Anyway, I think the real purpose of this episode is to start setting up the final conflict between Walt and Jesse. At this point, I think Jesse’s done. He’s not going to want to keep working with Walt after what happened. And that creates a problem for Walt, which may lead to him feeling that Jesse needs to be dead due to everything he knows. And then if/when Jesse finds out about Brock, he’s gonna want to kill Walt. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Are there any scenes where Holly isn’t wearing a fucking hat? Its getting to be like Marie and purple.
I think these two posts sort of contradict each other the way you hold him responsible for shooting the kid, but letting him off the hook for the plane crash. Sort of, not completely. Also, they would be completely innocent as well as the people that got caught in the fire at the laundry, were those random laundry workers, I don’t remember.
They committed murder in the first couple of episodes. The show was clear from the very beginning that Walt and Jesse were just thinking about themselves while their actions had dire consequences for the people around them. Walt poisoning Brock was a turning point in that it showed how far he was now willing to go to get what he wanted (harming an innocent person) and how skilled he was in getting the job done. It was an evil thing to do but it can’t be called a moment he became evil or anything like that. They’ve been trafficking in human misery the whole time and they’ve killed people throughout the show. And Jesse has already seen a child die - not as a result of his own words but as a result of the business he and Walt are in. The show has been a quick descent that way. I’m not sure there is any one moment you can say this became evil except the very beginning, when Walt decided the way to provide for his family financially and get revenge on the world was to use his chemistry skills to make crystal meth.
I think something about the heist will come back to haunt them, maybe the spilled methylamine or something to do with the missing kid or etc. I think that because in Breaking Bad loose ends don’t just disappear and everything eventually ties together, I like that about the show but in this case I think it’ll be a little unrealistic. The reality is in a place as large as the desert they just bury the kid and he will never be found, ever. They just kick dirt around any of the spilled methylamine and no one will ever notice it was there, no one would ever find those buried tanks or the holes that they were in and this basically would be a tragedy about a missing kid who never got found.
I think some people have a very unrealistic view of how interconnected things are and how easily law enforcement can do stuff. The reality is people go missing in the desert all the time and are never found, the scale is so massive that even missing small planes can end up not being found in the desert…and that’s a missing small plane being looked for by helicopter search and rescue and etc.
It’d be very easy to make a random kid disappear in the desert to never be found, and since none of the principals have any connection whatsoever with the kid they’d never be suspects even remotely. It’s not even guaranteed that local law enforcement will even know that a train had to stop briefly in that area due to a broken down vehicle, and they also won’t know that it happened at the same time the kid got disappeared because they won’t know precisely when whatever happened to that kid happened to him. Even if they do find out the train had to stop for a broken down vehicle, it’s unlikely the train engineers took down any information that would allow the police to even find out who the guy driving the truck might have been.
Finally there is no reason the police would even be trying to test random soil for spilled methylamine, and I wonder too if methylamine spilled in the desert would eventually break down in the sun or etc so it may not even be there by the time the police looked in that area (which most likely they’d never do anyway.) So in reality I think the murdering of the kid and the heist, as it went down, would never result in trouble for the principals…but yeah I do suspect something crazy will happen to get them in some hot water over it.
And Jesse seems to have the money to retire, at least for a while. He certainly has the know how to get back in the game a few years from now if he wanted to.
I heard someone mentioned a few episodes ago that splitting the show into two sets like this will make them eligible for two years worth of Emmys (I have no idea if if it’s true). I wonder if that makes Jesse and Skyler (and anyone else on a potential hit list) kill-proof until we’re at least well into the final 8 so they have a chance to get nominated for both parts of the season.
IIRC, that is exactly the intent of the show, from its inception.
I’d like to watch the entire heist scene again from the time Walt turns on the pump to see if there’s a subtle change in the background noise that would help pinpoint exactly when the kid pulled up on the bike. Maybe that’s asking too much of Gilligan, but at this point I wouldn’t put it past him. Unfortunately I was a bit quick on the draw and hit the delete button on my DVR.
And I got the impression that Mike got back involved with Walt and Jesse to pay off his guys to keep them quiet. His granddaughter’s money was secondary.
Was the ethernet tap and bug all just to prove/disprove Lydia’s innocence? Seems like a lot to go through if that was the primary motive there.
Walt has a massive ego that was basically forced dormant because of twenty years of being married to Skyler and being the nerdy science teacher and mild mannered father. While it’s never been explicitly said, it’s been heavily implied the reason Walt wasn’t married to Gretchen and wasn’t a multi-millionaire owner in Grey Matter was not because of Walt being screwed but because Walt’s ego blew both his personal relationship with Gretchen up and his business association with Gretchen & Elliott.
I think the cancer diagnosis broke something loose in Walt and let his ego, long dormant, come back to the surface. That’s why he refused several very realistic and easy ways to provide for his family (including Elliott openly saying he would just give Walt not only money for treatment but straight up charity money or a job with Grey Matter making basically as much as he wanted), and had to do it himself. The chance encounter with Jesse on Hank’s ride-along made him realize a way he could do it all himself and satisfy his egotistical need to be singularly responsible for saving his family and making them wealthy after his death.
When Walt had to create toxic gas to poison the drug dealers that had Jesse and him at gun point, killing one and incapacitating another that was basically pure self defense. When Walter went downstairs to finish off the other dealer it was a very hard decision for Walt. Walt knew it had to be done to stay in this drug business, the only alternative at that point was probably calling the police to deal with it and dying in shame and probably jail. Walt made the decision to stay in the drug business by killing the other dealer and that’s really when whatever Walt it was that was a normal father and husband for 20 years was gone forever.
Any remnant of Walt’s humanity hasn’t been seen in a long time, when he watched Jane die you could almost see Walt mourn the loss of his humanity but the fact that he allowed it to happen shows it was truly gone.
After that, the only real glimmer of human decency in Walt was his paternal relationship with Jesse, which was stormy and unpredictable but genuine. However in this recent season and the latter part of last season I think we now see that whatever paternal relationship Walter actually had with Jesse now only exists in Jesse’s mind and Walt is just manipulating it to his advantage.
I think Gilligan has done an amazing job of making us question any support we might have for Walt. Most shows with “antiheroes” just don’t really push the envelope, instead the antihero is “kind of a bad guy with a heart of gold who was in bad situations.”
From the very earliest in, Walt isn’t even doing this because he has no other choice. He’s doing these horrible things because he’s too proud to accept a very generous offer from old friends that would leave his family fully provided for and for most normal people this would have ended there.
In the meth business, Gilligan very quickly forces Walt to do murder and horrible things, which I think is great. It would have been easy to try and portray Walt as this nerdy science teacher who, through mastery of chemistry, was able to bumble his way through the drug trade but without ever having to do anything outright evil. Instead, Gilligan (probably correctly) shows early on that in the real world’s drug trade if you’re in business for yourself with a product like meth you will very quickly be required to be willing to do violence to continue on.
The only real place for a non-violent person in such a world would be something like Gale’s arrangement with Gus, where he’s just a well paid but highly sheltered employee working on the payroll of a very large organization that protects him from the realities of the drug business.
Indeed, if this series was remarkable for nothing else, it would be remarkable for Walt’s character arc - I can’t off the top think of any other example of a lead character being portrayed as losing his humanity so utterly.
I am still rooting for Walt, in a small way.
Not that he can possibly redeem himself at this point, or undo any of the damage he’s caused. And I doubt he’ll achieve his original goal of building a nest egg for his family. (He might not even have a family for much longer.) But I am hoping that at the very end, in the final minutes of his life, he’ll realize the path he chose was all a giant mistake.
Then maybe with his dying breath he’ll shrug and say, “Bet it would make a kick-ass TV show though.”
It was the fault of Jane’s Dad that the planes collided. Yes, he was sorely grieving for Jane, but still. Unless I am misremembering something. And didn’t Walt and Jesse get everyone out of the laundry after they set the lab afire?
I don’t know. I do think there’s varying degrees of evil. Walt’s descent into it wasn’t immediate, and he was a somewhat sympathetic character for quite some time despite his new career track (cancer survivor, loser nobody chemistry teacher, son with MS, cheating wife). It’s easy to shrug off the harmful effects of the drug he’s producing as a bunch of loser dope fiends. Its easy to root for the death of the likes of Tuco Salamanca, Gus and the cousins. I think poisoning Brock is still that critical moment where we really get to see just how cold and manipulative Walt really is.
So far as we know, no laundry workers were killed in the fire. The bodies found in the charred rubble were (probably) the two henchmen that Walt killed as he forced his way back into the lab.
Right, I always forget about those two guys.
And both times the plan ended up making things worse.
The desert is big. I’m sure there will be loose ends, but just because there is a search for the kid doesn’t mean that they’ll find the tanks. With a kid missing in the desert, speed will be of the essence, and they wouldn’t examine ever inch of the dirt unless they see a child’s shoe or something else that definitely links to the kid.
I know! I heard the train whistle at the beginning, so I was expecting the kid to get a bad end. But I was expecting it to be an accident, or him killed after some argument. The friendly waving and then no hesitation to take his gun out was chilling.
That’s a good point. Jesse could have gotten out already. I’m guessing he’s stayed in to have something to do, and because of loyalty to Walt. I’m guessing he’ll be looking towards the door more but manipulated by Walt into staying longer.
Oh, that’s a very good point. We know Walt isn’t a huge fan of Mike, and has thought about taking him out. Todd could very well be of use to Walt there. Also I noticed how Walt seemed very interested when he was talking to Lydia about how she took a hit out on Mike, showing that that idea is on his mind as well.
He didn’t necessarily see anything incriminating, but they had no way to know. He probably saw them celebrating and turning off the generator near the train tracks. Maybe they could have explained something that would satisfy him, or maybe not. He could have told his mom about the weird guys he saw near the train tracks, and maybe she would have ignored it, or maybe she’d think she’d need to tell the authorities.
It did. It broke the dam on Walt’s resentment. He does have a huge ego, but I view that resentment as the driving force behind almost everything he’s done since then. Several times it’s even surpassed making money as a motivation. From just about the first episode you could see that he did want to provide for his family, but he also wanted to get revenge on the world because of the raw deal he got: missing out on the Gray Matter money, getting stuck teaching at a high school, Walt Jr.'s illness, and finally contacting lung cancer without even smoking, which is sort of the ultimate instance of getting a raw deal. He’s sick of being seen as a helpless victim and he’ll do anything to demonstrate that he isn’t, including bragging to his wife about his crimes, damaging their cover story, and as he does all these things, he keeps sucking everybody further and further down and wrapping up more and more people. Walt just keeps doubling down on being Heisenberg because he needs to project that resentment and satisfy his ego.
And there’s a sensible argument to be made there. But when Walt chose to start making drugs, he made a choice to do something evil for what was (on the surface) a good and noble reason. Since then he’s just chosen increasing degrees of evil, usually for worse and worse reasons. I think the only real clear dividing line is the first choice he made. That’s what set everything else in motion. He’s gotten worse and worse since then, I agree.
As it just so happens, that’s the focus of the spin-off series. I hear there’s even a three-way with Gus (and maybe Gale?).
I see Walt’s defining characteristic as pride, in the Miltonian sense: “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven”. Better to make money as a meth gangster than accept charity from one’s ex-lover and ex-partner.