Just to add my $0.02, incredible episode -- incredibly hard to watch. I felt Walt's pain after Hank was shot, when he sank to his knees and fell over. Just the fact that Walt offered Jack ALL of his money lets us know how badly he wanted to save Hank's life. And then, just like that, it's done, Hank's gone. Incredibly sad. Hard to see Walt's feelings for Jesse changing to the point where he tries to rescue him. In fact, I still think Jesse will be the target for the ricin, but, of course, I could be wrong. Did everyone see the previews for next week? They're available online so this is not a spoiler. Saul tells (presumably) Walt that with 2 DEA agents missing and presumed dead, absent Walt, the Feds will go after Skylar. So I don't know how effective Walt's little gambit during the phone conversaion with Skylar will eventually be. Junior attacking Walt made perfect sense to me, as it does to some others. Any man (including father) in a physical altercation with my mother is "attacking" her no matter who has a weapon. This was especially true when I was 17 or whatever Junior's age. Also, I'm in the camp that feels that Hank and Gomez' deaths can both be laid at the feet of Walter White. Just when I thought we'd never get closure on Walt's culpability in Jane's death... I just wonder if Vince had this in mind as the way he would close this out all along? What a ride. Dude who is only in season 2 on Netflix, please do yourself a favor and dont read this post or any others in this thread.
I don't think Walt knows Jesse is alive, I think he's going to go back to kill the NAZIs for killing Hank and wrecking everything.
My guess on how this all ends Spoiler: MY GUESS is that Walt finds out Jesse is still alive being used by the nazi's. Maybe not directly but just by seeing someone with a bag of the true blue meth. Only one other person knows how to make it after all. He gears up to assault the meth lab. Crazy shit happens. Walt is probably wounded. Hears the voice of Jesse, telling him to stop shooting. Turns out Jesse and the red head are running things or maybe even Jesse is now a hardened kingpin. Show ends with Jesse putting a bullet in Mr. White.
Breaking Bad has been amazing...incredible...but if they don't make Walt sacrifice himself to save Jesse I'll be incredibly angry. I want to get a couple more Jesse BITCH quotes before it's all over too.
Walt knew that Hank's death would be the one crime he couldn't simply get away with. That it could cause his whole house of cards to collapse. And that's exactly what happened. That's why he desperately begged the Nazis to spare his brother-in-law.
Watch this... It's well made and has some good cameos. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duKL2dAJN6I[/yt]
Come on dude.. even if they are not strictly spoilers they still give away something and some people prefer to be totally in the dark. At least spoilercode them if you want to talk about previews.
Pretty much everything in this episode hinged on Todd, a heretofore minor player. Todd is the one who saves Walt. Walt's collapse in my view should have been because he thought Jack would just kill him and take all the money. Frankly, Todd telling him not to because he respects Walt is horribly weak writing. Walt being a better person because he feels pain when Hank is killed is first, hard to believe, because Walt knows he's about to join Hank. And second, and much worse, it's just fatuous adolescent bullshit. Walt deciding to confess all to save Skylar is also hard to swallow. That DVD is still going to be hard to explain as coerced, but even more to the point, the carwash was run by Skylar, which means she was laundering the money. See Orange Is the New Black for insight as to what the Feds think of laundering drug money. Anna Gunn's going to replace Laura Prepon! Marie leaving to prepare Junior/Flynn is the only good plotting, explaining why she's out of the house while the Aryans are stealing all Hank's evidence. The other memory card is absolutely vital to further developments. If the money from Jesse's cook is too much to pass up, the money in that last barrel is too much to pass up. Todd saving Walt and Jesse is self-contradictory other than Todd just a nice kid who gives Heisenberg the respect he deserves. Feh. Lydia will be pleased at the improvement in the product. Walt coming back to kill Jesse is the logical outcome, not Walt coming back to save Jesse. And neither makes any sense unless Walt is dying of cancer imminently.
If you think Walt's feelings for his brother-in-law were not genuine, I think you may have missed some significant parts of the show. Walt is a bad guy but he is not Todd, an unfeeling sociopath. He does care very much for family and that is how he thought of Hank at the very end, with Jack standing over him with a gun about to shoot him. Hank had only recently became a real threat to Walt. Before, Hank was his brother-in-law whom he'd grown to care for over the years. Walt just needed to keep Hank at arms distance with respect to his meth empire. Despite it all, Walt still cared about Jesse and he knew and respected (and loved) Hank as a family member for a much longer time. He referred to Jesse as "family" and didn't want any harm to come to him for the longest time, so why would his feelings for Hank not be even greater?
Acknowledged. My bad. Agree, basically, (except with the "adolescent bullshit" part). Would have been better if Jack just decided to let Walt live out of respect for a fellow "professional" and someone who had paid Jack's gang handsomely for past work. Making Todd a part of saving Walt was unnecessary UNLESS, it plays into some bigger plot point in the ensuing episodes. There is no evidence that Skylar had anything to do with the DvD confession other than Marie's opinion/beliefs. But Skylar IS guilty of money laundering. The Nazis' might steal the memory stick from Hank's house as a precaution, but if it doesn't happen, that would be logical since the "evidence", Jesse's confession, is worthless anyway. It's the reason Hank and Gomez scrapped the idea of using it (alone) to go after Walt. I tend to agree with this. But at the end of the episode Walt is shown leaving "forever". And he is shown doing this knowing that Hank's murderer is still out there and that Jesse might still be alive. So what makes him change his mind about abandoning these two things, as was his initial plan, apparentely, and returning? My hope is that Walt has an epiphany and realizes finally that he is the problem and he is the reason Hank is dead, Jesse is a slave and hates him, and this makes him want to save Jesse. Again, my hope -- not what I think is going to happen, necessarily.
Even though Jesse was portrayed like he was younger, I think Paul himself was ages 29 to 34 in the time on the show. That's a weird patch for some people. Things settle around the face, unlike Cranston who went from 52 to 57, & looked almost exactly the same throughout. Even Skylar looked a little more aged in her flashback appearance than in the pilot, but it was kind of obvious with Jesse Had it not been for the flashback which really was minor, I really thought it was cool how much Jesse had changed in the time. It was only 18-20ish months or so, & he looked like the life had destroyed him
The only part of the episode I question is why they spared him and left him a barrel of money. It seemed to me like Jack's initiative, not Todd's. Could be because he saw him as an Aryan ally or something, like professional courtesy. But he really accepted his handshake as 'I won't revenge you'? I don't know if Walt will kill Jesse or not but he certainly wants to kill the drug dealers, and Jesse's not his main target. Jesse's certainly not innocent, he's a murderer, but he takes a far smaller percentage of the blame than Walt. Jesse was a dumb impulsive kid who trusted a father figure. Walt knew what he was doing. And Jesse tried to get out after he saw the consequences of his actions, and he never forgave himself when that 12 year old died. Walt kept going and going full knowing the possible consequences. Jesse was emotional and had rage and ambition he didn't know how to express. Walt was a calculating entitled narcissist.
Do they still want him to cook? I thought that was why they took the money, basically as a conclusion of their association, and why Jack wanted Walt to shake on it for "no hard feelings."
My only problem with the story so far is that at no point was Walt really a kingpin. He was just a cook who sold a large batch of stuff to people from time to time. He never really had an army of subordinates, never really dealed with any cartels on more than one-time type deals, and the only people who ever really feared him were the people who saw how batshit nuts he'd get and hire people -- again, only temporarily -- to do the real work for him. That's not really a "kingpin" to me. Not even close.
Yeah, I don't see why they would want to bother with the risk or the effort to keep cooking now that they've got, what was it? 80 million dollars? Todd is the only one who wants to keep cooking, probably because he's jonesing on Lydia. It's why he wants to hang onto Jesse.