Breaking Bad: I thought that XXX (Spoilers) hadn't been poisoned??

Cafe Society
1

On Breaking Bad, (I’m getting thru the 5th season now-Ep 12) I’m hearing Jesse say that Walt poisoned Brock, and Walt is saying that he, indeed, did.

Now, here’s the way I saw it:

  1. Dipshit Jesse lost the Ricin cigarette
  2. Walt conjured up another one, and let Jesse find it in the Robotvac, or whatever.
  3. Brock gets rushed to the hospital.
  4. Jesse tells Drs., who tell cops, to check for Ricin poisoning.
  5. Drs/cops come back and say 'It wasn’t Ricin poisoning."
  6. Jesse, and Walt, say that Walt poisoned the kid.
    Even if Brock got poisoned by the original Ricin cigarette, I don’t think that we can say that Walt poisoned the kid. It was Dumbass’ fault, for losing the cigarette.
    WTH- did Walt poison the kid? I am now wondering if I am missing something, and I don’t want to go back and watch. I have been viewing the show so sporadically, that I can’t even remember if it was season 4 or 3, or maybe early 5, where the kid goes to the hospital, so, I don’t want to go through all of those just for this one point.
    Can you tell me what I missed??
    Thanks,
    hh
2

You probably don’t want to know the answer to this until you’ve finished watching the entire show.

3

Here’s how it went down:

  1. Walt gives Jesse a ricin cigarette with which to kill Gus. Jesse puts it in a cigarette pack (turned upside down so he won’t smoke it himself) but he never gets the chance to use it. Walt blames Jesse and then Walt and Jesse have a big fight and go their separate ways.

  2. Gus takes Jesse to Mexico to cook a batch for the Cartel. This proves that Jesse can cook on his own.

  3. Walt now realises that he is dispensable and, consequently, Gus will try to kill him. Walt knows that Jesse is protecting him, but he also knows that won’t last forever.

  4. Walt goes to Jesse to beg for help but Jesse is still mad after their fight so he tells him to get lost. During this, however, Walt sees Brock.

  5. Walt cooks up a dose of poison derived from the Lily of the Valley, a plant which he happens to have in his garden, and which also produces a poison with symptoms superficially similar to ricin poisoning.

  6. Walt tells Saul that Jesse still has the ricin cigarette and that he may do ‘something rash’ with it. Walt asks Saul to get it off him.

  7. Knowing that Jesse won’t just give it up Saul calls Jesse in to his office on a pretext and has Huell pickpocket the cigarette while pretending to frisk him.

  8. Walt poisons Brock with the Lily of the Valley.

  9. Jesse realises that the symptoms sound like ricin poisoning. He checks his pack, finds the cigarette gone and correctly deduces that Huell stole it. He knows Walt must have ordered the theft of the cigarette and so he goes to kill Walt.

  10. Walt convinces Jesse that he’s wrong (even though he isn’t). Walt points out that Gus has a track record of hurting children, and that Tyrus could just as easily taken the cigarette from Jesse’s locker while he was in the lab. He also points out that it is in Gus’s interest to turn Jesse against Walt. Jesse believes Walt, in part because he makes a superficially plausible argument, but also because he just doesn’t think Walt is capable of poisoning a child.

  11. Because of all this, Jesse secretly turns against Gus and together they kill him and destroy the lab.

  12. Jesse learn that Brock was poisoned with Lily of the Valley. He doesn’t consider this suspicious in and of itself because Lily of the Valley poisoning can happen accidentally (curious kids eating berries etc…). However, this raises a question for Jesse: If Tyrus didn’t take the cigarette, and Saul didn’t take it, where is it? Now, we all know that Saul did take it, but Jesse doesn’t. In fact, Walt has the cigarette. Saul gave it to him and Walt has held on to it just in case he needs it again.

  13. Walt makes a fake ricin cigarette.

  14. Walt goes round Jesse’s place to look for the real ricin cigarette (which, lest we forget, is actually at Walt’s). During the search, Walt slips the fake ricin cigarette into the Roomba (or whatever it’s called) then he “finds” it and disposes of it before Jesse can look at it and realise it’s fake.

Conclusion: From Jesse’s point of view it looks like he just lost the ricin cigarette and the Roomba vacuumed it up. Brock’s poisoning was accidental. But that doesn’t matter because he was evil and the world’s a better place without him anyway.

The truth, however, is that Walt got Saul to steal the cigarette and give it to him, hid it in his own house, poisoned Brock with something similar, duped Jesse into thinking Gus stole the cigarette to poison Brock in an attempt to turn him against Walt, thereby turning Jesse against Gus, then made a fake ricin cigarette and stuck it in the Roomba.

Also, to clarify, Saul had no idea about any of this. As far as he was concerned, he was just taking the cigarette to help Jesse.

That’s the gist of it, anyway.

4

Aww, fuckbags! For any of you who clicked on my spoiler, please note that the penultimate paragraph SHOULD read:

Conclusion: From Jesse’s point of view it looks like he just lost the ricin cigarette and the Roomba vacuumed it up. Brock’s poisoning was accidental. Jesse didn’t need to kill Gus, but that doesn’t matter because he was evil and the world’s a better place without him anyway.

You can see how the bolded words change the emphasis somewhat!

5

Ah, I see what I missed.

Thanks, guys!

6

Doctor WB, maybe you can clarify something about Brock’s poisoning that bothered me.

In the aftermath, IIRC we see Walt retrieving a Lily of the Valley plant from Brock’s house, where he presumably had left it earlier. It always seemed too chancy to me that he would rely on the kid eating the berries himself. Your post suggests that Walt actually cooked up a dose of poison himself and slipped it to Brock. That makes more sense than leaving it to chance. Is this actually shown or indicated on the show, or is it just your inference. (I’ve forgotten the details.)

7

[spoiler]Walt doesn’t retrieve anything from Brock’s house. The Lily of the Valley was in Walt’s backyard. There’s a scene where he spins his gun trying to figure out what to do, and it ends up pointing at the plant with a reaction shot of Walt snapping out of his funk. In the season finale we see the plant again in Walt’s backyard with confirmation that it is Lily of the Valley.

Walt poisoned Brock, it wasn’t accidental. Walt meets Brock twice next season and both times Brock’s reaction is less than friendly.[/spoiler]

8

That’s because

[spoiler]1. Walt doesn’t retrieve the Lily of the Valley from Brock’s house. It is in his own backyard – we see it twice before that:

After Walt’s family goes to stay with Hank & Marie, Walt is sitting in the backyard waiting for Gus’ goons to show up. He has his gun sitting on the patio table, and he is absentmindedly spinning it. Twice it stops pointing at him (a la ‘spin-the-bottle’), but the third time it points away from him. It is pointing at the Lily of the Valley, giving Walt the idea for the scheme (though this is not obvious to the viewers at the time.

After Gus is dead, Walt and Jesse meet on the roof of the parking structure where they shake hands and Jesse tells Walt that Brock will be fine, that the poison was Lily of the Valley, and rationalizes that Gus had to die anyway, right? Walt shows empathetic relief that Brock is OK and agrees that Gus had to go. They drive away and the scene switches to the White’s back yard, where the camera zooms in and focuses on the Lily of the Valley (with a convenient label), revealing that Walt was the poisoner all along.

Walt gathers up the plant, along with the bomb-building equipment, when he’s cleaning up before his family returns in episode 5-01.[/spoiler]

2. It is never made clear how Walt poisoned Brock. Does he give him berries directly? Squeeze them into a juice box? When he encounters Brock later, at Jesse’s house, there’s no indication that the kid recognizes him, so it seems he didn’t hand him anything directly. Who was the surrogate? Mysteries that the writers left as such…

Of course, while we’re on the topic,

When Walt has to get the money to bribe Saul’s receptionist he needs to get into his house, which by now is occupied by Gus’ men. He’s already built his pipe bomb, and he won’t be cleaning up the kitchen until the beginning of season 5. So these two guys, who work for Gus, presumably know that Walt has been “cooking” something up at his house, and the bomb angle seems to be obvious – did they inform Gus of this? If Gus knows Walt is running around somewhere with a bomb, maybe that’s why he doesn’t return to his car. But it seems that Tyrone should be specifically looking for a bomb in Tio’s room – if he has a clue what to look for, he’s likely to find it.

9

Damn, Reverse beat me to the punch! But I don’t think it’s clear that Brock recognises Walt.

10

I just want to say that I’m envious of handsomeharry for having the experience of watching Breaking Bad for the first time. It was so satisfying.

11

I do remember Brock giving WW some stink-eye after his (Brock’s not Walt’s) recovery - but it’s true that it’s not made explicit, this relies on the viewer knowing what Walt did and putting two and two together, assuming that Brock also knows.

12

I couldn’t agree more!

13

Thanks for the explanations. That makes sense.

I guess when it was revealed that Brock had been poisoned by Lily of the Valley I jumped to the conclusion that Walt had somehow “planted” the plant at his house. I obviously mixed up where the plant was seen.

14

Well, this is a coincidence! I just watched this episode and came here to search the threads to see if I could find out how Walt had poisoned Brock. I thought I must have missed something.

I didn’t watch the show originally so I’m watching AMC’s binge on Sundays. And even though I’m familiar with the basic story just through cultural osmosis and I know how it ends, it’s still riveting television. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t see it then because it’s great not waiting weeks or months between episodes!

15

Good write up of a very convoluted series of events. The only thing I can add is that at one point we can see Saul’s secretary shredding a document which appears to be a school schedule. It’s never made explicit how he did it, but the inference is that Walt used that information to find an opportunity to slip Brock the poison. Most likely he spiked Brock’s juicebox or something when he was in class.