He was a sick old fart that had been searched for weapons, and they were a bunch of badass Aryans in their own clubhouse. What’s to fear?
“Hey, what’s in the trunk, man?”
[SIZE=2] Plus, Uncle Jack is not the brightest bulb, and Walt just challenged his ballsiness. There’s some showin’ to be done.
[/SIZE]
Oh my god! They killed Kenny!
Some thoughts on the finale.
Loved how Jesse pointing the gun at Walt was the mirror image of the Jesse- gale ending of season 3.
Walt’s criminal career ends with a police raid- like the one Hank brought him on in the beginning.
Lydia the tattooed lady- a song associated with Groucho Marx is Todd’s ringtone for Lydia.
The AB also enjoys Ben and Jerry’s and uncle jack quotes Woody Allen.
Not sure if it’s coincidence or a hidden wink.
My 2 cents: Walt didn’t plan on rescuing Jesse.
He was just trying to buy some time to get to his car keys.
When he saw Jesse, he couldn’t bring himself to have him die too, the time he spent in NH made him look at things differently.
Somehow I don’t think Stevia will be happy with their product placement…
When he was trying to steal the car he said something like “Get me home and I’ll do the rest.” He didn’t expect to survive the mission and he didn’t seem to have any plans afterward. The deal he suggested to Skyler works a lot better if the authorities know he’s dead. He has nothing else to do, the police are coming, and even if he somehow got himself back across the country, the idea of waiting a couple more weeks to die in that cabin kind of sucks. He’s not doing that. He didn’t shoot himself on purpose and he failed to get Jesse to do it, so it’s interesting to consider what he would have done if that hadn’t happened. I guess he would have shot himself, but I got the impression he was too vain to destroy himself.
And they buy Stephen Colbert’s flavor.
I thought it was interesting in the EW interview when he talked about basically using the ending to the John Wayne movie, The Searchers. Where Wayne is on the hunt for a woman kidnapped by Indians with the intent of killing her because she’s “gone native” and has become one of them. At the end, he races his horse towards her and instead of killing her he swoops her up and takes her away to safety.
I don’t believe there is actually a company or brand called “Stevia.” Stevia is a plant, and the sugar substitute product made from extract and sold in powdered form or liquid form is sold by several different companies all using the name Stevia in it. It’s more like the word “sugar” than say, the term Splenda or Sweet n Low.
Jesse had made it pretty clear that he was done cooking, and that he hated Todd for killing the kid in the desert, earlier in the season. I don’t think Walt would’ve thought Jesse was working for the Nazi’s of his own free will.
No way to know for certain, since the show doesn’t address it, but I think Walt went to the compound to free Jesse. If he just wanted to get the revenge on the Nazi’s, he could’ve just ratted them out to the DEA.
I think it’s pretty hard to call anyone’s ending “happy”. Skyler and Flynn and Holly lost their father/husband in the worst possible way, lost their uncle, and are now nationally known as the relatives of a terrible monster. Even if they utterly 100% buy Gretchen and Elliot’s story and accept and spend the money, I don’t think you can really call their ending “happy”. Sure it could have been worse, but there are any number of decisions Walt could have made over the course of the series that would have ended up with them being vastly happier. But of course that would have made it a less interesting TV show.
The more I think about it, the more I love the ending.
I think the “fairy tale” aspect of it is what makes it perfect. As Emily Nussbaum says in her review:
“I mean, wouldn’t this finale have made far more sense had the episode ended on a shot of Walter White dead, frozen to death, behind the wheel of a car he couldn’t start? Certainly, everything that came after that moment possessed an eerie, magical feeling (…)”
It totally did, but Nussbaum misses the point if she thinks of that as a strike against the finale. In a sense, this *was *the ending as Walt’s dream, or as I called it earlier, the power trip fantasy ending. Which is not to say that it all happened in Walt’s head while he was dying of cancer in New Hampshire - that would be ridiculous - but something more subtle: It was the show in a different narrative mode, where realism was abandoned for cinematic fantasy. Again, the “realistic” ending was played out at the end of “Granite State”. This episode had something of a meta feel to it, like the show was saying: “You’ve seen the realistic conclusion, now here’s the fantasy one, we know you all desperately want to see that as well”, and being completely self-conscious about it. Besides, the show has been shifting gears between realism and movie fantasy, a slightly eerie feeling of not-exactly-real, all throughout its run. If we hadn’t seen the fantasy ending, there would have been something missing. Doing it like this, over-the-top magical and coming after a much more bleak and realistic conclusion in the previous episode, adds a perfect irony. We get the happy ending, but it never feels entirely real - and it’s not supposed to. This lets the two possible conclusions - 1) Walt dying as a broken man, either alone from cancer in New Hampshire or in prison, and 2) Walt going out in a blaze of glory, killing the Nazis, getting the money to his family and dying with a smile on his face - both exist in a kind of narrative superposition, like Schrodinger’s cat. And somehow the show pulls that off *without *leaving us with a feeling of ambiguity or lack of resolution.
Seen strictly on its own, the finale may seem too “happy” and not really satisfying, but seeing it in isolation would be a mistake. Coming after “Ozymandias” and “Granite State”, it was damned near sublime, and fit the show brilliantly. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, and it’s always possible to nitpick about details, but the broad strokes of it was really just a storytelling tour de force.
Watching the shootout again- you can actually see when Walt gets shot. The bullets start coming in more and more erratically toward the end and there’s a moment where he gasps and jerks upward a little bit. There’s so much going on and it’s so loud that it’s easy to skip past it, but you can see it.
I think folks seem to forget Jessie’s description of Walt “He is smarter than you, he is LUCKIER than you”. This is hardly the first time Walt has had things go his way, so to speak. It’s hardly a fairy tale ending, Hank’s still dead, Walt Jr. still hates his father. Skyler still hates Walter (although she also loves him too). Walt knows he is dying, why wouldn’t he try and tie up his own loose ends? Do something, anything with the money, contact Skyler. So those aspects are not too neat in my opinion. He did not come back to kill the Nazis or Jessie, until he found out from Badger and Skinny Pete that Jessie was still alive. I think Walt was originally just going to the Schwartz’ and to see Skyler and that was it. Those were the loose ends in his life he knew about, then the Jessie loose end comes up and Walt, because he is Walt, cannot leave without trying to tie that one up too. Of course, instead of killing Jessie and the Nazis he ends up saving Jessie and getting killed himself, which is fine with him in the end, because he tied it all up and now he can die like he knew he was (sooner or later).
Didn’t he say something to Gretchen and Elliot along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow, you need to give the money to Walt Jr.,” similar to what he said to Skyler? I could be combining those two conversations, though.
Another benefit to killing Lydia and the Nazis the way that Walt did is that it reinforces to the Shwartz’s how powerful Walt is. If he went out in a way that was pathetic, maybe it’d plant a seed of doubt about whether he was capable of having hit-men working for him after his death. If I were them and hadn’t seen the laser pointers but heard about what he’d done after he left my house, there’s a chance I’d believe he’s got people watching me based on his word alone.
Yeah I don’t see this as a happy ending either. Sure they’re not ALL dead, but far from happy.
Why didn’t Walt just call in the DEA on the nazis? I think it was personal. He wanted his revenge dealt by his own hands.
The series is over. Can we please spell Jesse’s name right? It’s not Jessie.
On this show, it’s always personal.
By the way, come to think of it: Am I right in saying that not a single character on the show ever faces justice at the hands of the law? (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Skyler and/or Jesse may have something coming their way, but it’s implied that they’ll at least mostly get away. The closest I guess are Mike’s guys, who actually get locked up, but Walt gets to them before they face trial or give anything away.
It seems to me that the police and the justice system are always either impotent or irrelevant on the show. Even Hank, who starts out as representing the DEA and by extension the law, ends up going on a personal vendetta instead. Heck, the Nazis and Walt can both walk right into Skyler’s house, even though the police is supposedly watching. Badger gets arrested once, but if I remember it right, Saul pulls his ass out of the fire.
Yes, I definitely think Walter White would not want to call in the authorities when he had even the slightest chance of doing something himself. Even at the end, he still has enough of an ego to want to settle things personally. Most importantly though, he wants to see his Felina, his beloved, one last time before he dies.
Since I’m bored and still in denial that the show is over, here are more eggs quotes:
Followed by:
Eggs, eggs, lovely eggs…
[QUOTE=Saul Goodman]
Eggs breaking? I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s been known to happen.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Kuby]
The guy broke ten eggs in the span of two minutes. All’s I’m sayin’.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Gus Fring]
I will break your eggs. I will choke your infant chicken.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Hank Schrader]
That rotten egg? I don’t care if it breaks, as long as we get it all on tape.
[/QUOTE]
Eh, Walt’s not really against hiring people to take care of stuff. He hires the Nazi’s to kill the people in prison, for example, and later to kill Jesse. He gets Jesse to kill Gale and tries to get him to kill Gus. “Settling things personally” is actually kind rather out of character. And I don’t think we ever see Walt really that motivated by vengeance, at least not the “look you in the eyes while I kill you” kind.
He goes after the Nazi’s personally so that he can free Jesse. If he called in the DEA, Jesse would go to jail.
No way. He thought Jesse was alive and in partnership with the Nazis. As stated before, he finally saved him only because he saw he was a slave and not a partner.