Shall we anticipate the FIFTH SEASON of the AMC series "Breaking Bad"? I think I may.

I would say that yeah, the show ended with Walt dying, maybe a couple months sooner than the cancer would've gotten him, and the only one of dozens of people whose deaths he caused that he has any real remorse over is the in-law that used to grind his gears. Kinda came out way better for Walt than it could've.

hat shot was amazing.

that scene reminded me a bit of the rape scene in a clockwork orange.

― Evil Juice Box Man (LocalGarda)

Reminded me of the safe-robbing scene in Marnie.

how did the police end up at the nazi ranch? sound of gunfire? i had assumed it was secluded. what did they think that building was before they discovered it was a meth lab?

I imagine the sound of a heavy machine cannon firing for some minutes would drift pretty far across the desert.

I wanna know why Walt left his watch on the payphone.

and the "theory" that "i like to think it was all a dream" is incredibly self-indulgent.

― Evil Juice Box Man (LocalGarda), Monday, 30 September 2013 23:53 (Yesterday) Bookmark

i really like the dream-like feel to the episode - it was more to do with walt gaining a form of closure - admitting he did do it all for himself, and facing up to his death.

― Evil Juice Box Man (LocalGarda), Monday, 30 September 2013 23:57 (Yesterday) Bookmark

...

do you not get how someone could like a dream-like quality to an episode but not want it to LITERALLY be a dream?

But how would they know where it was? I suppose the building was thought to be a factory or whatever?

Some of the stuff about concealing meth labs in early seasons was kinda ignored as regards the Nazi operation.

Bit silly considering the lengths Gus and later Walt went to to cook without raising suspicion.

xpost saying it was dream-like does not in any way equate to actually theorising it was a dream. ffs.

xpost, thank you.

I wanna know why Walt left his watch on the payphone.

idg this either

I can totally buy that the Nazis were less careful than Gus and Walt. For all we know the DEA could have been on their ass.

the watch was explained by Gilligan in Talking Bad, summarised upthread

I ain't watching that shit, and it's above the break

watch explanation is upthread, dudes

(jinx, sic)

load all 9000 messages

Let's remember Eliot and his knife for a moment

Yeah I tried to catch up on everything on this thread but it was too daunting so I skipped to the bottom.

was waiting for Elliott to do something pretentious like take a defensive stance and shout "I KNOW TAE-BO AND I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU..HEISENBERG!"

I did some google, watch explained here:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/09/breaking-bad-finale-facts-learned-on-talking-bad.html

elliott snaps walt's neck, whispering "you're out of the company..." as he descends to the floor. 45 minutes "crimes of walt" montage set to a Phish jam follows.

I can totally buy that the Nazis were less careful than Gus and Walt. For all we know the DEA could have been on their ass.

yeah i guess that's true.

Also the Nazis are all known criminals so I'm sure they'd show up on the radar more readily than a humble chicken man or a science teacher.

anybody who thinks anything in this episode was "too tidy" needs to go watch Gustavo Fring, fatally wounded with his face half blown off, exit a hospital room, straighten his fucking tie, and collapse

Hahahaha....this morning, my wife said "So, Breaking Bad...should I watch it? Would I like it?" I had no idea how to answer her. She is kind of predisposed to dislike things that I like these days. I told her "I think it's really good, but you may not care for the bleakness and nihilism." Anyway, I just heard her fire up the pilot episode in the living room. Hope this goes well!

you should go tell her "you know, he dies at the end"

Best season of AMC's Breaking Bad

Yup, the last half of season 4 is another case of the show being too tidy (I hate Salud. The show spent 3½ seasons building the cartel up as some undefeatable force of nature, and then it was defeated by a bottle of booze. Boo.)

As I said upthread, the struggle between chaos and tidyness was constant throughout the show. But before, anytime something too tidy happened, we could rely on the show returning and showing some unremembered thread untying the whole thing all over again. It was dissapointing to me to see it double down on the tidyness at the finishline.

Shit, I just realised Jesse's pretty fucked. The police are totally going to find his confession tape in the Nazi compound.

(I hate Salud. The show spent 3½ seasons building the cartel up as some undefeatable force of nature, and then it was defeated by a bottle of booze. Boo.)

so you'd prefer them taking a protracted measure of fighting the cartel for like several seasons? I mean this is how TV works. Foe previously thought undefeatable KO'ed, often via unconventional means.

Jesse doesn't have any money either

I can totally buy that the Nazis were less careful than Gus and Walt.

For sure. Talkin' about train heists with methylamine in the parking lot and all that.

xxp: I would have preferred for the cartel to remain undefeatable, or, when they were defeated, for another cartel to take it's place. As it is in the real world. The show could have functioned in the shadow of retribution, would have been okay. The show was at it's best when the wider world was unknowable, as I've said before.

I'm ok with "Jesse is young, his family might be ready to take him back, he's clearly finished with doing/making drugs, and he seems to have never been implicated in the case against Walt" as his relatively optimistic forecast, although I hadn't considered the possibility of his confession tape still being out there.

I would have preferred for the cartel to remain undefeatable, or, when they were defeated, for another cartel to take it's place

Germany will go on

if you were looking for realism there wouldn't be any shadow of retribution. wicked genius vs. the cartel is a first-round KO by the cartel literally every time.

Jesse also hasn't appeared in public in months, so they might just assume that he's dead.

Could be argued that another cartel did fill the void: Walt's.

Also Walt was mostly selling in the Czech Republic so the turf wars weren't as much of a big deal.

if nussbaum is right - and i don't really think she is - it'd be a much better ending than the one readily accepted here. parallels with that epic deconstruction of the sopranos final scene that was floating around a few years back

nah screw it, i'm buying it. would like to hear giligan's response to it anyways

da croupier otm upthread

I don't think it would've been that difficult or finger-pointy to make the final episodes at bit more even-handed.

it would've required more time though, and it seems pretty clear from the pacing of this season that as it is they had to take a pretty streamlined approach to get in everything they did

I don't think anyone's saying it actually is a dream. If it really was, that'd be a terrible bait-and-switch. I took EN's idea more as a lens to view the episode's tone through.

while dealing with her immediate feelings of disappointment with the finale, she said she wished the ending was a dream, as it would have made its "everything's coming up walt" tone more explicable. It was actually her expressing that disappointment so well that made me realize the short-sightedness of it.

i think EN *is* saying that really. i know what you mean though, it's a bit reach-y but i can't help but feel the whole thing was so slick and rushed, i want it to have some extra dimension so it's more than just blam blam pulp schlock where everything goes walt's bad-ass way

i think that dimension is there, once you realize the limits of his "success" in the finale

i think it's also clearer once you take the episode as part of the whole. As a stand alone, yes, Walt did what he wanted to do. But in the context of the series, saying "Walt won" is totally blinkered.

the lack of supporting character moments actually adds to that - there are no whimsical subplots and small-scale foibles. Walt destroyed that. Allegedly, as it was at the end of previous seasons, the family has money coming. But Hank's dead. Everyone else is miserable and hates him. To provide for his family he destroyed their lives. That's all there in the finale, in between the moments where Walt pulls lucky switcheroo on someone he dislikes.

That he's not denied that switcheroo, that pulpy victory, is so much more acidic, unsettling than if he'd been left crucified to think about what a bad guy he is.

the big problem with season 5b is that it's just hard to see why he gives a shit about the nazis or Lydia. I get the idea that he wanted to stake a claim for his old empire that is running without him, but the stakes were so much higher for his Gus/Gale/Tuco machinations. They should have had a way for him to find out that they were threatening Skyler. Maybe they wrote that they killed her or Holly and then chickened out.

You're killin' it with otmness itt.
xp to da croup