In one of the best episodes of the series to date, Breaking Bad‘s Confessions gave us not just one monumental scene usually reserved for the basis of an entire episode, but two.

It’s almost cruel to make someone pick which sequence to talk about first, so I’ll just stick with what the show did chronologically.

The restaurant scene featuring the White family’s Hail Mary to the Schrader family was something for the ages. The two sides sit down at a public place to try to discuss cordially what absolutely cannot be discussed cordially. And Hank doesn’t once give up his game face. He’s insistent that the man sitting in front of his, his brother-in-law, Walt, turn himself in immediately. Marie has a much more drastic solution in mind (“Why don’t you just kill yourself?”), but Hank wants Walt to suffer in jail.

Walt and Skyler are, interestingly enough, still going at this from the angle of kinda-sorta-maybe still insisting they’re innocent. Which, by the way, is a waste of time. Hank knows they’re guilty, and the only thing they’re hoping to accomplish is to buy time. These tense verbal standoffs are intercut with an amusing waiter who doesn’t get the hint until the very end. This is even funnier if you’re even remotely familiar with the film Office Space, which it’s impossible to think Gilligan and Co. weren’t trying to ape.

Before they can even get their order in, Walt and Skyler realize that Hank will never budge, and are forced to resort to Plan B, which they just so happened to have already filmed and are ready to distribute to the Schraders.

The previous scene, in which we see Walt pacing back and forth, and Skyler asking him if he’s ready, actually got me a little excited. It made me yearn for the days of early in the series when we would get moments like this. We weren’t sure of the plan, but we were sure there was a plan, and we were going to see it play out. Almost like a heist movie that deliberately withholds its secrets to heighten the tension. Of course, then we see Walter sit down, announce who he is in a more-than-familiar manner, and then proceed. BUT THEN HE SAYS, “THIS IS MY CONFESSION,” and, man, all bets are off.

Fast forward to the scene of Hank and Marie standing in front of their TV watching the video. What follows is perhaps the most Machiavellian ploy outside of Darth Sidious. What Walt has done here is not only laid his cards out on the table to Hank as far as where he stands vis-a-vis his guilt, but also he’s letting Hank know that, despite all of the DEA agent’s frustrations, he has no play. There isn’t anything that Hank can say to counteract the video confession, there isn’t an angle he can attack it from that will make it less impervious. Walt has concocted an excuse, alibi, and/or plausible scenario for anything Hank could possibly come up with. And poor Hank, he’s just such a good guy (as in, not a villain, not that he’s a stand-up fella, though he is that, too). His training has been the law his entire career. He only knows avenues to a goal by way of that paradigm. He’s absolutely incapable of thinking outside of that box. And Walt dropped an atomic bomb on that box. It’s as if he’s taunting Hank, “If you wanna come at me, you’re gonna have to step up your game. You’re playing your Little League game, and I’m hitting home runs from goddamn Yankee Stadium.”

And through that video, Hank also learns the truth about where the money from his physical therapy rehab came from. Truth be told, I’d forgotten that he still thought it was from the insurance. If you’d have asked me, I probably would’ve said that he thought it was gambling money, same as Marie. The absolutely crushed look on Dean Norris’ face when he tells Marie that she just killed him is heartbreaking. The guy who started out as a frat-boy DEA agent has become one of the most ubiquitous law enforcement agents in recent pop culture this side of Robocop.

Moving on from there, we’ll now touch on the meeting in the desert between Jesse and Walt. Out of this scene, I did manage to get something I’ve wanted for years: An acknowledgement from Jesse that he knows he’s getting played by Walt. At all times. No matter how big or how small, there is never a time Walt is not playing Jesse to fit his own goals. And the suggestion that Jesse pick up and get the hell out of dodge with a fancy new identity was just the last straw for Jesse. When he screams at Walter that he just wants the truth, that he just wants Walt to be up front with him about why he needs to leave town, namely that it would be very convenient for Walt, even with that, Walt can’t come down to that level. No, he has to continually play the con game.

And then that hug.

Of course, with as shitty as Jesse’s life has been recently, and given the fact that I think Jesse would actually like nothing more than to get the hell out of ABQ, he decides to relent and adopt a new identity.

And in this scene, with Jesse at Saul’s office, with his giant stack of cash, I had a sense of dread fall over me. I really thought that maybe this was the episode that we would see the last of Jesse Pinkman. Not that he would board a bus and leave for Alaska happily ever after. But that he would be boarding that bus and it would be a nonstop trip to Belize.

But of course, Jesse is nothing if not an asshole with impeccable timing, so he lights up that joint, and Saul warns him the disappearer won’t take him if he’s stoned, so he gets Huell to lift the dope. Now, after the last time we famously discovered that, while Huell is generally an overbearing type of gent, apparently he has fingers of silk, I wasn’t looking for the pickpocket, but when it happened, I saw it. I actually rewound my DVR just to double check that I saw what I saw. I couldn’t tell what he’d lifted, but I knew he’d lifted something.

And this is where my Belize-related dread kicked into overdrive. I had thought that Saul told Jesse that he had to give the disappearer a specific card. I now know that no such line of dialogue exists, but, hey, it was late on a Sunday and it had been a long weekend. Anyway, I figured that Huell had lifted the card, and when the vanishing man went to pick up Jesse, he wouldn’t have said card, and the vanishing man would then make Jesse vanish. All over the pavement with a gun. Thankfully, it did not play out that way.

What we got was infinitely more badass. It was a realization. Not even a realization, but THE REALIZATION. And for those of you keeping track at home, there are only two of them for Jesse to have (the truth about Jane’s death, and the truth about Brock’s poisoning with the ricin cigarette Lily of the Valley). But with the realization that somehow sausage-fingered Huell had lifted the weed from his pocket, and that he must have also lifted the ricin cigarette, the puzzle pieces clicked into place for Jesse, and he finally saw Walt for not just who he always suspected, but, in one extraordinarily tense scene towards the end of Season 4, who he already knew Walt to be.

And the warpath he set out on against Saul, that beatdown, was both dramatically riveting and invigorating (Yeah, Jesse!) and emotionally staggering (it’s as over between Walt and Jesse as it is between Walt and Hank). And with very, very few exceptions over the course of Saul’s tenure, Odenkirk gets to play him for laughs. Except for when he doesn’t. And then it’s scary, but serious Saul is either scary or he scares us, because we’re scared for him. But seeing Saul on the ground with a gun to his head, blood pouring down his face, is awful. It’s awful because I only want good things for Saul, and I only want the trio of Saul, Jesse, and Walt to be on the best terms to facilitate the best meth cook around. But it’s over.

And rarely does something say, “It’s over” more than burning down someone’s house. Well, to be fair, we don’t actually see him burn it down. But, man, he’s dousing the shit out of it with gasoline.

And now one of the last people Walt could turn to is essentially a new sworn enemy. Hank has been kept at bay, for the moment, at least, but who knows how long that will last. And the cancer is back. All in all, things are looking pretty terrible for Walt, as his back is being pushed further and further into the corner.

Or maybe that’s a gun against his head.

@kent_graham