Vince Gilligan’s crime/family drama Breaking Bad (2008-2013) is often cited as one of the greatest television shows ever made, one of the best examples of the era of prestige cable drama. Telling the story of science teacher-turned-meth-cook Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his burnout assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), Breaking Bad’s serialized narrative, layered performances and dedication to dynamic visual storytelling elevate it in ways not enjoyed by most cable dramas. Perhaps one of the most presentational and ambitious episodes of the series is the tenth episode of season three, “Fly,” directed by Rian Johnson. A classic example of the ‘bottle episode’ – a television term for episodes that are smaller in scale and use existing sets to save money – “Fly” makes intelligent use of its limited setting and smaller scope to establish visual themes and symbols that personify both Walt’s fractious relationship with Jesse and his own feelings of emasculation and marginalization at this point in the series. Through both semiotic and social criticism lenses, “Fly” will be deconstructed to examine the show’s greater themes of masculinity, power, and control as personified through the relationships between Walt, Jesse and the titular fly.
Summary
Set late in the third season of the show, “Fly” shows a sleep-deprived Walt arriving to work at the super-lab meth kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) has set up for himself and his partner Jesse. Obsessively poring over formulas to determine the source of a missing amount of meth in their yield after Jesse leaves for the day, Walt notices a single fly buzzing around the super-lab. After several unsuccessful attempts to hit and kill it, Walt ends up falling from the catwalk of the lab and bumping his head badly in the fall.
The next day, Jesse shows up to the lab to see Walt has stayed in the lab all night chasing the fly and attempting to drive it out using positive pressure and a home-made flyswatter that makes him seem even more erratic. Jesse is initially skeptical of the existence of the fly, but is eventually convinced and, seeing Walt’s desperation and fatigue, decides to help him get out of the lab so he can get some rest. However, Walt, seeing his attempts to drive him out of the lab, locks Jesse out instead, forcing Jesse to cut the power from outside to convince Walt to let him back in.
After setting flypaper all around the super-lab, Jesse spikes Walt’s coffee with sleeping pills in order to get Walt to sleep, which leads to a series of monologues where Jesse likens Walt’s obsessiveness with his dead aunt’s obsession over a possum in her home (it being the first sign of her brain tumor), and Walt opines about the ‘perfect moment’ to have died from cancer, deciding it should have been the night Jane died. (Jane was Jesse’s drug-addict girlfriend from last season, who indirectly choked to death on vomit during an overdose, while Walt watched and did nothing.) Jesse, stirred by Walt’s compassion and seeing the fly on the ceiling, climbs to the top of a tall ladder to kill it, the delirious Walt falling asleep just short of confessing his role in Jane’s death.
Jesse eventually kills the fly, gets Walt to bed, and does the meth cooking while he sleeps. The following morning, Walt implicitly accuses Jesse of stealing the meth that led to the discrepancy in their yield at the beginning of the episode, which angers Jesse. Back home the following night, Walt continues to be unable to sleep, eventually seeing another fly land on the ceiling above him as the episode ends.
Semiotics – The Fly as Walt’s Insecurity
Semiotics is the practice of interpreting visual and textual symbols within a work of communication or art to discern its meaning (Sillars and Gronbeck, 2001). When viewing a text semiotically, the goal is to identify those units or aspects within that text that can be seen as ‘signs,’ relating those signs to the meaning of the text. These signs can vary based on the culture from which the text comes, or the culture of the interpreter themselves. Semiotics can take many different examples, whether analyzing a text’s structure, material symbols, or performances. To that end, a semiotic analysis of a text allows a greater symbolic meaning to be derived from subtext that is laid out implicitly through the audio-visual elements of a text.
When viewed semiotically, “Fly” contains many different visual and textual symbols from which to work. Most prominent among them is the fly of the episode’s title – a single insect that Walt and Jesse chase around the super-lab for the duration of the episode. Walter White, as a character, is an immensely calculating and power-hungry man: his expert meth recipe comes as a result of rigorous study and experimentation with chemistry, and he clearly sees himself as the intellectual better over the younger, more informal Jesse. At all turns, he strives to keep everything in his life perfect and under control: the anti-septic, clean super-lab is meant to be free of contamination, and he starts the episode obsessing over a .14% discrepancy in their perceived yield, condescending to Jesse at all turns when he attempts to help solve the problem.
The fly’s presence in the super-lab acts as a symbol of Walt’s never-ending quest for perfection, as well as its unattainability. The cold open of the episode establishes the fly as a major visual motif throughout the episode, simply showing extreme close-up shots of the fly’s mandibles, eyes and wings in strangely out-of-focus and dreamlike shots, while the lullaby “Hush, Little Baby” is sung. This becomes symbolic for both the fated creation of the fly that will cause Walt so much existential torment, as well as ironically show such a small object as large and terrifying (which it will be for Walt throughout the episode).
The fly’s short life-span also reflects Walt’s singular and unique feelings of mortality. Just as Walt is unable to kill the fly no matter where he turns, he himself feels he has “lived too long.” As he laments in his monologue late in the episode, Walt expected to be long gone by now due to the cancer that led him to seek a life as a meth dealer in the first place. However, since his cancer is in remission, he feels somewhat trapped by the life he has started for himself (which he did not expect to survive in the first place). Now that he has gone down that road, he wrestles with himself over the fact that he continues because he secretly loves the power that the life of crime provides him, but is also afraid that he will now live to see the consequences of his criminal livelihood.
In many ways, the fly also represents Walt’s own feelings of inadequacy, which stem from his position in Gus Fring’s employment. The fact that the fly actively prevents Walt from cooking can be seen as a psychological cry for help, Walt expressing his subconscious desire to not cook under someone else’s thumb anymore. Halfway through the episode, Walt explains that they cannot cook with the contaminant in the room, as their situation has changed from the independent operators they were in the first season to the mid-level cooks within a larger structure that has power over them: “there’s no more room for errornot with these people.” In many ways, this fly represents how small Walt feels within Gus’s operation.
Another element of this inadequacy is Skyler’s newfound role in his operation. At this point in the series, his wife Skylar now knows about the business and has insinuated herself in it to protect herself, which further chips away at Walt’s sense of independence. A major part of the show is Walt’s discovery of his need for power and control, to be in charge – his current situation, with people both at work and home calling the shots over him, causes him tremendous anxiety, leaving him feeling as small as a fly. Walt’s science-focused mind sees the world as a series of equations that always have the perfect answer: he opines to Jesse that he is frustrated that he cannot find the mathematically perfect way to convince Skylar that he knows what he is doing:
“I truly believe there exists some combination of words. There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that can explain all of this, but with her I just can't ever seem to find them.”
This immovable sense of control and obsessiveness leads him to act erratically and dangerously when faced with an insurmountable problem, for which the fly serves as a perfect metaphor.
The super-lab setting, and Johnson’s creative shot choices, also play a fundamental part in selling the claustrophobic and abstracted tone of the episode. In scenes concerning the fly, Johnson uses very presentational framing and symmetrical shots to showcase the uncanny nature of the fly’s presence. Top-down shots at extreme high angles, from the fly’s POV, are used to show Walt and/or Jesse’s feelings of smallness and powerlessness to kill the fly, as it can reach heights the two could never imagine.
Walt’s obsession with killing the fly, like many of his other obsessions, quickly takes hold of him in the episode and prevents him from doing the things that are really important in his life. Once he discovers the presence of the fly, he cannot cook, sleep or go home without getting rid of the ‘contaminant.’ If the super-lab represents Walt’s world, the fly is the one little thing that Walt cannot control or get rid of, which upsets his pathological need to be the one in charge of his own world. Eventually, some part of Walt gives up and tells Jesse, “It’s all contaminated.” While textually, this refers to the status of the lab, the subtext of that wearily-delivered line indicates Walt’s feeling that everything he touches – his life – is tainted irrevocably. There is no turning back from his dangerous and unfulfilling life of crime. This is made even clearer in the film’s final moments, in which Walt returns to his bed to face insomnia once more. This time, however, a fly appears in the blinking red light of the smoke detector that lies above him, showing Walt that there will always be some level of contamination in his life.
Social Criticism – Walt and Jesse as Unequal Partners
According to Sillars and Gronbeck (2001), social criticism is a form of analysis that explores the construction of relationships. These relationships can take many forms, whether it is that between an individual and their identity, or the groups they associate with, or even the way they interact within various social forces. Society is a group of relationships that presume some hierarchy of power, where some individuals have more than others; discerning the roles and levels of relationships, their respective expectations and connections, and more are all part of performing social criticism of a work.
However, Walt’s pathological need to assert his superiority and control over Jesse means that he cannot let Jesse have equal power in the relationship, which leads him to overcompensate and condescend even more than normal. Walt’s attempts to explain the situation with the fly to Jesse are done in ways that treat Jesse like a child, describing him as “a layman,” and he speaks slowly and simply to Jesse about the dangers of contamination. During these scenes, Walt is often framed within other objects, like tables and windows, showcasing those inner feelings of being trapped.
However, after Jesse spokes Walt’s coffee with sleeping pills, and his existing fatigue sets in, Walt begins to open up more about himself and his current anxieties. Central to this is his own feelings about himself and the death he should have had of cancer by this point in his life; here, Walt waxes philosophically about the nature of probability, trying to determine what moment in his life would have been ‘perfect’ to die in – ideally just after he made enough money to take care of his family, but before any of his family found out about the dirty business in which he was engaged. He also points out the miraculous encounter he had with Jane’s father in a bar the night before the man caused a plane crash in his grief. This puzzles Walt, as he says “the universe is random, it’s not inevitable,” and yet he found himself sitting next to that man on that night. In these scenes, Johnson frequently frames Walt and Jesse together, their blocking placing them closer and closer together as they bond in these moments, Walt confiding in Jesse as a friend for the first time in a while.
Jesse, in the meantime, struggles to assert himself under Walt’s domineering attitude, often taking a sarcastic or sardonic approach to Walt’s attitude. For most of the first half of the episode, Jesse tries to continue to cook and dismisses Walt’s concern about the fly. Jesse is less concerned with the quality of the product and the sanctity of the environment for their meth cooking, saying that “we’re making meth, not space shuttles,” and dismissing the need for quality control as claiming that they “make poison for people who don’t care.” He also clearly sees Walt’s condescension and throws it back at him: “You’re chasing a fly, and in your world, I’m the idiot?” As Walt grows increasingly obsessed with the fly (and consequently his own sense of control slipping away) it is Jesse whose super objective throughout the episode is to bring Walt back to reality, however sneakily he can. This is done through his consistent attempts to get Walt out of the lab, to make sure he isn’t shut out of the lab, and so on. His story about his aunt’s possum is itself a subtle lecture to Walt about how dangerous obsession can be for people’s minds. For as much as Walt talks down to Jesse, Jesse has a tremendous understanding of Walt.
In many ways, Jesse sees Walt as a father figure, and so much of what he does is in search of Walt’s approval. His feelings of frustration and claustrophobia in their relationship is exemplified through shots like the POV shot of Jesse scrubbing chrome parts to their lab, the camera mounted on the brush itself as it moves quickly back and forth dizzily while Jesse scrubs. His eventual dedication to getting the fly, his constant attempts to get Walt to sleep, and his eventual one-man cook job after Walt falls asleep is all in service of proving to Walt that he deserves to be equal partners with him.
In the end, however, Walt’s accusation that Jesse has been stealing meth proves to Jesse, once and for all, that Walt will never truly see him as an equal. Rather than being a resourceful friend and confidante, Walt will always see Jesse as the irresponsible child he must continue to lead around and keep under his thumb. Walt admits in one scene that he believes “we are who we are”; this, along with his cold, scientific method of evaluating each situation in which he finds himself, goes a long way toward explaining his black-and-white view of the world. In this way, the end of “Fly” becomes a point of no return for Jesse, who now knows to abandon his quest to get through to Walt.
“Fly” represents a signature moment in the social relationship between Walt and Jesse, perfectly exploring their dynamic in subtle and overt ways. The mentor-mentee relationship they have had the whole time is given its greatest test as Jesse attempts to assert himself as Walt’s equal, which the control-freak Walt will not allow. As a result, the fly situation becomes a tug of war between the two characters for control over their relationship, with Walt turning down Jesse’s reasonable offers of help at every turn. It is only after Jesse performs subterfuge against Walt that he gets him to become vulnerable and open up to him, hashing out emotional anxieties that have been present for seasons at this point in the show, and coming close to bringing out some real revelations about Walt’s role in Jane’s death. However, because of Walt’s inability to change, this ultimate opportunity for catharsis is tragically cut short, thus creating a rift in Walt and Jesse’s relationship that will persist through the remainder of the series.
Conclusion
When viewed through semiotic and social criticism perspectives, the Breaking Bad episode “Fly” becomes a stellar examination of both the symbolic anxieties that Walt and Jesse are going through as people in their particular situation, as well as a social turning point in their relationship with each other as partners and people. The titular fly becomes a symbol for all of Walt’s insecurities and guilt about the position he has put his family in, the crimes he has committed thus far, and his overall frustration at the lack of control over his life. The fly becomes the White Whale to Walt’s Ahab, with only the younger Jesse to try to snap him out of his foolish quest. The episode is also the lynchpin for Walt and Jesse’s confirmation that they will never truly be equal partners in Gus Fring’s operation, with moments of true solidarity and friendship undercut by constant bickering and tactics to establish power over the other. By episode’s end, Jesse recognizes that, even after all of his sacrifices and love for Walt, Walt will never have that same level of trust and brotherhood. Director Rian Johnson makes incredible use of the elaborate super-lab setting and cinematography to convey these visual and thematic symbols, shifting effortlessly between presentational scenes with the fly and more naturalistically-filmed conversations between the episode’s two characters. In the end, all of these elements combine to make “Fly” one of the greatest, most innovative episodes in one of the best television dramas ever made.
References
Caitlin, S. & Walley-Beckett, M (writer), Johnson, R. (director). (May 23, 2010). Fly (Breaking
Bad episode). In Gilligan, V. (producer), Breaking Bad.
Sillars, M., & Gronbeck, B. (2001). Communication criticism. Waveland Press.
