I think one potential point of the flashback was to show an interesting potential weakness of Gus… his hubris. If he’d been OK with settling for 96% pure, Gale would be happily cooking away and Gus would be in a much more stable situation. And logically, that’s clearly what he should have done. But his pride was on the line, so he needed his product to be the best possible, so he needed Walt. An interesting aspect to a character who had previously seemed to coldly calculating and logical about everything.
Nice observation. Looks like he has more in common with Walt than he would like to admit.
Actually Vince Gilligan says in the podcast or behind the scenes, can’t remember which, that the purpose of the scene was really to explain the presence of the box cutter.
the thing i thought was, victor has to have family, and that family would have an inkling about where he works, (los hermano pollo?) and would report him missing. so disappearing him would lead to questions anyway…
Gus was satisfied with 96%. I think he mentioned it at least twice. It was Gale who remained fixated with the 99%, and pulled Gus along.
Did anybody notice that on Hank’s night-stand, there’s a vase filled with flowers – right next to a painting, hanging on the wall, of a similar vase filled with similar flowers?
This was what I thought made the flashback scene brilliant. I’d never understood why Gus hired Walt to begin with, when he already had things set up with Gale, who seemed like a highly competent professional chemist. Nor why Gale would consent to being second banana in a lab he helped set up and was clearly capable of running.
I think it’s implausible that Walt could do anything Gale couldn’t. It obviously can’t be that technically difficult to make 99% pure meth, since Walt and Jessie were doing it with stolen high school lab equipment in an old RV. But clearly what it takes is not the technical setup, but fastidiousness: an absolute commitment to careful measuring at every stage, to checking and rechecking as the reactions progress, to scrupulously cleaning every bit of equipment and accounting for every flake of precipitate, every waft of vapor, every gram in and every gram out. That was what impressed Gale, and while I think it’s obvious he could have done the same thing, he wasn’t sure, and more to the point, I don’t think he wanted to try. He didn’t have the ambition to strive for perfection and risk failure–what he wanted more than anything else was to sit at the feet of the master and absorb someone else’s glory. He preferred being second banana to someone who was actually better than him rather than compete with him.
That, and that alone, was what drove Gus to hire him. He knew that Gale would never be content to keep working for Gus while Walt was out there somewhere else setting the standard.
Walt was shown to have superior chemistry knowledge. There was a scene where they were talking about the process, and Gale asked Walt why he added something at X drips per hour at first but then tapered off rather than just having a steady rate, and then figured it out - apparently he had a more fine tuned, perfected technique in subtle ways that Gale didn’t even consider.
Well where did that come from? Was it because Walt’s a Wile E. Coyote-style supergenius who could visualize how the dynamics of the fluids mixing in his mind, or because he took continuous measurements of the reaction while it was occurring, where any other scientist would have checked it when it started and checked it when it was finished?
Ok, maybe it is because he’s a Wile E. Coyote-style supergenius. It sometimes seems like he’s a Marvel mutant whose superpowers are making perfect crystal meth and showing superhuman levels of arrogance and cunning. I think this is one of the best shows ever on television, but I do have to remind myself that they’re not going for realism sometimes. Walt is totally a comic book character, just an incredibly well-written and -acted one.
I really don’t know. Is there room for finesse in chemistry? An extremely high level of expertise that seperates the good from the great?
Walt has been portrayed as a chemist who was a partner in what would become a rich company based on his design, and I think they’ve hinted before that he should’ve probably won a nobel prize. The show certainly has certainly shown him to be extremely adept at the chemistry - is it that implausible that he’d have picked up tricks and insights to the point of knowing exactly how to vary subtle processes for the best results? I don’t really find anything implausible about it.
You also have to consider Walt’s ego. He “knows” he’s one of the best chemists around, even if no one else does. When you put yourself up on a pedestal like that, you can’t let anything knock you down. He’s better than Gale because his own definition/delusion of his self worth is defined by it. Someone like Gale could probably reach 99% if they were as obsessive as Walt has been.
I think that was one of the key aspects of the “Fly” episode. It was how one little error, while probably non-consequential to anyone else, could drive Walt insane. I think that’s how he got to 99%. His narcissism is to the point where he couldn’t accept anything less than perfection or it would destroy him.
Gale, while probably just as intelligent as Walt, didn’t have that all-consuming need to be perfect and to prove to everyone else just how perfect he was.
The scene could serve more than one purpose.
Maybe it’s symbolic somehow, like his continued pursuit of crystals (only mineral crystals rather than crystal meth). His current life is an imperfect shadow (painting) of his previous life.
I know the show is a drama and not a documentary, but I’ve also wondered if it is really very realistic that a professionally trained chemist like Gale would be incapable of producing an almost chemically pure product. His talk about closing that last 3% gap sounded credible, but given the right equipment and an understanding of the chemistry that seems very weird to me. Lots of chemicals are mass produced in factories in which plant operators run the machines, these jobs only require a high school diploma and the product they produce is massively standardized.
Chemical engineers are heavily involved at the upper levels of such an operation, sure, and chemists were involved in actually discovering the chemical being produced, but blue collar grunts are the ones making the actual chemical.
I don’t mind at all that the plot was only marginally advanced, to me this show has always been more about the intense moments and extreme harshness of the show’s universe (which is close enough to the real world, and the episode delivered on both of those.
Well, that’s the thing. The scientists at pfizer might be making a very high quality recipe for their drugs to get perfect purity, and then the lab grunts can pump it out 100%. But there aren’t legal high level chemists working on perfecting the meth amphetamine formula. Street thugs learn enough about it to make rough and dirty stuff. A skilled chemist could perhaps make very good stuff - that’s the 96%. But in this case Walt is the equivelant of the staff of pfizer perfecting the process here - here’s the expert chemist who’s coming up with the method to obtain optimum purity. But there’s no pfizer of the meth world. Which is why Walt’s skillset is so unique and valuable.
It’s true that a lab grunt could replicate his work if he understood it, since Walt had already worked out the process. But his counter to that was - yes, you can probably do a decent job when everything is going well, but what happens if there’s a problem? What if one of the machine goes out of spec? What if you get bad ingredients? What happens when the humidity changes? You need me to be able to handle it whenever anything out of the ordinary happens.
Pharmaceuticals are their own breed. That’s why drugmaking is so profitable and having a brand is so important.
I learned how delicate drug recipes can be when no one, absolutely no one, ever figured out how to knock off quaaludes credibly. And I know that no one did because I would have heard about it. Methaqualone, the branded kind, was far and away the greatest party drug ever, especially combined with coke, because it’s like taking alcohol in pill form. All the high, none of the sick. Amazing stuff. And after it got pulled off the market, there was never a knock off that was worth shit.
Sure there is. Ever heard of Adderall? 