What happens to Hank when he takes the video to his superiors and they discover that Walt has been paying for his hospital bills? Hank claiming he was ignorant won’t fly. He’d be prosecuted and he’d end up in prison, absolutely.
Or even better, stop letting pride get in the way and just take his money and his new life and just move on.
“How could this incredibly effective drug enforcement officer not know his own BIL is the greatest drug kingpin on this side of the Mississippi? Isn’t it more likely he’s so good at his job because he knows exactly who and how to get competitors. Isn’t it more likely a high school teacher would need a serious connection and protection to do what he did?”
Seems probable to me this would go bad for Hank.
If you work on the assumption that they take Hank’s side and believe that Walt is lying, will they side with Marie and Hank when they say that they made up a story about it being gambling winnings? The real trick would be for two fold IMO 1)have the DEA pick up Walt Jr ‘for questioning’ and ask him where his parents got all that money and have him sign a statement saying so and 2)Have Hank promise to make a good faith effort to pay back the money to the DEA. Since it’s just money that they’d confiscate anyways, he could probably pay it off at some ridiculously low rate like $10 a week with no interest. Although $100 a week would pay it off in about 35 years.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but am I the only one who felt that the whole thing with Jesse lighting up and Huell taking the dope, leading to Jesse’s realization, felt just a wee bit contrived? Like the seams were showing a bit too much, writing-wise?
I feel bad about carping on this point right after such a kick-ass episode, but that explanation is really awful. Especially coming from Gilligan who is so good normally. A strange man plying an elementary student with a juice box? And then Brock not recognizing and not saying anything when he saw him at Jesse’s house a few days or weeks later? And no one remembering a scary-looking bald guy hanging out at an elementary school right before a kid gets poisoned?
But this was a great episode. Too bad it hinged a little bit on the Brock stuff which was always a little clumsy and convoluted IMHO.
Whether or not the confession would work, it’s plausible enough that it might buy Walt time. He thinks he has a few months to live and is running out the clock.
Y’all are forgetting that Jesse figured out that Walt poisoned Brock right after it happened – he burst into Walt’s house and held him at gun point. Walter finally convinced him that Gus liked killing children so he let it drop, but Jesse never really believed him. Jesse also withheld his knowledge that it wasn’t ricin for awhile, presumably trying to catch Walter in a lie. Not only that, but Jesse figured out that somehow Saul lifted the ricin cigarette from him, but Walter said that it was a completely ridiculous idea. I think the phrase was that Huell had “hotdog fingers” and could never pickpocket.
I’m not remembering this. What picture?
Do you mean Old Joe, the junkyard owner? The guy who crushed the RV and sold Walt the big magnet?
Is there a picture of him and Hank?
Something else to remember is that in the first or second episode Hank should up at the school and went through the supply closet and found several pieces of glassware missing as well as one or two masks. Walt also confirmed that he’s the only person in the entire building with a key (in his pocket). If that is filed in a report somewhere it’s going to start a trail of evidence against Hank from Day 1 that he was helping out. It’ll say that there was Lab Glass and gas masks missing from the science lab but he never checked again to see if anything else was missing or if any other precautions were taken to prevent further theft.
Eh, Hank does look pretty sketchy from the outside. Hank would need to convince people that it’s just coincidence that the drug lord he was “looking for” just happened to be his BiL and he never realized it. And the same BiL gave him $200k and told him he made it “gambling” and Hank didn’t question it. And Hank’s weird obsession with going after Gus looks pretty bad in light of Walt’s claim they were rivals in the drug trade.
Plus there’s the simple fact that Walt seems like a pretty meek guy to be running a vicious drug ring, while Hank is a badass cop.
Walt’s story makes more sense, even if it isn’t true.
Completely disagree. Hank’s problem is that the version of the story Walt tells on the tape is way more plausible than reality.
Out of the two of them, which one is the hothead and which one is the beta male? (To the outside observer, not to us.) Who is more likely to have connections to the underworld? Specifically, which one was more likely to have had a connection with Gus Fring, a vocal DEA supporter?
I had forgotten that Hank didn’t know about Walt giving them money for his medical bills. Who’s going to believe that?
Up until about six months ago Walt was content to let the rest of the world push him around, and that was obvious to anyone who knew him even a little bit. It would be way easier to believe that he continued to let himself be pushed around than to believe he became a badass meth kingpin on his own accord.
Sure, the story might fall apart under sufficient scrutiny, but Hank didn’t have the goods to nail Walt in the first place, much less to definitively refute Walt’s competing explanation. The key is Jesse, who might finally be mad enough to look past his history with Hank and work with him to end Walt.
Well, if you believe that, then the last five minutes of this episode didn’t make much sense.
For the record, the hotdog fingers line was Saul’s. He was complaining to Walt that having Huell pickpocket Jesse was extremely risky because of the girth of Huell’s fingers and that they had been very lucky to get away with it. If I were Walt, I would have made sure Huell and Jesse stayed far away from each other because it was very risky that Huell would say something about this.
It’s when Gonzo got his arm ripped off by the stack of falling cars when they were trying to hide another body. Someone (thought it was Hank, might have been someone else) took their picture with the body.
Remember also that Hank insisted on staying in Albuquerque and being in charge of the blue meth investigation, even at the price of turning down a promotion.
We all know that he did it out of fear and anxiety after the turtle bomb, but that’s not how it would look in the context of Walt’s “confession”.
Eh, Walt was a chem teacher just a few months ago. Granted probably at a different school, but it’s not that implausible he knew someone at the elementary school and could come up with a plausible reason for visiting.
Yes, I remember that now. I’m not sure how that would come into play. I think that was just the writers showing us that he was kind of a gungho jerk. “Look at me with the dead bad guy!”
So Walt nearly killed Brock to manipulate Jesse. I wonder if Jesse will now manipulate Walt by threatening Walt Jr? Maybe Junior is home as Jesse douses the place with gasoline.
Jesse is full of anything but pride, I think. Regret, remorse and anger - yes. He was just a burnout looking to make a buck. The hard-core aspects of the business have always bothered him, and the kid on the bike was the last straw. Now that he knows that Walt poisoned Brock he has a direction for his anger.
As for the house not burning, who could stop him at this point? Probably only Walt, and only because Jesse would drop the gas can and draw his gun. Walt will have his vending-machine ice gun and the two might end up in a New Mexican stand-off. If they end up shooting it out, I wonder if Walt will confess to watching Jesse’s girlfriend die.
Great episode. I loved the tension in the Mexican restaurant. The brilliance of this series is the blending of drama and humor. In the same scene you are laughing at the poor waiter pushing the tableside guacamole and then gasping at Marie telling Walt to kill himself.
Sorry, took too long typing and the thread is moving. This was in response to JoeyP about 20 mins ago.
Jesse is a complete loose cannon, always was, always will be. In fact, even if Walt had managed to convince him to disappear, and he hadn’t found out about the ricin, that might not even have been enough. He was in enough of a funk to throw all his millions away. Say he did disappear, went on one more drug-fuelled soul-searching binge in the wilderness of Alaska, somehow avoided being eaten by bears, and his inner demons just got the better of him? He could still come back and decide to turn Walt in.
Really, the only way that Walt can be sure, ever, that Jesse stays out of his hair, is to send him on a one-way trip to Belize.
Which is the one thing Walt still can’t do. Maybe that would be the final step to 100% full-blown Heisenberg.
What was Walt’s plan B, anyway, if Jesse hadn’t agreed to the disappearing act?