Say what you will about the band America, but hearing the strains of their song “A Horse With No Name” kick off this week’s episode of “Breaking Bad” was a perfect way to remind us that, although Walter White may have begun his transition from Mr. Chips to Scarface, when it comes to his taste in music, he’s still got a looooooong way to go. Given everything he’s done since the beginning of this series, it’s no wonder that he’s looking more than a little twitchy when the cop pulls him over, but how typically Walt to try and use the plane crash as an excuse to get out of a ticket, then getting huffy when the cop doesn’t accept it as valid. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who groaned audibly when he got out of the car to approach the officer. Seriously, who does that? Apparently, the man who’s expressing his First Amendment rights does that, which is why he quite deservedly got pepper-sprayed for his belligerence.
Once Walt found himself being thrown into the back of the squad car, it was only inevitable that Hank would find his way into the proceedings, and so he did, though his first appearance finds him in mid-discussion about the investigation of Olive Oil and his brethren, who went up in smoke at the end of last week’s episodes. Gomez’s less-than-casual comment about Hank’s “famous blue meth” having not been seen in 29 days leads me to suspect that we won’t go much beyond 30 before there’s a change on that front. After Walt rescues Hank from his clink (kids, remember: no matter how legitimate it may sound when you’re delivering it, nothing makes an apology seem less sincere than staring at your feet the entire time you’re delivering it), the two have some approximation of a heart-to-heart talk, and I feel certain that Hank’s uncertainty about Skyler’s refusal to let Walt see the kids is going to resurface again, especially since she shut Hank down the moment he tried to bring it up at dinner.
By the way, having Hank once again underline his belief that Walt is a textbook underachiever only serves to make me anxious…and not necessarily in a good way…about how he’ll react when he inevitably finds out that his brother-in-law is Heisenberg. I’m reminded of how one of Lex Luthor’s computers took all the facts available to it and deduced that Superman’s secret identity was Clark Kent, but Luthor declared it to be an impossibility because the computer didn’t know Superman the way he did, and he couldn’t accept that Superman would ever deign to take on such a lowly persona. Mark my words: Marie’s going to be in on it before Hank is.
