/Film will be recapping episodes for the third season of Breaking Bad, starting with last Sunday's premiere. A spoiler warning applies after the jump for every recap and the comments section. Meth heads welcome. For previous write-ups on the second and third season of Breaking Bad, click here.
Sunday's premiere, entitled "No Mas," was a subdued affair save for multiple homicides and a nightmarish undercurrent that ran throughout. Series creator, Vince Gilligan, didn't feel the need for a time jump, so we find Walter White worse for wear in the aftermath of season two's finale. Now sporting a much thicker goatee, it's the first time in the series that he looks less like a cancer patient than a hardboiled criminal off The Wire. "No Mas" also marks the second ep directed by star Bryan Cranston and he immediately introduces us to a pair of nameless, relentless, and nearly identical thugs, shown above.
With no exposition, in minutes the duo comes to represent the unbelievable, escalating real life wrath of drug cartels in Mexico and these cartels' common belief in the skull-headed deity of Santa Muerte. If you're unfamiliar with the chaos happening in the country, check out this recent editorial by journalist Charles Bowden. Something tells us the third season of Breaking Bad will thoroughly address the gruesome "life is cheap" realities of Mexico's drug trade, after foreshadowing them with the classic tortoise scene last year.
The episode opens on toxic-filtered skies and shots of desolate terrain, choreographed with an eerie beauty now familiar to fans. We close-in on a surreal image of several adults crawling Daniel Plainview-style across this terrain towards a dilapidated shack. Enter the aforementioned Cousin #1 and Cousin #2: two bald-shaved, nearly identical Latin Americans in expensive gray suits, with well-kempt goatees as macho-looking as…Walt's. After the duo finish crawling, they silently walk into the structure—it's a shrine ritualistically filled with countless gifts, including a Lucha libre figurine, offered to a skeleton deity accessorized with a scythe. The cousins make an offering and it's then we see tacked on a wall a crude Unabomber-like illustration of Walter White disguised as his drug-alias Heisenberg. Clearly Walt has stepped on the toes of the wrong dudes—I mean, they drive a gangster-requisite black Mercedes and later give the keys to a goat—and the wrong god.
Back in Albuquerque, a TV is turned to a local news broadcast reporting the latest on the airline disaster that, to the ire of some fans, occurred directly over the Whites' home and concluded season two. A fresh reminder of the growing scope of Walter's hard-won drug endeavors, the news broadcasts multiply—one's in Spanish—and become a unsettling cacophony of reportage. One local witness says of the explosion's debris, "It sounded like hail," and we then see multiple newspapers spread across a room. A page one photo is shown of Donald Margolis, the air traffic controller responsible for the disaster, along with a screen shot of his late daughter, Jane.
In the ep, Walt doesn't show any signs of being distraught over his secret role in Jane's death—he loomed over her as she overdosed next to a wonked-out Jesse—or Donald's life, forever altered by his tragic mistake. (Have we seen the last of Donald?) Standing next to his pool, Walt's deals with so much death on his hands by is firing up a grill containing his major drug score from last season. Fat stacks of hundred dollar bills catch and ignite. But almost immediately, Walt has a fairweather change of heart, quickly tossing the grill into the pool and then himself.
The pool has become something of an ambiguous metaphor for sin and cleansing in the show, not unlike the one in Tony Soprano's backyard. In the pool drain, Walt recovers and studies the detached eye belonging to the pink stuffed animal that rained down from the airline explosion (in what was a frustrating aha-moment last season because the stuffed animal's clue-like appearances were appa
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