Breaking Bad: "Peekaboo"

 
After last week's excellent episode Breakage, where Walt broke even badder and gave Jesse a gun to help clean up his tough guy act, Peekaboo  picks up with a loaded Jesse paying a visit to the meth addicted couple who robbed Skinny Pete.

Watching a hopped-up Jesse trying to psych himself up for a Scarface-style confrontation was great fun to watch. Kudos to Aaron Paul for owning this role. His scenes with the little red-headed hillbilly boy showed that he's really no gangster, and really the only clear-headed thinker of the bunch.

Meanwhile, Walt continues his downward spiral after an unexpected visit from his old flame Gretchen, who just happens to have the beans spilled upon her by nosy Skyler that she and her hubby Elliott were paying Walt's medical bills. This is news to Gretchen of course, who does her best to react without reacting. However, this seemed like a really stupid thing to have done by a guy as calculating as Walt. He's too smart of a guy to set up such a flimsy house of cards. What was he thinking?!  Must've been the meth fumes talking.

I do have a minor nit to pick with this week's episode.  I really doubt that Spooge and Skank would've just let Jesse lie there on the floor after clobbering him on the head with a whiskey bottle.  They obviously should have tied him up, or more likely, killed him (after all, we saw from the flashback of the ATM robbery that they were capable of this).  It just seemed a bit too easy for Jesse to wake up and walk out of there.  Again, just a minor nitpick. 

Also, bad move on Jesse's part stealing some of that ATM money.  This will make it look like a robbery to the police, which would lead to dusting for prints (I think Jesse's safe there, though - good luck finding any decent fingerprints in that dump).

One of the other shocking scenes in this episode was the use of the F-word. AMC will allow the occasional 'shit' and 'bitch' bombs to be dropped, but I'm pretty sure the F-word is still off-limits for basic cable. AMC hasn't broken that bad...yet. But thanks to the DVR, it turns out that Walt did not actually utter the F-word on basic cable. We still got his point, though.

Another excellent episode from an excellent second season. Very happy to hear that the show was recently picked up for a third season. I can't imagine where these characters will be by then. I'm just happy that they'll still be around.

For more on this series, visit the official AMC site.