If not related, there’s a good possibility that they knew each other. There was an aerial shot of the train that showed cattle fences on either side of the tracks, so the kid was out tarantula hunting on his own property. Good Samaritan was traveling on a road that crossed the kid’s property, so there’s a fair chance that he is an employee of the kid’s family.
Calling Jane innocent is a bit of a stretch.
Jane was a hopeless heroin addict and as long as Jesse was with her addiction to heroin was going to be part of his life too. Letting Jane die was obviously morally wrong, but in a sense it actually saved Jesse’s life. Jesse was head over heels for Jane, and when they left town together with the $350k or whatever it was that Jesse was getting as his cut they’d literally inject every bit of it into their arms until they were both dead.
Wasn’t Jane clean and Jesse the addict when they met?
ETA: I guess Jane was an addict too, in the sense that she used in the past, but I remember her holding out for quite some time before Jesse drug her back down into it. Of the two of them, I don’t think that Jane was the one who needed to go to save Jesse, so much as it was the other way around.
Also, on the issue of Todd I think if I was a “Meth Kingpin” I’d probably kill him on the spot. Yes, he’s getting rid of a potential loose end. Yes, he was being decisive. But here’s the thing, he’s not out by himself. He’s with Walt and Jesse who he’s supposed to defer to, he was basically doing what Victor did when he started cooking meth, he’s taking liberties above his station.
At that point in time it was Walt and Jesse’s decision on what to do with that kid, not Todd’s. The fact that Todd just did it shows he’s too impulsive and too willing to make major decisions for himself. There is a fine line between a henchman that makes good independent decisions and one who starts making decisions that they aren’t supposed to make.
If I was Walt I’d take my gun out and shoot Todd in the back before the kid was even cold, and Mike/Walt/Jesse would dispose of both of them at the same time.
My prediction is that Jesse gets really upset and wants to kill Todd, but Walt sees Todd as a valuable asset. I can’t predict how Mike will react, I disagree with Marley that Mike is just a stone cold criminal and will see the decision Todd made as the professional thing to do.
Mike is a cold criminal in some ways, but I don’t think he kills people for no reason. I don’t think he’d kill a kid in that situation because it actually doesn’t make much sense, there is basically no real chance the kid will make any trouble for them and the kid going missing will significantly increase unwanted attention from the authorities into that area.
I also think it’s a big mistake for Walt to see Todd as an asset, Todd was trying to impress Walt from day one and that almost shows a dangerous level of ambition. The smart move on Todd is to eliminate him immediately.
You don’t remember correctly. Jesse was a long term meth user who I believe had flirted with being clean for awhile before meeting Jane. With Jane he started to do meth again, but it was Jane who was basically like “hey, I used to do heroin and it’s great, let’s do that.” Jesse had never shot heroin in his life before Jane, and it was at her suggestion they do it, she even taught him how to shoot up and how to make sure you didn’t pass out in a way that would risk you choking on your own vomit.
Yes, Jesse got Jane back into using because using meth prompted her to start using heroin again. However the fact that she went back to heroin and took Jesse with her shows me she was the sort of addict who was never really going to get clean. By the time Walt let her die both her and Jesse were in full on heroin addiction and there was no way either of them were stopping. As long as he had Jane, Jesse wasn’t going to go to rehab, and as long as Jane had access to Jesse’s money and didn’t need her dad her dream was basically to just run away together and do tons of heroin until they died.
Actually Jane said after they hit the road they would “get clean, but for ourselves” but that’s basic addict talk, they weren’t going anywhere other than a casket in the trajectory they were going. The only way Jesse survived is when he ended up depressed and wallowing in his own addiction, without Jane around he had nowhere to go so when Walt rescued him from the crack house Jesse basically was going wherever Walt told him to go. In this case to rehab.
Granted. Still, despite her drug addiction, she was convincing Jesse to take the money and run off with her and get out of that way of life.
Walt didn’t like that. No, not at all.
In the next episode, we see Holly wearing purple and Marie wearing a hat…awwww…who am I kidding…
Inside Episode 505 Breaking Bad: Dead Freight
Making of Episode 505, Dead Freight: Inside Breaking Bad
She wasn’t innocent? Whom did she murder?
Funny!
Seriously though…the producers/writers/director of this show have got to be intentionally needling the fans with some of this stuff. There’s so much viral shit on the internet surrounding this show and its memes.
I actually believed you for a second there…I thought “hey, they’re switching it up!”.
Oh absolutely - like the whole business with the unsliced pizza, later being explained how “they pass the savings on to you!”. It was definitely a nod to the fan discussion, because otherwise there’d be absolutely no reason to include that bit as it’s not of any importance to the plot. (though it was pretty hilarious when Jesse challenges Badger’s logic - “Savings? What savings?”)
For nostalgia’s sake, here’s the pizza scene. I forgot how good it was.
“You got some, like, scissors? I will cut this bitch up good!”
Then Badger starts trying to calculate the “man-hours” spent slicing pizza… priceless.
I’m going to take Marie’s offhand comment about never giving Holly back as foreshadowing of my prediction (last season) that Hank and Marie will end up raising Holly.
What can we read into Skyler saying “I’ll be whatever kind of partner you want”? Is she ready to sleep with him again, in exchange for keeping the kids out of the house?
Hmm. In the preview for next week, Skyler tells Marie that if she knew the things she’s done, she’d never speak to her again. I wonder if Marie will blab that to Hank, and Hank will start thinking about that, and the cars, and the watch, and start piecing things together. Or not.
BTW, for anyone who didn’t see the Inside Breaking Bad vignette for this week, Aaron Paul gives a mini-kinda-spoiler (not really much of one since it’s quite vague, but it’s a clue on the focus of the next episode):
(re: the kid getting shot) “Jesse… does not like that. Next episode, the shit hits the fan.”
I can see Hank and Walt immediately switching calmly into “fixing the mess” mode while Jesse is out of his mind with anger.
If they kill Todd, how will they explain it to the rest of the Vamanos Pest crew?
Walt and Mike?
Walt and Hank getting together to deal with the dead body in the desert next to the tank of stolen methylamine would really change the course of the show. It might make Skyler and Marie closer though.
On the podcast from last week, Anna Gunn compared Skyler to Carmela Soprano. The problem I see with that is that Carmela had a network of mob wives for support (same went for Karen Hill). Skyler has no one to talk to. For some reason the Skyler/Marie joke reminded me of that.
She was blackmailing Walter. Granted, she was blackmailing Walter for money that was rightly owed Jesse, but she did make a point that the blackmail could possibly continue indefinitely:
Jane: This is blackmail. Because what I know about you, high-school teacher turned drug dealer, with a brother-in-law in the DEA… that would make one hell of a story. National news, I’ll bet. Do right by Jesse tonight or I will burn you to the ground.
Walter (to Jesse): How do I know she’ll keep quiet?
Jane: I guess you don’t.
I’m not sure, and that’s the only reason I could imagine for possibly not killing Todd right away. However that is a crew of criminals, they understand force and the use of it. If they are told “Todd didn’t do as he was told, Todd is gone” I think they’d be more likely to do exactly what they were fucking told from that point on versus be trouble. Gus ruled his organization with an iron first (and rarely seems to have resorted to violence aside from near the end) and his men respected that, they wouldn’t have turned on him just for making an example. Think of how Mike responded to the killing of Victor (a friend), even with Walt trying to use that to turn Mike, Mike remained very loyal to Gus.
That seems most likely to me.
The problem with Todd is I wouldn’t trust him in my organization if I was Walt or even Mike, and Jesse will hate him for emotional reasons. The guy really did overstep his bounds, the whole point to the operation was to avoid any attention, a missing kid is the definition of attention. Not as bad as an outright robbery with two dead train engineers and a disabled train left behind for the Feds to find, but it’ll get some unwanted attention all the same.
Now, they could just say “you’re fired” to Todd, but then you have a guy with basically all the goods on you out there who may try to use that against you in some way.