The tragedy of the two principals from Badfinger finding out that their success wasn’t all it was cracked up to be paralleling Walt’s success made me love the choice, actually. The opening line actually fits better than any of Dylan’s lyrics. I’m just partial to the intro of the Watchband’s cover.
Maybe it’ll be about a cereal killer…
…sorry.
Skyler is sent to prison where she’s shanked by the Aryan Sisterhood. Despondent, Junior offs himself 2 weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Holly is taken from Marie when Marie gets popped shoplifting kid’s clothes at K-Mart. Holly is sent to a foster home with a bitter grandma and another kid named Brock. Jesse hauls ass out of the compound, but makes a left turn at Albuquerque and ends up lost in Nebraska. He stops to ask for directions at some donut shop. Gilligan decides he needs a break and hires on as the first mate of a charter boat based in Hawaii.
At least they didn’t continue to follow in Macca’s footsteps. Or maybe they did, if those freaks were right. 
Marie becomes a DEA agent.
He was there before her and added the ricin to a packet of Stevia, and then left it as the only packet available on her table. She asked to waiter to bring more.
It’s where and how the Greek Tragedy Aethestic applies, bitch!
Oh man, that is silly.
We never see Walt putting the ricin in anything. But there’s a Very Deliberate Shot of Lydia putting the “stevia” in the tea, after, IIRC, Walt had left. (Technically, IIRC, we never saw her actually drink the tea; I think there was a commercial break.) So I’m pretty sure the stevia was the ricin. I’m kinda curious how/whether you could tamper with a single-serve packet like that and not have it show, but not a big deal.
It was brought up in one of the first few episodes and he dismissed the issue by saying something about how people were going to buy meth whether he sold it or not. That seemed pretty typical of Walt’s arrogance.
I fully expect this show to get the full academic treatment; undergraduate papers, graduate theses, undergraduate course, etc. There’s already a book coming in November from a professor at the University of Southern Maine, “Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the Context, Politics, Style and Reception of the Television Series.”
Of course, it’s not the first television series to get the attention of academics. A lot of times, it seems they’re giving heavy-duty attention to fairly lightweight material but I think Breaking Bad is worthy of serious consideration.
The Stevia: I believe he doctors the packet in the booth he walks up to first, before he turns around. Then he takes the packets from the container on her table, betting correctly that impatient Lydia will ask for some but reach into the container on the other table.
IIRC.
And Lydia’s daughter.
“Better call Old Joe!”
So then it’s safe to assume that he had every intention of killing her and just told Todd about the ‘plan’ so he would lead him to Jack and Crew.
So a nationally wanted fugitive is able to just wander around a restaurant fiddling with packets of sugar? No one asks him questions? No one recognizes him? And how does he get the ricin in the packet and then reseal it for Lydia to open?
Fugitives wander around doing stuff all the time. Focus less on what’s possible, and more on what it means.
Yeah, all he was looking for was a way into that compound so he could get the trunk popped open. He already has his plan in motion when he met Todd & Lydia. He was completely full of shit about his “alternate method” for making meth.
I’m also 100% sure he was planning (and hoping) that he’d be cut down in the hail of gunfire.
It’s a callback to the episode Kafkaesque, where Jesse tells a story at the N.A. meeting about making a box in a woodworking class, getting it perfect, and then trading it for weed.
Right- he didn’t have a new method to cook that didn’t need methylamine. It was just a ruse to get him there. Of course he probably didn’t realize they weren’t buying it and wanted to kill him too!
I assumed that he tampered with the package beforehand (which shouldn’t be that hard, just slice it open, add the ricin, glue it back together carefully, and Lydia probably wouldn’t notice unless she looked for it), and then quickly swapped it at the table he knew Lydia would sit at before she got there.
Still, no real guarantee that Lydia would put it in her tea, or worse, that someone else wouldn’t end up doing so instead of her.
As for not being recognized, I guess the Lambert “disguise” looks different enough from any pictures of him shown on the news.