I have just one episode to go in Season Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* It’s been an eventful four or five episodes since last we talked, but in terms of Walter and Jesse’s business, the noteworthy thing for quite a long stretch there was how uneventful it was. Up until (let’s say) Jesse hired Badger, Combo, and Skinny Pete to work for him, our dynamic duo’s career really was, as I’ve said before, pretty much just a series of calamities flowing from Walter’s initial request to do a ride-along with Hank. But once Jesse and Walter go into business for themselves, you finally start seeing what I thought the show would be all along: a status quo for the science teacher-cum-meth dealer. There are bumps in the road, to put it mildly, but for the most part they’re no longer stumbling into kill-or-be-killed situations within half an hour of meeting someone else in the game. Skinny Pete getting mugged and Badger getting pinched really were just the cost of doing business, as Jesse always put it. Even “death by ATM” could have gone a lot worse for Jesse, and for a while at least it actually made his and Walter’s lives easier. (I’m not convinced it won’t come back to bite them if someone thinks to trace the bills from the machine, but we’ll table that for now.) A season and a half into the show, we finally got to find out what “business as usual” would look like.

* I think this is why the bottle episode in which Walter and Jesse get stranded out in the desert, as enjoyable as it was in the moment, felt so much like a throwback to the in-retrospect less-interesting first season. For one thing, it was in miniature what the whole series had largely been: Walter and Jesse careening from one catastrophe to the next. For another it required the two of them to drop down several levels in the competence they’d begun to display. (Although perhaps this was necessary to help set us up for Jesse’s drug-induced flameout of self-pity and resentment of Walter later in the season.)

* Though the show looks like it’s gonna slowfoot any involvement with the cartel, they gave the concept a big enough introduction to enable themselves to pay it off at any point down the line more or less at their leisure. A full narcocorrido music video (I thought I’d accidentally skipped to a bonus feature) threatening “Heisenberg”‘s murder followed by the memorably Boschian image of Danny Trejo’s severed head attached to a tortoise rigged with explosives is more than enough to establish the outfit’s deadly bonafides. The bomb sequence in particularly was beautifully shot, edited, and recorded — truly like hell on earth.

* And once again you have to grudgingly respect Hank, who despite his twin poles of bluster and panic had the presence of mind to run back into the fray, whip off his belt, and use it as a tourniquet to save his fellow agent’s life. It’s perverse that he’s so good in these life and death situations that are making him sick.

* Took me a while to get used to seeing Bob Odenkirk in a drama, even if he’s the comic relief. I kept waiting for him to sing the praises of Cinco’s new bowel-irritating gel or whatever. But he’s perfectly ridiculous in that role, and he’ll forever make me wonder if any of the ambulance-chasers whose commercials I see during episodes of Judge Judy are secretly some gangster wannabe’s consigliere.

* Shoulda seen Skyler’s storyline coming, I suppose. I mean, I guess I did — you knew the moment she asked to see Ted Beneke that she and this guy had some kind of history, and that her present circumstances might lead to history repeating itself. But I didn’t anticipate some of the particulars, like that history being a) sexual harassment, and b) a secret she kept from Walt all these years, which makes me wonder if c) it wasn’t sexual harassment at all, although d) you’d think it would have been addressed in one of their private conversations if it had been a fling and the harassment story was just a bowdlerized version Sky told her sister. At any rate, it’s the details that stick out here: Skyler’s quiet but unmissable reliance on a cleavage-centric wardrobe; the fact that Ted actually does seem like a prototypical “nice boss”; the excruciating “Happy Birthday, Mister President” song at Ted’s birthday; Ted watching Skyler walk back across the parking lot after she decides to stick it out with him despite his tax evasion. And of course, as it turns out, Hank’s not the only one in the family who’s pretty good at their job of ferreting out wrongdoing.

* As awkward as Skyler’s birthday serenade was, the sequence leading up to Combo’s murder was tense. I haven’t felt that way watching TV in a long time, that sickening dread when you know at any moment someone’s going to pop up and shoot someone. I’m easily spooked enough by loud noises to turn down the volume in situations like that so that when the inevitable gunshot rings out I don’t jump in my chair. The weird thing? I love feeling this way.

* Despite how awful Walter has become in many ways, I still beamed and clapped and “yesss!”ed when he got the good news about his cancer. Didn’t you?

* After more or less stopping for a third of the season or so, those ominous black-and-white opening flashfowards hinting at an unspecified, explosive disaster at Casa White returned with a vengeance — and two body bags — in the very same episode where Walt starts tinkering with the water heater and the floorboards. Clever of the show to tease us with a possible “way out” of these grim prophecies that doesn’t involve a meth-lab explosion or an attack by a psychotic rival. Extra high-school English class points for the “something’s rotten in the Whites’ foundation” metaphor, too.

* Jane was a toughie for me. For the longest time, she just rang a bit false. There were some too-writerly bits there — the tattoo artist who refuses to get any tattoos because it’s too big a commitment is like something out of a lousy Vertigo comic — but mainly the problem was this: What on earth would this lovely, sardonic, canny person see in a goofball loser like Jesse? Only the tackiness of her tattoo design gave us any indication that she’d ever give Jesse the time of day.

* It was only as time went on, not even when we find out she was recovering addict but only after she fully relapses and becomes a real cutthroat junkie, did it become apparent that her attraction to Jesse was at least in part her addict self’s compulsion for self-destruction. On some level this was a deeply unhappy person just aching to fall back off the wagon. Renting to Jesse, befriending Jesse, sleeping with Jesse — all stepping stones to the inevitable other side.

* A little too inevitable for me, alas and alack. Basically, I did a full-on Lando Calrissian “Hello, what have we here?” when I laid eyes on Krysten Ritter (I’ve mentioned my thing for pale dark-haired girls, right?) and couldn’t resist looking her up on the Internet. So I ended up spoiling her eventual fate for myself. It wasn’t so bad, though. I mean, it was clear that that would have been a distinct possibility the moment she turned back around from the door of Jesse’s apartment and joined him for a smoke in his bedroom. Plus, it gave her dad Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s decision to give her till tomorrow, and his conversation about daughters with Walt in the bar later that night, an absolutely crushing weight of sadness. (I’m almost worried to watch the finale because I don’t want to find out how the poor man takes it.)

* But the big thing is that fortunately (? if that’s the right word for this), I didn’t know anything about Walter’s involvement in her death. That still hit me like a bus. Once again, I sat on the train watching the show on my laptop, utterly, physically aghast. It was a brilliantly acted scene: When he sees that she’s choking, Walter instinctively runs over to her side. But then we watch as he weighs the life of this girl who’d been awful to him against the lives of Jesse, his daughter, his son, his wife, and, yes, himself. Simply thinking about the decision was a decision, in this case.

* The filmmakers expertly toyed with our sympathies throughout the whole episode leading up to Jane’s death, too. She’d been a pretty sympathetic character, and a crushable one too, but her drug use brought out a really ugly side, and by the time she was on the phone with Walt threatening to burn his life to the ground, those crime-drama “aaaah! kill her!” audience instincts kicked in. But between Walt’s affection for his daughter and Jane’s Dad’s affection for Jane, it became impossible to root for her demise for every long, even after she choose to taunt Walt when he drops the money off instead of joining a contrite Jesse in assuring Walt that no further blackmail is forthcoming. And the way she died ended up being one of the most horrendously intimate death scenes I’ve ever seen. It’d be tough to root for Tuco going out like that, let alone Apology Girl. And it was next to impossible to root for Walt standing there and letting it happen.

* By the end of the scene I realized that Walt and I had had the exact same physical reaction to what he’d done: we both watched it unfold slackjawed, hands over our gaping mouths.

* Everyone else noticed that Jane said she was gonna kick tomorrow, right? She don’t mean no harm, she just don’t know what else to do about it.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

* I took a break from Breaking Bad during the holidays — my train-commute viewing time was no longer a going concern, after all. Looking back, I think I skipped out on writing about the last episode I saw prior to the break, S02E04. From what I recall you had some pretty intense rock-bottom character work in that: Jesse gets thrown out of his aunt’s house and ends up crying on the floor of the RV, literally covered in shit. Walt lies to Skyler just about as brutally as he possibly could — lying about having no idea what he’s supposed to have been lying about; those living-room confrontations are pretty much always dynamite. And Skyler smokes a cigarette while pregnant, testing our tolerance for bad behavior even on a show like this (it’s pretty amazing what audiences will and won’t forgive) and exercising a shitty form of control over one of the few aspects of her life left for her to control.

* But even with all of that filed away in my brain, I was unprepared for how disorientingly good the show was right away upon returning to it a couple days ago with episode 5. (This is the episode where Walt and Jesse decide to go into business for themselves, while Hank has a panic attack following his promotion to the El Paso bureau.) And I think “disorienting” is the word that occurred to me because of the actual filmmaking, the way in which the show took images and abstracted them. The overhead shot of the river as two immigrants swim across it and a shot swooping down the hospital exterior as Walt exits following his last round of chemo were the most dramatic examples at first.

* But throughout the episode, inanimate objects became near-abstract containers of information, a la this David Bordwell essay. Lingering close-ups on the glass cube with the teeth inside, on the endlessly long bill printed out at the cancer clinic, on the pack of cigarettes Walter retrieves from the toilet, on the “hope is the best medicine” button he receives, on the food prepared by both Skyler and Jesse in separate attempts to pass off an abnormal situation as anything but — all of these items mean something to the narrative simply by existing, and all the show needs to do is show them for us to understand what that meaning is. Thoughtful and fun filmmaking.

* Nice character bits in this one too, of course. I really loved the question mark added by Walt when he says “thank you?” to the woman behind the counter at the clinic after she wishes him well, for example. And I loved “Jesse Comes Alive,” which is how I mentally referred to his competent, enthusiastic, clear-eyed behavior at the meeting with his meth friends when he directs them in the logistics of the new operation, in contrast to how pro forma all the “word up, yo” talk between all of them felt beforehand.

* But then.

* I want to be clear here: I was not IN ANY WAY prepared for that poor little boy to appear in the next episode, when Jesse raided the meth-heads’ house to get his money and meth back. Not in any way. I can’t recall the last time a show so dramatically raised its stakes, transforming a really well-done crime thriller into a brutally depressing meditation on the central crime’s effects at the drop of a hat.

* Oh wait, yes I can: “University” from Season Three of The Sopranos. Seriously, that wasn’t a rhetorical device just then — I realized at this very moment that really was the last time I felt the ground open up beneath a crime show that completely. Not even the best moments of Boardwalk Empire season two pulled it off like this, because those moments felt personal, not directed at, more or less, all of humanity like that beautiful little red-headed boy covered in filth did.

* The fact that he looked a bit like my daughter in terms of his facial features? I’d be lying if I said that didn’t have anything to do with how knocked out I was by this episode. By the end, as Jesse raced to round up his money, call 911, and rescue the little boy before the cops came, I had my hands in my hair, staring bug-eyed and slackjawed like a Brian Bolland drawing of the Joker. That was enormously powerful television. The business with Walt unleashing decades of fury at Gretchen was just icing, as was the fact that he’d essentially ordered a pair of murders the episode before. Suddenly the show proved itself willing to look something very, very ugly right in the face. Thrilling.