Breaking down ‘Breaking Bad’: Season 5, episode 10, ‘Buried’ and Lydia’s blues
Why is the story of Lydia important anymore? If you take away the adrenaline that started pumping with the desert shooting last week and Todd, you may wonder that question from “Breaking Bad.” Laura Fraser is not an actress that has been a part of the show since the beginning, yet she has been a part of an integral scene each of the past two weeks instead of giving us more Jesse, Walt, Saul, or anyone else.
Needless to say, she is still important, and will continue to be almost a walking ghost of what Walt left behind. She screams money at this point with her very aesthetic: She walks in the desert wearing a pair of Louboutin heels, and Vince Gilligan makes sure that these are focused on these things long enough for you to really notice. In season 5A, these were not the top-dollar shoes she was wearing. Given that color is such a major theme of this show, we may be getting an extra use out of those red soles: It’s an aggressive color, symbolizing a woman who at one point was not nearly so keen to pass along her contacts in the Czech Republic.
But has Lydia “broke bad” in her own way? You could argue so. She is not Heisenberg, and does not try to be. Everything from her blindfold to her cowering during a gunfight gives her this delicate, fragile light, that she is somehow too cowardly to get involved in the real business. Yet, she is the real business. Just this outfit alone represents money, and blue in particular is important to this show for one simple reason. She can transform a lucrative business into (as Walt would say) an “empire business,” and that makes her someone that these people would want to protect. Nobody may like her, and that seems to be the case, but the feeling here is that they need her. She is the only real broker left of prominence, and she smartly keeps her contacts to herself.
This story is probably not going to end well for Lydia, given that she has a daughter and when unprotected, she is easy to defeat, but we imagine that there is a lot of story left here to tell. She is the figure that remains, the one that doesn’t knock; just like Walt ignored his past after getting “out” of it, he also ignored her. Sometimes, the biggest threats to you at the end of the day are the ones that you leave around.
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This is the latest edition in a weekly “Breaking Bad” analysis series, where we take a specific look at one key moment a week from the AMC hit. If you want to read our full review of “Buried,” click here, and we will have more moving forward to the weekend.
Photo: AMC