‘Breaking Bad’ fourth season comes back strong

In the fourth season premiere of “Breaking Bad” on AMC, Walter White – high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine mixmeister extraordinaire – targeted a rival chemist, Gale, out of fear and self-preservation.

Gus Fring, his current – well, I suppose “benefactor” is too strong a word, in the sense of “patron” or “supporter.” “Boss” will probably have to do, although Gus was working with Gale before Walt and lab assistant Jesse Pinkman came along.

Gus had built a secret, commercial-grade meth lab to Gale’s specifications underneath a drycleaning operation. The meth is cooked, packaged and distributed throughout the southwestern United States using Gus’s fried chicken franchise as a cover.

Gus was satisfied with Gale’s product, but was impressed with the crystal meth Walt produced. As a chemistry teacher, Walt insisted on the highest quality materials for his product. If he could make the purest crystal, Walt reasoned, he could sell it for the best price, and he was desperate to make as much money as possible in the wake of his diagnosis of cancer, now a little over a year ago. Between poor health coverage through the school, a son with cerebral palsy and his newborn daughter, Walt was worried that treatments for his cancer – now in remission – would leave his family penniless.

Walt had the technique. What he didn’t have was the marketing. He was also making some serious inroads in local distribution. So when Walt approached Gus about distributing his product throughout the Southwest, Gus was willing to listen. He was a businessman, after all, and Walt had a superior product. Gus showed Walt the lab Gale had put together, and Walt was duly impressed.

Yes, after months of perfecting his product cooking in a rundown Winnebago in the desert, Walt was actually excited about using such precisely calibrated commercial equipment to craft his sky-blue meth and, for the first time since he started down this path, expressed actual enthusiasm.

This secret lab could produce the volume needed to secure his family’s future. This despite the fact that in the process of living the double life necessary to cook methamphetamine – not only fantastically illegal, destructive and immoral but which made him a target for as closely connected a person as his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank – Walt and his wife, Skyler, had become estranged.

Tension

Walt also had good reason to believe Gus wanted Gale to learn the secrets behind Walt’s superior product before tipping Walt into a shallow grave in the New Mexico desert. Despite Walt’s attempts to bond with him, Gus remained aloof and hard for Walt to read. That and Gale just made himself too interested in the details of Walt’s cooking.

When this antipathy became too obvious to ignore any further, Walt sent Jesse to kill Gale. Just as Gus’s hired gunman was drawing on Walt, Jesse was at Gale’s apartment pulling the trigger.

And while one of Gus’s security people – a gunman who’d gotten himself identified at Gale’s apartment – tried to convince Gus he was capable of re-creating Walt’s recipe, it was clear he was hopelessly out of his depth, and Gus ... fired him, pretty violently, with a box-cutter to the throat.

Walt had won. He was Keeper of the Knowledge, and for the moment, he was safe.

But Walt’s still struggling with the day-to-day problems of being the top meth producer in the Southland – finding ways to launder his money and avoid rival meth-dealers and hitmen, looking after his brother-in-law (who’s in rehab after being shot by drug-dealing assassins who’d been after Walt to begin with), and trying to keep his assistant Jesse from flaking out on him while struggling to put his family back together.

And in the meantime, Gus is still pretty hard to read. A puzzle – one Walt is desperate to try and figure out.

New episodes of “Breaking Bad” premiere Sundays at 10/9c on AMC. The show carries an MA rating for excellent reasons.