What is the name of the movie that Mike is watching when the DEA search his place?
I don’t know what he knows, but there’s something about that guy that tells me he’s gonna be hustlin’ Walt, somehow. The “eager to please, loyal soldier boy” description people have been applying to him in this thread is an act for sure. You can never trust a sycophant.
Tough cop Dave Bannion takes on a politically powerful crime syndicate.
Taglines: Somebody’s going to pay …because he forgot to kill me…
haha, damnit. I knew there was a chance I missed it. :smack:
I’m going to live with the (faulty?) reasoning that since the lawyer was able to place the happy 18th birthday note, and filled the box to its absolute fullest (and even said to Mike that a single dollar more wouldn’t fit) that the DEA didn’t get that money because the lawyer wasn’t opening that particular box on the trip where he got arrested.
There was also 9 photos of boxes being opened on the photo board in hanks office when Walt retrieves the bugs. To me that also hints that kaylees money doesn’t get taken.
Saul explicitly said that Mike got his stash taken twice by the DEA. Also, the bank would have had records on all of the boxes.
Right, there’s just no way that money would be left alone. It would also undercut the whole story they are telling here: Mike was doing the same thing Walt says he is doing (leaving money for his family). He failed. The money is gone, he abandoned his family, and now he’s dead. As far as his goals went, it all amounted to nothing.
Exactly. I mean, did you guys not see how casually and thoughtlessly he pulled out a gun and shot a little kid?
“Eager to please loyal soldier boy” implies a moral sense. But someone with a moral sense would at least hesitate before killing an innocent kid, even if it were for some reason necessary to do so.
Todd (Tod–german for death) is going to be the undoing of Walt.
How about this for a totally wild-guess prediction:
- Walt attempts to favour Todd in a final attempt to manipulate Jesse back into the fold through jealousy, not accepting that Jesse has had enough of him and the business. Todd uses the lattitude he’s given to plot taking out Walt and his whole family, to take over. Jesse finds out about this, attempts to warn Walt and is blown off, and is forced to make a choice: walk away and leave them to their fate (as he would like to do), or take out Todd. Because of residual loyalty he takes out Todd, and is sucked back into the business he would rather flee. Walt, not accepting that Todd was plotting his death, now sees Jesse as the danger, leading to a final confrontation between 'em.
This is the first season I’ve been watching the show as it happens, so I have to ask- do people usually get this focused on relatively minor characters? Did people ever talk this much about Tyrus or Victor? Nobody’s denying that a psychologically healthy person wouldn’t just pull out a gun and shoot a kid, but then again, Walt has killed at least half a dozen people in the series and we just saw him kill Mike because Mike criticized his decisionmaking. That was just as impulsive and even less justified (it’s really is true that the kid could have told someone something; Mike was leaving forever). From a narrative standpoint I think Todd illustrates the difficulties of being in charge: your word is law and your underlings will apply your instructions even if you don’t think about the implications of those instructions. He also shows how lucky Walt got with Jesse as a partner because he does not seem to be up to par as a replacement. And of course the shooting led Jesse to leave forever because he realized that Walt’s promises are always bullshit. Todd joined the business two weeks ago and he’s going to take over somehow? Todd is setting Walt for some kind of betrayal to… whom? Mike already said his prison connections amount to squat. I don’t think the show has ever pulled this kind of twist and I doubt they’d start now.
Well, if you are watching it episode to episode you don’t really know who will turn into a major character. After all, Mike was originally a pretty minor character.
But I am, as I said, just wildly speculating. The great thing about this series is that most plot developments and twists aren’t easily predictable and minor characters can have major impact - I mean, who foresaw that the 2nd season would end with a plane crash caused by Jane’s Dad? 
Marley, I think last season with the storyline about Gus brought the detective work to a new level. At least for me. Before that the foreshadowing didn’t add to the drama much, and the main characters weren’t that devious. Walt’s killings before then were spur of the moment decisions, or poorly planned. Now we see plots and conspiracies unfolding, or more like folding up one of those old gas station maps, that seemingly never can be re-folded again, but at the end it all collapses down to a neat little flat rectangle. YMMV.
When you watch the old episodes you don’t have to wait a week for the next episode to come on so we have time to take the episodes apart like this. Also, when you’re watching the old episodes, you don’t have people to talk to like this. We talked about Victor quite and how he may or may not have posed a threat to Gus. But Gus took care of that pretty quickly so there wasn’t a lot of discussion.
Also, we now know we are close to the end. Everything that happens now happens for a reason.
Marley23, I think Todd is being treated differently than other minor characters because viewers have no background on him. He came out of nowhere and we don’t know anything about him.
As an example, nobody speculated about the motivations of Skinny Pete and Badger because we knew they were Jesse’s friends and they behaved like Jesse’s friends. We saw them in scenes when they were away from Walt and Jesse, and we knew what to expect from them.
Todd’s a mystery. We haven’t seen him interact with anyone except Walt and Jesse and Mike. We haven’t seen him alone except for that scene in the car, when he was looking at the spider. All we know for sure is that he’s trying to ingratiate himself with Walt.
Plus, his name is in the opening credits, so we know he’s important. 
I understand the amount of attention you can pay to characters on a week-to-week basis is different, but I was curious about the look at the peripheral characters in particular. If some people considered Victor as a potential major actor, that does answer my question. And yes, Saul and Mike wound up being significant characters in unexpected ways. I just don’t think you’re going to see the kinds of twists being proposed here. Breaking Bad is not the Sopranos or The Wire. Both those shows spent a lot of time on a lot of characters and gave us in-depth looks at how most of them ticked. The cast here is fairly small and the show really doesn’t care that much about the side characters. There hasn’t been a lot of Hank this season (that’s changing now) and little of Marie, and we’re not even seeing much of Skyler the last few episodes because she no longer wants anything to do with Walt. Ultimately everything that happens on the show is about Walt and his transformation and drive. That wasn’t true of The Wire, which was about an entire city, or on the Sopranos, which was about a whole Mafia family and Tony’s civilian life as well. Walt doesn’t even have a domestic life anymore. There are twists and turns but they’re of a different type than “Todd is a serial killer” or “Todd betrays Walt to the prison gang.” We’ve seen Walt betrayed on the domestic level with Skyler and in various ways by Gus, although Gus’ actions were generally prompted by the fact that Walt was unstable and a pain in the ass for his operation. The rest of the show is going to be about Walt grasping for more power and seeing it all fall apart, and that has to come from within, not because it turns out that someone who just showed up this season is a usurper or a lunatic.
Also, any of us who watched Friday Night Lights (which is on the short list of shows that are ALMOST as good as Breaking Bad) were like “hey, that’s Landry! Clearly he MUST be an important character”.
True. But it’s evident that the someone who just showed up this season will play a large part in Walt’s fall. He already has, by killing the kid, which caused Jesse to quit. It remains to be seen what else Todd will do, but I think it will be important.
I don’t see him as a usurper. Jury’s still out on lunatic.
Yeah, this. There are innumerable young male no-name actors out there. For Vince Gilligan to pick one as instantly recognizable and semi-famous as Landry, he must have had SOMETHING meaty for him to do.