This is interesting. Not sure I agree with the rampage part but I think Walt will go for Lydia first just to kill the flow of money.
Before the episode I thought his motivation to gun down the Nazi’s was to clean up what he started and end the blue meth trade. Saving Jesse in the process.
Then at the beginning of the episode I realised he didn’t give a shit about all that and just wanted his money for his family.
But by the end of the episode you realise that he cannot get his money to his family and that his family are no longer his family. So now I’m thinking the gun and ricin is for good ol’ fashioned revenge. Christ knows now what he’s going to do with Jesse if he succeeds.
That’s what I love about this show. None of us have any fucking clue what’s going to happen next. Vince Gilligan is the real Walter White. Always 3 moves ahead of us.
I agree that the last few seasons of Dexter were getting worse and worse, ending with the worst season and possibly the worst episode. And the ending itself was just awful. It turned from a show that was challenging their writers with each season and each episode to a contrived, predictable farce. But that’s not the point is it…
Ha. I sometimes enjoy his show on PBS, or at least the guests. The news program, where he shares “anchoring” with Oprah’s girlfriend, is a snoozefest. I can’t watch that.
My question is - what evidence is there that Walt is the blue meth king? Hank couldn’t find any, and the gang has Jesse’s confession, so all they have is two missing DEA agents and Walter going on the lam. How is that enough to destroy Skylar’s life and seize everything?
I was disappointed with the episode. The writing seemed lazy; almost every speech seemed like exposition very clunkily put in someone’s mouth. There were very few of the little funny moments - I think the hat on the buck antlers was the only thing that really felt like those little gem camera shots I love about the show. I feel like they are hurtling to the final episode and there is too much plot to get through, so they threw this together. The directing, too, just seemed off. The way everyone was not made up, kind of plain, was such a departure from the look of the show previously that I felt like the episode didn’t fit. And the plot points just seemed so clumsy. That the vacuum repair guy would put himself at risk by repeatedly visiting the cabin is not believable at all - if he had a successful business like that it depends on getting in and getting out and making sure there are no tracks. I hope they redeem it with the final episode.
Crystal Goodness - Saul wearing black and white. Gone are his magenta, aqua, and orange sherbet. He’s not spinning what-ifs or impossible stretches. He’s straight up with Walt. It’s over. It’s black and white, dude.
The police have Walt’s phone call, which even though it was meant to shield Skyler from even greater harm is still a confession. Marie got Skyler to spill the beans to Junior, and presumably to the police as well when they arrived after Holly’s kidnapping. By now, they’ve certainly investigated the car wash as well, maybe finding evidence of money laundering - but even if not, they’ll still know that the money for the purchase did not come from gambling winnings. That’s plenty of dirt not just on Walt, but also Skyler herself.
Walt would have cared about the Gray Matter comment; Heisenberg doesn’t give a kitten. Heisenberg DOES care that the blue meth is still out there. This means Jesse is still alive, but what is WORSE is that Jesse is doing exactly what Gretchen and Elliot did all those years ago: taking credit for Walt’s genius.
This is why the two comments were juxtaposed in the same scene.
Good point! I always wondered if the final episode was going to star Walter or rather his Heisenberg persona. The mention of “Walter White” being long gone in the interview might be driving a point home.
Where I slightly disagree is in your thinking that it’s injured pride at work here. I don’t think the Heisenberg emporium is still that important to Walt - Walt was ready to give himself up. And as Walt giving himself up would also prove that he is no longer responsible for the blue meth, the motive must remain “righting a wrong” or finding redemption, I think. A wrong that Walt can’t trust to be righted while he is behind bars, what’s more.
There’s very little left to say and not much time to say it in. In that case the showrunners would want to minimalize. The opening scene is of Skyler sans make-up facing her persecutors. She’s in a ‘fugue state’ of her own, desolate, beyond grief; she’s naked and without a socially acceptable mask. If Walt is gone and there’s only 'Heisenberg now, then Skyler too is absent as a result of the destruction of her family, but she doesn’t have another persona to assume. I wanted to applaude Anna for that bit of acting. It wasn’t the projection of an emotion, but something much more subtle – it’s absence. That’s very difficult for an actor to do.
I was in the redwoods of northern CA last month and experienced something increasingly rare while outdoors – absolute silence. Until another hiker walked up the path, there wasn’t so much as the sound of an insect. In ‘Granite Slate’, the characters are totally disconnected from society, isolated by silence each in their own way. Walt is self-imprisoned in a cabin cell in the New Hampshire woods. Skyler, as the wife of a nationally publicized and hunted meth manufacturer and suspected murderer, is still in her community and hasn’t got a friend in the world, not one except the one who’s paid to be her friend and counselor, her attorney – her ‘Saul’. I have to imagine life in high school (did you notice that Junior is sitting in the back of the classroom, where the kids that don’t want to be noticed sit?) is a daily torment for ‘Flynn’. Kids can be cruel and relentless, even when torturing a kid on crutches. I’m half expecting to see a scene in the final episode, where we watch Flynn head down the druggy path trying to escape what his life has become (as though being a teenager by itself wasn’t hard enough), probably a hit of the blue meth. This show has never lacked for irony. If Skyler is sent to prison, Holly’s future is with Aunt Marie, so in the end Marie ends up with Skyler’s kids after all. We’ve all formed some sort of opinion about what kind of mother Marie would be. Hope Holly is fond of the color purple.
And of course, we know what circle of Dante’s inferno Jesse is in. I think social isolation and loneliness have been continuous underlying themes in this series. We never see them connected or networked into their communities, they’re without a support system except for each other, and when their lives explode apart from each other, they have no one and nothing to fall back on. Even Walt’s barrel of legal tender has been rendered worthless. This is usually the point in the story where I’d expect ‘The Church’ to step up, some de-gooding member of the clergy. Odd that opportunistic institution has been excluded from this story.
Anyway, ChickieD, that’s my thought processes on the episode, which I saw last night after purchasing it from iTunes.
I wish the show had been quite as crystal and silent as you describe, though I get that was the intent. If they had just had everyone so stripped down and it otherwise felt like the same show that would have been great. I found the exposition not as smoothly done as normal - like the bit where they had Charlie Rose on and they did the news story with the Gray Matter people. I just thought it was awkward and “he just provided the name,” was just so such an obvious and crude way to make the point which could have been delivered a lot more subtly.
I’m used the writing being more witty and clever. I felt like it was “Oh, let’s bring the Gray Matter people in so people remember who they are,” instead of like, “Those Gray Matter people - I hate those guys!!!”
So a coworker brought this up, and while I am loathe to accept this and I’d be slightly upset if it’s not done well…
What if this is all just the dying delusions of a great mind who got stopped short of achieving greatness, watched his son drift away at the cancer diagnosis to his brother in law, and so created a world where he could provide for his family in a way that his brother in law could never approve of, a world where the brother in law who is going to “take care of everyone” afterwards doesn’t fit?
Think about it. Walt Jr talked more about “Uncle Hank.” Uncle Hank is so cool. Uncle Hank stops the bad men. Dad just teaches at the high school. And then goes to work at the car wash working for an asshole.
There’s signs all through, signs of drug use and fugue states and pain and such, but we can’t see it since the entire theme of the show is drug use.
I’m not saying this is what’s going on, it probably isn’t, but isn’t it interesting how Walt does the following:
Turns one of his loser students around
Builds a large financial empire
Becomes a reknowned chemist
Gets bigger than Grey Matter
Provides for his family forever
Uses ingenuity to WIN over everyone.
And even beats cancer for a bit
And then… it crumbles. Because he didn’t beat it. He hasn’t beaten it. He’s coming to grips with the end of his life, the end of his journey, barren… alone…
If it turns out to be a “It was all a dream” ending I will burn some shit down. That is a cheap-ass way to go out. It was clever in Newhart but Breaking Bad has been much more based in reality than that ever was.
