Posted without comment:
Side note: A spinoff series entitled Better Call Saul is in development. A prequel, so there’s no guarantee Saul will be alive at the end of Breaking Bad.
Did anyone notice how small Aaron Paul is in this episode? I mean, I never assumed he was a big fella but when they pulled him out from under the car and were man-handling him, he looked very small.
That’s all. On Aaron Paul.
At the same time he has put on a lot of weight. I knew the flashback was reshot.as soon as I saw him.
Does anyone else think Uncle Jack is actually afraid of Todd? He agrees to pretty much everything Todd Politely suggests without the slightest hesitation.
Lately I’ve been considering the possibility that he’s smarter than he lets on. And his personality structure most closely resembles that of a sociopath, as opposed to a psychopath or somebody who has APD. The critical distinction is impulse control. Todd has it, psychopaths and people with APD don’t. The lack of visible tattoos clearly indicates that he is mindful of how he appears to others, and carefully affects a persona of civility and lack of criminal intent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised of he kills the rest of his crew so that he can keep the bounty to himself. I hope Jesse kills him. I really want the final scene to show Jesse, Andrea, and Brock leading a quiet existence in Alaska, and Jesse working as a bush pilot.
He is noticeably chubbier, and older. 
He looks like a kid in the pilot. His character has evolved a lot too. Heck, in fact, he’s almost a completely different character now.
I suppose Jesse’s arc on the show is a kid becoming an adult, in the most brutal way possible. But man, he did it quickly, if the show’s time frame is only about two years.
The look of the show has come a long way, as well. There has been some gorgeousness-creep over the seasons.
Not to get off on a tangential distraction, but where are you getting that from? I’ve never heard any such distinction or definition before.
Best acting by a baby ever …loved her peeking around the edge of the car seat.
I don’t have cable, so I watch the episodes streaming the next day and don’t see any promos (or “previouslies”). So I’m glad to hear this because I was starting to wonder when we’d get to see Saul again. The last time we saw him was in the hotel parking lot with Walt, right?
It also occurs to me that Saul is the only member of Walt’s inner circle who has not been permanently damaged/destroyed by Walt yet. If Walt were to really disappear, Saul gets away relatively unscathed with a whole lot of money from their little adventure. He might have some legal problems if Slylar or Jesse implicate him, but he still has the option to disappear himself to a secluded beach somewhere. I’m almost as curious to see what happens to him as I am for Walt and Jesse.
No, his most recent appearance was at the car wash. He had an A-1 Day.
I just read six pages but I’ve got to move on. Wanted to read it all before I posted but I’ll have to just fire away …
Interesting points about the house. Maybe Skyler and the rest will be moved into protective custody so that the bhouse trashing doesn’t harm them.
re the Nazis retiring…you’d think that if they were going to do that they would make sure that the lab wold be taken down and Todd would be given orders to lay very low.
re Walt’s bday … I would think that it is very important to change it when you change your identity. It would be a nice twist to find that he did and assumptions about the timing that the audience makes are wrong.
Yeah, the way Jack said “my nephew wouldn’t like it” (or would be disappointed or something along those lines) makes me wonder if there’s something else going on with Todd in their power dynamic.
But then again, Todd appeared to be just a grunt in the pest control operation.
Gus had some nebulous past in Chile that afforded him extra consideration, but time’s running pretty short to flesh out much more on Todd’s past.
“My nephew here, he respects you. He would never forgive me if things went another way. Also, I’ll be honest, you caught me in one hell of a good mood.”
I’ve never gotten the vibe that Jack is afraid of Todd. More like, sense he’s family, he listens to him a little more and cares about their relationship, such as it is.
The nazi’s definitely aren’t gone. While I’ve never been part of an Aryan Prison Gang I have a suspicion that the first thing a group like that would do when they hit a 70 million dollar windfall is to try to get a second 70 million dollar windfall. As of the end of this show they have Walt’s recipe and the remains of his empire and contacts to continue selling meth to keep the cashflow coming in so they have a shot at that second (and third) big payday.
But Jessie is smart, and he absorbed a lot under Walt even if he didn’t want to. We were reminded in this episode that early Walt couldn’t help himself - even when manufacturing an illegal drug he still took it as a perfect opportunity to treat it as a teaching tool. Jessie absorbed more science from Walt than he would care to admit - and that’s a big part of the reason that he was able to make such pure meth in Mexico when he cooked the sample for the cartel.
I bet that Jessie kills Todd through science. It seems appropriate and would be a great bookend for the character. He may use the red phosphorous trick Walt used in the first episode, or he may use a more imaginative trick. In any case, he gets away.
That sets up the finale to be a 3 way “Mexican Standoff”. The Nazi’s need a cook to continue their cash flow - if they can’t find Jessie they’ll use Walt’s family to lure Walt back into the open so they can force him to cook for them. And Walt bites because he wants revenge on them for killing Hank. Then there’s Jessie who wants to kill Walt but the Aryan’s want to kill Jessie for (probably) killing Todd. There are still lost of pieces on the board and lots of vendettas to be settled.
That line totally reminded me of Dexter a few seasons ago when he was trying to understand empathy. He said it to someone and it sounded very hollow and fake. (To my knowledge, true psychopaths have no concept of empathy.)
The “52” with the bacon on his birthday is a sentimental thing for Walt. It wouldn’t be a reason for him to do it on a fake birthday, unless he was really that eager to get the free meal at Denny’s.
Two bits of symbolic imagery and foreshadowing from this episode that stuck out to me:
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When Walt notices the bullet hole in his gas tank, his reflection is split into either two or three images of himself (I cannot remember exactly). One of the images has the bullet hole superimposed over his head. If you read into the split images, perhaps this means that one of Walt’s “personalities” has just died. If you do not read into the split images, but you still accept the symbolism of the bullet hole placement, it could be foreshadowing that Walt will literally take a bullet to his head before this is all said and done.
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In the fire station, the crew is depicted playing chess. There is an extended shot of the white king, in check, protected solely by two pawns and a knight (the knight faded in the distance). The player moves the white king. As a corollary, the next scene depicts the White Kingpin, in check, moving away via the van. Who are his two pawns remaining? Skyler and Jesse? Who is his knight? The Aryan Brotherhood? Of course, once a king is on the run in chess, the game typically ends in mate soon thereafter. Although, I do think it would be interesting, for those chess geeks out there, to look into the actual set up of the board and see if it is associated with any great comebacks in the international competitions…
This was discussed on the podcast. As I recall, they set it up so that the white king, while not in a “checkmate in 3 moves” situation or the like, was certainly going to be mated fairly shortly. (Not a chess geek myself, and listened to the podcast Monday night, so not doing a terribly good job of explaining, I suspect.)
Maybe they’ll re-create the ending of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.