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

I mean, you act like the DEA is just going to sit back and say "WELP, this man operated a successful meth business under our noses for a year and got two of our best agents killed and buried in unmarked graves in the desert, but he's dead and his wife has a lottery ticket with GPS coordinates on it so she's innocent and case closed! We will never view this family with suspicion again!"

More from Gilligan: " Of course, Walt for years now has been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. … For years now, he thought if he makes his family financially sound — that’s really all he has to do as a man, as a provider, and as a father. They’re going to walk away with just shy of 10 million in cash, because of Walt’s machinations with Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) and Elliott (Adam Godley). But on the other hand, the family emotionally is scarred forever. So it's a real mixed message at the end."

Skyler is clearly not in jail. They've got nothing on her. The idea behind the scheme is to trade info to free their assets, right? I don't know if it would "work" or not, but I did feel Walt was being depicted as honestly being contrite/recognizing his own horror and trying to make it better, with nothing to gain himself save peace of mind.

see i would much rather wonder & debate about this stuff than have every single thing spelled out for me

Yeah, me too. My exact thoughts were "like fuck". Walt has been deluded for the best part of 5 and a half seasons of this programme, and, riven with cancer and driven insane by solitude, he's come up with these crazy, useless, half-assed methods of redeeming himself, which he just about manages to put in place but has no guarantee for at all on any front.

xposts.

Debating is what we're doing, right?

He WAS honestly being contrite! That doesn't mean that his little gesture ultimately worked.

Like I don't doubt Walt actually was remorseful. It isn't zero sum game - he can be remorseful and still leave his loved ones lives irreparably fucked.

Jesse's gift there, as it were, was the ability for Walt to actually say that he wanted something, rather than manipulating Jesse into thinking he was acting in his own interests, and then Jesse was able to tell him "do it yourself."

Kind of analogous to the admission to Skyler that he didn't do everything for the family, he did it for himself because he liked it.

I have no doubt that he was honestly contrite; just that his contrition was late and futile and impotent, by and large.

does walt jr get any spare meth that was just lying around in the lab

Granted my understanding of how the cops work is mostly from TV but 1) this is actually TV and 2) the whole reason that Hank figured out it was Gus and then Walt was that he kept following suspicious hunches, and Skyler trying to trade the bodies of dead DEA agents for freedom from prosecution and Walt's former partners suddenly setting up a $9mil trust fund for Walt's son, when school staff witnessed Walt telling his father that he didn't want his money meaning people know it was a thing Walt was trying to do, are super suspicious.

I'm not saying that is how it's going to work, because I don't know! But I am definitely saying that this ending is nowhere near as pat and redemptive as you think it was.

Josh in Chicago you're explaining things in v tidy terms to complain about tidiness

does walt jr get any spare meth that was just lying around in the lab

― combination hair (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:29 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

Jesse's gift there, as it were, was the ability for Walt to actually say that he wanted something, rather than manipulating Jesse into thinking he was acting in his own interests, and then Jesse was able to tell him "do it yourself."

This is OTM.

I mean, there was no redemption for Walt after episode one. That's one reason I like the ending of "The Shield" better. The events set in motion in episode one lead to a scenario where the guys "gets away with it" but still ends up with nothing, trapped in his own personal hell.

Walt thinks he checked these things off his to do list, but as has been the case for the entire show, he was being dishonest with himself. There was very little actual redemption in his character even if he did set things into motion that he thought would eventually succeed.

Yeah I don't really care about Jesse getting 'closure' whatever that means, I just would have liked him to have had more screen time.

I guess we're all just going to have tune in this week and see what happens in the aftermath.

did Heisenberg have a will? y/n

Yeah I don't really care about Jesse getting 'closure' whatever that means, I just would have liked him to have had more screen time.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:30 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I mean I didn't need Ghost Jane and Ghost Andrea waving and smiling Return of the Jedi style at Jesse. but agree a few more minutes of screen time would have been nice.

I have to imagine the next time a woman tells Jesse "I think maybe we should settle down" that he runs around the room screaming and smashing shit in panic.

ghost andrea: jeeesseeee killl brock so we can be together in heaaaaaven

I should stress that I liked this episode fine. I guess just slot me in with the folks who were hoping for something darker (keeping in the mind the show was innately dark). And I've been complaining about the deus ex Nazi all along - no one likes Nazis - but were we supposed to forget that Lydia (who surely is not a worse person than Walt?) has a child of her own? Were we supposed to feel good about Walt tormenting his former partners, who as far as we know have never done anything wrong to Walt, and in fact appear to be rather generous? Dunno. Those beats all felt a little phony to me

Heisenberg had nothing left at the end, man

Jack trying to bargain with the rest of the money and getting shot was nice. Was that also the first time that Walt did his own dirty work? I don't think he ever fired a gun until then.

He shot one of Gus' guys and told Jesse to run.

Shot Mike.

xxpost Walt fired a gun many times. He killed the one survivor at the end of the "Run" episode with a headshot, also shot two dudes in the Season 4 finale, and shot Ehrmentraut.

From Vince Gilligan himself:

"“We didn’t feel an absolute need for Walt to expire at the end of the show. Our gut told us it was right. As the writers and I worked through all these different possibilities, it felt right, but I don’t think it was a necessity for us. There was a version we kicked around where Walt is the only one who survives, and he’s standing among the wreckage and his whole family is destroyed. That would be a very powerful ending but very much a kick-in-the-teeth kind of ending for the viewers. We talked about a version where Jesse kills Walt. We talked about a version where Walt more or less gets away with it. There’s no right or wrong way to do this job — it’s just a matter of: You get as many smart people around you as possible in the writers room, and I was very lucky to have that. And when our gut told us we had it, we wrote it, and I guess our gut told us that it would feel satisfying for Walt to at least begin to make amends for his life and for all the sadness and misery wrought upon his family and his friends. Walt is never going to redeem himself. He’s just too far down the road to damnation. But at least he takes a few steps along that path."

― Neanderthal, 1. oktober 2013 16:23 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

More from Gilligan: " Of course, Walt for years now has been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. … For years now, he thought if he makes his family financially sound — that’s really all he has to do as a man, as a provider, and as a father. They’re going to walk away with just shy of 10 million in cash, because of Walt’s machinations with Gretchen (Jessica Hecht) and Elliott (Adam Godley). But on the other hand, the family emotionally is scarred forever. So it's a real mixed message at the end."

― Neanderthal, 1. oktober 2013 16:26 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And then the part you left out: "Walt has failed on so many levels, but he has managed to do the one thing he set out to do, which is a victory. He has managed to make his family financially sound in his absence, and that was really the only thing he set out to do in that first episode. So, mission accomplished.”

Wtf, dude, removing that part from what you post is just disingenous.

Also, later on in the interview he states: But the most important sequence in the episode for me probably was Walt succeeding at his 62-episode long task, which is leaving money to his family. The sequence with Gretchen and Elliott at their house was the hardest thing of all for the writers and I to figure out. In the previous episode, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) lays it out for Walt. He gives Walt all the reasons why it’s impossible to leave millions and millions of dollars to his family. He says, ‘You’ll never get it past the cops, and if somehow you manage to get to your family, the cops will find out about it and they’ll seize it because it’s drug money. And if miracle of miracles, you manage to get it past the cops, your family is not going to take it because it’s from you and they hate you. Especially your son, who is primarily the one you’re doing this for, so it’s an impossibility.’ We kept talking about that in the writers room saying, ‘Jesus, Saul’s right on the money, no pun intended. There’s no way for Walt to do this.’ The Gretchen and Elliott scheme is structurally the most important sequence in the episode, when Walt pulls that scam on Gretchen and Elliott and he intimidates them into giving his family money so that it’ll ride past the DEA without the DEA knowing it’s drug money and then it’ll be accepted by Skyler and Walt Jr. as largesse, as charity and not as money from their patriarch. As soon as we figured that out, we were like, ‘Oh my god, let’s go to lunch!’ [Laughs] That’s probably structurally the most important moment of the episode, and the toughest one to crack.”

xpost But other than that ... first time!

Anyone get a real "Blue Velvet"/Lynch vibe from the Nazi clubhouse?

Were we supposed to feel good about Walt tormenting his former partners, who as far as we know have never done anything wrong to Walt, and in fact appear to be rather generous?

Whether we were or weren't, I didn't. I never viewed the Schwartzes as bad people - that whole "fuck you" conversation with Gretchen sealed what an asshole Walt was.

They spent a lot of time in that ep making them seem like yuppie jerks. They were not portrayed in the best of lights.

Frederik B, I didn't post that part of the quote because you already alluded to it, I was supplying the rest of the quote to emphasize that it wasn't as black and white as you implied Gilligan made it out to be.

There's a wide gulf between "ok, Walt accomplished the one thing he said he set out to accomplish in Episode 1" and "Gilligan gave Walt the ending he always wanted". That in no way was how Walt imagined himself going out when he first started playing Meth Kingpin.

Would call you crazy, Josh, on Lynch comparisons, but dead body bobbing up and down on massage chair was totally on-spot.

Also Uncle Jack seems like he may have had an Uncle Frank.

They spent a lot of time in that ep making them seem like yuppie jerks. They were not portrayed in the best of lights.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:38 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again, this is where viewing things all in context of one episode hurts. this is not how they were portrayed in episodes leading up - I felt like it was more a "compare/contrast" type deal with displaying two well-to-do yuppies arguing about pedantic shit as they unknowingly walk by their drug kingpin ex-partner, who has basically lived in the underworld for two years.

yeah

ghost andrea: jeeesseeee killl brock so we can be together in heaaaaaven

― conrad, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:34 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

Just some theorizin': Walt intended to kill Jesse because he probably expected Jesse to have turned the tables on his captors just as Walt expects that he would've done in similar circumstances. He expects to see Jesse willfully colluding with the Nazis and coming out on top because that's what you do (in Walt's eyes). And then when he sees that Jesse is just Jesse and he's being used as a tool, he decides to save him. There may have even been a moment when Walt saw from the other side what he had personally put Jesse through and felt a degree of contrition.

oh yeah, Walt and guns, nm

the yuppie jerk thing is in the eye of the beholder. you could have had them talking about how much they hate foodies and it'd still be people calling them jerks. if they were discussing literally anything and some people would still assume it was meant to be an illustration of how banal they were.

I do agree that Jesse got shafted w/r/t closure. He didn't even get to finish screaming his euphoric/traumatized scream before the camera cut back to Walt. I hated that, because it was such a good moment, and it was like Gilligan figured it wasn't even worth dwelling on.

― zchyrs, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 9:14 AM (20 minutes ago)

aaaaaghhhsdaf;kldaslfkjas'doriqew[p9iru
Perhaps the scream is cut off to convey the idea that this is a trauma he'll never get past. JUST MAYBE.

One question I had, and this is neither here nor there, was whether Walt felt anger when he saw them on Charlie Rose, or was that just his realization that they offered a way to get money to his family?

Of course, that would never happen, because while all of Walt's other crazy schemes never went right. That exploding meth early on, the train heist, magnets ... but getting money past the DEA funneled through these Bill Gates types who give away millions? Nah.

One question I had, and this is neither here nor there, was whether Walt felt anger when he saw them on Charlie Rose, or was that just his realization that they offered a way to get money to his family?

Both! Almost all of the either-or propositions being pushed around this thread like brussells sprouts are not either-or propositions!

actual footage of me removing my bookmark from this thread:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/145bf46175269c90dc82caeeadd1e2fd/tumblr_mtzse9IVgZ1qglx18o1_250.gif

Brussels sprouts shredded and pan fried with bacon are awesome.

I love 'em seasoned and roasted with grapes.

What about hank's geodes? Prbly still sitting in storage somewhere, waiting for hank to come home.

Poor geodes.

No closure.

They were just a fad. They're in storage with the Beanie Babies.

Storage wars cameo

Daryl will trade them for a half smoked cigarette