Breaking Bad: 1.2 ‘Cat’s in the Bag…’ Recap

by Chandra on January 28th, 2008

Recap
Original Air Date: January 27, 2008

NOTE: This series and recap contain very mature themes and language.

The episode opens where the pilot episode ended. WALTER and SKYLER are both covered in sweat after just having sex, but Walter goes into the bathroom because he can’t catch his breath. As he splashes water on his face and looks in the mirror, the scene flashes back to twelve hours earlier, with Walter and JESSE standing beside the desert road following their encounter with EMILIO and KRAZY 8.

TWELVE HOURS EARLIER

After a Native American tow truck driver arrives and pulls the RV back onto the road, Walter and Jesse get inside and agree to part ways as soon as they finish cleaning up the mess. The vehicle falters several times and then finally starts, and just as it does, the pair hear coughing coming from the back — one of the cousins isn’t dead after all. Walter and Jesse are so frazzled by the increasingly worse turn events keep taking, they don’t even realize they’ve left one of their gas masks behind in the desert.

THE PRESENT

Walter, Skyler, and WALTER JR. are having breakfast when Jesse calls on the phone pretending to be a telemarketer from the phone company. He’s freaking out because whichever cousin came to on the RV is moving around now and making noise like he’s trying to get free. Walter apparently told Jesse the guy would die soon after he woke up, and now Jesse is insisting that Walter come over ASAP and help resolve the situation.

Walter has to be at school for work, though, and when he tells Jesse he’ll stop by afterwards, the younger man gets even more upset. As Walter talks on the phone in an increasingly agitated voice, Skyler comes in the area, listening in. The moment her husband and son leave for school she calls back the number Jesse called from and hears his hip-hop-style answering machine message, indicating whoever called definitely wasn’t a telemarketer.

In class, Walter lectures about the state of chirality, which he compares to mirror images reflecting identical things that are also opposites — for example, your left and right hands. The teacher is visibly distracted and having difficulty concentrating, which leads him to mishear a student say “murder” when he actually said “midterm.” When he finally gets a break, Walter takes a couple of gallons of hydrofluoric acid from a stockroom.

Meanwhile, Jesse is at home trying to cover up the huge bruise on the left side of his face with foundation makeup when he hears the RV door open. By the time he gets downstairs, he finds shreds of tape all over the ground and Krazy 8’s body gone.

Walter is driving over at that time, and as he heads down a suburban street, he passes right by Krazy 8, who’s wheezing and walking in a daze down the middle of the road. Walter starts talking to the dealer, who responds by running away when he recognizes the teacher … right into a tree that knocks him out cold, allowing Walter to put him in the car and take him back to Jesse’s house.

Walter and Jesse lock Krazy 8 in the basement while they go upstairs to figure out what to do next. Jesse informs Walter that the dealer is one level up from his dead cousin, so he’s like a distributor rather than a street hustler. As the two talk, they suddenly hear scraping from the basement and realize how stupid it was to think just because Krazy 8 seemed like he was out cold, it was safe to leave him untied.

So, after Jesse secures Krazy 8’s head to a pole in the basement with a bicycle lock, he and Walter are back at square one. Since they’re supposed to be partners, they flip a coin to decide who will get rid of Emilio’s body by dissolving it completely in acid and who will take care of Krazy 8. The coin comes up heads; thus, Jesse will deal with Emilio and Walter will get rid of his cousin.

While Jesse finds an appropriate container to dissolve Emilio’s body in, Walter works up the nerve to kill Krazy 8. The first order of business is to decide how to do it, and Walter stumbles on the idea of smothering him with a plastic bag after he takes a couple of guns out of one. When he goes downstairs to do the deed, however, Krazy 8 is not only conscious, but he starts begging for water. Walter goes all out in response, bringing the dealer a sandwich, a couple of gallons of water, a bucket to use the bathroom in, and some toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

After admitting to Krazy 8 that his cousin is dead when he asks, Walter returns to Jesse’s kitchen and smokes some of the weed out in the open on the counter. Jesse comes home empty-handed — no store in town sells a plastic container big enough to hold a body — to learn that Walter has been smoking his weed and has to leave for a medical appointment. The teacher promises to take care of his part the next day and then goes to the hospital with Skyler for a sonogram.

The doctor reveals the baby is in excellent shape, and when the lucky parents consent, she tells them it’s a girl. Walter gets noticeably upset when Skyler makes a comment that he won’t be so happy when she turns 16. He, of course, will be dead by then, but his somber reaction inspires Skyler to admit she looked into the person who called that morning, which is why she knows it was a druggie former student of his named Jesse Pinkman. She demands to know why Walter is associating with a person like that. After telling her point blank that Jesse sells him pot, Walter asks his stunned wife if she can do him a favor and stop riding his ass so much.

Skyler then takes it upon herself to visit Jesse to warn him to stop selling her husband weed or else she’ll have her DEA agent brother-in-law come down on him. Jesse agrees without any protest because she interrupted him while he was moving Emilio’s body from the RV to the bathtub in his house. After Skyler leaves, he finally gets the heavy and stinking body up to the tub and pours the acid over it and the two guns the cousins had, complaining to himself all the while about how messed up the situation is.

Unfortunately, Walter arrives soon after, and Jesse learns why it was so important for him to buy a container made out of plastic to dissolve the body in. When blood and guts soak through the floor of the bathroom and come crashing down onto the main level, Walter explains that hydrofluoric acid won’t eat through plastic, but it will dissolve just about every other material, including metal and ceramic.

Yet, that’s not the worst of the bad news for the hapless meth dealers. Out in the desert near where the RV incident occurred, a little girl playing with a little boy finds the gas mask they left behind earlier.

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