The first episode of a new season is an interesting sort of animal. It has a lot of different hats it has to wear (yes, that was on purpose) and some of them are contradictory. Starting off a new season, it’s important to capture, or re-capture, the interest and excitement with which you ended the previous season. In this type of show you also need to raise the stakes in some way. On top of all that, you also need to lay the groundwork for the upcoming season’s storylines, character development, plot twists and cetera. Oh, and all of this needs to happen with a story that is already in progress.

Tall order, that.

The opening scene is a pretty effective, though perhaps unimaginative way of accomplishing the first task. Replay season 1’s closing scene and use it to remind the audience of exactly where we were when last we met. It reminds us that when it comes to the evils in the world, there are levels. It also reminds us that Walt and Jessie are now very firmly in over their heads, but it reads a bit differently at the beginning of a season than it does at the end of one. As the ending of a season, it comes across as “Oh, holy shit, now what?”. At the start of a season it’s “Oh, holy shit, now what?“. It’s an important distinction. The stakes seem to have been raised significantly and our focus is subtly shifted from what just happened to what’s going to happen next. Walt and Jessie are now playing in the big leagues and they will either rise to the occasion or they will be utterly destroyed.

Now, when it comes to the groundwork for the upcoming storylines, I have a bit of an admission to make, dear reader. I haven’t quite managed to keep my knowledge of the show as spoiler-free as I would have liked. I have stumbled across the odd bit of information here and there such that I know there was a plane crash, though I’m not sure specifically how that will play into the plot of this season. I did catch, however, that the burned teddy bear in the swimming pool was detritus from the crash, and I’m pretty sure the $737,000 that Walt calculates he needs is a reference to a Boing 737. I also know that at some point there will be characters named Saul, Mike, and Gus Fring (thanks a lot YouTube algorithm), though again I have no idea when they show up, or what role they will play in the story.

In terms of threads that have been unplucked from the show’s frayed hem in this episode and are ready to be unravelled over the course of the next 11 episodes or so: we have Walt almost spilling the beans (also on purpose – sorry, not sorry) to Skyler; Walt leaving all the money in the box of diapers where Skyler is almost certain to find it (thereby forcing Walt to finish spilling the beans); the identity of the people who are surveilling Walt and Jessie (probably the big players that Hank mentions, whose toes are likely to get stepped on by someone who needs that much precursor); and of course the abduction of Walt and Jessie by Tuco, who probably thinks those big players are out to get him as he likely doesn’t know what happened to Gonzo other than that he suddenly disappeared.

I’m a bit less interested in the whole Marie/Hank/Skyler shoplifting storyline. It feels a bit tacked on to me, like it was meant to be a piece of smoke and mirrors distraction in season 1 and now the writers aren’t sure what to do with it. It’s important that we not lose sight of the fact that this is all happening as the result of Walt’s choices, and that rather than saving his family, those choices are more or less destroying it, which Skyler’s breakdown in front of Hank demonstrates, but adding in the conflict with her sister really only serves to muddy the waters unnecessarily in my opinion.

All in all, a solid episode that felt a bit slow in places, but laid some very interesting groundwork that I hope to see pay off handsomely in the next several episodes.