This cliffhanger really reminded me of last season’s cliffhanger on Dexter:
In both cases, the law enforcement family member finds out about the protagonist’s evil ways and now will have to wrestle between their loyalty to their families and their loyalty to their careers.
I don’t get people’s dislike of the book reveal. I honestly think that they writer’s may have been aiming for this from the first mention of Walt Whitman. The discussion in the lab, Hank finding it in the book and kidding Walt about “W. W.”; all of that fits together so nicely that it just doesn’t seem like a ret-con to me. Why did they bother to bring up Walt Whitman at all, and then mention it a second time highlighting the initials coincidence?
Hell the names, “Walt White” and “Walt Whitman” are so close that it almost makes me wonder about just how far ahead they were thinking about this.
Mithras explains away Walt’s supposed carelessness very nicely.
Granted, Mithras could be fan-wanking, but if you look at that scene (I have it on TIVO) the inscription is not on the first page, it’s on the second, the first is blank, and you almost get the impression (at least I do) that those two pages were slightly stuck together and Hank pulled them apart.
That’s the only thing that bothered me about the final scene. It wasn’t that the mighty Heisenberg, who built an empire out of nothing and ultimately gave it up for the family he loves, was taken down by Fred Flintstone stumbling into his head to take a dump. It was that Gilligan felt it necessary to utilize a cheesy flashback scene to illustrate its significance.
Another serious loose end for Walt is the chubby Native American girl who worked for Fring. All Hank has to do is show her a picture of Walt and that cements Walt’s relationship to Fring.
That scene was from a different season - although most people watching are loyal fans of the show who will remember it, they kinda have to show that for people who started watching late. Plus I thought it was a great last line of the show: (jokingly) “You got me!”
I wonder if Hank is going to do the hyperventilating/collapsing he seems prone to do when stressed when he goes back outside where everyone is. Already having said the “monster” comment about the person behind the ten killings (which imho somewhat strongly affected Walt’s decision to ‘get out’, fwiw), will Hank freak out before he can even get back to his wife? I am likely thinking that part too hard, of course.
I LOL’d big-time at the mention of a ‘ploop’-sound being added to very end of episode…great one 
And remember that Hank was ready to just drop the whole thing until Walt got drunk and said that the notebook was obviously an underling to a true genius. That caused Hank to take a second look and figure out the Fring connection.
I would agree with you but they have done this type of thing over and over in this series, you HAVE to be paying attention to everything or you are going to feel like you do all the time with this show.
there was one scene (after Walt knew about Beneke) where Walts mood suddenly changes for the worse while drinking coffee…from a Beneke coffee cup. if you dont actually look at the cup you have no idea at all where the bad mood came from.
I bet he left one hell of a mineral deposit.
I don’t think Hank knows that Walt paid his physical therapy bills. I seem to recall that the Purple One told him that his insurance covered everything. I’m sure that will be a complicating factor next season.
But as Marley23 has pointed out in earlier threads, Hank has shown pretty much total commitment to professional honesty. He was willing to flush his entire career down the toilet rather than lie about beating up Jesse. Of course, when Hank finds out it was Walt who single-handedly saved Hank’s career by getting Jesse to drop the charges, he may think twice about bringing Walt down. But just a hesitation; Hank’s under no illusions about how evil Fring’s successor is.
As for the state of the Fring investigation, I have to believe that the simultaneous murder of 10 inmates attracted crazy DEA and FBI attention. I doubt they would have abandoned the investigation into such a shocking crime.
That’s not the same thing. We can connect the dots. We do watch closely.
In a previous thread, someone said Walt’s alias in the Denny’s scene was using Skyler’s maiden name. Seems like whatever he’d been doing those months we haven’t seen yet, hiding from Hank probably wasn’t it. It would be very stupid to be using a family name to hide from family.
Not seeing Gale give Walt the book, didn’t bother me in the least. I mean, we didn’t know Walt had Lilly of the Valley before that big reveal either. If we had seen Gale give him the book, people would probably have complained every time it showed up that Walt should’ve gotten rid of it.
Wasn’t much Jesse, but what there was was great. Reminiscing about the RV, the obvious tension, then the release at the end with Walt leaving the money and Jesse tossing the gun. Great scene.
Just thinking about my previous post, I’d forgotten how much Walt has actually done for Hank.
That’s going to be one hell of a confrontation next season. Walt will be all, “You think you’re better than me, Hank? If it wasn’t for me, you’d be working mall security in a wheelchair right now, not ASAC in charge of the ABQ office. Or, more likely, divorced, unemployed, and unemployable, surrounded by minerals and Schrader-brau empties in your stinking single man apartment. You think about that, Hank.”
Hank would never have been suspended or shot without Walt’s criminal hijinks.
:smack: I really miss having a DVR. I could avoid asking stupid questions.
I loved the scene changes showing the operation. I think they started with a bag of blue “falling” into a barrel of blue liquid. At first I thought the bag had fallen off the scale and that Todd was going to get yelled at for being clumsy. And that first overhead shot of the green tented house looked like something was wrong, but then we saw all those other tented houses. Lots of bugs in that neighborhood! I wonder if Vamanos is offering discounts.
Not part of the show, but the trailer for the Seven Psychopaths movie looks like fun.
Yeh, typically flashbacks of this sort are a sad and trite editing device to make sure the audience ‘gets it’. But in this case, even if it that was the case in editing, that scene from the prior season was just so haunting, you could really feel the weight of what Hank finally uncovered.
I also think he had the book in the bathroom to peruse, forgot it there, lying on top of the pile, and over the weeks, the other magazines and reading material completely wiped it (heh) from Walt’s sight and memory. It was only that Hank had no interest in Skyler’s magazines that he dug deeper for something more… interesting.* “plooooop!”*
I’m in the camp that really liked the reveal. So long as that book existed before, and especially that existed in a prior season, there’s been plenty of circumstantial hints that fall in line of both character and the course of events, that it doesn’t play off like a huge ret-con. Had they showed Gale offering him the book, I could see myself hailing it as brilliant, not unlike the Lily of the Valley reveal, but this is plenty for me to respect. Of course, such a thing may have made it far too easy to guess what would finally incriminate Walt.
Didn’t we see Gale’s dedication in the first episode of season 5?
I provide reading material for my guests as I know I hate having nothing to read at any time. It’s also likely that Hank requires more time on the toilet these days. He’s still barely walking.
At least a brick or two.
Because we all know how well TPO keeps secrets. 
I’m envisioning free inspections where the Vamanos people secretly plants bugs. Literally. OMG it’s an epidemic!
If we did, I missed it. I do know we saw the book (cover only) in Hazard Pay when Walt was moving home. I didn’t realize that it was a gift, I thought that Walt simply had a copy of his own. That said, I have no problem with the reveal. Even pros make mistakes and Walt is hardly a pro.
Plus, by not explicitly showing the audience the book gifting, it puts us in the same state of awareness of it as Walt, who obviously forgot about it, or didn’t know about the inscription. I don’t buy that he knew/remembered and kept it as some sort of trophy. He’s been pretty meticulous in getting rid of and hiding even the smallest bits of evidence, and has no reason to keep a Gale trophy or memento.
And although I’m aware that it’s most likely a false memory, am I the only one who seems to remember Gale giving Walt the book? It was either that, or some other gift that I’m thinking of. Is it possible that the original-airing had a different cut than repeats/DVD/iTunes? (Yeah, I know, I’m grasping.)
I also have a vague memory of Gale giving Walt the book. I didn’t say anything because everyone else seemed to be certain that it hadn’t been shown, so I figured that I was mistaken.
It should be easy to find out if there was such a scene.
I couldn’t tell on screen exactly what was written in the book. Here’s a screen cap somebody made.
I wonder if a lot of people found it confusing.
I was speaking with someone about it and he said something like “why would that make him think W. W. was Walt any more than the other time”. I told him “because it’s in a book in Walt’s bathroom”.
Later he asked why the book was in the bathroom rather than an evidence locker. It was at that point that I realized that he totally didn’t get what was going on in that scene.
I then explained to him that it was a Walt Whitman poetry book and that it must have been a gift from Gale to Walt. Then he understood what was going on.