Fly

Episode Summary & Review

Summary

When Walt becomes driven to distraction by a contaminant in the lab, he refuses to cook meth until they are able to get rid of it.

Our Take

The bottle episode that shouldn’t work and does: Walt, sleep deprived and guilt ridden, spends an entire night chasing a fly in the superlab like Ahab after the whale. Jesse helps. Everything is subtext: Walt’s obsessive need for control, his half confession about Jane (“I lived… there was…”), and the fly as the contamination he can’t see but can’t stop hunting. Divisive on release, canonical now, the show’s quietest hour is one of its richest.