Both Skyler’s scenes, with Hank and then with Lydia, were awesome. Everybody was acting their asses off. Criminey, everybody on this show is such a good actor.
Agreed - assuming you mean Marie, the sister. Lydia is the new drug lady.
I totally see this happening in the final episode!
Oy vey, yes, of course. My mind is all over the place this morning.
Yeah, hat’s off to hajaro on that one. However, Walt didn’t seem to look for it on his way back through the house to get the ricin, and everything was pretty cleared out at that point.
This occurred to me a a few minutes ago, and I was like :smack::smack::smack: I’ve been thinking of them more as business partners than real husband and wife, but of course, they never did go through with the divorce. Basically everything Skyler knows is worthless because it was disclosed under marital confidentiality. She can say she saw the money, but they laundered the hell out of it (who’s going to prove that they didn’t get those extra vehicles through each day?) and she doesn’t know where it is anymore.
It just struck me that Lydia’s actions in this ep mirror Skyler’s character arc: she’ll be involved, but she doesn’t want to know. She closed her eyes and let Walt lead her through the scattered corpses and just let the money roll in.
Best moment: Skyler’s “maybe our best move is to stay quiet”, mirroring Walt’s “thread lightly”.
Is this actually true? I thought it was just that a person can’t be *forced *to testify against their spouse, not that they can’t give evidence at all. 
I think Lydia thinks she’s the only “good” person in the whole operation. She shields her eyes from the carnage around her not because she doesn’t want to see it, but because she’s pretending it isn’t there.
I wonder what the odds are that Walt ditches Skyler to go to New Hampshire. Skyler’s past is now open and as Hank uncovers the things she’s done she’s going to face a long jail sentence. I could imagine Walt trying to get to her only to see Hank arresting her and taking her off to prison.
I have to admit that these last 2 episodes, though very good, are very hard to watch. Hank and Marie really loved them and the betrayal is palpable. I really feel bad for them.
I think Skyler’s moral ambiguity is becoming even more interesting than Walt’s.
Does anybody anticipate a Skyler suicide?
I don’t think anybody would be surprised if Hank’s planning Suicide by Cartel-Cop-Czechs-Whatever Gets Introduced Next.
And I still predict that blue meth will have severe side effects that causes some users to become creatures known only as ‘Walkers’. And ultimately Jesse will go down in a firefight with a sheriff named Rick in small town Georgia.
On Talking Bad Anna Gunn said she insisted on the “no contact” type of stage slap for her scene with Marie because she knew it would require several takes and didn’t want to be black and blue. Aaron Paul said that Jonathan Banks beat the hell out of him in their first scene together (Mike slapping Jesse around and telling him to ‘man up’ when Jane dies) because he really was slapping and they required several takes.
I think the theory here was that Walt would have the ability to block her testimony because of spousal privilege. I’m not sure that’s true because I’m having difficulty with the Wikipedia entry here. There are situations in which either spouse can say a communication was privileged - meaning here that Skyler could refuse to testify against Walt OR Walt could block her from testifying to certain things. However the situation may be different in federal cases: if I’m reading correctly Skyler could refuse to testify if she didn’t want to, but Walt (as the defendant) would not be able to block that testimony.
I think it’s more likely Walt places his phone call and Skyler says she’s not going with him. But that’s just me.
I was rambling a little bit in another thread about how the show has maybe stayed too much with Walt over the seasons, and that it would be interesting too see the world he has created more from the perspective of the people he has screwed up.
Interestingly, that’s what the show has been doing in the last two episodes. We’re much more inside the heads of Skyler, Jesse and Hank now, than in Walt’s head.
I think Breaking Bad has pretty much always been all about Walt- it’s much more focused on him than the Sopranos was on Tony, for example. When we get a close look at the other characters it tends to be based on their roles in Walt’s life and how they’re affected by the things he does. On the one hand you could say we don’t know as much about the people around Walt, but I think they also bypassed some of the stuff about characters who weren’t as interesting. If you do the math I think the Sopranos lasted something like 86 hours and Breaking Bad is going to finish somewhere around 46.
Ethical opinion question: does anybody believe Walt (and Jesse and Gus Fring and Lydia, etc.) bear any moral culpability for the lives destroyed by their product?
I can see a case either way. On the one hand, none of them ever forced anybody to start using meth, but otoh the pure product and the “spice must flow” philosophy probably did keep many addicted.
This show’s Number 1 problem is the overabundance of Walt’s tightie whitie scenes weighed against the million scenes of cute little Aaron Paul is standing around fully clothed.
I know Breaking Bad has absolutely no intention of being The Wire (this is a tragedy focused on one character, it’s not about society in general) but it would actually have been nice to see some more of the wide-reaching consequences of the meth trade. When we see addicts on the show, they’re caricatures like the Spooges, or clowns like Badger and Skinny Pete. I’m not really getting the feeling that Walt’s meth is out there ruining lives on a grand scale. Although I suppose it is.
Then again, I don’t live in the U.S., and don’t really see the effects of meth around me on a daily basis.
I do see the effects of heroin use around me where I live, to an extent. That’s what the junkies around here are doing. And… holy shit. But meth is more “abstract” to me. Then again, so is coke, ecstasy, etc. Maybe I live a shielded life.
Totally!
That’s because none of the characters care about it. The plane crash stands in for the broader effects of what Walt is doing, I think.
The huge pallet of cash is money that hasn’t been laundered because it was waaaaaaaay too much to plausibly launder through the car wash. If it was laundered it would be sitting in a bank, not a storage unit.
No, not really.
But if I get fanciful I imagine something having completely tipped Skyler and she and Walt are in full Bonnie & Clyde. It turns out she was in the car at the diner. She’s lying down in the back seat while Walt is retrieving the ricin.
They’re out for revenge and things have gone full Tarantino.
And then they reveal that the lottery ticket was lost and picked up by the employees of a local grocery store and we learn that this fall’s new drama, Lucky 7, is actually a spinoff.