Although individual episodes are sure to keep us guessing, we know what to expect from Breaking Bad’s final season: Walter White, having killed Gus Fring, finally seizes the power he’s wanted so badly for so long. As creator Vince Gilligan has said, Walt is transforming from embattled hero into full-blooded villain, and these final 16 episodes are sure to make last year’s bomb-planting and kid-poisoning look tame. Since we spent the Season 5 premiere drinking blue cocktails and doing spit-takes over Walt’s ridiculous, audacious, and often reckless swagger, we’ve decided that this year we’ll be rounding up each episode’s biggest Walter White WTF moments. The top five for this week, when we found out the real Grey Matter story and something good very nearly managed to happen, are after the jump.
1. As soon as Mike leaves after chaining him to the radiator, Walter goes into demented MacGyver mode, melting off his plastic restraints with live wires and giving himself some pretty nasty burns in the process — all to avoid earning $5 million and saying good-bye to his meth lord fantasies. Mike really should have known to use metal cuffs.
2. Walt shows up at the office intent on stealing all the methylamine. Of course Mike is there. Of course.
3. Walter: You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business. Jesse: Is a meth empire really something to be that proud of?
4. Walter decides to keep running the business without Mike and Jesse. You know, because he’s totally got the distribution end of things down pat. How hard could it really be to recruit and manage a network of dealers powerful and trustworthy enough to handle a meth supply worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
5. “I’ve lost sleep the past two nights thinking about it,” Walter tells Jesse when his partner brings up the kid Todd killed. That obviously isn’t true, because he hasn’t had anything like a conscience for a few seasons now, so it’s no surprise that he quickly shifts the conversation to a pep talk about how great it is that the two of them now run a self-sufficient business. If that weren’t callous enough, a minute later he’s whistling as he puts on his lab suit to continue cooking.