‘Breaking Bad’: Int. DEA office?

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Let’s start at the beginning, where I wish ‘Bad’ had begun.

Remember last week’s cliffhanger ending? Our man Walt had walked into his bedroom and said to his wife, “Skyler, there’s something I have to tell you.” Finally, with three episodes already gone, he was set to tell his wife that he has cancer and maybe two years to live. This also left us with the even bigger question to ponder: What exactly was he going to say, and how? Would it be the truth (I have cancer … ), the whole truth (and I’m now cooking meth … ) and nothing but the truth (and, um, I sort of killed a couple of guys)? Up to this point he’d told only one person about his illness; his name was Krazy 8, and the words “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” kinda-sorta applied to the poor guy. Krazy 8 was 86’d.

But let’s quickly recall that heart-to-heart Walt and Krazy 8 once shared. The doomed drug dealer had asked our hero why his family didn’t yet know the news. “Not a conversation I’m even remotely ready to have,” Walt said. Which is exactly why I wanted to see it. I’d spent a week waiting to get back inside that bedroom, and I fully expected to land there, considering each previous episode had picked up exactly where the prior one ended, a nice touch of continuity and something I figured would be the norm.

But instead we faded in to the brother-in-law, Hank, and a roomful of cops at Hank’s DEA office. Some bad jokes preceded the meat of the meeting, when Hank announced, “We’ve got new players in town. Now we don’t know who they are or where they came from, but they possess an extremely high skill set. Personally, I’m thinking Albuquerque just might have a new kingpin.”

Cue the kingpin, a shot of Walt in his tighty-whities, brushing his teeth. This gave me a little chuckle, but the Walt-in-his-underwear thing is a bit played out at this point, and that air of anticipation had left the balloon. An aside: who enjoys taking his shirt off more? Bryan Cranston, Will Ferrell or Matthew McConaughey? There should be a study. But I digress …

The cancer reveal eventually came after the credits, at Walt’s backyard barbecue, but it was only a reveal to Walt’s son, along with Hank and Hank’s wife. We soon discovered that Walter had told Skyler 48 hours earlier. Yes, the barbecue scene was a good one, but I still felt a bit cheated. I would have preferred to witness Walter telling the love of his life that his own life now had an expiration date. Oh well.

The rest of the episode played nicely and felt like one big exhale from the first three. Everything slowed down, a nice change after the chaotic and sometimes claustrophobic “what do we do now” storyline that ended with Krazy 8’s killing. And what was particularly nice to see this week was a second and third dimension added to Jesse’s character. Before he was just some dumb meth head who couldn’t do anything right. Now he’s a dumb meth head with a little brother that he really cares about, and a mom and dad who love him to pieces but who’ve had enough of his act.

And by the way, that perfect-little-family setup, with the buttoned-up parents asking their sweater-vested kid over dinner about his day, well, it couldn’t have led to a better payoff when we discovered that this was in fact Jesse’s family; if you’re at all like me, you may have needed a pause on the TiVo to fully laugh it out.

Tess Harper and Michael Bofshever were fantastic as Jesse’s mom and dad, and here’s hoping we get to see a bit more of them down the road. Kudos also to Kyle Bornheimer as the obnoxious suit who floated in and out of the episode, adding little to the story but much in the way of comic relief. It is the opinion of this author that the awkwardness of Bluetooth technology -– you know, the weird-looking pod-in-the-ear and that illusion of someone talking to himself (or to you) -– cannot be understated, nor overplayed on screen.

In the end, we got a nice episode that delved a bit deeper into our main characters, but whereas I wrote last week that two little words -– “I’m sorry” -– differentiated our hero from so many TV killers and subsequently made for great TV, this week’s episode fell three little words shy of the same compliment: “Honey, I’m sick.”

-- Josh Gajewski