Perhaps so, because it did lead me to believe that everyone in the clubhouse was going to die. I just didn’t like the heavy handed way it was done.
I look at it this way: it was in keeping with how things (almost) always went on Breaking Bad. By that point we were all pretty sure the Nazis were going to get shot anyway. We got to see Walt being a scientist, or at least an engineer, working on a project one more time. If Walt goes to meet the Nazis and a gun just pops out of his trunk with no foreshadowing I think it looks like something out of a B-grade action movie. If we see him build the gun and lose his keys as soon as he gets there so the drama centers around this very small thing that’s central to Walt’s plan, that’s much more Breaking Bad’s style to me.
No clue. They would not need to involve anyone in the conspiracy, but they might utilize a lawyer that they trust.
So? There is no law saying that just because someone deposits over $10,000 the Federal government sends agents out to investigate where you got it from. If you’re a very rich person, and they notice you make a large deposit and their investigators have reason to believe that said deposit is cash that you haven’t paid tax on or unreported income then they are going to come after you for that. In the United States there is no legal requirement that you prove to anyone where you got cash from, as long as you report it as income you have no legal requirement to tell the government where the cash came from.
No, they could just make one deposit. As long as they report the cash infusion as miscellaneous income on their tax return the government has no reason to come after them.
It does not matter how it looks, depositing money in a bank account is not de facto evidence of a crime.
Most likely nothing happens at all. There is no automatic “investigate everyone for criminal activity who makes a large cash deposit.” I’ve made over $10,000 deposits many time, I’ve never been subject to a criminal investigation for them.
If Gretchen & Elliott were flagged by the IRS for an audit because of the deposits (the IRS might want to make sure that big pile of cash didn’t come into G&E’s possession without being taxed as income), and G&E show that they reported it on their 1040 as miscellaneous income that’d be the end of the IRS’s involvement.
But let’s say they get really unlucky and the FBI thinks they’re funneling terrorist money or money laundering. They come to question G&E:
Agent: “Where did you get the $10m in cash you deposited?”
G: “We found it.”
Agent: “I don’t believe you.”
G: “Okay. Is that a crime?”
Agent: “No, but I think you’ve committed a crime.”
G: “Proof?”
Agent: “Oh, I guess not.”
Even if G&E told a complete lame ass story like “we found this money in our closet”, even though no one would believe it, having a poor explanation for where the cash came from is not in and of itself evidence of a crime. How would they convict them of anything?
But if they wanted to cover themselves even further, they could go somewhere and buy $10m worth of bullion off the books. Then sell the bullion to a major gold broker and keep a record of the transaction. In that case in the unlikely event a criminal investigator comes looking they could just say, “We bought a large amount of gold many years ago and have kept it in a safe. We don’t have any purchase records since it was so long ago, but we do have this document here showing we sold the gold and received $10m and that is where we got the cash we deposited into our bank account.”
It’s hard not to be heavy handed when using an M60.
The reason people go through all the trouble of laundering money is because they have an ongoing criminal enterprise. They want their income to be legitimate so they can spend the money without being investigated for “living beyond their means.”
But if the government believes you’re operating an ongoing criminal enterprise they are going to stick their noses so far up your ass that even the best paper trail to make dirty money clean money is going to fail to hold up to scrutiny. They’ll find evidence, because you have to continually launder money and you’re going to mess up somewhere. That then gives them evidence of illegal money laundering, and also probably gives them further evidence about your criminal enterprise in general.
If you are not operating a criminal enterprise and just have a singular big pile of money, some people will be suspicious if they investigate it, but since there is no ongoing criminal enterprise and not even really a money laundering operation going on (since you are just going to report it as misc income) even if the government is highly suspicious of where you got the big pile of money that suspicion is not legally sufficient to obtain any kind of conviction and probably not even enough to get you indicted.
Yeah I guess that is pretty stock standard drama building with the keys. It just seemed overdone because it is obvious from the scene in the desert where Walt builds it all that the gun will be in the trunk. To then have the conversation at the gate to draw attention to the car and follow that with a discussion about how the car is parked seemed, as I say, heavy handed. Perhaps they felt it necessary to make sure even the slow viewers knew what was coming. And perhaps because of my dissatisfaction with the episode to that point I was just in a picky mood.
Actually, on reflection, it is just my attitude that fucks that up. As Marley23 says, the foreshadowing is only the desert scene. The scene at the gate and the talk about how to park the car are to ramp up the tension, not belabor the obvious. Will the car get checked out? Will they make Walt park nose in?
Oh dear. Silly me.
Heh, I took this as one of the episode’s weaker points. The police get a bunch of phone calls that say Walt is back in town, they have extremely good reason to believe that he’d try and see Skyler, Marie and Walt Jr in some order…‘spread thin’ is one thing, Skyler’s house is another - it’s one specific spot they’d absolutely expect him to go to, and yet he’s able to slip in and out completely un-noticed? He’s a chemistry teacher/meth kingpin, not some uber-ninja secret blacks ops agent.
Re G&E and the money: For a multi-billion dollar company, $9 million barely even qualifies as a rounding error. Seriously. Skyler had trouble laundering the money because the car wash was a nickel-and-dime operation compared to the money he was bringing in. For G&E $9 million is ‘miscellaneous income earned’ from some small project last quarter that the auditors will barely even notice.
I’m not saying your opinion is incorrect. I’m just saying it was done that way for a reason and I think they handled it the right way. More important was that Todd didn’t get shot so Jesse could strangle him. I enjoyed that way too much.
I think the reason things were so heavy handed is because it’s the final episode. Sure, sharp viewers figured out immediately how Jesse knew Huell had lifted the ricin cig. And yes, sharp viewers realized that the conversation with Walter and Skyler in the 3rd to last episode was about Walt trying to protect his wife from criminal investigation. They didn’t spoon feed it to you…that episode.
But you’ll notice that in both those examples, they came back with another hint or two the next week as to what happened to let the viewers connect the dots. For instance, the conversation with Saul and Walter in Hoover’s basement where Walt spells out exactly what he did and Saul retorts with how good (or bad) that would end up working out.
There wasn’t a “next episode” here to fill in the gaps. There’s no next week to come back to an ambiguity and hash it out in a different conversation. Most viewers aren’t coming onto these 600+ comment threads to break down every detail. The show has to stand on its own and I don’t think Gilligan wanted to leave viewers confused about anything.
Yeah - so did I.
Staying fixated on how BB is and is not like a classic Tragedy: Think how different it would’ve been if tying off all the loose ends was dangled in front of Walt’s face, but it was snatched away as a final descent into chaos for him - and Todd with his empty eyes holding the keys.
Side Note: was anyone else smirking at the commercial for Aaron Paul’s Fast n’ Furious type movie? I wish him better choices going forward.
Ah well, I never saw Fight Club.
He said that after Breaking Bad he just wanted to do something fun, and I can’t blame him. His other upcoming projects sound better. He’s playing the part of Joshua in an Exodus movie starring Christian Bale, for instance.
Jesus!
Todd convinces Uncle Jack that now they can make 99% pure.
Walt and Jessie chained up on opposite sides of the dungeon, fade to black…
That’s too dark for me.
don’t know if everyone has seen this - very good interview with Vince Gilligan about the finale. Seriously worth a read.
http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/09/30/breaking-bad-finale-vince-gilligan/
I’m still of the opinion that they stuck the landing, that it was a great ending. I think the writers were in a tough spot with such incredible scrutiny. They were going to be shredded by commentators no matter which way they went.
Yep - that’s Tragedy Old School 
I wonder if I can wrap my brain around the ending if a different starting framework is applied? Okay, so if not a Greek Tragedy - maybe the American Dream?
Or a version of The Great American Novel? He is kept from his potential in his traditional world, so goes to a New World with no laws and fights his way to opportunity. He is damaged along the way, but died free, having provided for his loved ones.
…just thinkin’ out loud here. Does that fit better/explain the arc better?
That’s an excellent interview - thank you.
Key quote to my obsession about Walt “winning”:
[QUOTE=Vince Gilligan interviewed by EW Magazine]
On choosing an ending for Walt in which he was afforded a sliver of redemption before dying
“We didn’t feel an absolute need for Walt to expire at the end of the show. Our gut told us it was right. As the writers and I worked through all these different possibilities, it felt right, but I don’t think it was a necessity for us. There was a version we kicked around where Walt is the only one who survives, and he’s standing among the wreckage and his whole family is destroyed. That would be a very powerful ending but very much a kick-in-the-teeth kind of ending for the viewers. We talked about a version where Jesse kills Walt. We talked about a version where Walt more or less gets away with it. There’s no right or wrong way to do this job — it’s just a matter of: You get as many smart people around you as possible in the writers room, and I was very lucky to have that. And when our gut told us we had it, we wrote it, and I guess our gut told us that it would feel satisfying for Walt to at least begin to make amends for his life and for all the sadness and misery wrought upon his family and his friends. Walt is never going to redeem himself. He’s just too far down the road to damnation. But at least he takes a few steps along that path. And I think more importantly for him than that is the fact that he accomplishes what he set out to accomplish way back in the first episode: He leaves his family just a ton of money. Of course, Walt for years now has been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. … For years now, he thought if he makes his family financially sound — that’s really all he has to do as a man, as a provider, and as a father. They’re going to walk away with just shy of 10 million in cash, because of Walt’s machinations with Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) and Elliott (Adam Godley). But on the other hand, the family emotionally is scarred forever. So it’s a real mixed message at the end. Walt has failed on so many levels, but he has managed to do the one thing he set out to do, which is a victory. He has managed to make his family financially sound in his absence, and that was really the only thing he set out to do in that first episode. So, mission accomplished.”
[/QUOTE]
I’ve thought further on the classic Tragedy angle. Another reason why this doesn’t have the finality of the classic Tragedies is that Walt was running a meth empire, not a government. The whole system doesn’t change when he loses or wins, the most you can do is wipe the players from the stage.
It fits a bit better with Kurosawa’s antihero stories like Yojimbo, than it does with his Tragedies like say, Ran. Walt is clever, spends most of his time manipulating others to do what he wants them to do, and he will most likely be his own undoing; but he enjoys a lot of success on his downward slide. I don’t have problems with Walt finding a moment of peace before he dies, even killers should find that at their end. As I alluded to before, you’re going to have a hard time punishing a terminal cancer patient. You would have to strip away the trust he arranges for Flynn and thwart his plan to kill the AB members in order to punish him further than having his memory be tarnished. I could have accepted him failing at setting up the trust (and we don’t know, it still might fail, Flynn could just refuse to spend it,), but I don’t think I could have accepted him failing at avenging Hank. If he’s willing to die for the purpose (and why would he not be?), it’d be hard to stop him. Despite the craziness that he put himself and others through, he did deserve to redeem himself in his own eyes, to go beyond talking about it is more than most people would do, and he’s the only person who got to understand his redemption.
That’s all I’ve got for now, but I’ll keep thinking about it.
All fair. To be clear: given what he did, the redemption makes some sense. By “what he did” - I mean that he owned the fact that he had acted selfishly “for me,” then put that aside and acted for his loved ones, including Jesse, prior to his own death.
Hmm, okay - so, ultimately, a Greek tragedy framework is not going to work. Per Professor Subterraneous - BB has elements, but applied differently.
So - the American Dream? Is Walt/Heisenberg more like Gatsby than Oedipus?
The drug trade will never go away, but the Heisenberg empire is gone. That’s one of my favorite points about the last few episodes: Walt said a while ago that he was in the empire business, and in the end he destroyed the empire to cement his reputation (enhance it, even), protect his family, and avenge Hank. I don’t know if it fits any kind of Greek tragic criteria, but it’s marvelous irony.