Bryan Cranston talks about Jesse’s ultimate betrayal turning rat on Breaking Bad…
“Repeat after me — may I burn in hell if I betray my friends”
~ Tony Soprano
There is a common theme among criminals — even on TV shows — that you’re not supposed to rat to the police no matter how bad things may go for you. Being a rat is seen as the lowest form of life at least in the criminal world.
On Sunday night’s episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White came face to face with his former partner Jesse Pinkman, who not only turned against him but did it in the worst way possible — by teaming up with his brother-in-law and DEA agent Hank to bring his criminal empire to the ground.
The emotion boiled over inside Walt when he came face to face with Jesse just a few feet away from the barrels of money he had hidden — the same barrels of money he tucked away after compromising every moral he ever had building his meth business as the evil Heisenberg just so his family could have something once he was dead.
Despite the fact that earlier in the same episode, Walt was plotting Jesse’s death and even going as far as visiting Andrea and Brock in an attempt to flush him out of hiding, seeing his former prodigy betray him to the police was too much to comprehend.
“He’s a rat! He broke the code,” Bryan Cranston told AMC’s Talking Bad on Sunday. “We fully embraced our criminality and all of the sudden that’s the one thing that you don’t do, you don’t rat and he ratted, he’s a filthy little rat.”
It’s a strange dichotomy where a criminal can justify murdering an ex-partner over some sort of betrayal, but that person taking the story to the police for the sole purpose of sending someone to jail is just not acceptable in this life.
The entire ordeal that unfolded on Sunday night’s episode was brought about in large part because since Walt has retired, he’s been entangled in a complicated scenario where leaving the criminal life behind didn’t let him go as easily as he hoped.
He’s now dealing with Todd’s Nazi Uncle Jack who made Walk promise to give him at least one more cook to ensure their blue product is actually blue. The end result of that deal was Jack showing up just as Hank placed Walt under arrest.
With bullets flying overhead, cars being ripped apart by bullets like paper through a shredder, and everyone diving to save their own lives, Walt watches with absolute horror as the life he’s lived for the past few years has now come back to haunt him in the worst way ever.
“Walt has changed. He used to be so methodically and had a scientific mind and now he’s much more emotional.” Cranston said. “This experience in these last two years of his life have created an emotional being which he was never really open to, so he’s impulsive, hence the shooting of Mike by being insulted by that. The leaving of the book out, it was sloppy and it was careless and that’s what happened to him. It’s one of the ramifications of experiencing this whole trauma.”
The trauma can only increase in the final three episodes that begin next Sunday night. The cliffhanger from last week’s episode just showed the shootout between Jack’s Nazi brigade with Hank and Gomez trying to fend them off. It doesn’t seem like very good odds for Hank to make it out alive of this situation, and given Walt’s protection of his family this may be the event that finally sends him over the edge, spiraling off the cliff and bringing his criminal life to an end once and for all.
