Breaking Bad has always excelled at ending an episode (seriously, like, all of them) with the series shifted into a radically different direction than when that episode began. And Rabid Dog, clearly, was no different.

This episode of Breaking Bad switched a couple of things up on us, though not technically anything the show hasn’t done before (just not quite to this scale). And yet while switching up some of its practices, it remained steadfast in what it does best, namely giving us exactly what we weren’t expecting.

We start off with Walt arriving at his house, and for the first time ever, his house is enemy territory. Watching his attempt at stealth was fun to see, despite the very serious tones of the premise. Despite the buildup, nothing happened; Jesse was gone (for reasons we’ll soon come to discover).

Walt’s pathetic excuse for a cover story to Skyler and Walter, Jr. was incredibly flimsy. He’s so amped up about it, he’s not even lying well. We can see Skyler clearly isn’t buying it, but the surprise is that, for the first time ever, neither is Walter, Jr., though his suspicions that his father was simply hiding another chemo-pass-out event, given what he does and doesn’t know, were well-founded. Throughout the series, we see Walter, Jr. lash out the most when he perceives that he’s being treated like a child and kept in the dark. Last week, in “Confessions,” he was finally treated like a man by his father and alerted to the fact that the lung cancer was back. Walter, Jr. immediately responded by clinging closer to his family. But with this obvious lie that Walt is trying to peddle, his frustrations that he’s being lied to (kept in the dark, treated like a child) come to the surface, and he calls his old man out. It was nice to see.

Desperate to keep his family safe against the unknown Jesse threat, Walt opts to move the family into a hotel for a couple of nights. This leads to the wonderful scene between Walt, Saul, and Kuby in the parking lot. For as brilliant as Walt is at some things, the idea that Saul brings up (“Uh, what are you gonna do when you actually find Jesse?”) is something that really hadn’t even occurred to him. Of course he was going to talk to Jesse. What else was he going to do? Despite how far Jesse’s rage had taken him, Walt just couldn’t imagine not being able to talk – read manipulate – Jesse out of the anger.

But Saul’s a down to Earth kind of guy, meat and potatoes, and he can plainly see that the Rubicon has been crossed, and there’s no peaceful resolution to this situation.

He brings up the idea of going Old Yeller on Jesse, which is where the episode title comes from. We’ve got the loyal sidekick who is now incurable in his rage and hate. As far as Saul’s concerned, there’s only one option available, one which, after berating the hell out of Saul, Walt rejects out of hand. There was Tuco, the crazy meth couple, sweet ol’ Gale, Gus, and others, but Mr. Chips to Scarface draws the line at Hank and Jesse.

(Side note: I wonder if Hank is curious as to why Walt hasn’t made a play for his life yet. There are the obvious repercussions, but surely after the prison executions, Hank is aware that Walt is, you know, sort of good at this.)

And after another pathetic lie, we see Skyler call Walt out on his shenanigans in the parking lot, and offer up again to Walt the “Why don’t we just kill Jesse Pinkman” line of thought. And this is where it gets interesting. Even after the prodding, Walt asks you, “Do you know what you’re asking me?” And Skyler’s response, “This is a problem you need to deal with.” And not for the first time — even as Skyler specifically says, they’ve done so much, what’s one more? — there’s more tarnish on their values. It’s almost as if she’s (and definitely not for the first time). . .

This mirrors a conversation that Walt and Jesse had back in Season 2 so closely that there’s no way it’s an accident. When Skinny Pete got ripped off by the crazy meth couple, and Walt couldn’t stand the idea of people thinking him weak, he put a gun in Jesse’s hand and said, “Deal with it.”

(Perhaps it was, “Handle it,” now that I think about it some more, but it’s still pretty much the same.)

While this isn’t the first time that Jesse’s murder had been floated to Walt by way of Saul (back in his Season 3 conversation “Maybe it’s time to talk options”), this is the first time straight murder has been floated by Skyler, who, like Walt has always told himself, is just trying to protect the family. And Walt is taken aback by this. Everywhere he turns, someone is telling him to off Jesse, but he won’t do it. Jesse is too important to Walt as a person. Even with as far gone as Walt is, he refuses to see Jesse as a problem, as a rabid dog, that must be put down.

And then comes the big switcheroo, which answers a question that I’m sure a lot of us were asking: What if Jesse was with Hank?

Spoiler warning: He totally was. He totally was with Hank.

And then we flashback to an inconsolably angry Jesse about to torch the entire White family house, and then, BOOM, in barges Hank. Of course Hank would be following Jesse. Because he’s a smart DEA agent. But holy crap did it surprise me. And to see Jesse, in the middle of a breakdown, scream that Walt can’t keep getting away with it was heartbreaking. I love Jesse, and seeing him in distress physically troubles me.

And so Hank wants to stash Jesse in literally the last place Walt will ever look, the Schrader residence. And once more in this show, I’m given the feeling of such wrongness, but I’m so giddy about it, I don’t know which emotion is winning out. Jesse Pinkman staying in Hank Schrader’s house is like Skyler White in Saul Goodman’s office, which is like the Joker in the Batcave. It’s so wrong and should never be, but now that it’s happened, I just can’t wait to see what happens next.

And when Jesse comes out the next morning, and sees Gomez in the living room, we already know how much Gomez knows. We didn’t need to see that scene happen. However it happened, and I’m sure it was good, all we needed to see was Gomey in that living room, and we knew he was in the inner circle.

And just as Walt (incapable of telling the truth) delivered his fake confession last week, we got Jesse (incapable of lying) delivering his very real confession this week. And there are episodes and episodes worth of material in just those skipped-over hours of confession, and while I know we don’t get to see it all, I would have liked to have seen some of it.

And when Walter calls to set up a meet with Jesse, Hank and Gomez draft a solution: As Jesse so eloquently put it, their plan is to do Walt’s plan. And while Jesse is terrified of the concept (he knows more than anyone the spontaneous impossibilities Walter White can pull out of his ass), Hank gently lets him know that he’s not really asking. And while Jesse goes to mull it over, Gomez asks Hank, “What happens if the kid is right?” And Hank’s response, that he hopes the murdering, dope-slinging meth head is right, is both shocking and terrifying. Shocking because Hank Schrader is a man of the law. With really only one instance that I can think of off the top of my head, he has maintained that man-of-the-law status.

It’s terrifying to me because this response signifies to me that Hank isn’t so concerned about the law on this one. This one is about the pride. Hank has been made a fool of this entire series. As good as he is at his career, once Heisenberg’s identity becomes public knowledge, everyone will know that Hank is terrible at his job (even though, by any stretch of the imagination, he isn’t). His career will be gone, his reputation will be in tatters. Everything that Hank has spent decades building will be demolished. He’s pissed off, and he wants a little blood.

And this is where we come to my one main gripe of the episode, and depending on how it all plays out, maybe a big one of the series. At the meeting, Jesse is understandably nervous, but as he gets closer to Walt, he sees the Scary-Looking Man. And surely this Scary-Looking Man could only be there to put a bullet in Jesse, because, d’uh, what else is gonna happen? And Jesse improvises, something his teacher has always excelled at, and changes the plan.

Of course, we’re then shown that this Scary-Looking Man, while being scary to look at, was actually just waiting for his cutesy daughter to come back. And while it should have occurred to Jesse, that having a scary, biker-looking hitman literally ten feet away from Walt was just too obvious, it’s understandable, given the intense pressure he was under, that it did not.

What bothers me about it is that Breaking Bad has always been a show about consequences and responsibility. It’s rarely been a show about odd coincidences that impact the direction of the entire series. In fact, the last time it happened, we got a plan crash, and it took me a very long time to be okay with that. I felt then, as I do now, it’s sort of a cheat. There didn’t have to be that guy standing there. If he weren’t there, who knows how the episode, and series-at-large, would have played out. But he was there, and he was actually a nobody, and so now the series has been inexplicably altered because this nobody was standing there.

Again, we’ll see how it all plays out. The benefit of it is, as I mentioned above, we got to see Jesse improvise, which was always Walt’s bag. This is just one more instance of Heisenberg’s lessons rubbing off on his partner/apprentice. And because of that, only chaos will ensue.

All in all, for this episode, it was rewarding to see Walt stick to his ethical guns (for a while, at least) and watch the pious break bad.

Quick Note:

– I’m aware that there’s been a previous scene recently with Walt reflecting on his life poolside, but this one really drove home the distance from the pilot episode with Walt reflecting his then-life choices. That scene in the pilot has always stayed with me. The entire scene is wordless, someone most other TV shows wouldn’t even dare to toy with in the writers’ room, but it’s also one of the most pivotal scenes in the entire series. We’re only given Cranston’s performance to interpret what the character is thinking, and there’s so much going on in that wordless performance, it’s beautiful.

– The idea of Skinny Pete talking about Babylon 5 for three consecutive hours fills me with such joy.

@kent_graham