Point taken. If you reduce it to a chess game, however, there is no good or evil side. Just strategy. And that’s what I’m getting at. They didn’t kill Hank just because they like killing.
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I have to say that I’m a little curious as to the amount of money in the barrels. As of the end of first half of current season, it was a simply ridiculous amount of money, more than they could possibly spend in any number of lifetimes. Now, it’s barely enough to fund an Adam Sandler movie.
That’s kind of the point I was trying to make earlier. I think this episode was about how “nothing is black and white”, “no good or evil” or “just strategy” are really just convenient lies we tell ourselves. If it walks like a duck and kills people in cold blood like a duck… it’s an evil fucking duck.
Sure, if you accept that the very basic act of killing somebody is a move an actor in the system can reasonably make, then you can view it as “just strategy”. But isn’t it also a little mind blowing, the act of killing? I would say a good portion of our population would never even dream of ending somebody elses life, yet when we view violence in a tv series, everybody is suddenly a chessmaster arguing about trading pieces. Yes, it’s just a tv show and I’m not saying we’re all A-OK with killing just because we argue for somebody who does it in fiction but I think there is an underlying mechanism at work here. Where we do end up accepting evil consequences and mount evil decisions on top of one another because, relatively speaking, they are reasonable.
I think there really is good and evil and that it matters whether we buy into one side or the other - even if it’s just for strategy, for a short time or if we try to end up on the other side afterwards.
And I think Breaking Bad is about that. About showing us how pitiful our fascination with this downward spiral of evil is and how we, ourselves, are all one step into our own graves with the little conscessions to evil we are willing to grant ourselves and others. How the sum of all our combined, tiny little evil ways are what pushes the big evils in our world forward.
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Let’s reconvene in 20 years. I think we’ll be able to point to Breaking Bad as the high point of the dramatic depiction of the crisis of aging Boomer masculinity. If The Powers That Entertain Us are smart, they’ll do the same for femininity within the next decade (as opposed to trying to cram women into the current dramatic aging masculine mold established by Tony Soprano, which seems to be all They can muster at the moment). But this…this is a cultural breakwater.
To be followed by a piercing examination of the role (or lack thereof) of The Elder in American society, which should dovetail nicely with depictions of the complete collapse of traditional gender roles.
(And ha! You’re mainlining X-Files too. Netflix is like having a cultural drug dealer on call. I just discovered they’ve got Miami Vice on streaming…I mean, shit, I had the poster and everything…)
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That boy’ll go far.
It strikes me as a pretty good allegory for the financial industry in control of the US these days, as well.
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That 80 million dollars is still absolutely more money than any middle class family (that’s trying to maintain the illusion of being middle class) could ever spend in several lifetimes. Skyler made it quite clear that it would take FOREVER to launder all that money through the car wash.
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I don’t agree that GPS tracking was the reason they didn’t want him to hang up for two reasons.
- Aren’t Gomey and Hank supposed to be going “renegade” on this investigation (withouth the aid of the DEA)?
- Can’t you track a cellphone whether it is on or off? (You can)
Is it possible they didn’t want to let Walt stop talking so that he wouldn’t realize he was being ensnared in a trap? So he wouldn’t “stop and think”.
I like my explanation best:)
Well that, and they didn’t want him calling anybody else for backup. But they foolishly (but conveniently for the plot) hung up with enough time for Walt to still call the Nazis any way.
Because they’ve still been laundering it through the car wash. That has always been the goal, he only stopped because they had too much and they would never be able to run through that much.
But 80 million is still a ridiculous amount to a family that needs to stay middle class in order to avoid causing suspicion with a DEA brother in law always coming around the house. They can buy a new car or two but can’t upscale to the mansion with servants too easily. “Where’d you get this Picasso, Walt?” is going to end the charade pretty quickly.
I hadn’t considered that. You may be on to something.
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Fair point, but he would have earned that easily in the same time frame under Gus if he’d just towed the line from the get go. Being in charge of his own international drug empire with both Mike and Jesse out the picture didn’t seem to be offering him much advantage financially. I guess somebody else will have to finance Jack & Jill 2.
Breaking bad is about people in difficult situations making the best decisions they can to protect themselves or their family. Our fascination is that we can relate to having to make hard decisions and sometimes doing the wrong things for the right reason. You can call it pitiful . I call it human.
It was an advantage financially, vs the alternative which was to sell out along with Mike and Jesse (who “only” received a handful of millions of dollars). He didn’t HAVE the alternative of running the drug empire with Mike and Jesse, because they both decided they wanted out. And bear in mind, that was 80 million dollars after only using up a fraction of the methlamine. If he had stayed in it, he could have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars. Which would have been useless to him, since he could never, ever have spent all of it.
I disagree. I think what’s scary about him is he’s this young, good-looking kid with a Gosh-gee-whillikers-Pa! air, who even really respects authority- it’s just that he’s evil as fuck, and the authority he respects is those who run evil empires, not the cop around the corner. These brief touches of compassion- being chivalrous to (powerful, evil) ladies and protecting Walt’s life- are what make him so terrifying, because there IS a code there… it’s just so warped it’s more terrifying than no code at all, and it makes it much harder to predict his behavior than your average Chaotic Evil Nazi.
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And lest we forget, Walt’s original goal for his legacy to his family was a mere $670k…
Yup - and this is primarily why, when Skyler showed him the “giant pile o’ storage unit money”, he realized that he didn’t, actually, have to keep being a drug dealer, and quit.
He must have excellent health insurance then: cancer treatment can eat through $670K for breakfast.
Well to be fair, he arrived at that number when he thought his cancer was inoperable and that he only had a couple of months to live. That amount was the minimum he needed to leave them with for expenses, college funds, etc.
I’ll buy that.
