Shall we anticpate the AMC series "Breaking Bad"? I think I may.

xp yeah but i already watched the wire, but i watched it in bursts on dvd -- seems like an easier way to digest the magnitude of what's going on, esp when there are that many things going on at that many levels.

why would gus or walt need to nick jesse's ricin

Because Walt wants Jesse to think that psychic child-killer Gus stole it so that he loses trust in him and comes back to Walt. Have just looked back at the scene where Jesse gets "searched" and Saul's bodyguard definitely puts something in his pocket.

so the bodyguard pocketed the ricin pack or actually he had to have substituted the ricin pack for a nonricin pack at walt's behest but inexplicitly and it'll subsequently revealed that was the case maybe in tandem with btw hank knew about walt's involvement for ages already

I mean I guess it could be Saul's make-good to get back in good with Gus but all this shit is pretty far fetched

hated the ricin plot and if they actually kill off the kid it feels like writer cruelty to Jesse's character

so gus did know about the ricin and mentioned it to saul

xpost

Gus getting spooked and not taking the car is actually pretty plausible. People have hunches!

re: ricin, this show has always required a gigantic suspension of disbelief w/r/t chemicals/science, going all the way back to blowing up Tuco's office. I mean, why jump off ship now if you stayed in after Gus's cyanide coup in Mexico?

ricin thing doesn't really have anything to do w/ chemicals/science

x-post because Gus's takedown of the cartel was badass and poisoning the kid seems like a dick writer move to: (a) throw Jesse into crisis mode like Walt is (b) Get rid of the unused ricin subplot

kinda weird to see this ppl this far in now suddenly having issues w/ breaking bad's plausibility issues.

it is isn't it????????????????????????????????????????

fwiw I started watching three weeks ago and since then watched every single episode. Yesterday's was the first I watched live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekov%27s_gun

the ricin thing just made very little sense, but i'm sure they will clear that up soon enough. gus in the parking garage was a really great scene, like matt a said hunches are very plausible, plus i think it's reasonable to believe gus does this sort of thing all the time. he is a careful, meticulous guy after all.

Yeah I'm going to wait for the explanation before I declare that it makes no sense. I don't have any issue with him walking away from the car.

i have to say as much as they keep hinting at this german multinational and the man behind the man i do hope they don't really go down that road. meth produced in gmp facilities i can roll my eyes at and move on, meth produced by merck i'm not so sure.

it should be noted we haven't actually gotten any objective corroboration that the kid has been ricin poisoned (although if he has that kid's dead). also ricin was walt's assasination method going back to tuco (and it's really easy to make, random redneck militia types make this stuff, for someone w/ a chem master's iirc it would be a piece of cake), it popping up again as his way to kill gus is hardly surprising, that he would assume jesse would be a willing minion in going along w/ it is a given, and that once introduced it would factor into the plot in some dramatic fashion is screenwriting 101.

I kind of think that Gus either hooked up with this multinational, or the entire "we know who you are" thing with the cartel in his younger days was an allusion to Gus's family connections.

Obviously Gus is the son of an ex-Nazi war criminal that fled to Chile, right?

no one is surprised about ricin balls

at the same time they kept treating it as such an understood thing the kid is ricin poisoned it would be a bit of a cheat for him to turn out not to be. still thing it would play better my way but whatever. definitely do not think walt poisoned the kid.

think if the kid isn't on ricin someone in the hospital might have said at some point eh why did the guy say ricin it's not ricin what's he on and maybe the mum would have been like jesse I don't hate you and there's no point in me glowering at you through windows in the hospital

see if it IS ricin they would have been like "how the fuck did that guy know, arrest his ass"

don't see how they can resolve this one - I'm out

that kid could've gotten a concussion falling off his bike and moms was gonna glare at him.

little dude probably saw his older bro (bicycle kid) with some rocks, thought he'd found some hidden in Jesse's shit, and snorted them

but what then was saul's bodyguard pocketing after frisking jesse - just some stuff

maybe his hand

I don't buy the Saul's bodyguard angle -- I mean, these are the dudes who let Ted die on a rug!

Also, that wasn't even mentioned all episode, lol

but Dust checked the vid

don't think they *let* ted die it was a pretty decisive head-smashed-in rug trip

I don't buy the Saul's bodyguard angle -- I mean, these are the dudes who let Ted die on a rug! (mh)

What were they supposed to do? Rush him to the emergency room?

anyone willing to make a friendly wager on the saul's bodyguard angle?

I dunno, stop him from running for the door when they were supposed to be imprisoning him?

in case he tripped on the rug from earlier in the ep

I'll bet you $500000000 balls

No, because they were going to be holding on to him for two days and that'd be hard to do if he made it out the back door!

they'd made sure the back door was locked as will be revealed in the final ep

They probably just chose to not Vaccinate the kid. And plum forgot about it!

Cue Walt ranting on about the scientific necessity for vaccination

how do people think this saul's bodyguard scenario happened? jesse still had a pack of cigarettes when he freaked out. in less than a second a bodyguard who has only been portrayed as slow and lazy removed a single cigarette from jesse's pack?

Gus didn't get into the car because after carefully contemplating it, he realized he left his palm pilot in the hospital.

Yeah, but now the police are going to find this nice Volvo wagon registered to ... someone ... abandoned in a hospital parking lot (which, I assume, is being videotaped), with an IED stuffed in it. Right? Right?

Nah, probably not.

The ricin thing seems far fetched, but not as far fetched about Gus not knowing about it. Surely his confirmation of Jesse's trust came when Jesse didn't poison him, because if Jesse had poisoned and killed him then to would have proven himself totally untrustworthy.

This episode was weird and kind of a letdown. We don't really know what happened to the kid, surely the whole thing with ricin is that a tiny amount kills you straight away? But something *has* happened to the cigarette. Whole thing is clumsy; hope it makes more sense in the next ep.
I can buy Gus knowing about the ricin somehow, I guess.
The Jesse/Walt dialogue was off, too - Walt seemed to be saying the exact type of stuff in the exact way that sounded like he had actually done it and was 'cleverly' manipulating Jesse to think otherwise (I don't actually think this, it just had those kind of signifiers). Communication of relatively important facts between the two of them is almost reaching "Lost" levels.

Presumably Skyler doesn't know about Ted yet.

takes several days to die from ricin poisoning, pretty miserable death iirc

The kid doesn't have ricin poisoning. It's a red herring. Come on.

It's not even a red herring. Jesse's so high strung he'll believe anything. Plus, per the show's own science explanation, doesn't ricin give the victim heart attack symptoms a couple of days later? Kid got flu symptoms within hours of the alleged dose.

Really thought Skyler was gonna get picked off when she was having a cigarette outside.

appreciate you all analyzing the ep all critical like BUT GDAMN IT I JUST WANTED GUS TO DIE SO BAD

like my heart was seriously beating hard

EXPLODE HIM

Also Gus's ~premonition~ is not so far fetched. Shit's squirrelly already, Jesse starts acting up, and then he very specifically mentions poison. Recall Gus's last poison-related situation. It's definitely enough to make an extremely tense drug kingpin act more cautious than usual.