Well, okay. Just over the QUARTER-way mark. Season 5, the final series of the getting-darker-by-the-episode AMC show is being split into two 8 episode "seasons," the first eight of which we're halfway through, the second starts in 2013.

Okay, enough of that.

Last night's ep 5, Dead Freight, was arguably the most exciting to date. There's a old adage in the theatre that if you have a gun hanging above the mantlepiece in Act 1, that gun better be fired by Act 2 (or 3, depending on which version of "Chekhov's Gun" rule you abide by - and just to be clear, we're talking about the Russian playwrite Anton Chekhov, not Ensign Chekhov of Star Trek fame). In terms of Breaking Bad, if you see someone unfamiliar appearing in the opening scenes of an episode, expect their appearance to be fully explained sometime between the end of the current episode, or the end of the season (example: the Hazmat clothed figures pulling the burnt stuffed animal out of the Whites' pool a couple seasons ago). Last night's ep provided a much quicker payoff.

In beginning, we see a kid on a motorcycle. We meet him again before the end of the show, at a time that could not be worse, both for him and for us, thrilled by the heist our boys had just pulled off, adrenaline in living rooms all over America running every bit as hot as it was through Jesse's veins.

Until the very end. Last night's drama was a return to the "2 steps forward, 1.94 steps back" progress that has plagued Walter and Jesse from the start.

Let me make this clear. As sympathetic as the characters of Breaking Bad can be, they are, in the end, not sympathetic, except maybe the one stone-cold killer we know as Mike. As strange as it is, Mike has become the story's moral compass, the one guy who knows right from wrong. I just know that he is not happy with what happened last night. Not happy at all.