Breaking Bad 5.01 "Live Free or Die" 7/15/12

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Well, he got the meal for free.

Apparently he's more liquid in the hairier future. The gun wasn't cheap and apparently included a car.

The van going on its side was one of the few but great LOL moments of the series.

I'm not sure what made it a three man job though? I'll give it 'two people' but I don't see why the driver couldn't have controlled the magnet as well. I think that speech was just a way to keep Mike in the group. I'm always surprised he sticks with them. Especially for how often he keeps telling them all to take their money and just run...run really far away. You'd think by now he'd take his own advice.

[Rigamarole]

Originally Posted by Reverse

Well, that certainly makes a lot more sense than trying to sneak across the border with a giant machine gun in your trunk.

FYI, there is no border security crossing from the U.S. into Mexico - you can just drive right in. It's only coming back that you have to go through security.

[Rigamarole]

Originally Posted by Joey P

I'm not sure what made it a three man job though? I'll give it 'two people' but I don't see why the driver couldn't have controlled the magnet as well. I think that speech was just a way to keep Mike in the group.

Nah, they also needed Mike for his badass gate hot-wiring skillz.

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Can somebody remind me who the bodies were in the lab?
.

Either nobodies (laundry workers) or did we leave boxcutter victim and someone else in blue barrels?

[Bytegeist]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Can somebody remind me who the bodies were in the lab?

They're the two men Walt killed in the process of barging his way back into the lab — one from the outside, who brought Walt down on the freight elevator (under duress), and the other who was already in the lab, watching over Jesse. Walt shot both of them.

[Covered_In_Bees!]

This was a great episode.

Not much more to say that hasn't already been said except for me to go off on my own wild theories: Ted, Mike and Skyler, in order from most to least likely will be dying before the show ends.

Skyler's death was mostly just a pipe dream to me, but I think it took a good step towards reality with this episode.

Walter couldn't kill her if he was still angry at her or had some other sort of "loose string" with her. His forgiveness of her is the closure he'd need to allow her death to even be a possibility. The hug they shared was not an emotional, passionate, I love you hug. It was a cold and calculating move by Walt, saying good bye to any real emotional tie he had with her, even if the emotional tie was anger and bitterness.

And judging by the look on her face, she knew this too. Additionally, she even specifically stated she was afraid of Walter. Her time is limited if she continues on her own path of breaking bad.

All of this is also backed up by Walter now feeling and knowing he's the only one in charge now. Who else did any of the various characters take orders from first and foremost? Gus. Where is Gus now? Who's left? Heisenberg is left and he's fully aware of it.

EDIT: The magnet thing was a three man job, as will future jobs, because Mike has skills and knowledge that Heisenberg and Jesse don't. If Mike didn't shoot Heisenberg in the desert, he's not going to, he's a follower. A very trained, disciplined and dangerous dog, who's old master was killed by his new one.

[Rigamarole]

Originally Posted by SenorBeef

I can't remember if was mentioned here or on another forum, but if you watch the last episode of season 4 closely, one of the documents that Saul's secretary shreds is a school schedule for Brock. Saul found a way to get the lilly of the valley into his food.

Awesome catch! A lot of people were complaining about how implausible it would be for Walt to have a delivery method for that.

[davidm]

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but I'm pretty certain that the sudden wiping of a hard drive wouldn't cause a computer display to fail in that manner. I think that kind of drive failure would by itself either freeze the screen or cause some sort of BIOS error message. It wouldn't automatically wipe the screen like that.

Sure, it could be that, before a message could be displayed, the magnet killed the screen (Would a magnetic field do that to an LCD display? I have no idea.) but they seemed to be acting on the assumption that the display failure was a direct indication that the drive had been wiped, an incorrect assumption.

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by davidm

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but I'm pretty certain that the sudden wiping of a hard drive wouldn't cause a computer display to fail in that manner. I think that kind of drive failure would by itself either freeze the screen or cause some sort of BIOS error message. It wouldn't automatically wipe the screen like that.

Sure, it could be that, before a message could be displayed, the magnet killed the screen (Would a magnetic field do that to an LCD display? I have no idea.) but they seemed to be acting on the assumption that the display failure was a direct indication that the drive had been wiped, an incorrect assumption.

Yeah that bugged me too. Not only that, but even if the display didn't fail (And no, a magnet doesn't effect an LCD) I figured a magnet destroying a (resting) hard drive probably wouldn't do anything noticeable. IMO he should have been doing something that would access that hard drive. Run some calculations on a database or something along those lines. But I think they got their point across.

Also, I thought it was odd that they bought a brand new one instead of finding some one one for the project. Surely someone somewhere had an old laptop that they could have donated to the project (or sold to them for a few bucks).

[Covered_In_Bees!]

I think that was so general audiences knew their plan would work, which in opinion, it's going to. Laptop is destroyed, let it go. The new lead the DEA is going to have are the bank routing numbers.

[Invisible Chimp]

Originally Posted by davidm

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but I'm pretty certain that the sudden wiping of a hard drive wouldn't cause a computer display to fail in that manner. I think that kind of drive failure would by itself either freeze the screen or cause some sort of BIOS error message. It wouldn't automatically wipe the screen like that.

Sure, it could be that, before a message could be displayed, the magnet killed the screen (Would a magnetic field do that to an LCD display? I have no idea.) but they seemed to be acting on the assumption that the display failure was a direct indication that the drive had been wiped, an incorrect assumption.

You may be technically correct, but it's a television show and they needed a visual shortcut to show it to the average viewer. I hope Gus had a solid-state drive.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Joey P

Yeah that bugged me too. Not only that, but even if the display didn't fail (And no, a magnet doesn't effect an LCD) I figured a magnet destroying a (resting) hard drive probably wouldn't do anything noticeable. IMO he should have been doing something that would access that hard drive. Run some calculations on a database or something along those lines. But I think they got their point across.

Also, I thought it was odd that they bought a brand new one instead of finding some one one for the project. Surely someone somewhere had an old laptop that they could have donated to the project (or sold to them for a few bucks).

I think a wiped hard drive would become evident pretty quickly even if you're not doing much. Unless it's in sleep mode, a Windows machine is always doing system stuff in the background and is going to be accessing the drive for one reason or another pretty regularly.

As a fan wank I'll say that the screen reaction indicated that a strong magnetic field had reached the distance to the machine and therefore the drive had been exposed and therefore the drive is wiped, but that's an indirect, rather than a direct indication of a wiped drive.

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by Invisible Chimp

You may be technically correct, but it's a television show and they needed a visual shortcut to show it to the average viewer. I hope Gus had a solid-state drive.

I'd be surprised, unless it got backed up somewhere else, that looked like a cheapo Samsung. Do any Samsung laptops have SSHD?

[davidm]

I wonder if that strong a field could have some kind of effect on a solid state drive?

[Push You Down]

Originally Posted by Dewey Finn

I think that Mike was headed back to New Mexico after hearing about the death of Gus Fring, while Walt and Jesse were, presumably, trying to get to Mike to get his assistance (and, perhaps, talk him out of killing them).

I assumed that it was a meeting set up by Jesse. Them randomly meeting on stretch of dirt road seems ridiculous.

re: timeline
They said several times last season that roughly a year had passed since Walt's diagnosis.

[interface2x]

Originally Posted by Acsenray

It wasn't meant for the average viewer. It was an Easter egg.

Yeah, I've yet to see anything that required close viewing like that on this show. However, there are many times in which the show has rewarded close viewing - situations like this where you can marvel at all the little details they throw in there.

I think the "52" in the cold open wasn't any grand scheme by Walt. I think it was just TV shorthand to let us know that what we're seeing is in the future and apparently, shit gets real in the future. Now that we know the destination, we get to enjoy the journey.

[Sampiro]

Would police generally take a framed photograph from an office into evidence?

What's the cut-off I wonder, because you could easily conceal stuff inside a desk chair or inside a writing pen, or behind the wallpaper or under a floor tile, yet you can't just dismantle an entire office and take it all in.

[SenorBeef]

It's not uncommon for laptops to have SSDs, and Gus wouldn't need to buy a cheap one. But this is fairly nitpicky. If anything, the nits should be the sort of cartoonishly over the top caper in general, rather than specific nits about hard drive types. Maybe what they did was plausible, but it seemed kind of extreme to me, over the top. Anyone know better than I do?

And... the screens would likely not fail like that, instead you'd have windows trying to access the page file (which happens frequently for small stuff during normal windows operaton), getting a bizarre error from the drive, and blue screening. Which the audience would've recognized too, so you might as well go for that.

Unless the magnetism would affect the ram in the computer or graphics card - then you could get a sudden glitch out like that. But I don't think ram is magnetically affected storage.

[Shakester]

I thought the magnetic field broke the RAM in the video card. No video card RAM, no display. And I'm fairly sure that a strong enough magnetic field can indeed destroy RAM and maybe even solid state HDDs.

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by interface2x

I think the "52" in the cold open wasn't any grand scheme by Walt. I think it was just TV shorthand to let us know that what we're seeing is in the future and apparently, shit gets real in the future. Now that we know the destination, we get to enjoy the journey.

If the 52 isn't some grand scheme, why is he celebrating the date on his fake ID (unless, this is really far forward and it's his new life...as I said earlier, I could see him doing that)

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Would police generally take a framed photograph from an office into evidence?

What's the cut-off I wonder, because you could easily conceal stuff inside a desk chair or inside a writing pen, or behind the wallpaper or under a floor tile, yet you can't just dismantle an entire office and take it all in.

They probably took that in on the assumption that those people are likely friends or family that they're going to want to get in contact with at some point in the investigation.

[SenorBeef]

If he was trying to be noticed to establish an alibi, the 52 thing might've been a good way to get the waitress to notice him and get him to pull his ID - to keep it in her memory.

Or he may legitimately be 52, and the series starts out with him celebrating his 50th birthday, so it's an interesting reference point.

[Shakester]

Originally Posted by SenorBeef

But I don't think ram is magnetically affected storage.

I think you should test your hypothesis by putting a large magnet next to your computer's RAM.

A strong enough magnetic field can break anything electronic.

[Rigamarole]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Would police generally take a framed photograph from an office into evidence?

Absolutely. Why wouldn't they? Everything is evidence, especially photographs.

[Sampiro]

Was that David Strathairn as the junkyard owner?

[Sam Lowry]

Originally Posted by Joey P

Wait, just thought of something. Maybe, just maybe, he made the bacon 52, knowing the waitress would ask for the ID to confirm his birthday and that would confirm his whereabouts later to create an alibi for something or other later on.
The $100 would make him extra memorable and he likely scoped the place out a head of time to make sure the place didn't have cameras in the parking lot that would see him swapping cars.

Ha! I'm running with this idea. I'm also going with the beard and hair being fake.

My money is on this.

You're definitely right in that he wanted to be noticed and remembered. If he just needed to meet with the gun guy, he could have just had a cup of coffee or something and sat at a table or booth. Instead he sat at the bar, played with his food, had a conversation with the waitress, left $100, and left his food mostly uneaten.

But I'm having a hard time imagining why he would set up an alibi using a fake name. For most crimes on TV shows and movies, the crime is done with the fake name, and the alibi is set up with the character using his real name.

[Fiveyearlurker]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Was that David Strathairn as the junkyard owner?

Pretty sure it was this guy.

[Acsenray]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Was that David Strathairn as the junkyard owner?

I believe it was Larry Hankin who played "Tom Pepper as Kramer" (the show-within-the-show's Kramer) on "The Pilot" episode of Seinfeld

[Sam Lowry]

Also, here's an interesting article about how they set up the magnet stuff in the episode.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Was that David Strathairn as the junkyard owner?

Larry Hankin
http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Old_Joe
He played the same character in season 3 when he destroyed the RV for them.

[Acsenray]

Originally Posted by davidm

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but I'm pretty certain that the sudden wiping of a hard drive wouldn't cause a computer display to fail in that manner. I think that kind of drive failure would by itself either freeze the screen or cause some sort of BIOS error message. It wouldn't automatically wipe the screen like that.

Sure, it could be that, before a message could be displayed, the magnet killed the screen (Would a magnetic field do that to an LCD display? I have no idea.) but they seemed to be acting on the assumption that the display failure was a direct indication that the drive had been wiped, an incorrect assumption.

Originally Posted by Joey P

Yeah that bugged me too. Not only that, but even if the display didn't fail (And no, a magnet doesn't effect an LCD) I figured a magnet destroying a (resting) hard drive probably wouldn't do anything noticeable.

Originally Posted by SenorBeef

And... the screens would likely not fail like that

Originally Posted by Invisible Chimp

You may be technically correct, but it's a television show and they needed a visual shortcut to show it to the average viewer. I hope Gus had a solid-state drive.

I think Invisible Chimp has it right. It was a visual shortcut for viewers, kind of like when a code cracker is shown cracking a password one digits at a time.

[ZipperJJ]

Originally Posted by Sam Lowry

Also, here's an interesting article about how they set up the magnet stuff in the episode.

Neat! Thanks!

[Sampiro]

Thanks to all for the Larry Hankin answers; I thought Strathairn was a bit much star power, but there is a slight resemblance and they did have Jim Beaver in a bit part.

A tiny bit I loved:

"If Wendell doesn't eat, nobody eats."

Apparently Mike has a genuine affection for Jesse after their adventures together. And of course he does owe Jesse his life for-real at this point.

[davidm]

So now the police are going to wonder what the hell someone was trying to achieve with that giant magnet.

Maybe they, or Hank, will figure out that the intent may have been to wipe a hard drive. If they do, then the question is, was that laptop the only one recently placed in that evidence locker?

If so will that tip off the police, or Hank, that even though Gus is dead, there are still some very resourceful individuals left from his operation?

Will it also get them thinking that maybe someone who knows the layout of that police station was involved? Perhaps an ex-policeman? (Mike is an ex-policeman for those who don't remember).

[davidm]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Thanks to all for the Larry Hankin answers;

He also stole George Costanza's raisins.

[McDeath_the_Mad]

Yet another nit-picky item about the video:

Video feeds are large to store, even when compressed. Walter had been cooking for weeks, there are multiple cameras each recording 24/7 (it's a multi-million dollar meth lab, you will be recording 24/7 on all cameras!).

Smart DVR technology will compress video frames when there is no movement (if nobody goes into a room all day, why store video of nothing happening?).

But here's the thing, if I'm Gus I would want 100% live video recordings of all cameras all day. If he had this there is no way he could store that on a laptop. Especially if it had an SSD. Realistically if it was an SSD he'd have 512GB possibly 1TB. Even if it wasn't an SSD drive, I don't know if you can buy a 2.5" laptop drive in sizes larger than 1TB.

Most laptops only allow 1 internal HD, max it would offer is 2. So he could have ~2TB of video storage on his laptop.

Maybe someone else can run the numbers but I'm pretty sure that laptop would not be adequate as a DVR storage device.

MtM

[SykoSkotty]

I'm assuming that he deleted the videos after viewing them. If there was no suspicious activity, why keep them all?

[davidm]

Maybe he only kept a few days or a weeks worth. As you say, it wouldn't be storing much during down time, and how many hours a day and how many days a week were they working? Was it a 40 hour a week job to cook the amount Gus wanted each week? I have no idea.

Also, it could have been a black and white feed, like many security feeds, which would reduce the amount of storage needed.

But you do have a point. I think a lot of security systems still use tape, maybe for the very reasons you point out.

[Erdosain]

I'm pretty sure Hank knows that part of Gus's gang is still out there. The laundry didn't burn itself down.

The only part that bugged me was the gun dealer wanting assurances that the gun wouldn't end up in Mexico. If I'm selling someone shady a big ass gun, I don't want them using it in town. I'd prefer they kill a bunch of people in Mexico.

[Rigamarole]

Originally Posted by Shakester

I think you should test your hypothesis by putting a large magnet next to your computer's RAM.

A strong enough magnetic field can break anything electronic.

Or you could go with Jesse's explanation for how it works - *hand gesture + sound effects* Blooooop!

[davidm]

Yea. I got the impression that Jesse came up with the right idea for the wrong reasons. He seemed to be thinking about smashing it against the wall or something.

When Walt and Mike were arguing about incendiary devices I was yelling at the TV, "a magnet", along with Jesse.

It seemed obvious, but then computers are my field. I guess it makes sense that a chemist would first think about explosions and fire.

[Washoe]

Originally Posted by Erdosain

The only part that bugged me was the gun dealer wanting assurances that the gun wouldn't end up in Mexico. If I'm selling someone shady a big ass gun, I don't want them using it in town. I'd prefer they kill a bunch of people in Mexico.

My guess—we’re seeing a flash-forward to the last episode of this half season. Walt’s emergence as the new kingpin has put him at odds with the cartels. The gun dealer is concerned that Walt is going to use the product that he (the gun dealer) supplied to kill a cartel boss. The gun dealer doesn’t want that kind of heat.

[Bob Ducca]

Originally Posted by Rigamarole

Awesome catch! A lot of people were complaining about how implausible it would be for Walt to have a delivery method for that.

Here's a screenshot of the schedule being shredded.

[TBG]

Yeah, the feeds going directly to the laptop doesn't really make sense. More realistically, the feeds could go to a server of some sort, and the laptop could be used to access the server. Whether that's what was going on and this will come back to bite Walt in the ass, or it's just a case of tech on shows never making real world sense (like the screens glitching out), I dunno.

Glad to see I was right about Ted not necessarily being dead.

Still don't see how that big ogre Huel could've lifted Jesse's cigarette, though.

A breakfast scene where Walt Jr. doesn't talk about pancakes? Hmmm... I wonder if he's dead by Walt Sr.'s 52nd.

[Yeticus Rex]

The 52 is significant because the diagnosis from the first doctor (Season 1, Ep. 1) was that he had just a couple of years left to live....and just like the Pink Teddy Bear teaser scene at the start of season 2 led us to the crash of the 737 at the end of that season, I believe the same pattern of teaser reveals will lead to the finale of the semi-season or the last episode of the show, where Walt is at the end of his life and will be in a position of going out in a blaze of glory....just not sure who will be on the other end of that little friend of his.

My 1/50 of a dollar...

[AuntiePam]

Someone on Sepinwall's page pointed out that this episode title is the same as the one in The Sopranos, when that closeted gay character (forgot his name) ran off to New Hampshire. We know how that turned out.

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by AuntiePam

Someone on Sepinwall's page pointed out that this episode title is the same as the one in The Sopranos, when that closeted gay character (forgot his name) ran off to New Hampshire. We know how that turned out.

Vito, but I'm almost positive that episode was called "Johnny Cakes".

ETA, looking it up, a few episodes back is an episode called Live Free or Die when Vito gets spotted at the leather club.

[Shakester]

Since people seem to be ignoring my comment about the computer displays failing, I'm going to repeat it:

A strong enough electro-magnetic field could mess up the video card RAM, which would result in the failure of the display exactly as shown. The screen fail is realistic, not TV-fantasy.

[hajario]

This is a great start to the season.

"We're done when we say we're done." Love it.

The magnet in the evidence room was done in a movie called The Big Easy to destroy a tape. In this case the tape was on the shelf in an evidence room and it implicated a crooked cop taking a bribe. The cop tossed a huge magnet through a store window and a different cop who was his friend bagged up the magnet as evidence of a vandalism and just so happened to put it next to the tape on the shelf.

[Flang Dang]

It was in the future. Didn't anyone catch that the "Denny's" is a former "Pollos Hermanos"? Maybe even the old meeeting place with Gus,

The "I forgive you" at the end was Walt telling Skylar that what she did (with the affair and taking his money and going behind his back with Saul) was REALLY BAD and her life is in his hands. And it was not lost on her

[Joey P]

Originally Posted by Flang Dang

It was in the future. Didn't anyone catch that the "Denny's" is a former "Pollos Hermanos"? Maybe even the old meeeting place with Gus,

Do you have a confirmation on that or is it just speculation? Even if it is A LPH, it's not the same one. Right off the bat, the one we've been seeing has a huge parking lot and this one has a tiny lot right up against a main road.