A Fly in the Ointment?
**THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD THROUGHOUT- YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED**
Having recently rewatched Breaking Bad in its entirety, one of the episodes that continues to stand out to me is the tenth episode of season three, titled “Fly.” When I first watched the show, “Fly” instantly became one of my favorite episodes, although back then I couldn’t quite place my finger on why I loved it so much. I guess there was something unique about it that caught my attention and stuck with me. It came as a huge surprise to me, then, when I discovered that “Fly” was an extremely divisive episode at the time it aired in 2010, with a large portion of audiences complaining that it was slow, boring, and that nothing happens. Critics’ reactions were generally more favorable, but there were still some, like Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club, who hated the episode too.
As my own sort of confused original reaction to it suggests, “Fly” is one of the more puzzling hours of a popular, mainstream tv show to exist. It was only after watching it again this go around that I was able to fully realize why I love “Fly” so much and why so many other people loathed it. Although I understand some of the criticisms levied against it, “Fly” is in my opinion the single most important episode in the entire series of Breaking Bad, in that it marks a huge turning point in the show’s larger trajectory and greatly fleshes out the complexity of its main characters.
Following the opening title, “Fly” begins with Walt looking up at the flashing light of the smoke detector on his ceiling, as he struggles to get any sleep. After waking up and driving to work, Walt and his partner Jesse cook up a fresh batch of meth. Closing out another long, ordinary day, Jesse leaves as Walt stays behind to try to figure out why the yield of the cook is a little short of what it should be. Walt, now agitated, is interrupted when he notices a house fly land on his calculations paper. After several failed attempts to swat the fly, Walt falls off the lab’s catwalk, and it is implied that he stays up the whole rest of the evening and overnight trying to kill the fly. The remainder of the episode takes place the following day after Jesse comes back, as Walt insists that they have to get rid of this “contaminant” before they can resume cooking.
At first, Jesse thinks that Walt is crazy for being so worked up about a single fly, and we, as viewers, are inclined to agree. Why does this small, seemingly insignificant fly matter so much to Walt when it can’t affect their meth at all? The only plausible explanation, if we simply read the fly literally, is that it’s a combination of Walt’s uptight perfectionism wanting to preserve the pristine state of the superlab and possibly the paranoia that has been building up from his recent insomnia. But as the episode progresses and Walt refuses to do anything else, it becomes evident that this fly is more than meets the eye, as it takes on a special symbolic meaning for Walt.
The beauty of the episode (but also the main qualm of its critics) is that it doesn’t explicitly spell out what the fly represents. The writers, along with director Rian Johnson, leave it up to each audience member to determine what they think the fly is. In that sense, "Fly"'s ambiguity has a lot in common with arthouse cinema, something that most casual American television viewers are unlikely to be familiar with. There are a couple valid readings of the fly, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that it is a physical manifestation of the internal conflict Walt is experiencing at this point in time, specifically the collective guilt and regret he feels for the consequences of his actions since joining the meth trade.
As alluded to in the main monologue he delivers to Jesse in the episode, Walt believes that he missed the “perfect moment” to die when his family would have still missed him. He pinpoints the night of Jane’s (Jesse’s girlfriend from season 2) death as this moment, when he heard Skylar singing a lullaby through the baby monitor to his daughter Holly. Connecting his regret about how getting involved in the meth trade has left him estranged from his family (who he has supposedly been doing this whole thing for) to the lasting guilt he has carried inside him since letting Jane die on the bed and feeling like he was responsible for the mid-air plane collision that Jane’s father caused (all of which Jesse or no one else knows), Walt tells Jesse that he ran into Jane’s dad at the bar the night Jane died, marveling at the odds that something like that could happen.
For all of the third season prior to “Fly”, Walt hasn’t had any time to himself to work through the repercussions of Jane’s death and the plane collision due to all the things he has had to deal with, such as Skylar filing for divorce and having an affair, Hank critically beating Jesse to a pulp, and Hank narrowly surviving an assassination attempt by two Mexican cartel hitmen. Nevertheless, Walt’s insomnia, along with a scene in the previous episode where he almost commits suicide by driving head on into a truck, show that all of these negative occurrences (all of which Walt, in one way or another, has contributed to) have added up and taken a heavy toll on his conscience. Confiding in Jesse is the first time that Walt has opened up about the torment his sins are weighing down on him; he has reached a point where he can no longer bury or repress these feelings. Walt comes to associate this fly, or “contaminant,” with his feelings of guilt and regret, and that is the reason why he is so preoccupied with trying to kill it (which stands in for trying to rid himself of these feelings once and for all). It’s also worth noting that the first 45 seconds of the episode (before the opening title) shows close-ups of a fly as we hear Skylar singing the lullaby to Holly on the soundtrack (the moment that Walt later recounts to Jesse), further establishing the link between the fly and Walt’s guilt.
In the words of creator/showrunner Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad was always about how Walter White transformed from “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” Over the course of the series, Walt’s character undergoes drastic changes as part of this arc, to the point where he is a completely different individual from the first episode to the season finale. It’s true that the moment near the end of season two, when Walt allows Jane to die right in front of him without intervening, is a crucial step in this transformation. Still, throughout the third season, Walt remains a somewhat sympathetic character rather than being a straight-up antagonist who crosses over from anti-hero to bad person. As others have noted, the third season is where the show became much more serious and dramatic, largely eschewing most of the dark comedy from the first two seasons, but I would argue that “Fly” represents the exact moment where the series transitions into a prolonged stage of tragedy that persists for all of seasons four and five.
I find this intriguing, because as a self-contained episode, letting Walt outwardly express these feelings of guilt and regret should by all accounts make him more sympathetic to us, but this episode, taken in the context of the whole series, can be seen as the catalyst that directly led to Walt’s downward spiral and turned him into a monster. A seemingly radical idea, but hear me out. The end of “Fly” sees Walt give up on trying to kill the fly, as he tells Jesse that killing the fly doesn’t matter anymore when he says, “Jesse, let it go… it’s all contaminated.” Walt’s change in attitude toward the fly, in keeping with the fly’s symbolic meaning, signals that he has finally accepted the guilt and regret for what it is. He realizes that there is nothing he can do about these feelings, they’ll always be there and he’ll just have to live with them (a point that is driven home by a new fly still being on the smoke detector haunting Walt in the final scene, even after Jesse was able to kill the fly in the lab). If Walt were still a decent human being, his realization in these final scenes of the episode would make him repent and want to stop being involved in the meth trade at once, so as not to incur any further guilt on his conscience. As we know though, Walt is no longer the same person as the high school chemistry teacher we met in the pilot, he has become a broken man, and his acceptance of this guilt and regret actually has the exact opposite effect on him.
Beginning in the following episodes after “Fly” and continuing through the fourth and fifth seasons, Walt just becomes more ruthless and despicable. He will stop at nothing to make sure that he comes out on top, anyone who gets in his way be damned (i.e. Walt giving the order to Jesse to kill Gale, Walt turning Jesse against Gus by poisoning Brock, Walt showing little remorse after Todd kills the kid on the motorcycle following the train heist in season five, etc.). It’s as if Walt basically said, “screw it, I’m good at this, I have nothing left to lose at this point, I’ve already gotten this far, and I might die soon if the cancer comes back, so I might as well try to make this last as long as possible.” Everything from here goes downhill, as the human cost of Walt’s operation stacks up and everyone he cares about tragically ends up having their lives destroyed. As far as I’m concerned, Walt’s character evolution can be boiled down to before “Fly” and after “Fly;” by and large, the Walter White side of Walt’s identity died off with this episode, and all that remained afterwards was his Heisenberg persona.
At its core though, the one constant that made Breaking Bad such a compelling show was the complicated central relationship between Walt and Jesse, and “Fly” might offer the best exploration of what that dynamic was really about. Before Walt’s long monologue about missing his perfect moment to die, Jesse tells Walt a story about how his late aunt who died of cancer became obsessive over a possum that was underneath the floorboards of her house, insisting that she could still hear it even after it was trapped and killed. Jesse explains to Walt, “It wasn’t like her to be that way,” as he found out shortly thereafter that the cancer had spread to his aunt’s brain and that was why she was having these auditory hallucinations of the possum. In attempting to draw a parallel from Walt to his aunt, Jesse demonstrates a deep concern over Walt’s health, insinuating that Walt is like a family member to him and he doesn’t enjoy seeing Walt like this. Wanting Walt to feel better, Jesse vows to help him kill the fly, and does so even after Walt tells Jesse that the fly doesn’t matter anymore.
Jesse’s concern over Walt is returned by Walt in the last scene leading up to when Jesse finally kills the fly, when Walt nearly confesses to Jesse the truth about Jane, as he says, “Jesse…I’m sorry about Jane… I’m very sorry.” Bryan Cranston’s sensitive delivery of these lines come straight from the heart, showing that Walt genuinely cares about Jesse as a person. Even when he is using Jesse and trying to control him like he were a leashed-up dog, Walt always has Jesse’s wellbeing in mind, something Jesse acknowledges when he tells Walt, “Like you said, we both would’ve been dead within a week” (referring to what would have happened to him if Jane hadn’t died). Through all of the ups and downs of their often heated relationship, Walt and Jesse both remain loyal to each other (until Jesse finds out about the horrible secrets Walt kept from him in the last half of the fifth season, though they do somewhat reconcile in the series finale), because ultimately, they are two lost souls who need each other to survive. It’s undoubtedly messy, but there is (and always was) real mutual affection shared between them.
Apart from the enormous impact “Fly” generated on the narrative and characters in Breaking Bad, the reaction to the episode itself provides us with valuable insights about spectators’ relationship with modern television. First, it tells us that most current shows have become so intensely serialized that serialization is now expected as the norm; episodic television is much less common. “Fly,” however, is a great example of how a more one-off type episode can contribute to the larger serialized arc of the show, even if it initially appears that it has little to no effect on what is happening at the moment. This is what sets complex tv series like Breaking Bad apart from other shows, as they are able to integrate season-long or series-long arcs across individual episodes, finding a happy balance between serialized and episodic storytelling. The mixed reaction to “Fly” also shows us that most viewers prefer plot-driven narratives over character-driven ones. Even though Breaking Bad is a show where character relationships are vital, it is still very much a plot-driven show, as there are usually multiple lines of action happening from one episode to the next to move the story along. Being that “Fly” goes against these established conventions- it takes place all in one location and is essentially a plotless episode (the only thing that literally happens is Jesse kills the fly), it’s understandable why many people didn’t respond to the episode favorably. Perhaps, as Amanda Lotz suggests in her book Cable Guys, the pleasure that most viewers find in watching a male anti-hero show like Breaking Bad has less to do with viewer identification and more with considering one’s own moral compass in conjunction with the various dilemmas these series put their protagonists in.