It’s definitely possible, but it still seems like the most unlikely theory to me. Walt’s explanation of Gus doing it is convoluted, but it seems like if it was Walt that makes it even more convoluted.
That’s a very good point. If Walt knew how important Brock was to Jesse, then he would know how upset Jesse would be about Brock getting sick. And Walt knows that Jesse can act rashly, and that Jesse has shot someone before (although in very different circumstances). Walt doesn’t always behave intelligently (to say the least), but it would be monumentally stupid to turn his back on Jesse and leave his gun within reach.
But I haven’t been disappointed by Breaking Bad so far, so I expect that whatever the explanation is will make sense. And that the next episode will be have me on the verge of a heart attack from the tension.
Mark my woids, fellas, mark my woids. Walt IS a hardcore, shady genius - but not an evil one. He would no sooner kill Brock than his own children - but would he temporarily make one of them (including his own) unexplainably sick as shit if it meant getting rid of a bad situation, perhaps one that risks the lives of his entire family?
Walt may well be behind Brock’s illness, but he didn’t give him the Ricin. Did he manipulate things to let Jesse think Brock has in fact been fully poisoned? Sure. He knows Gus has to go, and fast, so that’s what my money be’s on. We saw the preview on amc’s website, I trust? Walt may just be breaking into Saul’s office because he needs something a certain fatass black thug lifted off of Jesse earlier : )
Also how would he get the cigarettes back into Jesse’s pocket without him noticing? Jesse had his cigarette pack with him; only the ricin cigarette was missing.
Something I didn’t understand about the meth batch:
Gus goes from his “Get back to the lab now” plea/order to “Well it’s ruined now, so stay with the kid and come back next week” in a couple of minutes. Obviously the few minutes Gus and Jesse had been talking wasn’t going to make that huge a difference. So was the batch really ruined, or was this Gus’s way of saying “Well, we’ll write this one off as a loss, you just take a few days to be with the kid, but remember you owe me”.
I know meth cooking is a complicated, precise and super volatile process; every year there are reports of cooks who don’t know what they’re doing getting badly burned/blown up/gassed/otherwise seriously injured or killed. But is it so precise that a matter of, say, a couple of hours would make a huge difference?
Watching the show a second time I noticed that when Jesse confronted Walt he said he though the bodyguard had purposely lifted the cigarettes when he frisked him (I didn’t catch this the first time). This makes me think…it’s not quite what happened. It seems too straightforward. I wonder if he took something else.
Or…I can’t think how this could have worked but maybe he just wanted a cigarette so he stole them and somehow put the pack back after taking one or two. Would it have been possible to lift one cigarette out of the pack while frisking him so quickly? I don’t think we ever saw him smoking but he hasn’t had too much screen time.
It just seems like none of the motivations or opportunities for any of the suspected parties to give Brock the ricin are entirely satisfying. I am fully prepared to be wrong about all of my guesses because I usually am. I just hope whatever the writers came up with is good.
Yeah. As far as we know, Walt had no way of of even knowing where Andrea and Brock lived, until Saul told him (off-camera?) where he could find Jesse, which is how he was able to show up there before getting in a scuffle with Jesse, then abducted by Gus’s goons.
The whole leaving the gun right there on the table thing seemed blatantly deliberate to me. By doing so he was conveying that he still trusted Jesse and considered him to still be on the same team against Gus. It could also be a bit of reverse psychology - “if I had been the one to poison Brock, would I really let you in here and leave my gun sitting on the table right in front of you, then turn my back to you?”
The whole thing with both Saul freaking out and Walt freaking out seemed contrived to demonstrate to Jesse that Gus is a menace, Jesse was the only one in a position to do anything about it, and everybody else is vulnerable and helpless without him.
If we’ve learned anything about Jesse, it’s that he responds positively to feeling empowered, and at this pivotal moment, he’s got all the power and wishes to exact vengeance on whoever he thinks is responsible for harming Brock.
I’ll spoiler but there’s not a lot it could spoil:
Walt has an angry confrontation with Saul’s pissed off and abandoned secretary in which he bullies and tries to bribe her into giving him Saul’s contact info
Were they? It didn’t look like Jesse’s house to me, I thought it was Andrea’s house. Also, by the way Jesse reacted ("What are you doing here?), it seemed he was surprised and angered that Walt would come to Andrea’s place. I could be wrong, though.
It was definitely Jesse’s house. His reaction can be explained by the fact that the last time he’d seen Walt he’d beaten him up and told him to never come back.
I’ve been rejecting the whole “it’s all a big scam arranged by super genius Walt” idea because, as others have said, he wouldn’t have left the gun laying there where Jesse could grab it.
But then I had a thought that seems obvious in retrospect. How do we know the gun was even loaded?
I’ve watched every episode of this show from season one. I don’t recall the writer’s ever attempting to be so sneaky in their plot points in an episode to mis-direct the viewers in the ways that so many posters here are attempting to speculate. So why would they start now?
If I’m wrong, please remind me of past episodes where this type of plot subterfuge has happened. Historically, we the viewer’s know what Walt’s up to…we’re in on it.
As I elaborated on above, the fact that he left the gun on the table and promptly turned his back to Jesse is what makes me think it was intentional. With the issue of the poisoning aside, that was very strange behavior considering the state of their relationship and his level of paranoia towards Gus and those loyal to him. Why not at least put it in his pocket or waistband?
As far as the gun being loaded, with a revolver you can usually tell just by looking that there are rounds in the cylinder chambers without even opening the cylinder. I guess it could be loaded with all spent rounds and then it would be hard to tell, except for a slight weight difference.
There are some examples, but probably nothing quite as significant. The one that comes immediately to mind is how they’ve been playing coy about whether or not Walt’s cancer has relapsed. In that example, it’s knowledge that Walt may or may not have, but the audience has been left in the dark on the matter with only little hints to keep us guessing.
It’s the penultimate episode of the penultimate season, so it’s kind of understandable why they would play these kind of games with us now more than ever - and I for one, like it!
This is where I am too. Plus, the bodyguard had nothing in his hands after frisking Jesse. Huell isn’t a magician. Using him to get the pack is too chancy. If Gus got the ricin, it was from the lab. Tyrus would have substituted another vial for the ricin and Jesse would think he still had it.
But both Walt and Gus seemed surprised that Brock was sick, and that Jesse cared so much about him, which makes me lean toward the illness being unrelated to ricin. Which also explains why nobody at the hospital wants to talk to Jesse.
It seems to much of a stretch that Gus would do it and then assume that Jessie would blame Walt. Walt very easily could have been with the DEA all the time and untouchable by Jessie. It just seems to up in the air and too many things to fall into place for a Gus plan.
Walt doing something is more a posibility IMO. He spins the guns and looks at the plant. Is the plant something that will make someone sick but not kill them? Does he come up with a plan to make the kid sick, blame it on the ricin and then Gus just to play the “he killed a kid before” card to get Jessie back. Again though there are a lot of things that have to fall into place for that to work. It’s not that satisfactory but a better chance that Gus IMO.
All in all I’m ocnfused and hope the finale explains this or even just leaves us with a image of Walt with the ricin capsule for example so at least we know who did it.
Can’t wait for next week though. This show just gets batter and better. My girlfiend sighed while watching it and said “Do you remember the easy days of the plane crash and Jane’s death” Great drama.
I would agree that there is the possibility that Gus may or may not have poisoned Brock. But I do believe that Walt believes that Gus did it and has now convinced Jesse. The writers have left us in the dark in the past as it relates to Gus and what his true actions, intentions, motives, etc. are…but they have never done that with regard to the persepective of Walt, and I don’t believe they would change that now.
Great drama.