“Madrigal” made a very brief appearance on Monday, I believe. A co-worker said he hadn’t seen it yet and I checked the website here at work; we were surprised to see that both episodes from Season 5 were there. Then Tuesday evening I was going to watch it again and it wasn’t there- but “Live Free or Die” was still available.
Edit: Didn’t see your post, jrepka. I was sure I saw both episodes available for streaming on Monday afternoon.
She wasn’t in the test kitchen scene, in Germany. She was however at the meeting between Madrigal executives and Albuquerque law enforcement agents, which included Hank and company.
Her house (where Mike ambushes her) is actually in Houston, Texas. That fact wasn’t apparent in the episode anywhere, but it is mentioned in the BB Insider Podcast. Perhaps this will be significant later.
Gus mentioned having kids once- he told Walt they wouldn’t touch his Chilean fish stew- and he implied it when he told Walt “a man provides for his family even if they hate him” (a paraphrase, not an exact quote). If Lydia’s related to Gus I would find it easier to believe her as his daughter (whose identity he clouded, as he did his on) than his former concubine. As she seems to be late 20s/early 30s she would have been born shortly before he left Chile.
Houston? Wow, Mike drove 29 hours (there and back) and didn’t even kill her? He should have done it just on that basis alone. If things go pear shaped, he can’t just hop in a car and take “full measures” without most of a day and three potty breaks.
I have to think that if it was important, Gilligan would’ve figured out a way to let the viewer know the house was in TX. Since he didn’t, I’ll bet it doesn’t come up.
He couldn’t have flown? He can get a gun anywhere…especially in Texas.
Because he’s from Chile; Don Eladio referred to his connections as the reason for letting him live when they shot Max; and of course in one of the flashbacks in season 3, a younger Tio refers to him as “Generalissimo.”
I don’t recall a photo of him in uniform and I think that, since he’s clearly in the U.S. under an assumed identity, he probably would go out of his way to avoid displaying any associations with the Chilean military.
She was one of the Madrigal executives shown in the meeting with the DEA, but she is American (though the actress apparently has a pretty distinctive Scottish brogue). She obviously is meant to seem a bit pampered, unfamiliar with the concept of a coffee shop (as opposed to a coffee shoppe), or with the concept of someone being on a first-name basis with the wait-staff.
Part of her unfamiliarity with her surroundings stems from the fact that Lydia lives in Houston, not Albuquerque. This is not a spoiler, as Gilligan said that they attempted to imply it by the view of the skyline from her house (they considered putting a subtitle to that effect in the exterior shot of the house, but decided that the fact would become clear in future episodes).
She is clearly a loose cannon, in whom Mike only reluctantly places any trust (sound familiar?), so I look forward to her meeting Heisenberg.
As a matter of fact, she’s just unstable enough, and looks just enough like Jessica Hecht (Gretchen), that I’m going to go out on a limb and predict a sexual liaison at some point between Lydia and Walt. He told Skyler that he forgave her, but he’s feeling pretty powerful now, and he’s clearly the BB-universe champion of lack of self-awareness and self-justification…
He could “go astronaut” to cut the length of the trip.
I dunno. You’re right, but flying seems kind of risky when you’re going to murder someone when you’ll be the number one suspect. Of course, a 30-hour hole in your alibi is going to be risky too. Maybe this is why they didn’t bother telling us Lydia lives in Houston.
But speaking of the alibi, how is Mike going to avoid getting nailed with Chow and Chris’s respective murders? He’s got to be suspect número uno for those killings, too.
As of now, anyway, Mike has had the aura of the “magic fixer” like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction who anticipates everything and does no wrong and never gets caught. But so far as I know, Breaking Bad hasn’t let us be comfortable with assumptions like this, so I’m guessing at some point, we’ll be shown for sure that Mike can’t anticipate absolutely every possibility.
Then there would be a record of him flying to Houston… shortly before the murder/disappearance of a Houston executive of a company he has ties to…
Ballistics will show Chris killed Chow, and there are probably many people who would want Chris dead because of his ties to the drug trade and who knows what else. The deaths of two other people on the list with Mike is very suspicious, but as long nobody saw Mike to go to Chow’s house, he could probably avoid suspicion for a while. I would not assume Lydia is in Houston; it would make the logistics of the episode very weird.
I’m just throwing this out there, but when we first heard the name of Madrigal Electromotive, I wondered if we were supposed to think of the last name or the type of music.
Now that I think about it, it makes sense why Mike had to disappear Lydia instead of just shooting her. A Madrigal exec winds up dead in a pro hit, Mike will immediately be suspected. An exec goes missing 14 hours away, could be anything. So Mike COULDN’T grant Lydia’s final request without making a bunch of trouble for himself.
I still think he drove; otherwise he’d have to rent a car and stick a dead body in the trunk and find some place close to Houston to bury it. With his own car, he can pick any lonely spot in West Texas or NM to get rid of it (maybe Radiator Springs).
Gilligan also mentions that since they haven’t been using subtitles up to this point (to establish locations or times), it would look out of place to start doing so now.
The crew also talk about how few people outside of Texas would recognize Houston from its skyline, and I certainly agree with that. If there was such an establishing shot, I missed it entirely.
Now that is weird. As I was reading your post, the thought just spontaineously popped into my head that “Walt is going to nail her.” An instant later, I read the sentence in which you suggested it.
Yeah, you know what’s funny about that: As soon as Gilligan says that in the podcast, I immediately thought of the pilot, in which the pre-credits sequence shows the wild drive of the RV through the desert (which happens at the end of the episode), and then post-credits we get an exterior shot of the White home and the subtitle “Three weeks earlier.”
Of course pilot episodes usually bear little resemblance to the regular run of a series, and I think this one was shot a good 6-7 months before episode 2 with an almost entirely different crew.
Is there a reason – other than cultural diversity on the show – for Lydia’s daughter to speak Spanish? I didn’t notice it but the Rolling Stone blogger did, and suspects for that reason alone that Lydia and Gus might be personally connected.
I’m not sure what you mean by cultural diversity here. The show is set in the Southwest and there have been plenty of Hispanic and Spanish-speaking characters, including (from the sound of it) Lydia’s nanny. But yes, this could all imply a connection to Gus.
People all over the SW are bilingual. It appeared as if Lydia’s daughter had a Latina nanny/maid, so she definitely would have picked up español from her. I’m liking the theory that Lydia is Gus’ daughter rather than baby mama too.
A lot of little kids with Hispanic caregivers pick up Spanish quickly. It’s very, very common, so common it’s almost unremarkable. I have a friend who started speaking Greek as an infant because of a Greek nanny.
I think it’s only been suggested ambiguously that Gus might be gay. There is nothing definitive.
Here is an admittedly odd reason to suspect it. A theme that has run throughout the series has been that the male characters, especially Walt, find life meaningless apart from family even though they do their manly acts of bravery out in the wider world.
Walt doesn’t really need the meth money to support his family; meth is really a way for him to find some meaning for his life, which up to then had gone mostly unlived due to his weakness and caution. The drug world leads him to gain some strength by acting courageously in the face of danger. Walt repeatedly sinks back into weakness and foolish, self-destructive acts when he’s motivated by vanity. He regains his strength and courage when he just does his best for his family, without looking for recognition. Gus, of all people, is the one who explains this principle to him.
The series has explored one variation on this with Jesse. Walt, Mike, and Gus have treated Jesse like a son even though he isn’t. The results have generally been mixed but disappointing overall. Jesse does not repay loyalty the way family normally does.
In this day and age, if a TV series is going to explore every masculine angle around “la familia es todo,” it’s almost required to see how this plays out in a gay character.