Breaking's Back

Compared with what we’re used to seeing on the absolutely brilliant AMC series Breaking Bad (Sundays, 10pm), last night’s third-season premiere was relatively quiet. Guilt and retribution were at the center of the episode, in which we saw the repercussions of the midair plane collision that capped off last year.

Walt (Bryan Cranston, who also directed the episode) is a mess, though somehow he claims that he’s happy in his marriage when wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) confronts him with divorce papers. Seems she’s at least partially figured out what Walt has been up to all these months (she thinks he’s been dealing marijuana). In a last ditch attempt to keep her from leaving him, he tells her some of the truth, confessing to being a meth manufacturer, but conveniently leaving out the part where he’s either killed someone himself or simply been on hand as he watched someone die. Guess the guilt wasn’t eating at him that badly.

Meanwhile, Jesse (Aaron Paul)—whose girlfriend was one of the people that Walt stood idly by while she took her last breath—is suffering from an avalanche of guilt. He supplied his newly sober girlfriend with the drugs that killed her, causing her grief-stricken air traffic controller father to neglect his duties and send the two planes into the same flight path. Jesse has proven to be a paragon of recidivism in seasons past, so his stint in rehab likely won't leave him cured, especially with the deaths of 170 people on his conscience.

If the episode didn’t offer up one of the show’s trademark out-of-left-field surprises, it ultimately didn’t matter. The dialogue is so crisp and the actions are so sincere (even if they are oftentimes completely messed up) that they test your ability to feel empathy for this group of extremely flawed characters. “Look on the bright side,” Walt tells a gymnasium full of distraught students in a rambling speech about survival, this is “just the fiftieth worst air disaster.” Far from consoling, but oh-so-typical of this wonderfully deviant series.