Breaking Bad is Vince Gillian’s smash hit neo-Western action crime drama starring Bryan
Cranston as Walter White and Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman. The series follows high school teacher
Walter after he is diagnosed with cancer, and in order to ensure his family is taken care of,
he contacts Jesse, a former student of his, to begin a process of crystal
meth cooking and distribution, and thus begins a rollercoaster of events that lead Walt and Jesse
to work for one of the biggest drug distributors in he nation, Gustavo Fring.
Gustavo is perhaps the most sinister character in Breaking Bad – ostensibly a politely-mannered,
well respected member of the community who owns a few chicken restaurants,
Gus is actually a fiendishly calculating, intelligent and pragmatic crime boss. A man who
very rarely lets his emotions get the better of him, Gus’s relationship with Walt becomes uneasy
in season 3 as he begins to see the drug-taking Jesse as more and more of a liability. And when
Jesse’s friend is murdered by Gus’ associates, Walt intervenes in Jesse’s revenge plan,
killing the drug dealers and infuriating Gus. Walt narrowly avoids being killed by Gus as he has
Jesse take out the only other man who can cook crystal meth to a similar standard to Walt,
and he goes back to cooking, in a painfully tense and uneasy season 4.
Gus then attempts to groom Jesse, turning him against Walt so he would eventually be OK with Gus
killing him. Gus makes plans to take out Walter’s DEA agent brother-in-law Hank, fires Walt,
and threatens his family, leading Walt to put into place a long-gestating plan to kill Gus,
and thus we end up in a scenario where Jesse is at the hospital attending his girlfriend’s son Brock,
the child having come down with severe flu-like symptoms. Jesse discovers his ricin cigarette,
which he originally intended to poison Gus with, has gone missing, and suspects Brock has
been poisoned by Walt as revenge in a bust up they have had, but when Jesse violently confronts Walt,
Walt insists that he’s been framed by Gus, and convinces Jesse to conspire to kill Gus.
In the episode End Times, Jesse refuses to go back to cooking while he is at the hospital with
Brock – Gus visits and reassures Jesse, and then he leaves to go back to his car in the car park.
Walter has placed a bomb under Gus’ car, and he is watching with binoculars on the rooftop of a
nearby building. It’s a perfect execution – but then, just as soon as Gus approaches the car,
he slows down and all of a sudden his spider sense starts tingling,
you see his mind making calculations, he walks out and stars into the distance,
dangerously close to where Walt is perched, and then, he simply turns around and walks away.
So what on earth happened here? Why did Gus choose not to get in the car? Did he have
some kind of bomb-sniffing dog abilities? To see Walt set up the bomb, and then have this tense
will he-won’t he scene with Gus, ending with him walking away from the car feels cheap,
because there seemingly is no reason for Gustavo to do so. It comes off as lazy writing,
an attempt from the writers to dangle the carrot in front of the audience and then whip it away.
Breaking Bad is full of tense scenes like this, Hank outside the RV comes to mind, but this scene
is perhaps the most extreme example in the show of it pushing the limit of what’s acceptable,
as there does not seem to be any specific catalyst as to what stopped him from getting into the car
other than plot armour, and it just seems to be a scene manufactured to give audience blue balls.
Even if Gus did suspect Walt was out to get him, why would he assume there was
something up with the car, when Walt could have gotten to Gus in a number of ways.
Think Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, a film in which people constantly blow up
other people’s properties, mainly their cars. Thus, when Jimmy Hoffa’s wife gets into a car
and is afraid to turn the ignition, the scene feels well-earned and authentic because it
has established car-bombings as an execution method, but there’s nothing of the sort here.
Some fans may want to speculate that Gus saw the reflection of Walt’s shiny bald head or the sun
reflecting off his glasses, or maybe he just caught Walter sitting there, but there’s very
little to suggest this, and even if it was the case, Gus clearly thought something was up before
he stared out to the rooftops. Maybe he just felt a sudden incoming bout of explosive diarrhoea.
This scene feels quite manipulative and cheap, and maybe it is, but it is vastly improved with
the context of the last episode of season 4, which establishes tat Gus did not in fact poison Brock,
and it was Walt, who wanted to turn Jesse against Gus in this tug-of-war that Gus
and Walt were in, and given Gus has poisoned people in the past and has been
involved in the death of children, Jesse would no doubt jump to Gus as his prime suspect.
As the final episode establishes Walt was behind Brock’s poisoning, or at least heavily
implies it until season 5 confirms it, the scene in the car park is completely changed.
At the hospital, Jesse tells Gus “he’s not sick; he was poisoned.” Gus says “How did that happen?”
and Jesse replies “The doctors, they don’t know.” At this point in time, because of
the earlier scene between Walt and Jesse, we assume that Gus was the one to poison Brock,
and he’s here at the hospital maybe to make sure he hasn’t been exposed.
But he didn’t poison the kid, and genuinely didn’t know who did it, so this was all news to him. and
if he didn’t poison Brock, well, someone did. It sure is a mighty coincidence that this child
who Jesse cares about gets poisoned in a way that makes it look like Gus did it. The show actually
plays it quite cleverly here, with Gus acting sus in his talk with Jesse, but it’s actually a case
of his mind’s gears beginning to work, wondering who would have poisoned the kid and why, not that
he’s trying to hide the fact that he did it, which is what we would have originally thought.
Gus would have not explicitly known about the car bomb, but his mind was connecting the dots,
and in that moment he came to realise that Walt must be out to get him, that he’s conducted a
plan, and Gus was now on full alert. He doesn’t know there’s a bomb, but he knows there’s foul
play at work, and he was in the middle of a series of events which had possibly been manipulated to
bring him here at the hospital – what with Jesse refusing to leave and making Gus come down there
himself to confront him, but nothing came of that - so he immediately changes his routine. Now he’s
identified himself as being in a vulnerable position and a trap possibly being set up,
being a cautious man he ensures he does not put himself in a further position of vulnerability by
getting into a car that’s been left unattended. Maybe Walt wasn’t even his only suspect – Walt
would have obviously have crossed his mind, but there was also the cartel, who may have
wanted revenge after Gus took out so many of their members. But Walt was clearly the prime suspect.
And given his hunch, Gus chose to play it safe. I mean Gus and Walt are both doing the same thing
here – trying to turn Jesse against the other, so it’s a case of real recognising real, of Gus
realising his king has been left open in this chess game.
He obviously thinks Jesse is in on the plan also, given Jesse is later kidnapped and forced to cook.
Interestingly, Giancarlo Esposito, the actor who plays Gus,
spoke about this incident in an interview, saying: “[Arriving at the hospital] my intention is to
get Jesse to come back and cook; I don’t think about the car. But when he comes
back [to the garage], he realizes he left no one guarding the car, so all of a sudden he
looks at his car a little differently. Folks are like, “Did he see something?” No! Gus listens to
his inside gut, and something is just off. He can feel a sense that someone is watching him.
There’s no glare off of Walt’s glasses, he doesn’t see a f—ing thing! He just knows that there is
some presence there. That’s how good this guy is.” It's interesting, when you think about it,
that had Jesse just controlled his emotions and not mentioned that Brock was poisoned,
thus accusing Gus, Gus would have most likely not become suspicious. It was Jesse’s line
about Brock being poisoned that made Gus think that something was up, so really in a way the
failure of the car bomb attempt was on Jesse. So why do you think Gus didn’t get into the car?
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