I may have missed something- Skyler asked what “that call was about” when Walt was in the crawlspace. Which call was that?
The room was indeed shaking, and I’m not sure why that would be. Some artistic symbolism, probably.
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I may have missed something- Skyler asked what “that call was about” when Walt was in the crawlspace. Which call was that?
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I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing Walt called Skyler off camera — “Meet me at the house, now! We need to pack!” Something along those lines.
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And on top of it, neither has learned that Ted went the way of the Darwin Awards.
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Too late for that. Ted has already reproduced.
Actually to me it seems they left Ted’s state ambiguous. Maybe he’s only comatose, or hospitalized. I could see the writers wanting him around for later so that he could be a source of leads for the police.
On the other hand, I won’t be at all surprised if he is in fact really, most sincerely dead as of now.
Excellent, excellent episode.
I’m guessing he frantically called her and left some semi-coherent message about getting the kids and packing bags.
Unless Jesse comes through and kills Gus…
Yeah, I mean, they’re going to have to name it Chekov’s Ricin soon.
If you were watching it over digital cable or satellite, that’s a video compression artifact. Parts of the image that don’t change much from frame to frame (like the wood wall/floor) are just repeated over several frames, and will shift slightly as the rest of the video is slipping beneath it as it plays at 30fps. Hard to explain, but it’s a common artifact, that really gives an odd appearance.
I noticed it too, I have Comcast HD. It happened on Walt’s face when him and Hank were on the stake out, too.
/video nerd
I think the point of the little medical clinic scene was Jesse’s realization of just how expendable Mike was to Gus. The wheels are starting to turn.
After Gus’s speech to Walt in the desert, it’s clear just how ruthless he is. Perhaps it’s a bluff, but I don’t think so. It’s one thing to kill the man’s wife, but to threaten to kill Walt Jr. And their newborn daughter… That’s a monster talking.
I don’t see why. They had blood on hand for all three of them and were prepared with detailed info on each of their medical histories. I don’t think Jesse felt that he and Mike were expendable after he saw all the blood and all the preparations they had made to save all of their lives, if need be.
Gus was unconscious, so it was not like he was in control of them ignoring Mike at first. The medical team’s combination of fear of letting the big boss die, and probably a big bonus they were promised for saving his life, is what caused them to decide to prioritize him on their own. Plus the fact they already knew what needed to be done to counteract the poison and had it all ready to go.
ETA: If Jessie had felt expendable after leaving the clinic, and after Gus made it clear that Walt was expendable, he could have plugged Gus in the back of the head. He may come to change his mind about feeling expendable, but right now, I think he feels pretty damned irreplaceable.
What was with the sublingual shot under Gus’s tongue?
While I know what you’re talking about, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that the shake at the end was a deliberate effect, to unsettle the viewers.
^I’ll watch it again… I may have been too wrapped up in the moment to notice.
Podcast to the rescue again.
The director of the episode spoke of how Michael Slovis (the show’s cinematographer) rigged a winch-system to draw the camera from the bottom of the set to the ceiling. They needed a heavy-duty system to hoist the entire camera rig, so the steel cables they used were bulky. They caused the shuddering. Vince Gilligan said that they tried to iron out the shuddering in post-production, but that it was impossible to do without causing visual oddities. He said that he’s happy with how the shot turned out regardless of their failure to correct it because the trembling adds an extra dimension of intensity to the shot of Walt lying on his back cackling.
This just became my new favorite TV episode of all time, replacing the season finale of Season 5 of The Shield.
People have been rooting against Walt for most of this season. I know I turned against him at the dinner when he told Hank that Gale wasn’t Heisenberg. I thought he deserved everything he got after that. This episode was designed to put people back on Team Walt. I think it worked. He just became sympathetic again.
It isn’t the wobbling that makes it look fake, it’s the lighting. Walt in the crawlspace with daylight shining on him is unaffected by the inside lights. The farther back they draw, the more it looks like Walt in the hole was pre-recorded and added later cheaply.
I knew they hadn’t done that, but I had to keep reminding myself.
Speaking of visual trickery, the scene where Walt is crowing to Gus about Jesse’s allegiance, where the camera is pulled back far enough that we can see the shadow of a cloud move across all of the characters, is a result of digital manipulation. The editor of this episode, Skip Macdonald, had to speed the film up by 20% and cut a minute out of the middle so that the shadow moves across them and then moves away in a single shot.
I’m glad they were able to find a way to make that work because it’s such a great shot.
I’m going to double-post here to mention briefly Goodfellas. My roommate pointed out the resemblance of the final scene of this episode of Breaking Bad to the end of Goodfellas, where Ray Liotta’s character returns home after being in jail, intending to flee before he’s murdered for appearing to be a snitch, and discovers that his wife has flushed their only remaining source of money. He has a breakdown, thinking he’ll soon be dead.
We were discussing the episode only an hour ago when I flipped the channel back to AMC and discovered that, oddly enough, they were playing* Goodfellas*.
Why did Walt purposefully mess up the weighing of the meth in the beginning?
He didn’t, he was resting his hand on the box absent mindedly. That added the few extra ounces. Walt was being careless, and the goon swooped in to show Walt he was wrong and make him lift the meth again.
I don’t know if Saul’s Last Comic Standing A-Team would have let him live after that. If he was alive, they would have had to escalate things a bit for everyone’s sake. They were going to wait with him for the check to clear - they would let him go to the hospital where he could suddenly wake up and call the bank (unlikely, but they still wouldn’t leave it to chance).