My guess is that the first scene of next week’s show will have Mike shuffling up, finding out what just went down, and going ballistic. He already knows that he’s working with Larry, Moe, and Curly. I don’t think he’s going to kill Todd, but he’ll probably kick Todd’s ass into the middle of next week. He may have to peel Jesse off him so he can have a piece for himself. It’s going to be a little more intense than the bitch-slappin’ he gave Walt in the bar. Then he’s going to roll his eyes and scream at all three of them until he’s blue in the face. Then he’s going to fix it like he always does. But this is unquestionably going to create a serious rift among the four of them, with Mike and Jesse polarizing against Walt and Todd.
I’m wondering if Jesse may kill Todd.
Yep. We don’t know that the engineers saw the kid, but they might have. Or the guy in the pickup could have seen him.
Very good point. Any or all of them might have seen the kid, and a missing kid will get lots of publicity, at least locally, with his picture all over the media.
I wonder what kind of tracks a dirt bike leaves in the desert. If any of them saw him and bike tracks are found going up to the train tracks but not leaving…
Mike wasn’t that far away. It was a frickin’ gunshot. Gunshots are loud. I’m quite sure he heard it (even if he didn’t know who got shot).
Yeah, where? To me that’s a piece that’s sort of a dangling story line. Maybe, if it comes to a fight for custody of little Holly, and it might go there as the story progresses, there’s no doubt Walt will use Marie’s illness against her petition for the child.
Does Walt know about Marie’s kleptomania?
In any case, a scenario that leaves Holly with Hank and Marie won’t involve lawyers. Skyler will be out of the picture and Walt will have bigger issues to deal with.
So, my predictions for the final three episodes of this half of the season. I’m putting them in a spoiler box, but I don’t possess any concrete information about the upcoming episodes. I’m just going from next week’s preview.
[SPOILER]Jesse is out of the business. That’s it for him. He realizes that there’s never going to be a point when they can operate without bloodshed.
Mike threatens to leave, and is serious about intending to quit. Okay, so I’m not entirely sure about what happens here. He cleans up some loose ends regarding Gus’ former workforce, gives them their final cut, and then he’s done.
Skyler continues her attempts to get the children out of the house. She’ll be pivotal to Hank discovering that Walt is Heisenberg, but I don’t know how, exactly. She’ll leverage baby Holly against Walt, somehow, since Flynn is basically a lost cause for her at this point.
Walt refuses to leave the business even though Mike and Jesse are cutting their ties. Todd becomes the new Mike at Walt’s request. Walt becomes increasingly reckless, and since he’s now the sole remaining operator in the business, he takes on more and more risk. He does something that arouses Hank’s suspicions.
Hank discovers that Walt is Heisenberg at the end of the seventh episode, and at the beginning of the final episode. This discovery is the catalyst for Walt going on the run, which brings us back to the first scene of the first episode of this season.
Something terrible happens with the ricin. Maybe it causes a small electrical fire?
[/SPOILER]
Anybody else care to hazard a guess?
Exactly. It seems like something that’s intended to be relevant at some point.
Or maybe it’s just another story line about morality and family. Maybe it’s a little morality play about right and wrong and how questions of guilt and innocence can enter a gray area at times; sort of a counterpoint to Walt’s story.
Maybe it’s just about showing that Hank will use his influence to intervene in the legal process when it comes to a family member; a tendency that might become relevant at some point.
If I recall correctly, Skyler told Walt about the incident at the jewelers.
I’m a little skeptical that Marie steals from her family. That’s the easiest way to get caught, particularly since Skyler already busted her. I don’t know if her kleptomania is intended to play into the larger plot of Walt’s crimes, although it’s an interesting idea. Why is it in the show at all other than complicating everybody’s life? Maybe it’s a hint that Hank the lawman can’t even keep his own wife from petty (and not so petty) theft. Maybe it shows that Skyler was already surrounded by criminal activity in her family. We did see last season that Marie’s stealing seems to get worse when she is under stress and that she progressed to kleptomania and to compulsive lying when she felt trapped and unhappy with her life with Hank when his physical therapy wasn’t going well. She was stealing and lying so she could live out a fantasy life. Maybe it’s going to get worse if she hears damaging secrets from Skyler - although I have trouble believing Skyler would ever tell Marie the truth. She’s mentally unstable and a blabbermouth married to a DEA agent.
(Based on next week previews, which I usually try to avoid):
It sounds like Mike is actually leaving, since he says that he had been followed by three different DEA tails. We also saw that Hank was going to focus their investigation and surveillance on him. He kinda has to go, at this point - he can’t count on always evading their scrutiny indefinitely.
As for what Hank knows by the mid-season finale, I doubt he will know for sure that Walt is Heisenberg, but he will at least have some strong, but imprecise suspicions. And I really doubt that Walt is going on the run so soon - how would they fill the last eight episodes? It seems pretty clear that the Denny’s scene only comes after some time has passed since he went on the lam. My guess is the Denny’s scene takes place in the penultimate episode of the series.
Wait, I figured it out. Hank is gonna go scavenging for minerals in the desert, and by an amazing stroke of luck, he uncovers the hidden tanks of methylmine. But Walt employs Marie’s super-thieving skills to lift it before the DEA can process the crime scene! Amazing how that all came together.
Wow. You must be looking over the writer’s shoulders. 
And then Michael Caine says “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off,” and they haul ass to Lollapalooza.
Is it possible that what we saw of Walt at the beginning of the first episode this season with the hair, 52, machine gun, etc happens not at the end of episode 8 but at or towards the end of the next run of episodes? It doesn’t seem like there’s enough time left between now and our half-season finale for things to completely unravel to that point. Yet.
I think that’s very likely. There are only three episodes left in this next half-season and I doubt they’re going to jump forward a whole year over that time when the entire rest of the series has taken place over the course of about a year.
Walt is not gonna let anyone but Jesse cook with him…Fool me once (with Gale), shame on me, Fool me twice (with Victor), shame on you…Fool me a third time (with Todd)? Ain’t gonna happen.
The preview for the next episode shows:
[spoiler]The kid is dead and buried (but for some reason Todd is digging him up) somewhere in a cellar or enclosed place, Mike slamming Todd against some wire mesh gate, Jesse being morally shaken AGAIN, Mike being tailed by the DEA and announcing that he’s done (until Walt finds a way to drag him back in), Marie and Skyler getting pink and purplely all over, and Walt getting reckless some more, Gustavo style.
But there is one scene where Mike and Jesse are out in the desert meeting up with 2 other people…and one of them “looks” like Hank…
[/spoiler]
What about when we first met Mike, when he had the bloody nose? Isn’t that likely to come back up, as in, he has a fatal illness, or something? What was the purpose of that?
You mean the final episode of the second season, where he comes to ‘clean up’ Jane? I just replayed it—I’m not seeing any bloody nose.