TV Review: BREAKING BAD: Season 5, Episode 8: Gliding Over All

Breaking Bad Season 5 Episode 8 Gliding Over All Review. Breaking Bad: Season 5, Episode 1: Gliding Over All may have been one of the best episodes of the season. It certainly had one of the best sequences of the season and possibly the series. The scene in questions is when all of Gustavo ‘Gus’ Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) former employees – now in prison – were killed in a single day on Walter White (Bryan Cranston)’s order.

The scene was impressive: Walter by a window, music playing, inmates getting shanked numerous times, thrown, burned, all on national television. What was striking is that if this in-your-face content was sexual, how much of it would have been allowed? Its another example of how people and networks have become desensitized to violence.

Back to Gliding Over All.

White is coming into his own as a drug lord. Though he is shrewd, there are others that think ahead just as he does. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle (Laura Fraser) had Walter figured out cold after he asked for the names. It was like a chess match but she had already thought ahead, keeping the names in her head and securing the offer to expand Walter’s business before giving him the names.

What was very good about the scene was that Lydia was right, Walter was going to kill her.

I was glad to see that Skyler White (Anna Gunn) was able to get through to Walter finally. That stack of money was impressive but also impressive was that Walter made so much of it that she was incapable of laundering it all. If half that stack is hundreds, Walter is a multi-millionaire. I’m guessing there is nearly a hundred million dollars sitting in that cubicle.

The reminiscing by Walter and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) was expertly led up to by the scenes that proceeded it. At first I thought Walter was there to clean up another loose end (so did Jesse) – like he almost did with Lydia – but Walter  wanted Jesse to remember how it was and that not all of it was bad. That they had been friends in arms, partners.

Hank Schrader (Dean Norris)’s discovery in the bathroom was excruciating, not in what he discovered but that the viewer has to wait until next summer to see the ramifications of it. Great flashback.

Hank will be able to put it all together now: the new cars, the watch, the car wash, how the person pulling the strings was always one step ahead, et cetera. Hank knows Walter’s background in chemistry. It will all fall into place except for why. Why did Walter White do all of those things?

It was a well-scripted way to end an episode and a mid-season break.

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