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.