Fulminated mercury explosions, of course.
I was coming here to make this very thread - I’m too excited for the final season to begin!
I don’t know where this will end up - some of the predictions here are really good.
I hope Jesse ends up with everything.
I hope Walt comes clean before (if) he dies.
I hope Skyler and the kids survive and she doesn’t serve jail time.
I hope Walt figures out that Hank is on to him and hires the Cartel to gun him down.
I hope Saul doesn’t cut a deal with the DEA for a lesser sentence and take down the whole damn empire.
I hope Jesse kills the new kid the one who shot the little kid on the motorbike
AND MOST OF ALL: I sincerely hope the ending leaves NOTHING to the imagination whatsoever. All questions answered for all characters. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY - DON’T GIVE US ANOTHER SOPRANOS ENDING!!!:smack::smack::smack:
This was addressed on some chemistry website (how’s that for a cite) that said
1- Yes, it will explode that powerfully
2- No, nobody would ever mistake it for meth
I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about what a happy ending for Jesse might look like anyway. All the poor guy knows about or enjoys in life is cooking, selling and using meth. All his friends are dopeheads and the women he’s involved with are either hookies or junkies, recovering or otherwise. Money doesn’t make him happy. When he was working with Walt in the superlab and was looking at the prospect of becoming a millionaire, he was still miserable and went back to small-time dealing on the side just for, apparently, the hell of it. Like Walt, he is his own worst enemy and always find a way to mess himself up. I can’t really see him taking his bag of cash and riding into the sunset, and then going to college, finding a normal career or a stable relationship. Bless his heart, but he’s just too restless, too angry, too self-destructive and just too damned dense for any of that to work out. And he’s fighting too many inner demons.
I think Jesse blew any chance of a happy ending at about, I don’t know, age twelve.
Right on. What I’d like to see Adam and Walrus test is how much it takes to cause the sort of explosion we saw in Tuco’s HQ. How many ounces to blow out the windows and toss an air conditioning unit?
Yeah, I saw that somewhere too. Mercury fulminate actually looks like a grey powder in pure form. It’s also so unstable that you wouldn’t even want to handle it the way Walt did, or it might blow up in your face.
However, we don’t know the details of how Walt made the bomb. What if he mixed the mercury fulminate in with meth? Could that produce something that would look like crystals, be safer to handle, and still go boom?
It’ll be interesting to see if Mythbusters mixes it with meth to find out. 
While Jesse isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, I tend to agree with the idea I think both his parents and Walt have espoused: He just never applied himself. But then Walt just *broke *him. Walt invented a lot of those inner demons. If Walt had not ridden him into the dirt, he might still be doing badly for himself (small time punk cook, maybe even locked up), but nothing like what Walt’s influence has done. If Walt had just left him alone the first time Jesse tried to lose him, Jesse might have had some hope for a happy ending. By now, that’s pretty much not in the cards. Just getting away from Walt will have to be happy enough. (For everyone, actually!)
Re: Mercury fulminate
Walt said that his version had “a little tweak of chemistry”. In other words, it wasn’t supposed to be your regular, run-of-the-mill mercury fulminate. The viewer is to assume that Walt created a way to harness the explosive power of the fulminate in a material that resembles his blue meth. Since he is supposed to be not just a chemist but a truly brilliant one, I’m willing to accept this for the purposes of awesome television.
Just a small nitpick - at the point in the show where Walt confronted Tuco his Meth was white. It wasn’t until the next episode that Walt realized that he didn’t have a steady supply of pseudoephredine (sp?) so he and Jessie stole the barrel of Methlamine. From that point forward his meth was blue.
D’oh! You’re right.
It’s been so long… did they use HF or HCl? Also, part of the myth tested would have to be whether it would also dissolve a (presumably enamel-coated cast iron?) bathtub, dumping liquified body all over the place. 
And of course dead pig. That’s the standard MythBusters (MethBusters?) stand-in for a human corpse.
The Breaking Bad mythbusters episode has already been broadcast in Australia. It’s “available”.
The two myths tested are can HF eat through a body, bathtub and flooring and can mercury fulminate produce the explosion in Tuco’s hideout.
Results are probably not what you expect.
HF; but I think the bathtub is supposed to be entirely ceramic. I 'spect that the HF is more effective at eating through the bathtub than the body. Remember that you don’t need to dissolve the bottom of the tub, you just need to weaken it enough that it can’t support the weight of the contained fluids.
I would go with a solution of warm/hot NaOH. It’s much better at attacking organic tissues – don’t know if it would dissolve through bone, but it’s much easier to come by than HF, which tends to be a more specialty chemical, at least at the quantities in the show (why would a high school chem lab have multiple gallon bottles of HF on hand anyway?). If there is bone left, smaller quantities of HF would make quick work of that.
Maybe I’ve put too much thought into this…
Walt’s meth has always had an element of “a wizard did it” to it anyway. For one thing, in reality, while there is blue meth out there, extremely pure meth is white or colorless. Any coloring is a sign of impurities, so it wouldn’t make sense for Walt’s “99% pure” meth to be blue. This is lampshaded when Gale says that he “can’t, as of yet, account for the blue color”. Another (more serious) problem is that (disclaimer: IANAChemist, I just googled this stuff) you actually wouldn’t get meth that pure using the P2P/methylamine process that Walt swears by, as it produces a mixture of two isomers of methamphetamine, l-meth and d-meth (same chemical but different structure), and only the d-type is psychoactive. The pseudoephedrine method would be better for making very pure meth.
It is implied that Walt has found a way to isolate the d from the l using the P2P process, but there’s no explanation of how he does that.
Even if you let that slide, another thing that is a bit questionable is the lengths the characters are willing to go to in order to get their hands on some methylamine, up to and including robbing a train. The stuff isn’t actually that hard to synthesize (at least as far as I can determine by googling), and you would think that a chemist of Walt’s caliber would at least consider just making it himself. It would be nice if they had at least addressed this on the show by explaining that maybe it wouldn’t be practical on such a large scale, or something like that.
In Season 4, it is mentioned that it is easy to synthesize. The Mexican Cartel tell Jesse that they synthesize their own and that “any sophomore chemistry student” should know how to do that (instead, Jesse just uses the barrel with the B on it). They never really talk about it again, though.
Nah, it that scene they’re talking about phenylacetic acid, a different step in the process.
I just watched it now and it was very interesting indeed. Especially the mercury fulminate explosion testing, where they literally
go down to the quarry and throw stuff in there.
The scene you’re thinking of talks about phenylacetic acid, not methylamine.
I forgive the show for any technical errors relating to the production of meth - I mean, they don’t want to make a how-to guide on creating the stuff. In any case, the story is consistent with Walt’s skills, the stuff they need, the process, etc. It’s not really a problem from a storytelling perspective.
Edit: That actually brings up an actual story flaw/plot hole that isn’t the chemistry. When the cartel guy asks the chemist “well how long is that going to take” [to synthesize the acid that they should’ve had ready to go, he says “I don’t know. I have no idea” which makes no sense. He’s acting as if Jesse’s lack of knowledge of how to synthesize the stuff is going to delay the whole process, but even if he knew how, they were going to have to take the time to synthesize it. It should’ve been ready, the cartel chemist was the one that fucked up, but the story tries to imply that they’re holding Jesse responsible for the delay. That’s an actual plot-relevant criticism since it doesn’t make sense.
Breaking Bad Season 5 has just been put on Netflix Instant.
As God is my witness, I swear that if that happens I will take off my Skipper’s hat and run around the island screaming GILLIGAAAAAN!