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He doesn’t ask Skyler for permission to move back in, he just does it she finds out about it when she walks into the bedroom and sees him taking his things out of a box. He seems to resent even having to consider what anyone else wants before acting. For all the talk of Breaking Bad as a drama in the Sopranos antihero-as-hero mode, it sure is going out of its way to make Walt a horribly entitled bully with a strong and ever-growing God complex.If Breaking Bad isn’t part of the curriculum in business schools, it should be. This is what’s known as a hidden expense. When Walt asked Mike to go into business with him and Jesse, he didn’t just get Mike: He got all of Mike’s obligations from Mike’s previous employer, a man whom Walt murdered with a bomb. But it seems to really bug Walt that their profit margin would be much higher if Mike hadn’t pressured him and Jesse into paying off the people on the Cayman Islands list on the installment plan. Afterward, Walt is so sullen that he can barely process the silver lining that Jesse describes to him: Even after subtracting all those expenses, their profit margin per cook is better than when they were day laborers on Gus’s payroll. It’s only when Jesse offers to cover Walt’s cut with his own that Walt acts properly ashamed of himself (even though he’s probably feeling macho pride rather than actual shame) and ponies up. Walt, as usual, is petulant when informed that he’s living in a certain harsh reality and has no choice to accept it. They have to pay for this and that and this and that. They have to pay for security and delivery. They have to pay the termite contractors whose business is a front for their meth manufacturing. Out comes one stack of cash, then another, then another. But then Mike steps in and does what Walt supposedly hoped he would do when he brought him into the business: He grounds them in reality. Walt and Jesse and Mike gather around a table piled high with cash, looking and feeling triumphant, and rightly so: They devised a bold new scheme for hiding in plain sight they cooked their first batch of meth as a new consortium and sold it. Mike has totaled up the cost of keeping the Fring associates silent and added a line item to the new meth consortium’s books.
#Breaking bad season 1 episode 3 summary full#
The final scene in “Hazard Pay” brings the opening scene full circle. He’s going to do that by forcing the new business to assume some the old business’s debts - debts that, as far as Mike’s concerned, Walt and Jesse incurred when they killed Gus and destroyed his lab. We all did … It’s not gonna be me, but sooner or later, absent the hazard pay, someone’s gonna flip.” Mike counters that the new business he’s “starting up” with Walt and Jesse is “gonna make you whole.” For emphasis’s sake, he repeats himself: “You will … be … made … whole.” In other words, Mike is going to keep his word to all these former Fring associates, for survival’s sake as well as out of a sense of personal honor. “The wife asks me where the money is coming from, I got nothing to tell her,” the guy tells Mike. Mike assures Dennis that the death of Chow was not payback or “a message” but “a mistake.” Still, Dennis has concerns. But during that first meeting with Dennis, it becomes clear to Mike that even if “a deal’s a deal,” reality is also reality. Ostensibly, Mike is there to warn ex-Fring associate Dennis Markowski that even though the money has been frozen, everybody is still obligated to keep their mouths shut. He’s visiting all the incarcerated Madrigal/Los Pollos Hermanos people whose Cayman Islands hush money, i.e., “hazard pay,” was frozen by the DEA’s investigation of Gus Fring. Mike, the most hard-nosed member of the new Walt-Mike-Jesse meth consortium, is posing as a paralegal. What’s happening in this opening scene is due diligence. Like the rest of this muted, surprising episode, and like so much of Breaking Bad, it’s really about the details of running a business: product and profit versus overhead and expenses.
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The first scene in “Hazard Pay” only looks like a prison visit.