Breaking Bad re-watch: Season 2, Episode 2: "Grilled"

Tuco, we hardly knew ye!

Raymond Cruz’s psycho, drug-fueled gangster meets his end. It’s probably for the best that the character checked out early. He was the perfect foil when the show was still classifiable as a dark comedy, letting Walt (Bran Cranston) and Jesse (Aaron Paul) know that they’re in a different world now. But now that they, and the show, have fully stepped into that world, such a villain archetype is something we’ve seen a million times. The series is above just giving us the formulaic, and will replace him with more interesting and original antagonists, such as Mark Margolis’ bell-ringing Hector “Tio” Salamanca who first appears in this episode.

While one villain run ends and a new one begins, a character on the right side of the law takes a major turn. Hank (Dean Norris) steps up to help search for his missing brother-in-law, abducted by Tuco last episode unbeknownst to him and the rest of Walt's family. This gives the character a little more to do than just provide comic relief, or at least groaningly try to provide it. But when his search leads him to Tuco’s hideout, Hank’s arc skids onto a different track in just a single scene. He dispatches the psycho dealer (already wounded by Jesse) in a shootout, and with Tuco the old Hank also dies. The episode ends there, but we’ll soon see Hank reborn as a crucial character. After watching the whole series, it was hard to remember he was anything but until I revisited season one.

Oh yeah, this episode has Walt and Jesse in it, too. Abducted last time, the two are now in a dilapidated shack with Tio and sobrino (that’s "nephew" in Spanish) Salamanca, waiting for a ride to take them across the border. The tension as they wait is pretty high as they never know what Tuco’s going to do. Not quite as high as the preceding episode, but that's because Jesse and Walt’s bickering about how to slip Tuco the ricin comically breaks the ice a bit.

Tuco predictably loses his cool, forcing Walt to let out Heisenberg in order to save himself and Jesse. The story arc of their abduction will be fully resolved rather anticlimactically (unless you like seeing Bryan Cranston get basic cable naked), but for now, they get out of danger and give a little hurt back to their abductor before Hank finishes the job.