Breaking Bad 3.03 "I.F.T." OPEN SPOILERS

Cafe Society
41

That’s weak; a lame justification at best.

Skylar lost the moral high ground as soon as she allowed Ted to cook the books. Even if Walt got into cooking meth for noble reasons and quickly started getting off on the rush, her spite-fuck is still much lower than anything Walt did to her.

His delusions of making the marriage work aren’t totally unfounded because Skylar has demonstrated a willingness to look the other way for a criminal. She can extend that courtesy to a grab-ass boss but not her own husband?

42

But Skylar’s transgressions until this episode did not hurt Walt. Walt’s transgressions put Skylar and her family at risk. It’s more dangerous to live with someone cooking meth than it is to live with someone cooking the books. Even if what Skylar did was wrong, she never hurt Walt. Walt however displayed no concern for Skylar in his endeavors, especially when he turned down money from his friends so that he could continue cooking meth.

Skylar isn’t perfect, but just because you helped someone cook the books doesn’t mean you have to accept a drug dealing husband.

43

I should have also mentioned that Tuco was Tio’s nephew. I assume Tio isn’t his real name, since it literally means “uncle” in Spanish.

44

This show is beginning to feel like the last season of Shield, which I would describe as “harrowing”.

45

Not only that, but we shouldn’t compare Ted and Walt when it comes to their relationship with Skyler. Ted doesn’t owe Skyler anything. Walt’s the one who has a real obligation to her, not Ted.

All this moral relativism is making my brain hurt.

46

I for one am glad to see that Walt finally cleaned the pizza off the roof.

47

A lot of posters are getting a ton of mileage out of the idea that Walt could have gotten the money from that ex-partner, but that’s not true at all. They could have gotten money for Walt’s hospital bills, sure, but that’s the least of Walt’s concern.

Remember, for the entire time Walt was cooking, he was going to be dead in a year. He wasn’t cooking for hospital bills, he was cooking for college tuition, mortgage payments, car payments; he was trying to provide for family for after he died. Of course he ended up going into remission, but that doesn’t change the facts when he was cooking. (Am I misremembering that he stopped cooking when or shortly after he found out he went into remission?)

In short, Walt never had the “borrow money or cook meth” choice people claim for him.

48

I assumed he got rid of it because it had bad associations with his dead ex in his mind.

49

He stopped cooking, but he didn’t stop selling. He cooked 42 pounds of meth in the episode where he and Jessie were stuck in the dessert. At the end of the episode he found out his cancer went into remission. After that he decided he still wanted to continue selling meth which led to his meeting with Gus.

Definitely a morally gray area. But how many people should die so that Walt’s kids could go to college and Skylar could pay the mortgage? Consider that if Walt stopped selling after his remission, Jane would still be alive and there would not have been a plane crash.

50

I don’t know that I’d call it “morally gray” – it seems pretty black to me. What Walt has done is indefensible. His “reasons” are rationalizations. No different from what many of us do when making bad choices, but in Walt’s case, people die. Even without the plane crash, people died, many of them innocent. What would have happened to that little kid last season if Jesse hadn’t taken him out of the house?

Walt’s precious snowflakes need hundreds of thousands of dollars after he’s gone? If he cared so much about providing for them, he could have bought some life insurance. But then we wouldn’t have a show. :slight_smile:

51

Cite? :smiley:

I looked around and didn’t see it. Forums, blog, recap, …?

My ears and TV are pretty bad, but I did a spit take because I thought I heard “fucked”.

52

Ha ha sorry about that.
How about this: AMC | Watch TV Shows & Movies Online | Stream Current Episodes
Under the tab: Inside Season 3
Video: Inside Breaking Bad: 303, “I.F.T.”
About 4:02 into the video.

53

Thats’ quite a leap you made there. Walt didn’t kill Jane; he abstained from saving her. (Maybe if she didn’t blackmail him he would have handled that differently.) If he’d stopped selling she still would have choked on her own vomit and that plane still would have crashed.

What did that have to do with Walt?

You guys seem invested in hanging every bad thing on Walt while cheering Skylar on. It’s very strange to me.

Here’s a hypothetical: Let’s say Skylar’s boss’s fraud comes to light and the company goes under, and one of his employees gets financially ruined because of it and kills himself. Does Skylar magically become the same level scumbag as Walt?

54

Did I say Walt killed Jane? I only said Jane died because Walt did not stop selling. That’s consistent with abstaining from saving her and is still in a bad place morally.

If Walt stopped selling then Jane would not have any money to blackmail him for. If Walt did not make that deal with Gus then he would not have had drug money that he needed to protect and let people choke to death for.

The causal chain runs even deeper than the money. The episode after Walt went into remission is the episode where Jessie’s friend dies while dealing drugs. That’s when Jessie goes on a meth binge and drags Jane down with him. Admittedly this is a result of actions taken by pre-remission Walt, but post remission Walt is still responsible for the consequences of taking drug money.

A suicide from financial ruin isn’t as foreseeable as people dying from your meth distribution. The risks of going along with a financial scandal and dealing meth are totally different. It’s much more obvious that dealing meth will result in someone dying. I’m not absolving Skylar of all her sins, but I still think Walt hurts her a lot more than she hurts him.

55

You’re going to have to connect the dots on this one, because I’m not seeing it at all. What did Walt do that made Jane start using again?

56

She was sleeping on her side specifically to prevent the choking hazard, and he arrived and shook Jesse and turned her over - so he’s responsible in that sense. It’s incidental, but if he wasn’t there, presumably she wouldn’t have died.

57

Just saw it last night. These last few episodes have been pretty slow, but they’ve set up the action for the rest of the season quite nicely. Especially how Walt and Jesse have simultaneously found themselves in situations that will drive them back to making meth. They both have other options, but they’ll both choose to go back to it.

Well, I guess Walt doesn’t actually have another option, but he doesn’t know it.

I like how we also learned some more of the backstory, like how Danny Trejo’s head ended up on the back of that turtle, who Tio really is, and we also met the boss of the operation and learned how Gustavo, the Cousins, and Tio are connected.

Speaking of which, Gus is continuing to be one of the most fascinating characters on the show. I always want to see more of him. The scene with him preparing for the meeting was so telling (and darkly funny.)

(Etiquette for drug cartel meetings: Serve h’ors d’oeuvres. Crudite is always a good choice. And if one of your guests can only communicate by ringing a bell, make sure you have a spare bell at the ready. :stuck_out_tongue: )

I’m not sure people are “cheering Skylar on” at all. I think people are sympathetic to her plight and her actions are more defensible, and certainly more understandable than Walt’s. She’s in a tough spot. People don’t like her, but they feel for her.

Take her keeping the kids away from Walt as an example. That’s an awful thing to do. But her reasons make sense. And little does she know that her fear of exposing her kids to “the criminal element” is MORE than justified!
The only person who we’ve been able to be unfailingly sympathetic to is Walter Jr. His minor transgressions are totally excusable given the circumstances. But I feel like the other shoe is waiting to drop. So here’s a question for you all to speculate on: Is Walter Jr. going to break bad, and if he does, how?

I think he’s going to. And he’s not going to get into doing meth. That would be too obvious, and I think he’s too smart for that anyway. Though it would be interesting if he got into some small-scale dealing!

58

I suppose it could be argued that Walter Jr. already broke bad in his own innocent way… when he got drunk and vomited in the pool.

If the writers lead to a story line that lets Walter Jr. turn into a Meth addict, then I’ll stop watching the show. I just don’t see that happening. One of the reasons that the show is so good (and has been proven by this very thread) is that who is good/bad, right/wrong is very ambiguous. If Walt Jr. touches meth, then Walt Sr. will 100% be a bad guy; no questions asked. Then it’s just another drug cartel story. What makes it good is that Walt is basically a good guy, who did right by his family (in his mind). In the bigger picture he is a bad guy who is doing wrong for a much larger group of people.

59

Maybe he becomes a teenage man ho who unknowingly spreads HIV all over the place, combining the sins of the father and mother :slight_smile:

60

I thought that happened on a different day. Walt gets the call to sell the meth, he frantically runs to Jesse, busts open the back door and shook Jesse. He takes the meth and sells it, missing the birth of his daughter.

Much later, Jesse tells Jane about his money, Jane blackmails Walt, and Walt gives up the cash. Jane and Jesse go on the drug binge that will end up killing Jane. After Walt spoke to Jane’s father in the bar, he felt he owed it to Jesse to help him, so he went back and found Jane choking on vomit.

At no point, did Walt disturb Jane that night.

Also, I think the causality chain between Walt and the airline disaster is extremely tenuous. It was the fault of Donald (Jane’s father) and the people in charge who put him in that air traffic controller’s chair. It was also a systemic failure that the alarms built into the system did not prevent the disaster.

Although in this case there is a chain of causality to Walt, the same disaster could have arisen from a far more innocuous or mundane cause. Suppose a controller was mentally distracted due to discovery of adultery or something else.

On the other hand, by not stopping the accounting fraud, Skylar is responsible for the financial losses of the many investors who rely on and trust this information. It is more causal of harm to an investor who loses their investment rather than an employee who is fired. (Since the employee would be fired anyway, had the accounting been correct.)

Let’s not discount the harm that financial ruination can cause due to fraudulent accounting.