I don’t buy it. Gus took a lot of care in crafting an aboveboard cover-story for his relationship with Gale; if Gale had a record as a sex offender, it wouldn’t torpedo that story (“Oh my - I had no idea!”), but it adds a totally unnecessary wrinkle. I’d bet a pound of blue meth that Gale was absolutely clean. Maybe he had a reputation for being hard to work with - which could explain how he ended up working for Fring - but that would be the worst of it.
That makes sense, however, Mike never said anything about 11 names (other then referring to her list), Hank never said anything about 11 names. The only time 11 names has come up was the list the Lydia had. Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense that they’re all talking about the same list. I’m just suggesting that, while they’re may very well be a lot of overlap between the accounts and the list, they might not be the same. Of course, I really doubt we’ll find out exactly.
Also, don’t forget, the people with off shore accounts were just the high paid people. It wouldn’t surprise me Gus had lower level people that were working for him but just taking a normal Madrigal/laundry/LPH paycheck. If they were making, say, under 35 or 40K he could put them on a normal payroll and not worry about hiding the money. Even the people that let Walt and Jesse under the washing machine know enough to cause a lot of problems. (And Lydia doesn’t know Walt or Jesse or Gale or the first chemist come to think of it). Sooner or later the DEA may go looking for a whistle blower with a nice 50 or 100 thousand dollar reward.
That’s part of the problem. Lydia doesn’t even know who she has to kill. She can kill the 11 people and there’s still plenty of others out there that know too much. Everyone in that laundry saw Walt and Jesse every day. Everyone there saw Gale and would recognize him if/when they play that youtube video. There’s too many people, above and beyond the Big 11 that would sell out for 50K and witness protection.
Is the list on AMCTV.com? What about the list of people with accounts in the Caymen Islands? I know over the years other evidence has been on the website.
I’m pretty sure Walt was the first chemist. Gale set up the lab, Gus had Juan Bolsa killed and cut ties to the cartel (who was previously supplying him with meth), and Walt started cranking out the blue to fill the void and fill Gus’s pockets.
The point isn’t whether Mike mentions 11 names. The point from LurkerInNJ is that Hank mentioned 11 names while interviewing Mike after the scene in which Lydia also had a list with 11 names. (Hank actually says there were a bunch of offshore accounts, “maybe a dozen of them”, so 11 plus Mike. Then Hank also says "Lucky for you you didn’t touch that money. I can not say the same for the other 11 on the list.)
That’s not just a coincidence, particularly with the amount of attention the writers of the show pay to detail. The lists are the same. Maybe it just means Lydia knows who has offshore accounts through her own means, the same as the DEA, but it could also be some deeper foreshadowing.
Lydia only cared about the people who could rat her out. Walt, Jesse, and the random laundry employees who saw them and Gale don’t know anything about her.
After a re-watch, I agree that Mike originally planned to kill Lydia.
Did anybody notice him in that Rat-Pack like Ciroc vodka ad with Sean [wtf-ever-he-goes-by-now] Combs that ran during the show? Here’s the longer version.
I didn’t catch Hank mentioning the 11/12 thing. If he said that then, yeah, I’ll assume we’re (Hank, Mike and Lydia) are all on the same page here.
I wondered if that was him! He and Combs and the gray-haired dude from The Sopranos are the only ones I recognized.
Back to Lydia – I think the character was cast as a woman because we have yet to see Mike or Walt or Jesse kill a woman (Jane doesn’t count). Lydia can’t survive – she’s too scared and jittery. First DEA agent that finds her and offers her a deal, she’s talking. Mike can’t possibly trust her, unless she believes he’d harm the kid, and she most likely doesn’t believe he would, not after he let her live.
I can’t imagine a circumstance that would result in Walt killing Skyler. I wouldn’t mind seeing it happen though, since Walt’s subsequent crackup would be awesome.
When I mentioned the original chemist, I was actually thinking of someone else, but I was reading the wiki on Gale and stumbled across this from the first day Gale and Walt worked together:
“As they’re cleaning up the floor, Gale asks Walt if Victor ever leaves and Walt tells him that his presence is something new and that there was some drama with the person Gale replaced.”
When ever I look at the characters on the wiki site there’s one listed as “Lead Chemist” and that’s who I was thinking of, but I see that’s the lead chemist in Mexico that Jesse taught. But in Gale’s page, it shows that there was someone before him that we never met.
This goes all the way back to the first few episodes which I don’t remember all that well.
The person before him that he never met was Jesse. Gale had initially set the lab up before Walt came on the scene, but Walt insisted on working with Jesse instead of Gale. After Gale was replaced, Jesse caused all the problems, so Gus brought Gale back. That’s when Walt and Gale would have had that conversation you cited.
Oh wait, I do vaguely remember him meeting Jesse and being offended at being replaced by such an apparent fuckup. Was that the first time he was replaced, or the second time?
ETA: Either way, Gale was the one who set up the lab, so I don’t think there was anyone before him at that lab. Of course, long before that, there was the partner (in both senses of the word) that Gus had originally, who was killed by the Don.
Re: Gale
I remember an early conversation when Gale and Walt were first hitting it off, Walt asks him how or why a talented chemist with an appreciation of the finer things (and some oddball stuff) got wrapped up cooking meth.
FWIW/IIRC, he mentions he’s a libertarian, so he didn’t have an ethical problem with what they were up to, and was pretty fresh out of either University or a crappy lab job, or something.
I can’t see Walt killing Skyler, but I can see Skyler killing Walt. She sees him as a monster now. She’s terrified. I wonder if she’ll be redecorating their room, and find the ricin.
Oh the irony if he’s in indefinite remission, makes his millions, fends off the DEA with a fully automatic machine gun with tracer rounds, only to be murdered by the one he first got into his mess for (not that she asked for it, but did eventually go along with it). Especially if he ends up havingto kill Hank. It’d just look like he succumbed to his cancer after all.
Of course I’m way off, and doesn’t really seem to jive with the direction of the final chapter so far, but that ricin is not going to end up under Walt’s control, that I guarantee.
And I agree, not only is it difficult to obtain enough pseudo for the huge batches they make (plus I would imagine there’s only a tiny amount of actual pseudo in the filler of a Sudafed pill). But the blue meth is his recipe, and even more so, his signature.
It’s his “brand” now, and it has high reputation, which equals high demand. $$$
Jesse is always looking for the shortcut, Walter has his standards and his pride. And greed.
Also, Mike had the utmost intention on killing her.
Of course, this synthesis business is a bit of dramatic license by the writers. As long as you’re making, say, pharma-grade product, the precursors don’t matter to the final product except in terms of the difficulty or tedium of the synthesis process. Now the look & feel of the product may be different and is a branding for the buyer, so that’s a good but different reason for Walt to stick with methylamine, but 99% pure meth is 99% pure meth.
Oh shit! Imagine if she found the ricin, thought it was drugs, and being all depressed and all, decided to try snorting some! Or even Walt Jr. doing the same. Nobody finding that would think it was extremely deadly poison; it just looks like drugs, which might be tempting.
I think you may be on to something here. Walt Jr. somehow being poisoned by that ricin is one of the few things that could actually upset Walt Sr. at this point.
Imagine this: He’s poisoned and starts showing symptoms. Walt realizes what happened. Maybe he finds the empty vial or something. Then he has to decide whether or not to tell the doctors what it is in order to save his son.
Maybe the whole business with the kid, along with getting Jesse to go along with killing Gus, was also a foreshadowing. Walt knows that mentioning ricin will get the authorities on his ass, since that’s what happened to Jesse. At least I assume that he knows that. Saul knew about it and probably told Walt. So Walt ends up having to decide between saving his son and risking being found out.
Even worse, what if the baby is poisoned? What if it’s the whole family, Skyler, Jr., and the baby?
Or maybe Hank will get too close to the truth and Walt will use the ricin on him. There are lots of possibilities!
Wow, cool connection of Gus to Madrigal : There were tons of Germans in Chile. Chile encouraged the emmigration of european intellects, and after the second world war alot of German Jews and Germans who belonged to the Nazi party emmigrated. More than half the immigration into Chile was German in 1948.
Those who were the far right wing facist leaning “nazi” sympathizers were said to be extremely helpful during the Military terrorist reign of Pinochet in the 70’s and 80’s. In the book Something Fierce Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter writer Carmen Aguirre in Chile recounts a harrowing story of the blonde blue eyed nazi sympathizers who basically spied on any leftist activity and kept “law and order” with Military precision. It would be an interesting twist if Gus was somehow aligned with the Military Hunta Pinochet of the 70’s and 80’s.. probably one of the most hated men in Chile’s history. There’s definitely more to Gus’ back story, as the Don said he spared his life over Max because he said “I know who you really are”
We’re all caught up on the show for the first time. It’s exciting… although of course now we have to wait a week for each episode instead of watching a handful a night. So far this season feels a little uneven to me because they’re introducing so much new stuff, but you can see they are setting up an even broader look at the implications of what Walt is doing. We’d heard about Madrigal and here they thrust us into that long taste test with no English and no explanation, and not a single word from Shuler if I remember correctly. I always think it’s very X-Files-esque when they do this kind of thing.
I think this was actually in episode one, but I was astonished when Walt said he’d lost money on this meth deal to this point. I guess the math does add up when you count the things they’ve paid for: treatment for Walt and Hank, cars, the bachelor pad, the car wash, and all the money that Skylar pissed away trying to get Ted to pay the IRS. Still- wow. Just another reminder that no matter what Walt does, he keeps going deeper into the hole. Almost as great was Hank’s casual comment that they probably never would have found out what was on the laptop anyway, making the whole magnet caper a waste of time (not that they could have taken it for granted, I suppose).
He said he loved chemistry but he couldn’t take the politics and ass-kissing that he needed to do in order to advance in academia. Walt is the same way, which is one reason he wound up as the most overqualified high school chemistry teacher in the world.
As far as the list goes, yes, Lydia knew about the list of Swiss bank accounts Gus kept in the photo frame. The DEA called in the men whose names were on the accounts, plus Mike (his account was in his granddaughter’s name). Lydia said Mike should kill those guys so they don’t talk about Gus’ operation, and when Mike said no, she paid someone else to do it. Mike was definitely going to kill her- it’s not like he can trust her. But with his money gone, he’s back to the meth operation.
I didn’t pick up on this myself, but the show did imply Gus was connected to the Pinochet government- Hector called Gus “El Generalissimo” in one of the flashbacks.
It was this episode. Mike told Walt and Jesse they should walk away and Walt said that he’s $40k in the hole at this point, counting the money he owes Jesse.