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.
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.
Nah, they also needed Mike for his badass gate hot-wiring skillz.
Either nobodies (laundry workers) or did we leave boxcutter victim and someone else in blue barrels?
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.
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.
Awesome catch! A lot of people were complaining about how implausible it would be for Walt to have a delivery method for that.
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).
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.
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 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.
I’d be surprised, unless it got backed up somewhere else, that looked like a cheapo Samsung. Do any Samsung laptops have SSHD?
I wonder if that strong a field could have some kind of effect on a solid state drive?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.