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But then Mike steps in and does what Walt supposedly hoped he would do when he brought him into the business: He grounds them in reality. Walt and Jesse and Mike gather around a table piled high with cash, looking and feeling triumphant, and rightly so: They devised a bold new scheme for hiding in plain sight they cooked their first batch of meth as a new consortium and sold it. Mike has totaled up the cost of keeping the Fring associates silent and added a line item to the new meth consortium’s books.
#Breaking bad season 1 episode 3 recap full#
The final scene in “Hazard Pay” brings the opening scene full circle. He’s going to do that by forcing the new business to assume some the old business’s debts - debts that, as far as Mike’s concerned, Walt and Jesse incurred when they killed Gus and destroyed his lab. We all did … It’s not gonna be me, but sooner or later, absent the hazard pay, someone’s gonna flip.” Mike counters that the new business he’s “starting up” with Walt and Jesse is “gonna make you whole.” For emphasis’s sake, he repeats himself: “You will … be … made … whole.” In other words, Mike is going to keep his word to all these former Fring associates, for survival’s sake as well as out of a sense of personal honor. “The wife asks me where the money is coming from, I got nothing to tell her,” the guy tells Mike. Mike assures Dennis that the death of Chow was not payback or “a message” but “a mistake.” Still, Dennis has concerns. But during that first meeting with Dennis, it becomes clear to Mike that even if “a deal’s a deal,” reality is also reality. Ostensibly, Mike is there to warn ex-Fring associate Dennis Markowski that even though the money has been frozen, everybody is still obligated to keep their mouths shut. He’s visiting all the incarcerated Madrigal/Los Pollos Hermanos people whose Cayman Islands hush money, i.e., “hazard pay,” was frozen by the DEA’s investigation of Gus Fring. Mike, the most hard-nosed member of the new Walt-Mike-Jesse meth consortium, is posing as a paralegal. What’s happening in this opening scene is due diligence. Like the rest of this muted, surprising episode, and like so much of Breaking Bad, it’s really about the details of running a business: product and profit versus overhead and expenses. The first scene in “Hazard Pay” only looks like a prison visit.