This episode was many things, but the one it wasn't was to advance the main plots of Season 3, such as Gus Frings building and reinforcing his Southwest methamphetamine empire, and Hank's recovery. Instead "Fly" was like a one act play, a character study, a Big Theme exploration and even filler to pad out the 13-episode commitment to AMC. It took place mostly in the meth lab, which gave it a claustrophobic, crazed feel.
Walt suffers from insomnia, annoyed at home by the blinking red light on his smoke detector. Coming to the lab, he becomes preoccupied with contamination, as he first hears and later spots the tiny "villain" shown in the opening scenes: a gray and black striped face fly (so called because it infests the faces of livestock). There must be no cooking until the impurity is eliminated. The fly must be slain.
That is the Big Theme, of contamination. The fly is a diversion, a ludicrous obsession that Walt uses to ignore the contamination both within himself and outside in his family, the city of Albuquerque and the region itself. Plagued by guilt and a severe lack of sleep, Walt seems to become psychotic.
At first it isn't clear, as Walt manically scrubs and sterilizes the equipment and tells Jesse they can't cook until the contamination is gone. He also checks and rechecks figures on a paper with a coiled, nervous energy and tells Jesse that their yield is .14 percent short, or about 1/2 to 3/4 pounds of meth. He interrogates Jesse to see if he's been siphoning off some of the product, which he denies, but indeed he has in his foolhardy plan to deal with his lunkhead peers, Badger and Skinny Pete. Walt reminds him that the men for whom they work would offer no forgiveness for this sin, only death.
Walt stays in the lab all night, and his pursuit of the elusive fly reaches absurd heights, such as when he throws his shoe up to the ceiling to hit the bug. It shatters a light, shards rain down on him, and the footwear becomes entangled its wreckage. Walt goes to the top of the stairwell to retrieve the shoe, which, of course, is just out of reach. He tries to snag it with a broom and falls over the railing, landing on the floor below in what could have been a critical fall.
I was more than amazed when he was up later, no bones broken.When Jesse returns the next morning, a loony Walt is standing in the lab, holding a long handled plastic wrapped fly swatter he made himself. Jesse has to believe his partner is ready for the rubber room, when Walt strikes him painfully with the fly swatter.
They have their usual 200-pound quota of blue meth to make, and Walt is raving about catching a fly that just happens to hide away until it their conflict is at dangerous levels, till it finally alights on Walt's glasses. Jesse, still smarting from Walt's blow, hits him back, and the fly takes off again.
Walt gets worse, tricking Jesse into giving him his keys to the lab and locking him out. Jesse runs through the laundry, trying to ask for an "el axo" (axe) in pseudo-Spanish. He goes into a maintenance room, where first he picks up and checks the heft of a ball peen hammer, then a sledgehammer, until he sees the master circuit breakers. But even turning off the juice doesn't faze Walt.
Jesse is antsy (sorry, couldn't resist a bug pun) to get cooking, so he comes back with a bag full of bug weaponry -- a real swatter, sprays and packs of fly tape. Walt rules against the sprays, because why bring in more contamination to remove a small impurity. Jesse points out that what they manufacture there is, itself, poison for humans, so what is the difference?
Soon the lab's ceiling is festooned with dozens of fly tape rolls. A desperate Jesse offers Walt a mug of coffee into which he sneaked a few sleeping pills. The product deadline is approaching, and Walt seems to be totally unhinged.
Walt looks back upon his cancer and his decision to start making the meth. He wonders aloud if maybe he has just lived too long. Cancer, a contamination of the human body, had affected both men.
Jesse remembers when his aunt -- the one whose house he now owns -- got cancer. There had been a kind of contamination there, too. A possum had moved in under the house, and its scavenging around the yard and scratching beneath the floor drove his aunt crazy. A pest control guy was brought in and told the aunt the animal had been removed, but she would not believe him. She claimed to still hear the possum and banged her broom on the floor to scare it away. She even named the phantom marsupial, dubbing it "Scrabble." It wasn't until the aunt was taken to the doctor that the family learned her cancer had spread to her brain, causing the hallucinations.
The pills take seemingly forever to take effect, so now the nutty lengths in which to catch the fly has Jesse setting up a stepladder on top of two file cabinets to reach the insect, which has retreated there for warmth. Jesse puts Walt into a chair after he falls. He climbs his precarious perch to get the bug, while a woozy Walt holds the ladder.
As Jesse swings, Walt descends further toward sleep. He talks about his decision to start producing meth, and not knowing when he will have enough money to leave his family. To quit kept being pushed back by need and life's events, such as Holly's birth or his own surgery.
The point, it seems, came the night Jane Margolis (Krystyn Ritter) died. That announcement turns Jesse cold, as he freezes in his swings at the fly, high above Walt.
Walt begins to remember the events in the Season 2 episode "Phoenix." On that night, Walt was still living in the family home, and Skyler sent him out to buy diapers for Holly. Before he left, he remembers that he heard Skyler singing a lullaby to their daughter over the baby monitor. He went to Jesse's apartment to give him his share of their payment.
Walt went to a bar and had a drink, meeting a man (John de Lancie, making any Star Trek fan forget Q with his tense performance). They had a drink together and talked about their families. They learned that they both had daughters.
Only later did Walt find out the man was Donald Margolis, Jane's father. And one thing Donald said, that stuck in his mind: family is the most important, and nothing else matters. This was what made Walt realize he needed to keep making money.
It was also on this night that the contamination from his activities began to spread. He returned to Jesse's apartment, where he found him and Jane in a drug induced stupor. Walt stood over their bed, watching Jane as she woke up and started to gasp and cough. Walt started toward Jane to help her, but then hesitated and watched her choke to death on her own vomit.
Whatever impulse drove him toward this was the sign of contamination within him. Jane had threatened to blackmail Walt and turn him in if he didn't give Jesse his share in their last payment. Her codependent relationship with Jesse was pushing them ever deeper into a swamp of hard drugs and personal destruction. That decision to let her die was the real turning point for Walt, who in an instant must have seen it as a way to eliminate a problem.
As the drugged Walt relates the story of meeting Donald, you almost think he will confess his part in Jane's death, but instead he expresses regret over other things -- his failed marriage, the blunder with the second cell phone, but not letting a young girl die.
Walt was haunted by Jane's death and his decision to let her die. He tried to ignore that contamination and how it spread to Donald, whose own reckless, impetuous behavior, fueled by a father's grief, had no place whatsoever in his profession -- air traffic controller. Donald's decision to let two planes collide over Albuquerque was the next wave of contamination that began with Walt's decision to make drugs. The contamination is reaching a crescendo this season as Gus Fring's multi-state network operating out of his Los Pollos Hermanos restaurants churns the potent blue meth out across the entire Southwest.
Jesse tries in his best way to support Walt, telling him that Jane's death wasn't his fault, and it was not his, either. What kind of irrational fury would have burst from him had Walt told him the entire story? The view of blame or fault for contamination, a horrifying act or event, would have shifted and brought yet another direction for that contamination to inflict more damage.
Jesse see the fly and finally scores a hit with the swatter. The insect drifts to the floor in slow motion and a shuddering sound. He exults in the kill and presents his quarry to Walt, but he has fallen asleep.
Jesse puts Walt to bed and does the cooking himself. Walt, back to his old self the next morning, grills Jesse and goes through a checklist to ensure his junior partner did things right. As they leave the laundry facility, Walt warns Jesse again that if he is stealing product, it must stop, because their bosses have zero tolerance, and he cannot protect him.
This episode was also a journey into Jesse's head. He too is trying to move on and stay sober. Early in the episode, he contemplates his life and past abuse as he pulls a cigarette butt out of his car's ashtray and stares at it. Perhaps it reminded him of a joint, or some other illegal substance he had used.
By the end of the episode, this often flighty man-child had to take the mature role in their relationship, normally held by Walt. He let Walt get a good night's sleep and filled their quota, presumably cooking up a just fine batch of blue meth. The fragility of their relationship is saved from shattering, and both leave.
Jesse, still clean and sober, has had an old wound reopened by Walt's recollections, and he must face the struggle with ice cold reality while preventing the monkey from returning to his back. And what will he do in regard to the stolen product and his own foolhardy idea to create his own little enterprise?
Walt goes home and finds himself lying in bed awake once again that night. The red light blinks on the smoke detector. He hears an annoying buzzing. Another fly! The detector light blinks and intermittently shows the silhouette of the insect upon it. The guilt, and the contamination, are still there.
[Photos: AMC]
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