"What's changed, Jesse?"

"Grilled" and "Bit By a Dead Bee" provide an interesting study in contrasts. If the latter episode explores what happens when Walt and Jesse try to run away from the consequences of the situation they've become embroiled in, the former depicts the two running full bore into consequences because there's nothing else for them to do. 

Throughout the episode Walt and Jesse concoct ways to avoid the presumably awful fate of working in Tuco's superlab. Jesse tries to convince Tuco to snort the ricin and almost succeeds. Jesse and Walt then try to lace Tuco's food with it -- "Grilled" is unbelievably tense, but no sequence in the episode is more difficult to watch than when Tuco's uncle foils their plan by repeatedly ringing his bell, turning a seemingly benign object into the most dangerous weapon in an episode full of deadly weapons. "Tio" can barely move, but the power he is able to wield is enough to doom the able-bodied Walt and Jesse, and that dichotomy suffuses the middle stretch of the episode with an almost unbearable tension.

When Hank makes a timely appearance in his search for Walt and dispatches Tuco, Walt and Jesse spend the entirety of the next episode creating alibis for themselves. (Catherine mentioned episode cold opens in her blog post, and I love the ways the openings of these episodes encapsulate what's to come in each one. The opening of "Grilled" foreshadows the conflict between Tuco and Walt, Jesse, and Hank in the episode's climax -- similar to the cold open of the premiere, only in color and referencing this specific episode -- while "Bit By a Dead Bee"'s opening displays the lengths to which Walter will go to hide what has happened to him from the outside world, specifically by stripping naked in a supermarket. Each episode has a very specific focus, as their openings demonstrate.) Jesse's alibi in particular nearly falls apart thanks to the sudden reappearance of Tio Salamanca. The show did such a good job of associating the sound of his bell ringing with grave danger for Walt and Jesse in the previous episode that the audience nervously anticipates hearing the familiar sound one more time, which would singlehandedly send Jesse to jail (though it never happens).

What particularly interests me are Walter's motivations at this point in the series. In Baltzer-Jaray's essay, she characterizes Walt's newfound life of crime as resulting from a desire to take control of the direction of his life following his cancer diagnosis. Indeed, Walt's life had been so unfulfilling to that point (as he explains to his psychologist, who I know as The Mayor from Buffy) that it's fairly clear that his life has been reenergized by his new purpose. (The song "Waiting Around to Die" plays during the episode, which could be interpreted as a reflection of Walt's mental state -- he certainly has no intention of waiting around to die of cancer.) When he tells Jesse that he wants to continue making meth because nothing has changed, it doesn't seem like he's wrong, as the goal of leaving enough money for his family remains the same. But as Walt is drawn into the drug trade and all of its short-term benefits, it's easy to see how it might erode the foundations of his life in the long run. His family can only be distrustful of him after his disappearance, and Skyler's suspicions aren't going to go away, especially after he's unable to come up with an excuse to explain away his second cell phone. In the end, he might lose a lot more than his life.