Anyone into 'BREAKING BAD'? (part 4)

Ya know, why would Walt have a beef with the neo-Nazis at this point? They've done business together very professionally. This idea that Walt's going to come back and blow them away doesn't make much sense. He gave the go-ahead to kill Jesse, and he has to know Hank's big mouth got him killed as much as anything. The gang gave Walt some money, and Uncle Jack interacted with him intelligently. Both Jack and Walt are men of their words. So the plot's got to go somewhere else...

 

I'm going back in for a replay tonight last night was insane.

 

I wouldn't call them stealing 85% of his money professional. He gave away where the money was, and it was a miracle that they didn't shoot him in the head. Walt knew he lacked "leverage" as he mentioned previously, so his agreeing to 1 barrel of the money was a stopgap action. He simply had no numbers or firepower.

Look at how much he was losing his sh** when he thought Jesse was messing with his money. Now he's just going to let them walk away with it? Doesn't make sense.

Dan

 

how cold was it when they shot this scene??

 

Whether Walt has a beef with Uncle Jack after last night or not, he will after they go to Hank / Marie's home for Jesse's confession tape, I doubt it will be "in & out and nobody gets hurt".

I really thought Walt Jr was going to get accidently stabbed last night, but his 911 call was heartbreaking.

 

isn't walt's diabolical nemesis actually just himself at this point?

 

How about this: Jesse escapes, so they don't have him cooking any more. They need the blue meth. They can't find Jesse, so they kidnap Walt's family to draw Walt back. Walt finds out through Saul and returns and gets the machine gun. At least it's a possibility. However, the writers are several levels more creative than this, so there will likely be things happening none of us have thought of.

 

Hard to believe that there was all this levity while shooting THIS scene. In other words, I DO believe it, but my brain can't quite get around it.
And what is Steven Michael Quezada looking at? The crane, I'm guessing? Or just throwing his head back for a laugh?


Dan

 

I'm thinking the latter.

 

I think that's a fair point but still... the neo nazis don't really do it for me except as minor characters, not "plot shapers".

 

Was Walt's "I watched Jane die" speech a plot device to make Jesse want to kill Walt or hurt his family for revenge? (You took something of mine so I'll take something of yours.)

Walt goes into his "new identity" hiding on the east coast, so Jesse trashes the house and possibly kills/kidnaps Walt's family members in order to get it on the news so that Walt comes out of hiding. Jesse moves in for the kill.

It feels that the show will have to end with the two main characters confronting each other one final time.

Impossible to predict but fun to try and guess.

 

Jesse's not exactly in a position to trash anything or kill/kidnap anyone.

 

I'm having kind of a hard time imagining Jesse attack Walt's innocent (barring Skyler's involvement) family. I know that they sort of played that card already when Jesse was ready to burn the joint down after he figured out what Walt did to Brock, but I'd still like to think that he's not that kind of a cold blooded killer. But if after being brutally tortured by Todd, Brock and Andrea get hurt. . . well, all bets are off! I don't think Jesse will necessarily be the reason Walt comes back, but there needs to be a final confrontation between them.

 

I'm speechless. My mind is still blown. Such a great show. Sad it's ending, but I would rather it end strong like this than whimper out.

 

That's as good a guess is any. But I still lean towards Walt coming in to kill the crypto-Nazis, if they've kidnapped his wife and family (and Jesse). Maybe this is a "hail Mary" pass so that he can be a hero before he dies, and the people in his family know he was trying to do the right thing.

It's a rare series where the very last two or three episodes keep getting better and better. I just read where Vince Gilligan has said that last night's episode was "I think for my money, is the best episode we ever had or ever will have."

http://www.tvfanatic.com/2013/09/breaking-bad-exclusive-vince-gilligan-teases-heart-attack-conclu/

 

Awesome episode but Walt should have just taken the family and gone into hiding after Hank put 2 and 2 together. Now Hank's dead, Jesse's been captured, Walt's family hates him, the law is after him, and he is on the run by himself. What a horrible mess.

 

I will give my opinion of Sunday's episode by using other forum members thoughts. Above is #1

 

#2 ..., that child really was something else!

 

#3 Agree and it ain't gonna be pretty! I feel a meth lab will blow!

 

I always hoped there would be more of "Andrea" in this show. Emily Rios is a great actress, she did really good work in 'Men of a Certain Age" and is currently doing very good work in "The Bridge." I hope "Andrea" and "Brock" make it out of the show alive at the end.

 

At the time, Hank's death pretty much took everything out of him. The man couldn't even stand up and recovered slowly.

 

Talk about unfair, I personally loved the show "Men Of A Certain Age", what a shame that no one else watched, as you missed a great show that, for once, wasn't geared to a young audience!

 

This bounces around a bit and probably self-contradicts, so take this overlong and under-edited semi-anonymous internet post with a heaping grain of salt. Blue salt, of course...

Thinking about last night's episode, particularly Walt's sense of mercy towards Hank followed shortly by his mercilessness towards Jesse, I feel the Walt/Heisenberg dichotomy is an over-emphasized simplification embraced by the audience (and perpetuated by Gilligan & company). As I see it, what Walt has done is not so much developed an "evil alter-ego" as he has allowed himself to use his analytic skills to override the "humanity" instilled in all of us throughout our lives.

By giving that aspect of his intellect increasingly more control, he has allowed his sense of morality to be subject to the hard, cold calculations deemed necessary to survive. Now, this is not to excuse his choices but in fact to make him culpable for his actions. Overly separating his personality almost gives him an out, of sorts, as if "Walt" is himself in a fugue state when goin' all Heisenberg on people's asses.

Early in the series, I'd say that Walt began exercising a warped sense of "englightened self-interest," but over time the veneer was eroded, revealing base self-interest; this slide allowed tumor-like malevolence to grow. One reason I believe many still "side with Walt" or are more willing to forgive him is that since the audience has been given so much with which to empathize, it is difficult to simply label him as evil. Frankly, anyone wo tries that gas can lie is too dithering and foolish to be evil, right? Since people like to stamp binary labels (good or evil, nice or mean, etc.) and we like to assign teams (Redskins vs. Cowboys, Team Walt vs. Team Hank, etc.) many will root for the person now that they rooted for at the beginning. I think Gilligan and his staff are pretty good at playing on this tendency and, along with their cast and crew, have done a largely good job of modulating their characters' gray areas.

While I'm not a fan of the neo-Nazis, which I feel are too easy and broad in concept, what they do bring to the table is that Walt still sees himself as being noble compared to them; after all, in his mind he stands for a kind of meticulousness and even honor (arguably all his killing has been to help or protect not just himself, but others) whereas these people, with their Third Reich iconography and savage nature are beneath his dignity. Never mind that both they and he are devoted to a kind of purity (chemical vs. societal). In a sense, they represent true "evil" (anyone want to argue that Nazism ain't evil?) and therefore give a sort of absolute against which to judge Walt, who in essence has "made a deal with the devil" every time he makes a handshake deal with them. In my mind, it emphasizes that Walt is not "evil," but a fool who with great hubris thinks he can be an arbiter of right and wrong in a relativistic scenario. This, to me, is scarier than "evil." He may think he is in control but that is at best tenuous, as he learned in Hank's last scene. Walt's control, like so many of our bank accounts, is based on over-drawn credit.

What might have been, for me, the strongest emotional point in last night's episode was Walt's phone call to Skylar, where it seemed that Walt chose to use his Heisenbergian skills against, in essence, his own perceived self-interest by cleaving himself from his family for their benefit. It was the rare scene in which it was clearer that there is no real dividing line between Walt and Heisenberg beyond allowing Darwinistic narcissism to outweigh empathy in order to get the job done. The difference here is he's doing it consciously and, against his own apparent self-interest since he is now, officially, past the point of no return in regards to both the law and his entire family. I'm curious if the phone call ultimately will ultimately be unconvincing to the law since, in my opinion (after a single viewing), by the end of it he is tipping his hand that he is trying save Skylar. That's as close as I get to prognostication.

Backing it up a few minutes, the scene in which Skylar pulls a knife on Walt rang devastatingly true to me. Skylar has not been strictly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome (or, Helsinki Syndrome for you Die Hard fans), but like Walt she has a very human tendency to feign control over her situation. I think that is what has made her an active and hesitantly supportive "partner in crime." When Flynn became a moral mirror in which she could no longer deny the ruin her life had become I think she had to pivot. She was already that unraveled and operating on reflexive fear that when Walt could neither construct a lie about a Hank or elaborate the actual, pitiful truth of his "negotiation" to save him, she assumed reasonably that Walt actively killed Hank and represented an immediate danger. Likewise, I believe that Walt's abducting Holly was reactive and adrenaline-fueled. It didn't take long for him to realize that between his diagnosis and his own options, that he couldn't start over alone with the baby. She couldn't fill the hole that he made of his life, and all of his "sacrifice" would be for nothing unless his family could go on.

Walter bumbled into professional failure then bumbled into clandestine, underworld success ("just because you killed Jesse James don't make you Jesse James" -- Mike Ehrme... y'know). Finally, the traits which led him to where we met him in episode one of the first season are those which are undoing him now. Like Hank said before being killed, Walt is a very smart man but not perfectly smart. People are not chemicals and while a range of reactions can be predicted, intuiting of human nature is beyond Walt's most innate skills. He depends on a universe where causality can be calculated. He prides himself on being able to account for contingencies, much like a chess player has to look many moves ahead, but this is not chess and there is more chaos than he can plan for. Jesse points out to Hank that Walt is lucky. Until the last two weeks, Walt might have argued that Heisenberg, to paraphrase Einstein, does not play dice with the universe. Now, he might argue that he is not the danger but rather the dice.

I haven't rooted for Walt in several years but mainly because I've seen his choices to be poor and blinded by both hubris and epic moral compromise; nevertheless, no matter the series's more cartoonish elements it doesn't mean he is, as Jesse declares, "the devil." Too black and, well, "White." It's too easy to condemn evil and not learn the lessons that led -- and lead -- to such chaos and destruction. Whether resorting to Gilligan's desire for karmic balance in this story or something like Hollywood's old Hayes Code, Walt will get what's coming to him. Hopefully it is more akin to Vic Mackie's existential hell in the Shield than to Tony Montana's hail of bullets.

p.s. Holy crap, why didn't I delete this when I had the chance?!?

 

Walt will go after them if they kidnap his family (which I think is likely to happen) or he comes to the realization that he was wrong to want Jesse dead.

I don't think he has the insight to recognize HE was to blame for all of this at this point. He'll blame them for Hank's death NOT himself.

 

I loved that show too, one of the best on television. Too bad we only got two seasons.