Dead Freight

A young boy rides on a dirt bike through the desert. Encountering a wild tarantula, he allows it to crawl over his hands before placing it in a jar. He hears a distant freight train and rides toward it.

Walt pays a visit to the recently promoted Hank at his new DEA office. During their conversation, Walt confesses that his marriage to Skyler is failing, feigning tears. When Hank leaves momentarily to get coffee, Walt installs eavesdropping bugs on the computer and inside a picture frame sitting on top of Hank's desk. Later, Walt, Jesse, and Mike interrogate Lydia about the tracking device found affixed to the bottom of one of Madrigal's methylamine barrels. Mike and Walt believe that she planted it and decide to kill her. After forcing Lydia to contact Hank and report her discovery, the crew eavesdrops on Hank's next phone call, learning that it was actually placed by a DEA team in Houston.

Although exonerated, Lydia is now useless to the trio, as all of the barrels in her warehouse are compromised. Desperate to avoid being killed, Lydia tries to prove her worth by asserting that she can access an "ocean" of methylamine, suggesting that the trio could heist a tremendous amount of methylamine from a transiting train. At first, the trio are skeptical but with Jesse's motivation, they come up with a plan to stall the train in a dead zone and take the methylamine and replace it in equal weight with water, so that no one will even know that the heist took place.

On the day of the heist, Walt's crew manages to stop the train by blocking a railroad crossing with a "broken-down" dump truck driven by Kuby. When the engineer and conductor exit the locomotive to assist him, Mike acts as a lookout while Walt, Jesse, and Todd drain methylamine from the train into an empty buried tank, simultaneously pumping water back in to ensure its weight remains unchanged. The robbery is threatened when a good Samaritan arrives on the scene and pushes the dump truck off the tracks earlier than expected. Despite being told by Mike to stop, Walt recklessly makes Jesse and Todd complete the job, but they successfully pull it off. As Walt, Jesse, and Todd celebrate the heist's apparent success, they turn to see the boy with the dirtbike. The boy waves to them; Todd returns the wave, but then shoots and kills the boy, to Jesse's horror.

"Dead Freight" was written and directed by George Mastras, making his directorial debut on the series. Mastras revealed that the episode was logistically complicated to film because many cameras were needed to capture the lengthy train heist sequence. On the first day of filming the sequence, the train broke down. According to Vince Gilligan, the sequence took four days to shoot.

The episode was originally titled "Dark Territory," but was changed to avoid confusion with the film Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Coincidentally, that film also features actor Jonathan Banks. Mastras explains that "dead freight" refers to wasted space on a vessel that has been paid for in full.[1]

• "Dead Freight" at the official Breaking Bad site
• "Dead Freight" at IMDb