I’ll buy that.
Next question… what was the deal with the massage chair at the clubhouse? Was it the noise that distracted Jack and let Walt get at the remote control? Were we supposed to think that the guy in it might be low enough to get missed by the spraying bullets?
I like to think that on some level Walt’s prayer at the beginning was to the writers. Just get the character to Albuquerque and everything else will work. In universe, I think it makes Walt’s character more complicated in a way I’m having a hard time verbalizing right now.
I also really liked Marie’s line about Walt not being a super criminal or whatever, knowing that in the end she’ll likely believe that he is.
I didn’t like how he gave all that money to Elliot and Gretchen how are they supposed to just give Junior all that money without someone getting suspicious. And I thought it would be better dramatically if he ended up with no money to show for everything
And how did he even get all that money from the cabin to the car
Overall I liked the finale and it was a hella cool scene how Walt set up the gun to shoot like that B)
I was kind of let down cause I didn’t like it as much as Ozymandias and Granite State (but that’s setting the bar really high)
Here’s my question: who called the police at the end? I guess it’s possible the neo-Nazis have neighbors that would have heard the M-60, but I would think that if I lived next to a bunch of murder-happy Aryans I’d learn to keep my damn mouth shut when weird noises happened in the night. If the police were tailing Walt, what took them so long?
I’m going to trust that Jesse went in a different direction than the police came from and thus didn’t get picked up.
Lydia. She knows she’s been poisoned by Walt so she’ll call 911 to be taken to a hospital. She knows where he is and that everyone else there is probably dead. She also probably knows that, no matter what she tells them, she won’t make it out of this without an investigation into why she was poisoned. So regardless of whether or not she knows she is definitely going to die, she’d tell them exactly where Walt is when she calls for an ambulance.
And let’s add: The AB agreeing to bring Jesse up to the “clubhouse”
Still, I didn’t mind any of that very much since the acting was so good and the story so compelling. The scene with Jesse driving away was priceless. “Baby Blue” at the end.
Loved it.
And I loved the cameos that Aaron Paul did on SLN on Saturday. Anyone who didn’t see them should do so. They should be on Hulu at some point.
Here’s my $.02 about Jesse’s fate-- it’s been months since the AB watched his confession video. At least Todd and possibly the rest of them are implicated in murders. If they were smart (a big if, I know) they would have destroyed the evidence.
As for what Marie knows, it’s possible she hadn’t even seen Jesse’s confession video-- Hank had been trying to shield her from the worst of things, trying to get her to leave the house when he brought Jesse over. It’s possible the most she could tell the DEA was that Jesse had something to do with the Heisenberg drug empire, but the DEA already knew or suspected that when they had Jesse in custody after his cash delivery stunt. That wasn’t enough to hold him then (of course, he wouldn’t have Saul to spring him now). Anyway, that’s how I finagle a happy ending for Jesse in my mind.
I don’t have that interpretation of it, but one of my favorite shots was the overhead shot of the keys falling from the visor. That’s a very complicated shot to get, so clearly it was important. And the perspective really enhances the sense of the keys falling from above.
Whether that’s the writers or some other entity, I don’t know. I don’t actually like the idea of any deus in my machina, but I loved that shot.
Anything Marie could say would be hearsay, right?
I assumed that they were there because of the gunfire.
And I thought that Lydia lived in Houston, as that’s where the Madrigal warehouse was that Jesse visited to pick up the methylamine. So why was she visiting a coffeehouse in Albuquerque every Tuesday at 10am?
The entire time leading up to him finding the keys, I was thinking, “Come on, haven’t you seen Terminator 2? At least check the visor.”
I think it was to show that the AB have been enjoying their newfound wealth. Wasn’t Uncle Jack wearing cashmere or something too?
This is a fictional drama. Hyperrealism is a style, but it isn’t a requirement for good drama. In fact, most drama requires strong suspension of disbelief, even the best works in fiction.
It isn’t a flaw for improbable things to happen, as long as they “make sense” in the context of the world and the characters that the creator has set in place. If only probable things happened, it wouldn’t really be entertainment, it’d be like a fictional documentary.
At this point, who is going to be prosecuted? Almost everyone involved is dead now. (Although I’m sure that the DEA will want to create a timeline of all of the events in Walter White’s secret life.)
They should just buy that complete series blu-ray set. That thing looked sick.
I think one of the points was that once Walt was able to gain self-realization and allow things to happen without him getting the credit, things worked out better. That’s what the speech to Skylar was about - “I did it for me… It felt good”.
So he can get some money to Walt Jr., but only by making it seem like it didn’t come from him at all. Flynn will live the rest of his life hating his father for what he did, and being grateful to the Schwartzes for their support. Or, if he does get the notion that the money came from Walt, he’ll refuse it (which we already saw him do).
I think its more way of providing something of a happy ending for the few people making largely moral decisions (Flynn in particular) or the truly innocent (Holly) without Walt getting any of the glory.
One thing I would have liked would have been Todd knowing that Lydia was dying, and dying because of Walt. Let that phone call happen earlier, and have it be the cause of Walt not getting shot immediately. He tells Todd why Lydia is sick, and maybe attempts to bargain with an antidote. Still need a way to get Jesse up to the room, I guess, for that final showdown and redemption moment for Jesse (“do it yourself”).
Realistically $10m is relatively minor compared to the totality of Gretchen and Elliott’s assets. Most likely as long as they can create a plausible fake story as to how they generated that income, and they pay taxes on that money and then put it into a trust for Walt Jr no one will be any the wiser. The IRS doesn’t dig into the source of your income just because you have a lot of money, and when we’re talking a couple who at one point at least were the sole owners of what became a $2bn market cap company the primary interest of the government will be that they pay their taxes.
Wealthy people hide or illegally move far larger amounts of money than this and never get caught. So G&E doing a bit of maneuvering with this money is highly unlikely to get them in trouble. The only government entity that really digs into random wealthy people’s income are tax authorities (if they are hedge fund managers or something then they might have other watchdogs on them), and the tax authorities are primarily concerned with making sure a wealthy person is not sheltering income illegally to lower their tax liability.
Most people who are caught laundering money, the government is investigating them because of their criminal enterprise. Once the government has a good idea that this person is involved in a criminal enterprise, they may start investigating the money stream. Money laundering mostly only holds up to ordinary day to day level interactions, it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny.
This is why many big time criminals hold the vast majority of their money in cash. It was a common theme in the Sopranos. Tony had legitimate income from being a union representative with a waste management firm or something that was reported to pay in the six figures. That was enough for him to legally own his house and typically the car he was driving. But his true wealth was far vaster, and he specifically kept almost all of it in cash. When Carmela got on a kick about wanting to invest her money, Tony specifically mentioned that he couldn’t just go down to a brokerage and put his money into the market because he was under continuous Federal scrutiny and they’d immediately investigate the source of that money and find out that it was far more than he could have on hand from his waste management job.
When Tony was expecting his house to be raided by the feds, they took a huge portion of the personal items in the home and removed them. While the home was bought with “free and clear” money, they mostly filled it with stuff Tony bought with cash. The sum value of all of it would have been far higher than a guy with Tony’s legitimate salary would have been able to afford.
But all of that was done that way because Tony was in the mafia, he basically had Federal agents investigating him from the first episode to the last episode of the show. Two legitimate multimillionaires (perhaps even billionaires) are not being watched 24/7. No one from the FBI is going to break down the door of their mansion and take inventory of all their assets or do forensic accounting on all their holdings. For people like them, persons of significant means not under active investigation, it would be very easy to hide $10m in income or fold it into legitimate income. It’ll most likely cut down the amount Flynn receives by anywhere from 10-25%.
Jesse. Marie will have let them know he was with Hank shortly before his death. The authorities might bring him in based on that alone, even if just for questioning. I imagine they’ll check his fingerprints against what was found at the compound and find them all over the meth making equipment. At that point, he’d be arrested. Even if that’s the only crime they can charge him with and he somehow spends almost no time in jail before getting out on bail and is either not tried or found not guilty, he’s now publicly connected to a massacre of Aryan Brotherhood members. I have a very hard time constructing a scenario where Jesse’s life from here on out will be easy or happy.
I totally agree. BB has been called “Shakespearean” and you could pick apart any of Shakespeare’s plays in this way if you really wanted to. Look at MacBeth, which probably is the one with a plot most like BB (except maybe King Lear? I never actually got around to reading that one). I mean, 3 witches spouting easily misinterpreted oracle-like prophecies? Come on.
Oh, yeah - totally. But, as I mentioned up thread, BB ultimately didn’t go full Shakespeare - the ending wouldn’t leave Walt dead knowing his loved ones were taken care of. He would’ve had everything ripped from him.
And, as I mentioned upthread, I am still figuring out how I feel about that. And, I suppose, I love the fact that Breaking Bad has been so flippin’ excellent that I find myself so invested in thinking it through. Great experience.