The road goes two ways. Jesse takes a left, cops come from the right. Or, they stop him, talk with him and he just tells them he don’t know nothing about that place and keeps going. If he’s not Walter White or a guy with swastika tats, he’s going to be small fry for them.
I mean, that was a lot of cops with armor, they’re expecting something, not just one unarmed guy in a beat up El Camino who won’t stop smiling and who could use a bath.
I thought all Walt had going in was a better understanding of the chemistry.
I think that’s a big part of the hook of the first and second seasons: Walt groping his way by trial and error from a minimally profitable (maybe even unprofitable) RV-based mini lab – on the strength of A-1 chemistry but zero business sense for organized crime – to playing with the big boys and making some real dough.
At the beginning, Jesse seemed to have some understanding of the stakes and how criminals really work. He knew you couldn’t just expand into other people’s territory without consequences. But he was mediocre at the chemistry and had a penchant for smoking up his profits.
Walter White brought him knowledge and a modicum of discipline, but also chaos, overreaching ambition and unbounded greed, and a naiveté about career criminals that caused Jesse and everyone else in Walt’s life no end of misery.
The last episode had a bunch of unrealistic elements that were necessary to see the plot through, but this was the only one that actually irked me. I mean, I believe you could concoct some plausible story about how Walt’s super-rich, charitable acquaintances wanted to help out his family by taking care of them after his death - something like the original sum that Walt had in mind (around $ 700,000, mostly for mortgages and college education), paid out in increments would’ve been OK. But making the kid a multi-millionaire? Just a few months after his dad disappeared with a barrel of cash which he said contained almost the same amount? There’s no way in hell Flynn is going to believe that. Then again, it’ll be his choice to either stay firm and refuse to take any of what’ll very probably be drug money, take enough to help his family out and give the rest away, maybe back to the Schwartz’s foundation, or keep it all and pursue his own ends with it.
Am I the only one who found similarities btwx Breaking Bad and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”? In every instance, when the demure and restrained ‘Walt’ is revealed to be ‘Heisenberg’ to various figures in his life, none can bear the existence of this man. Rather than help him find his way back to meek scientist he was, they’d rather see him destroyed.
If it’s any comfort, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending. I haven’t digested it long enough to articulate exactly why, but some of what you mention, I’m sure, is part of it, and some of it is melancholy about the show being over. I can say that Jesse escaping just didn’t sit right with me.
I fully agree - except for the title. If Felina did not relate to the song ‘El Paso’, then there would have been no reason to use it at all. That it also carried another meaning and another reference is a testament to the writers’ talents.
I never could manage to not like Walt. Not that what he did was always good or enviable - just that his predicament speaks to that survival thing in all of us, as well as a certain amount of following the rules merely because doing otherwise would not be to our own advantage. Once all bets were off because he believed he was dying - Walt became his…primal…self. He still had values and emotions. He just didn’t have the same attachment to socially accepted methods any more. And when he thought he might survive? He had tried to get back to his old life somehow. The old dualistic nature of man thing.
Well, it wasn’t for lack of trying, just that Walt was enjoying his Heisenberg persona so much that he’d have none of it. When Skyler begs him to stop and appeals to him by saying he’s “not a hardened criminal”, Walt is actually offended by that and takes it as a lack of respect, not as a sign of caring for the man he used to be. When Jesse reasons with him that they can just sell the methylamene, get away from the business clean and with more than enough money for the rest of their lives, Walt refuses because he’s obsessed with overtaking Gray Matter. Marie and Hank offered to take care of Skyler and the kids if Walt gives himself up, which would’ve also ensured his alleged goal was met. They only turned against him and tried to “destroy” him after he’d not only turned down their offers and suggestions (and, in some cases, viciously attacked them instead).
That’s not what I was saying. From the outset Walter understands the stakes are life and death and people are going to get hurt. Jesse never ceases to be surprised when people have to die and get hurt for Walt and Jesse to stay in business. In what episode did Walt try to kill Krazy-8 the first time? s01e01. Jesse doesn’t even seem to realize how his activities affect innocents until “peekaboo” near the end of season 2. Even then he remains in denial until he is forced to face the consequences of their actions in season 5. Jesse may have some drug connections but he is entirely naive in certain aspects of the drug trade.
OK, but I have to disagree with that too, at least partially.
Back in the second or third episode, when the two dealers force Jesse to take them to Walt, it’s true that Walt doesn’t hesitate to trick them into inhaling potentially lethal vapours, fully intending to kill them right away.
But look what happens when it turns out one didn’t die. Walt and Jesse flip a coin for the job of killing him, and Walt draws it. The man stays tied up in the basement for days while Walt hesitates, feeds the guy, talks with him. Jesse berates Walt for not getting the job done. The man very nearly talks Walt into letting him go. It’s only when Walt notices a shard missing from a broken plate that he realizes the guy is going to try to stab him, and so strangles him with the bike lock – he doesn’t do what he promised until he must, in self-defence.
So, on the one hand you have an argument, in that almost right off the bat Walt seems ready to kill. But as soon as the situation isn’t one of urgent, imminent danger, it’s a different story. He finds it agonizing, seems to wish he could just cook his meth without these complications.
Maybe over the long haul Jesse is more squeamish about killing, for longer. But I’d say both Walt and Jesse start out very uneasy with the people getting hurt part.
But IIRC Walt is the one who has to explain to Jesse why Krazy-8 has to die. Jesse doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand the stakes time and time again. Walt has to walk him through it nearly every time. That doesn’t mean Walt relishes murder. It just means he knows what he’s up against.
OTOH, with Better Call Saul being a prequel, we’ll likely get some more of Mike, Gus Fring, etc.
That first scene with the car was quite pivotal. Leading up to his exile in New Hampshire, Walt was the one making the decisions. He was the one who led Hank and the thugs to his nest egg. After Walt hurt himself trying to hot wire the car, Heisenberg took over and got the key from the visor. It felt like a clean switch from emotion back to logic.
I’m not terribly far from New Hampshire, so quite familiar with the climate. When it’s very cold, snow tends to be loose and fluffy as shown in the scene. It’s conceivable you could give your window the old Fonzie rap and knock a bunch off, especially if the car has only been covered with a relatively light dusting as in the scene. IMO it really doesn’t need to “settled together as a mass” for that to work. In fact, when it’s settled together as a mass I find it tends to cling to windows.
I haven’t re-watched the scene to really pay close attention to the snow, but it didn’t strike a false note to me.
I was more concerned with how he would drive a presumably unploughed 8-mile road in that Volvo, to go fetch the rest of the money.
That’s true.
At the beginning, Walt is better at understanding the stakes on an intellectual level. But it does take him a while to come around to getting the job done quickly, when he needs to – bits of lingering conscience keep getting in the way. Arguably the final turning point for walt is Jane, but I’m sure it would be possible to make a good case for other turning points.
Jesse does get there too, for example with Gale, but what makes him different in my opinion is not that he’s surprised that Gale (or anyone else) has to die, it’s that he has much more of a conscience than Walt does, so he’s consumed by guilt. Meanwhile, Walt uses Gale’s copy of Leaves of Grass for bathroom reading. (And has that well noted tendency to adopt some of his victims’ habits.)
Jesse is equally culpable and in some ways worse than Walt.
Exactly. Heisenberg is unapologetically evil but Jesse is actually the worst kind of sinner: one who knows better but lets himself be led into sin because it’s to hard to do the right thing. He’s a loser, drifting with the dead fish downstream because he doesn’t want the struggle. We can see he’s a great chemist, but he once flunked out of Walter’s class (“Apply yourself !”, the test said.) Instead of building real friendships, he buys them by providing drugs. Each step of the way instead of making his own choices he allows Heisenberg to drag him in deeper.
In the end I think Jesse is redeemed because we see him dreaming about the one time he applied himself and made something beautiful. That desire has finally been fully awakened in him. Jesse the loser died in that hole in the ground in the desert and this new guy might actually have a shot at doing something worthwhile as he races, manic with energy, into the world with his second chance.
I really feel Todd was the most tragic character of the series. For all the claims of sociopathy Todd always tried to be nice, help people, and never actually took pleasure in hurting people.
I think Todd was just mentally disabled, he was extremely kind and obedient because that’s how a lot of disabled people learn to function. It just happened that all the authority figures around him needed him to kill people so that’s what Todd did, and he never showed much reaction since he never had a strong will or understanding that he was doing something wrong. Jesse’s flaw was always his passions, if Jesse wasn’t so angry at Todd over the murdered kid, ambush, and torture I think he could have convinced Todd to let him go. Instead Jesse endured Andrea’s death and months of torture. For someone who was never capable of making his own decisions or even understanding what was happening I think Todd dying at Jesse’s enraged hands was really quite sad.
…and at least Walt accepts his own culpability. Jesse likes to pretend he is a victim and that Walt is the real bad guy. Jesse did such a good job convincing himself Walt is to blame he seems to have convinced some viewers as well.
In the vein of “Walt is one step ahead” he had to know that Lydia would want him dead, and get Todd to kill him. I never thought for a moment that Walt thought they would go for his “new method” story. They have 80 million and a way to get the methylamene. Walt knew he was a huge liability for the nazis and for Lydia, that he was going into an ambush, and that Lydia was part of it.
That is, in fact, a brilliant observation!
The tools he was using are Japanese carpentry tools- planes and chisels that are very expensive and take years to master. When I saw (hey now) what he was using, I thought immediately that no high school program in the US teaches students how to use the Japanese block plane and chisels. It’s just too expensive, time consuming, and everyone would need their own tools because sharpening them is so much of the art.
So, EITHER the details were fuzzy, and they hired a skilled carpenter for the close in stuff without thinking about it- OR this is one of the most detail-obsessed shows ever made, and your explanation is the only possible one. He learns the Japanese carpentry LATER and finds some peace among the sawdust and shavings…
Skyler will see straight through it from the get go—it was insinuated/stated outright before that they were paying Walt’s medical bills when it was actually coming from his drug money, so it wouldn’t be the first time. However, Walt is gone, he can’t lie/use/manipulate/threaten them anymore, and the money is going to Flynn not her, so I’m pretty content she’d never bring it up.
