It looks exactly like the one he and Jesse had, though.
Did someone speculate about Walt’s last thoughts? I looked for the post and couldn’t find it. If I had to choose I would say he was thinking what he’d said to Skyler earlier: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was really- I was alive.” If you wanted I think you could take the Badfinger song as his last thoughts, too. Maybe that song popped into his mind from time to time during cooks and came back to him now. Walt probably wouldn’t think this was what he deserved, but I can imagine him thinking it ironically for a moment.
My wife’s main comment: WTF was Walt doing, leaving that specific book in the house when he knew Hank would be coming over at some point? For all his genius and brilliance, it was a really really effin’ stupid way to screw everything up.
They even prefaced it at some point by having somebody (Hank I think) make a statement like “No matter how smart a criminal is, they’ll slip up eventually.” That was Walt’s big slip-up.
They toss the money from Walt into their house safe and use it to pay the maid and the gardener.
Then in a couple days they phone up their lawyer and say, “We heard our old friend died and we’ve always felt bad that he didn’t profit more from the company he helped start. Sell some shares of the S&P 500 index fund in our brokerage account and use it to start a trust for his kids to give them a head start in life. Have Amy stop by with the paperwork this afternoon and we’ll sign it.”
This doesn’t even slightly approach being even vaguely an issue for them.
I am not sure how much of a slip up it was to leave the book out. I think he consciously did this because of this enormous ego. He underestimated Hank, thinking he would never pick up a book like that even if he saw it. And he probably got of on the fact that he had “proof” of his illegal dealings right out there in the open for the world to see.
My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I think right after the brief shot of Walt being hit (there’s a slight “bullet hitting flesh” sound and he jerks and grimaces) it cuts to a very brief shot of a metal refrigerator with bullet marks on it. I think the implication is that there was a ricochet off the fridge.
In this case Checkov’s Gun was literal. In one of the interviews Vince says when they wrote the foreshadowing scene of Walt with the machine gun in the trunk they had no idea what they were going to have him do with it. Just that they were sure they could come up with something cool for him to do with it.
I’m going by memory here so I could be wrong, but I think the book was in the private bath off the master bedroom. Walt wouldn’t expect Hank to use that bathroom; to do so he would have to walk past the main bathroom in the hallway.
shrug I’ve seen alarm systems like that. You disarm it once you arrive home, and it’s not active while you’re there. Maybe it’s a motion detector, or you’re going to be going in and out of the house and don’t want to disarm every time you open the door. Plus it’s a wealthy neighborhood in a gated community in Santa Fe. I’ve seen wealthy neighborhoods in gated communities in Santa Fe. No one’s worried much about bad guys while they’re at home.
Sure, they can each take $9500 per day to their bank and make a deposit. This won’t trigger a cash transaction report sent to FINCEN. It will only take the two of them 500 banking days to complete. Hopefully the teller who sees each of them come in everyday with a wad of cash just below the $10,000 limit doesn’t file a suspicious activity report (SAR).
And hopefully they have cash sitting around to fund the trust as you suggested. They may be rich but that could mostly be in shares of Gray Matter.
It’s interesting, there are two somewhat contradictory lines of discussion about BB in these threads and on the internet as a whole. One has been talking about how the entire show is the inevitable set of consequences that resulted from Walt’s initial decision to cook meth. The other has been talking about the coincidental chains of events, how X happened only because of the very unlikely Y, etc, etc, with Walt leaving the book in the bathroom being a good example of that.
I think that even though Hank only caught on because of the book, it was very unlikely that Walt was going to get away with it. Jesse still knew about him, and it’s very possible that his arc would have played out the same, including finding out that Walt was the one who poisoned Brock. And of course Todd and Lydia and Declan and that whole side of things would have played out in some fashion, meaning someone might have shown up on Walt’s doorstep applying some level of pressure on him to cook again. And of course there’s $80 million in cash in a storage unit, which is another way things could go wrong. Etc. etc.
It happened to be the book that started everything unravelling, but I don’t think Walt was 100% guaranteed home free without that.
A better question is why Gale would write such a purple-prosed dedication to a man he shared one cook with. Is he dropping these off all over Juan Tabo Boulevard? “To Gustavo, who fixed me my fair trade coffee this morning. My star, my shining light.”
It seems like you didn’t read the post you’re responding to. The idea was that they don’t deposit the money, instead using it to pay their gardener etc in cash.
I am not sure whether such a thing would be caught in an audit, but it does seem free from the risk of setting off any flags for anyone outside an audit context.
I always wondered when Gale gave this book to Walt. Did they meet years ago in the crystallography world ? The book did look pretty weathered. But they did not seem to know each other when first introduced in the lab.