug ballads,” which have become a subgenre of Mexican regional music. “The music itself is fascinating – some of it is quite lovely music, catchy and eminently listenable, and so hearing about this I went on the computer and found videos of these narcocorridos, some of which are really charming in their homemade-ness, if that’s even a word,” Gilligan said. “It just occurred to me that this would be very interesting for a show to incorporate, and I specifically began to think of a narcocorrido about Walter White.”

“It’s refreshingly absent of slickness,” Golubic said of the video, “Negro y Azul” (‘Black and Blue’), which copies the look and feel of many narcocorrido videos that populate YouTube. “On one level, the [music genre] is controversial, and our show is somewhat controversial as well,” he added.

Sony Music has released the song – which talks of Heisenberg, the mysterious gringo from New Mexico who’s making a new blue-colored methamphetamine -- as a single. And the frontman of Los Cuates de Sinaloa, Gabriel Berrelleza, said the band has been playing the song live for about two weeks. “We get a lot of questions, like, ‘Do you know this guy? What do you know about him?’ ” he said through a translator.

Pepe Garza, who co-wrote the song with Gilligan and is also the programming director for L.A.’s La Que Buena, said he’s gotten a different question since his radio station began airing the tune. “People are actually asking me about the drug and how to find it,” he said with a chuckle.

A feature about the song and band appears in Monday’s Los Angeles Times.

-- Josh Gajewski