5x01 - 5x02

it's a given that walt's head trauma and gunshot injury are major mitigators of the bulk of his behaviour in these episodes. then there's the previously established issue of transference, which comes into play when the enormous sense of guilt he still carries about martha's murder finds a convenient focus in the search for donna. i think his motivation here is a belief that in rescuing donna he'll be atoning for (what he perceives as) failing martha; i.e. he has to save donna because he couldn't save martha. saving donna will balance the scales, in effect. this sort of 'cosmic tally' framing is very on-brand for walt: cf his belief that cady's accident was some kind of punishment for him having sex with lizzie, thus requiring him to perform whatever ritual it is i can't remember to even up the score.

all of this then piles atop his fixation on maintaining control. the more walt feels he's losing that control, the more threatened his sense of self becomes, leading to a kind of existential panic. his psyche copes with this by creating a less threatening reality, one he can control: inventing feelings for donna as part of a grand narrative in which he's the intended target of the attack. he then proceeds to ignore or lash out against anything (vic, evidence, logic) that doesn't forward or fit within his chosen narrative in order to preserve his artificial sense of control (due to defence mechanisms themselves requiring constant defending from the intrusions of reality). this leads him into a paradoxical spiral wherein the more he tries to exert control, the more out of control he becomes. the moral of the story is that attempts to control reality via a personal narrative always fail because reality gives zero fucks about your psychological constructs.

meanwhile, vic bears the brunt of all his shit, as well as taking care of him, and solving the fucking case, and saving his stupid ass from drowning, and giving tamar CPR to save her life. does vic get any credit? maybe a quick thank you? a brief but heartfelt apology? no she does not. am i bitter about it to this day? yes i most certainly am. however, as i said, getting shot + head trauma + pain + medication = heavy mitigation for assholery. that doesn't mean he just gets a pass, though, especially not for his particular cruelty in 5x02. those few seconds when he allows vic to believe that the jane doe in the morgue is donna are inexcusable. he can see how devastated she is and he knows that she's devastated for him. it is an entirely deliberate setup on his part and... just... what the actual fuck, walt?? it reads like punishment to me, but i don't understand where the desire to hurt her is coming from at that point. is it because he knows she's right about donna being the target but doesn't want to admit it? is it because his grand narrative is collapsing and he needs someone to blame for this whole clusterfuck? is it just a "my life is shitty and i feel like being a dick" move? i cannot account for it and that bugs me because this calculated viciousness isn't something walt has ever displayed towards her before.

5x03

it's a few(?) days later and, as usual, walt's injuries appear to be magically healed. now it's as if his constructed grand narrative never existed. he doesn't seem terribly upset that donna is avoiding him; he's got an air of sad defeat about him, but he's neither heartbroken nor making any real effort to change her mind. the latter could be read as him being respectful of her perceived wishes, but i'm not convinced by that. he didn't respect her expressed wishes when she first turned him down; instead, he continued to pursue her in his own waltish way. additionally, she's just been through a traumatic experience and, if he had any real feelings for her, he wouldn't hesitate to force the issue with his special brand of aggressive caretaking (which is what he does with vic).

since he's a perceptive man (when he's not being wilfully obtuse, anyway), it can't have escaped his attention that tamar's obsession was a mirror to his own. that might also be a factor in his anaemic response — it's gotta be an uncomfortable realisation, if nothing else — but given his overall personality i think it unlikely his ego would allow anything other than complete denial about the possibility that he could go as far as she did down the same path. despite (very! recent!) evidence to the contrary, and maybe even more than most people, he believes there's a point at which his conscious mind can overrule his unconscious. cool story, bro, but that's not how it works. the unconscious mind is the undertow beneath even the most placid surface. it's incredibly powerful and, if you get caught in it, it's almost impossible to escape without intervention.

so, in typical walt fashion, he chooses to ignore the problem rather than engage in some self-examination about the way he's been behaving. it's disappointing but completely unsurprising. what is surprising is something new that manifests in both this episode and in 5x07. there are several instances where we've seen him lash out defensively when feeling jealous or threatened, but always in reaction to an immediate situation. this isn't that; i don't know precisely how to define it, because it's not a single specific behaviour common to both circumstances. yet they're such markedly uncharacteristic incidents that they must stem from a common motivation, particularly given how deliberate and conscious his actions are. and although his intent is clearly to hurt vic, it's not to the level of cruelty in 5x02. these are small, petty hurts, like little jabs meant to sting but not inflict real damage. why, though? now that he's no longer shielded from the discomforts of emotional reality by his grand narrative, he's obviously extremely conflicted. his attempt at escapism hasn't done anything to resolve the turmoil going on in his psychological landscape; in fact, it's likely made things worse. that's the only explanation i can come up with for the very abrupt swerves he begins to take.

in this episode, the "it's work-related" phone call he makes to donna is very clearly performative. there is absolutely no reason why walt couldn't make that call in the privacy of his own office. instead, he deliberately walks out to use ruby's phone when vic is the only one there. his nervousness and dithering are probably real to a certain extent because there's precedent (cf him calling cady in 2x02), but i'd be surprised if some of it isn't solely for vic's benefit. his awareness of her presence is hardly subtle: he glances back at her after he dials; he glances back when he hears her footsteps; he looks at her when she's at the printer; he turns to look again when she walks away.

his behaviour makes it clear that he not only wants her to know he's making the call, but also wants her to hear whatever conversation eventuates; he sets it up that way. and it's confounding because it's so unlike him. this is like a foray into teenage levels of emotional maturity, whereas walt usually fluctuates between the two extremes of mature adult and cranky toddler. viewed from one direction he's regressing, but viewed from the other he's maturing. IDEK. i genuinely can't determine if he does it to get her attention and provoke a reaction (like pulling her pigtails?) or to punish her because he can't handle what he feels and the only way he can cope is by making it her fault. possibly it's a combination of both? added to this he continues to be perplexing by otherwise treating her with much more respect and consideration professionally than he has done in quite a while.

5x04

speaking of abrupt swerves, i submit this scene:

What Work Conversations Look Like According to Walt and Vic

as a scholar of the many expressions (or lack thereof) of walt longmire, i can state with authority that he has never looked at any of his other deputies in this manner. he's never even looked at either of his girlfriends in this manner. but there he is in the middle of his office (with dave milgrom standing off to the side), listening to vic report on a lead, and looking at her *waves hands wildly at screen* like that.

5x06

there's nothing relevant in 5x05 so we move on. here in 5x06 we just skip right over the part where dave should be petitioning a higher level court to get the judge on the case to recuse himself due to his personal relationship with the plaintiff's lawyer (*sigh*) and discover that vic's being called to be deposed as a witness for said plaintiff.

dave: but you said you had a good relationship. she likes you, right? happy employee? vic on the answering machine: damn it, walt, pick up! it's me, vic. walt's face: ... dave's face: oh, shit.

apart from enjoying the comedic excellence of this scene, i am fascinated by the news that walt has categorised his relationship with vic as "good" at this point. so many questions arise! i'm very curious to know walt longmire's definition of a good relationship because it appears to be quite different from mine. and considering that dave wasn't even introduced until two episodes ago, when was this statement made? was walt drunk at the time? damn it, i want answers!

next up is the absolutely excruciating awkwardness of vic's deposition, in which the ~revelation~ of the kiss in 5x01 wins first place in some kind of mortification championship. walt is even more than usually inscrutable in this scene, which i don't entirely know how to interpret, but i suspect it's because he's ruthlessly suppressing a fervent desire to punch and/or murder tucker baggett. for my purposes, the scene itself is only noteworthy in that it serves as a catalyst for the conversation between walt and vic that follows on the drive back to the office.

one of my favourite undergrad professors once described an epiphany as "an intellectual orgasm. in a can!" an idea that has continued to delight me immensely ever since. it pops into my head on those occasions when i have a breakthrough in understanding or a moment of significant insight about something, such as the one i had about the post-deposition conversation that turned out to be in complete opposition to the big chunk of words i'd already written about it. my intellectual orgasm in a can was so powerful that it untwisted my perspective of that scene and led me to an entirely new understanding that made so much more sense. it was pretty awesome, albeit humbling to learn i'd originally gotten it so wrong. but the good thing about being wrong is that i then get to figure out what's right, which for me is often more fun than just being right in the first place, because i am A Nerd. it turns out that where i'd been going wrong was in making a judgement based on an erroneous comparison. in the context of season 5 (and the entirety of season 4 as well), walt's been very closed off to vic; however, instead of comparing the walt in this scene with that closed-off walt, i'd been comparing him to early seasons walt, who's much more open (on the walt longmire scale of openness, anyway). it's such poor character analysis on my part that i'm kind of appalled at myself, and my only excuse is that the back half of season 4 and most of season 5 really mess me up. i'd never had an actual character trigger me until donna, but she does, and it's severe enough that i'm unable to untangle the character in the narrative from the trauma she represents, which is likely why this season is the hardest for me to analyse. olol thanks i hate it, etc.

back to walt, though. he's such a private person that he must be feeling a certain level of discomfort about the kiss being public knowledge. in spite of that, when vic brings up the topic, he actually talks to her about it rather than ignoring her or brushing her off. i used to think that walt referring to the kiss as "a moment" was an example of his favourite coping mechanism, aka denial. i thought he was too afraid to say the actual word because it would be an acknowledgement of what had happened. but actually this scene represents his first tentative effort to reach out to vic after a season and a half of nothing. he's not trying to diminish what happened between them; rather, he's redefining it, without reference to anyone but the two of them. by calling it "a moment", walt is reframing it not just as a single act but as a shared experience that was so much more than simply a kiss. that scene, that shared experience, is all about intimacy, vulnerability, and tenderness between the two of them. so here walt is saying "it doesn't matter how tucker baggett, or anyone else, misconstrues it, you and i know what it was and what it meant." apart from the romantic aspect, this 'us vs them' element of their relationship got lost (or, on days when i'm feeling particularly mad at walt, destroyed) in season 4. now he's taking the first small step towards reestablishing that sense of unity with vic and i am here for it.

in the final part of this scene, he tells her, "if you were unhireable, i wouldn't have hired you." it's a statement i'd always interpreted as meant to correct the logical fallacy (i.e. he hired her ergo she wasn't unhireable), and a bit of a jeer at tucker; given the expression on vic's face after he says it, that's how i think she herself takes it. but thanks to my intellectual orgasm in a can, i realised his intention is more personal. kind of like the scene in 4x01 in which vic tells him, "don't you touch me," what's important in this sentence isn't the verb; it's the pronoun. in the same way that his use of "a moment" excludes everyone but the two of them in regards to the kiss, this statement also serves to bind them together in a shared experience. he, walt, hired her, vic, and whatever tucker baggett or anyone else thinks about the matter has no bearing on them. they are now, and have always been, in this together. it's an affirmation of what's clearly spelled out in 2x12:

walt: why didn't you tell me this when you applied for the job? vic: 'cause i didn't think you'd hire me. walt: because you'd done the right thing at your last job?

he hired her when he didn't know the truth; he would've hired her even had he known the truth. she was never, and could never be, unhireable to him, regardless of whether or not she was unhireable to anyone else.

5x07

strap in kids, because here comes the longest part of this hybrid essay/conversation with myself. 5x07 is an episode i don't know very well; the case itself doesn't interest me and there's just too much donna in it for me to watch more than vic's scenes when i rewatch it at all. so, of course, because there just isn't enough irony in my life already, it would have to turn out that this deceptively non-relationship episode—in which a character positioned as walt's love interest has more screen-time than in any other episode!—is actually the most significant walt/vic relationship episode of the season. this discovery came in bits and pieces while i worked through other episodes, but as i wrote through everything that came up, its shape seemed to fall into four interwoven strands. none of them exist independently of the others so it's difficult to tease them apart, but they're roughly as follows.

strand 1: the title of the episode as an overarching theme. 'from this day forward' is an allusion to marriage vows. using that particular phrase to represent/encompass the episode is an interesting choice, given the number of other possible options from the same text, because this clause serves to define a temporal placement. grammatically speaking, 'from this day' positions us at a point in time that is 'now', while 'forward' indicates onward motion, i.e. 'beyond now'. there is no 'before now' within the parameters set by this subordinate clause. in a sense it severs the past from whatever meaning is made by the main clause to which it's attached. it marks the border where change takes place.

strand 2: walt's lack of interest in sexy times with donna. full disclosure: i've never actually watched the first four minutes of the episode. everything i know about it is secondhand, so there may be details that i'm missing. that said, walt certainly doesn't appear particularly bothered by ultimately not having sex that night/morning. in fact, he seems to give up on the idea quite easily. this impression is reinforced in a later scene with donna when he tells her he and his wife waited to have sex until they were married, then asks, "will you be all right if we just watch a movie tonight?" while the walt longmire lexicon can at times be very complicated to translate, in this case i really can't fathom what it could mean other than "i don't want to have sex with you".

strand 3: the very specific and unprovoked jab walt takes at vic on the first morning of the episode. in 5x06 walt tells dave he wants to settle the lawsuit because "it's about negotiating lies. i don't know how to play that game. [...] i care about being able to get back to doing my job. this lawsuit is a restraining order to keep me from being effective. these people did not elect me to protect myself, dave. i'm here to protect them." yet here in 5x07, when vic expresses her concern that he didn't sleep well because he's worried about the lawsuit, he mentions none of that noble reasoning. instead, he insinuates that his motivation was her deposition.

You okay?

when taken out of the context of their history, the words themselves might seem innocent; they might even seem to be meant as reassurance. in context, though, it's clear they're meant to sting. they imply that her deposition revealed something so shameful he's choosing to settle the lawsuit in order to keep it hidden. he's deliberately trying to make her feel small and guilty and responsible. this would be a dick move at any time, but given their post-deposition conversation in 5x06 it's particularly spiteful. the only motivation i can find for this abrupt swerve is that some kind of connection was made in walt's mind between vic and what happened (or rather didn't happen) with donna earlier that morning. not that vic in any way prompted his lack of, um, fervour with donna, but we certainly have canonical evidence that if walt really wants to get it on, he will get it on, physical discomfort notwithstanding. so what seems to be happening is that, rather than accepting and admitting to himself that he really isn't into donna, somewhere in the depths of his psyche, where all his confusing romantic and sexual vic-related feelings live, walt turns it around to become vic's fault that he didn't care enough to go to more effort to have sex with someone else.

strand 4: marriage as metaphor and symbolism. while marriage as a plot element is hardly unusual or noteworthy in the show, this episode features the concept of marriage as a recurring motif. for starters, there's the obvious parallel between tizz and walt: they're two people whose spouses were murdered. ordinarily this would be an inconsequential detail—walt deals with a lot of spouses of murder victims—but what's interesting here is that both of them are somewhat distanced from their marriages. by that i mean that martha was murdered several years ago and tizz hasn't seen her husband for two or three years. both of them are separated from marriage not only by death but also by time, which connects back to the overarching thesis of 'from this day forward'.

then there's the conversation at the end of the episode that i'm just going to refer to as the "let's not have sex" scene from now on. in it walt uses his marriage to establish what amounts to a barrier between himself and donna. he obviously feels he needs to justify or excuse his new reluctance to have sex with her, but instead of being direct about why, i.e. "it turns out i'm actually not into you", he references his history with martha. this abrupt swerve is probably the only situation in which i feel any compassion for donna. it's got to be confusing, even a little insulting; after all, it's a rejection. despite my belief that she deserves what she gets in every other circumstance, i make an exception here because, consciously or not, walt is being dishonest. by invoking his marriage in this context, he's implying something that's simply not true. to begin with, we know, and obviously walt knows, that he had sex with lizzie ambrose at least once when they were "not really dating", and at no point did he bring up waiting until marriage with her. then of course there's donna's own experience with him: that he was apparently quite willing to bone down when they were basically strangers, perhaps slightly less willing but not opposed to it a few days ago, and on neither occasion did he even hint about waiting. so while his sweet story of What Happened In My Marriage itself is true, what it implies isn't. it's merely a convenient shield for him to hide behind.

and that leads to what's at the heart of this, which is if marriage is the framework then what's inside it? something had to occur for walt to make his 180° spin from attempting sexy times with donna at least twice in the opening scene to basically telling her it's not going to happen at all only days later. i'd never been able to determine what it was because there just didn't seem to be anything that could qualify. of course, the underlying emotional reasoning has been evolving in his unconscious for a long time and we've seen what a messy struggle it's been because even within himself walt is a stubborn bastard. yet, in spite of his sometimes contradictory behaviour, when you take season 5 as a whole, there is an obvious linear progression towards a resolution. those apparent contradictions in behaviour are external indicators of the inner struggle between what he actually wants and what he thinks he should want, etc. which is all fine and dandy but the movement from struggle to resolution to action requires a trigger and i! could! not! find! it!

the problem is that causal relationships in psychology aren't always obvious. sometimes you have to make an inference based on the evidence and then work backwards to prove or disprove it by process of elimination. to that end consider, first, that walt's jab at vic early in the episode serves as the final external evidence of his emotional struggle; second, that the "let's not have sex" scene serves as the initial evidence of said struggle having been resolved. logically, then, the impetus for that resolution must be found at a point occurring chronologically between those two scenes. it also has to contain some kind of personal resonance for walt. now consider the scene in the middle of the episode in which tizz tells walt, "when you love someone as much as i loved tony, even when they're gone you can't help thinking they're gonna walk through the door. at least now i know he can't."

hat, rabbit, ta da!

no, really. that's it. anticlimactic as it seems, this quiet, unassuming moment is the something i could never find. this is the catalyst that enables walt's psyche to finally reconcile the conflicting parts of himself. is there direct textual evidence that this is the moment? nope. there's also no convenient light bulb going off over walt's head; nor is there one of those close-ups used to signify a character's mental breakthrough. yet it's the only plausible answer fitting all the parameters required by the question. additionally, if we examine the structure of the narrative, even the scene's placement—in the middle of the case and of the episode itself—implies its function as some sort of pivot, so that both temporally and thematically it's quite literally central.

but why? it seems like a total non sequitur in relation to what walt is/has been going through. that's why i said causality can be hard to determine. it's like trying to explain the train of thought that begins with a conversation about tying shoelaces and ends with you blurting out something about the donner party. your thoughts make the journey from A to B via logic determined by your individual neural connections and conceptual associations; however, anyone outside your head is going to look at you and say, "where the actual fuck did that come from?" possibly while backing away to a safe distance. (no this has never happened to me why do you ask?) the unconscious functions in a similar way: it obeys its own logic, but that logic is largely inaccessible by direct means. this is why ending up at B, even if you do know the location of A, can appear entirely random and without reason.

so, here's me teasing out the logic of walt's unconscious. to begin with, although tizz only mentions love, she's specifically talking about her husband, and walt is going to comprehend her words within the context of marriage. while (romantic) love and marriage aren't necessarily synonymous to everyone, for him they absolutely are. to walt, that kind of love is inextricably linked to the idea of marriage because his foundational experience took that path. in effect, his relationship with martha is the reference manual by which he navigates romantic love both conceptually and in praxis. that's actually the main reason why i always overlooked this scene: i'd supposed that whatever feelings he was feeling here had to do with martha. after all, walt + marriage = martha in the shorthand of the show. the problem with assuming that association here, though, is that it's lazy thinking. the narrative hasn't referenced or reminded us of martha in quite a while. in fact, the presence of her absence ceased to be an overt theme in walt's life mid-season 4. added to that, tizz isn't talking about her husband's murder; she's talking about the pain of years spent believing that he'd left her and being unable to find closure. her experience has nothing in common with walt's beyond grief and that's such a broad category it's essentially meaningless.

with neither martha nor a direct parallel to act as anchors for this analysis, we need to shift away from boolean-style thinking. ('cause lbr the unconscious is far more quantum than binary anyway.) embracing a more oblique approach, what i find is that walt's unconscious responds to tizz's statement by, in essence, posing its own real life 'compare and contrast' essay question. it asks him/itself, "in the contexts of love, marriage, and the prospective pain of being left, who do you love as much as tizz loved tony?" and since there's no way to consider that question honestly without confronting the pretence walt's been using as a defence mechanism since 4x07, the path he takes to arrive at an answer necessarily addresses and ultimately resolves his inner conflict at the same time. like many things we try to hide from ourselves for protection, what he's forced to admit is ultimately quite simple: the answer to the question is not donna. arriving at that admission is akin to reaching a destination, or the end of the quest, if you will. there's always a bit of an interlude before the next quest begins, and in this case it's taken up by the passage from unconscious to conscious mind. sometimes that sort of thing seems to happen suddenly and all at once, but i believe this is more of a gradual trickle situation. possibly because he's maintained his defences so staunchly and for so long that he needs to ease himself into the truth, though it's equally possible that it's simply the normal processing pace of walt's emotional insights. that would actually explain a lot. either way, by the end of the episode his conscious mind has received enough information to spur him to act on it, and obviously that action takes the form of the "let's not have sex" scene. so although he and donna don't officially "break up" until 5x10, any possibility of a romantic relationship between them effectively ends here.

bam! *mic drop* (idk i've just always wanted to do that)

frēonds, it seems you can take the girl out of academia, but you can't take academia out of the girl, 'cause i've got an itch in the back of my brain saying there's got to be a conclusion to wrap everything up. except conclusions and i have never really seen eye to metaphorical eye and this is not an academic paper, self. instead i'm going cheerfully rogue by introducing a new topic only tangentially related to my central thesis. because of reasons, that's why. and, weirdly enough, it's about donna. i know, right? but, see, the thing i've come to understand in the >3 months and >12K words it's taken me to get all this out is that donna's obvious role as a plot device isn't the excursion into horribly lazy writing i've always taken it for. i'm simultaneously grateful for that realisation and pissed off about it as evidence of how much she messes me up because i have degrees in this shit and i should be able to spot something that blatant at a distance even without my glasses on.

but the point is that donna's arc is heavy-handed by design because she's intended as a blunt instrument of dramatic irony. that's her whole purpose. her defining characteristic is being undefined not because the writers couldn't be bothered fleshing her out but by necessity. she's not a creature of the narrative, merely a tool in service to it, and her function is as a vessel, a blank canvas, a metaphor. she has to be explicitly unknowable in order to serve as the embodiment of fantasy, lies, and secrets; and as the manifestation of the familiar comforts of guilt and denial; the demands of the past; the tyranny of should*. as such, there's no means by which she could be more an agent of the unconscious unless she were an outright hallucination. i mean, come on, walt's impetus to pursue a relationship with her in the first place is due to a fucking dream.

in the conscious world, i seriously doubt he gives donna a moment's thought after the case in 4x05 is closed. having been confronted by the prospect of losing vic again, he's still suffering from jealousy and its consequences. the rift between them continues to increase largely due to him punishing both vic and himself: withdrawing from her like a wounded animal retreating to its den, except in this case he retreats into himself. it's confusing and hurtful for vic, but it's maybe even more damaging to walt himself since he's already done a fantastic job of alienating/disconnecting from his other sources of emotional support. but while he's not ready to acknowledge his feelings, let alone address them, withdrawing into himself doesn't allow him to escape them, either. then suddenly his unconscious mind provides him with a convenient avenue for that escape: donna. he can't allow himself to feel what he feels for vic, but he can shift the focus of those feelings by pouring them into the empty vessel of a stranger (transference leading to the grand narrative in 5x01-02). when that fails (quite spectacularly, i must say), he shifts to (an attempt at) recreating the past. post-5x03 he and donna are just somehow in a relationship despite having no history beyond a few conversations, one attempt at sex, and a traumatic assault. it's like he's taken "fake it 'til you make it" as relationship advice. donna, still being a complete unknown, poses no emotional threat or danger of contradiction, and for as long as she remains that way, walt can fill all the empty space with whatever he wants her, and them, to be. on the surface, it looks the way he believes a relationship should.

of course, in reality it's impossible to actually have a relationship with a complete unknown, with a construct, a metaphor, a blank canvas, a dream. and since that's all donna is, in reality it's impossible to have a relationship with her. we're practically hit over the head with it in 5x01-02 as walt's grand narrative plays out and crumbles right in front of us. what this reveals is that the story arc between walt and donna is never about walt and donna; it's only ever about walt. the narrative is showing us an external representation of the internal journey he's undertaking and the choice he ultimately has to make. it's like a live demonstration of the processes that usually stay mostly inside our heads, but here it plays out in a very literal way, so that the conceptual choice between whether to remain within the safe and stable confines of the construct or to embrace the frightening and uncertain fluctuations of reality is made manifest in a choice between two women.

is it really a choice, though? when i initially began to really think about the idea, i remembered the scene in 3x05 in which vic expresses being conflicted regarding her concerns about branch's behaviour. the situation is eerily reminiscent of her experience with bobby donellato and causes her to doubt both her past actions and her instincts in the present. she asks walt what he thinks she should've done in philly, if maybe she should've kept her mouth shut instead of reporting what she knew.

walt: doesn't matter. vic: it doesn't matter. why not? walt: 'cause i don't think you had a choice. looking the other way and keeping quiet, that's not who you are.

i kept coming back to that's not who you are. this is the same episode that begins with the heraclitus quote "character is fate", the idea that who you are determines what you do. so walt's argument is that, although ostensibly faced with a choice between two actions, vic's decision was predetermined because, being who she is, she could not have chosen otherwise. in that light, what seems like choice is, in fact, a process of the conscious mind catching up to what the unconscious mind already knows, and the presence of options to choose between is for all intents and purposes an illusion, or perhaps a disguise. it's like a magic trick the unconscious has to perform to allow the conscious mind a sense of having control over its actions, when all the time it's really just following the path already laid to a foregone conclusion. if walt was much younger i might describe his journey as a bildungsroman; or maybe it qualifies as an allegory, though it's neither strictly moral nor spiritual. either way, the outcome of his "choice" was inevitable because that's who he is. he was always going to choose reality over fantasy. he was always going to choose vic.

THE END (finally!)

(and intentio(n-) comes from the verb intendere ‘intend, extend, direct’, which is formed from in- ‘towards’ + tendere ‘stretch’. literally, stretch towards, or a stretching towards. how beautiful is that? (and have i mentioned how much i love etymology?))

so i know i’ve made gif sets using these shots before but only in the context of the scenes themselves. looking at them as a trio, in the context of, like, “three times walt grasped vic’s arm because of reasons, etc.” i think the symbolism and visual metaphors become really apparent. and excuse me but i have to feel a lot of feelings about all of it.

#1 i think it’s significant that he doesn't move into her physical space, but instead reaches out and draws her into his. visually, it says, “i want you here with me.” (also, if you watch his hand closely, you can see that he doesn’t just grab and pull: he’s gentle with her. he adjusts his grip to help support her and by the time they’re actually kissing he’s almost cradling her upper arm. help me i’m dying.)

#2 this shot. THIS SHOT. the way he reaches up and holds her arm is just... i can’t. there’s no physical reason for it; it’s entirely emotional. he’s touching her solely for the sake of touching her. and the gesture itself communicates so much: vulnerability, reassurance, relief, gratitude. ugh, it’s everything, shut up.

#3 if you asked me for a single visual metaphor for their relationship, this would be it. unlike any other woman walt’s been involved with, including martha, vic is a part of both his work and his private lives. this long upward pan and the way the shot lingers for a moment with his hand resting below the patch is both embrace and acknowledgement. the job is where they met, where their relationship developed, where they came to know one another as people, as friends, as partners. it’s where they fell in love. everything they are to each other developed within the context of the absaroka county sheriff’s department. so here is the symbol of their beginning, then a continued pan upward (a metaphor of growth/evolution) to the deliberate and intentional melding of professional and personal. there’s no separation between them anymore, either metaphorically or physically, because this time when walt holds vic’s arm and kisses her he doesn’t have to bring her into his space. she’s already there.

for a long time i’ve really wanted to talk about 6x03 and, among other things, how vic is the pivot around which three men spin, but i couldn’t quite find my starting point until i was struck by the juxtaposition of these two shots. it’s such a beautiful and densely layered visual metaphor that makes for a particularly inspired piece of storytelling. (kudos to joel plotch, who edited this and several of my other favourite episodes. editors are the unsung heroes of media, fight me.)

firstly, there’s the motion: two open drawers, one into which something is being placed and one out of which something is being taken. it’s temporally and symbolically the movement from past to future. in the initial shot, you've got walt putting martha (the past) away in a manner that’s both tender and deliberate. in the second shot, you’ve got travis taking out an engagement ring for vic, by implication the future.

these are both very personal moments, and both intrinsically connected to vic. travis’ is the most obvious, of course: he intends to propose to her, imagines that she’ll accept. walt’s is more indirect (much like the man himself). to me, this scene feels far more like closure than the end of 3x10, which was ostensibly when walt laid martha to rest. the tranquility and gentleness here are almost meditative, and the whole thing is kind of a journey in and of itself by way of the progress of him getting dressed as that metaphor. it’s a tiny encapsulation of how far walt’s come from the first episode, in which he was still carrying martha’s ashes around with him, to this point, when he’s able to take a direct reminder of her death, sit with it, and accept it. there’s sorrow here, but there’s also peace. he’s gentle, because martha’s memory is and always will be precious, and he puts it away for safekeeping, but ultimately he’s no longer holding on to the past. he makes the choice to release it and he’s ready to approach the future openly.

that this is very much related to vic is made explicit by the narrative in walt’s next scene. having just literally closed a drawer on the past, he reacts to vic’s (the future’s) approach in the courthouse in a completely new way. for the first time we see his genuine reaction to vic unencumbered. and it’s a-freakin-dorably goofy. he acts like she’s put the whammy on him, all smiley and bashful staring at the pretty girl in front of him. he never quite loses that openness during the scene, either. even when dave comes along, walt still spends most of that conversation looking at vic.

but anyway, back to the imagery:

the passage of time, the movement of bodies and hearts through it, that’s what this tiny interplay of two shots is about. the visual metaphor strikes me as a kind of symbolic ouroboros - the snake eating its own tail - where our personal infinities are made up of putting things (people, feelings) away and then bringing them out again. endings that lead to beginnings that lead to endings and so on.

all of this informs what i think is the overarching significance of the episode, and that’s vic as the centre of everything. thank you, victoria is an episode about choices: those that have been made, those that are yet to be made, and the consequences thereof. i mean, the court scenes, and in particular the jury selection scenes, are literal demonstrations of that very thing.

and vic is positioned right in the middle (at the heart!), while three men negotiate her significance in their lives.

first there’s chance, who’s obsessed with her. then there’s travis, who thinks he’s in love with her. and finally there’s walt, who is in love with her, and wants to keep her safe. it’s fascinating to look at them in relation to one another, as well as in relation to vic. both chance and travis have made/are making her choices all about them; both travis and walt are guilty of making (or trying to make) choices for her that she doesn’t want; and walt and chance are almost diametrically opposed in their relationships to her except that for both of them their choices towards her are rooted in their utter devotion: one to saving her and one to destroying her.

for her part, vic spends most of the episode uncharacteristically kind of floundering. in the face of all the ferocity surrounding her, she seems oddly quiescent and powerless. it’s not until the very end of the episode, when she makes the choice to steal travis’ car that she seems to become present again, like she’s finally woken up. that’s when she takes her power back and it’s fucking epic. i don’t mean because she shoots chance; that’s almost incidental, really, in the midst of all the symbolism. it’s so much more than a single violent act. 

first, she literally takes power back from travis by leaving in his car, subverting not only his attempts at control but also his ability to reclaim it. second, by showing up and distracting chance, she provides walt with the opportunity to escape from a potentially deadly situation. girl finds boy, girl saves boy, girl thwarts her enemy’s plans simply by existing. third, and undoubtedly the most significant, is the moment she speaks the words, “so do i.”

a man has the right to live free. so do i.

that crucial line comes an instant before she shoots, so that the shots become mere punctuation to this incredibly important assertion of her own fundamental value. she has the right.

vic doesn’t take back her power with bullets; she takes it back with her absolute certainty that she has the right to exist without being terrorised, or obligated to anyone, and without having her choices taken away. it’s a giant ‘fuck you’ to everyone who’s made her feel small and worthless in her life, but mostly it’s an act of courage and strength and absolute defiance. when you’ve been abused or traumatised, one of the hardest things you can do is to literally stand up and declare to the world, “i have worth and nothing you do can take it from me.” and she did that.

i mean, look at this puppy. 

this isn’t the face of a man who’s angry. we’ve seen walt’s anger play out in other situations and it doesn’t look like this. there’s very little tension in his face here; it softens when vic turns away. he continues to look at her with that little furrow between his eyebrows, but again it’s a soft look, not a glare or that penetrating laser stare of his. his mouth is closed but his lips aren’t pursed; his jaw isn’t clenched.

to me, this looks like the face of a man who lashed out defensively because he’s embarrassed and hurt. he feels like vic’s making fun of him, that she’s played a joke on him. not only that, but (he thinks) she’s set it up so that he’d be embarrassed in front of his subordinates. it’s something he might’ve expected from, say, branch, but definitely not vic. she’s not just his employee. vic’s the one who’s always got his back; she’s always on his side. so this feels like a kind of betrayal to him. (also, i submit, because of other confusing and nebulous feelings he can’t admit to and doesn’t want to be having about her.)

the other reason that i don’t believe he’s really angry is how quickly he gets over it. walt’s anger is slow burn and he holds grudges. it takes time for him to regain his equilibrium, even with henry or cady. but there’s no indication of that in the following scene where he and vic are examining the rental car. it actually feels like he’s trying to be conciliatory. and when she tells him she didn’t ask lizzie to come to the station, he believes her easily. he accepts that vic’s telling the truth without question, which is definitely not something he does when angry. because he wants to believe her. (i.e. he wants to believe that she wouldn’t push another woman at him because deep, deep down he maybe kinda sorta hopes she has the same kind of confusing and nebulous feelings about him that he has about her. that neither will acknowledge unless under the influence of an intoxicating substance and/or grave peril, natch.)

i was hoping to find a quote to use for this meditation on strength, but unfortunately i came up empty. which is annoying because i am usually excellent at finding quotes. anyway, there's a lot in the back half of season 5 and the entirety of season 6 very obviously making the point that being strong doesn't mean doing everything on your own. that, in fact, it's a form of weakness to insist you can do it all by yourself. it's not until walt finally accepts (or is forced to accept) help that he gets his life back. his own actions only serve to make things worse. (this is in line with him being a tragic hero, too, but that's a whole essay unto itself.)

while walt's acceptance/redemption arc is fairly gradual and consistent, vic's is all packed into a handful of episodes, with the culmination being the scene in 6x09 when she literally yells to the uncaring universe, "i give up!" that moment, which to her is an admission of weakness, is actually her moment of greatest strength. to quote ani difranco:

buildings and bridges are made to bend in the wind to withstand the world that's what it takes all that steel and stone is no match for the air, my friend what doesn't bend breaks

vic admitting that she can't get through this — the race, her grief — on her own is the bending she needs to do so she won't break. and that, of course, is the moment when the horse comes back in a symbolic affirmation. at the same time, walt and horses have been aligned emblematically since at least 1x03, and walt's horse is just "walt's horse" — he doesn't have a name. that's significant in a critical theory sense because no name = no identity = a vessel/capable of being inhabited (cf owls and martha) (different states of a single particle). so you can really look at the entire horse portion of the challenge as an extended metaphor on vic's relationship with walt right up to that moment: once they got the hang of it, everything was good until an external force came between them, then walt ran off scared and vic wandered around alone until, finally, walt came back to help her.

in conclusion, sometimes giving up requires a hell of a lot more strength than holding on. and walt is maybe/maybe not a horse. and tree uses way too many physics metaphors.

HAND DELIVERY!

what i love about this, apart from the oh-so-obvious crush donnie has on vic (same bb), is that even this late in the game the show is still opening up these little pockets of the background life of the characters. they could've just as easily had a standard interaction with a lab tech, but instead we get this adorable scene (which reminds me of agent pendrell and his crush on scully, aww).

season 4 starts this whole arc about vic's sense of isolation: an emotional vacuum, which the idea of a baby fills for her. and it's not that her feelings aren't valid because in a lot of ways she very much is isolated. but with this scene we're explicitly made aware that at least part of the reason is her not recognising the potential for connection, because donnie is totally into her and she's totally oblivious. and while she might not be looking for a romantic relationship with anybody except walt, with this one example we're shown that she isn't/doesn't have to be as isolated as she feels she is, that there must be other people who'd react positiviely if she reached out and tried to form friendships. (though let's not even talk about how the writers dropped the ball on vic and cady in the back half of season 5 and all of season 6 because aughghghgh.)

this is a scene that i think is easily misinterpreted, and since i was clipping the episode anyway, i decided to take the opportunity to talk about it.

4x01 is a tough episode for everybody, but especially for vic. at this point, when everyone (except walt) still accepts branch's death as a suicide, she's convinced that she's at least partly responsible for it. to her, it’s bobby donellato all over again.

when she tells walt “don't you touch me”, it’s easy to hear “don’t touch me” — a straightforward rejection of his apparent (though fairly anaemic) attempt to help (or possibly just move her away from the crime scene; honestly it’s hard to tell). but the pronoun is what’s significant in that sentence. consider everything else she’s said to him in this scene:

another man is dead because of me

i’m toxic

you should stay away from me 

i'm bad for people

everyone who gets close to me either dies or leaves

put all of that together with her drunk logic and you get “don’t you touch me.” vic’s not pushing him away; she’s trying to protect him. in her mind the rest of that sentence goes: if you do i’ll be bad for you and you’ll leave or die because i’m toxic just like my dad always said. and though she’s drunk at the time, her feelings for walt and her fears aren’t a product of that; they’re very real.

we see later reflections of this scene in 4x03, 5x10, and 6x05. “don’t you touch me”, “i will lie for you”, “even if you were guilty, i couldn’t do that”, and “i couldn’t be the thing that brought you more pain” are all rooted in the same ground. they’re expressions of vic’s willingness to sacrifice (or potentially sacrifice) herself for walt; she’s giving up, or offering to give up, help, her integrity, her career, peace. the words differ but the underlying meaning of these statements is i love you and i’ll do anything to save you.