he doesn’t answer for his crimes, but he’s lost his family forever. His money is essentially useless to him. Finally it is entertainment, there were quite a few contrived elements in the series, Gus Fring taking out the cartel guys in a spectacular poisoning. Frings own death. If it was supposed to be realistic, there would be meth labs in trailer parks with little kids playing around the toxic chemicals.
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Hey, wow. My first thought was, nah - that was the box he swapped for a bag of weed, but @jimh 's observation about the expensive Japanese tools and the point about attention to detail totally sold me.
Sweet! I was bumming about no more BB (and when I first saw that scene I assumed it was meant to serve as a contrast to Jesse’s current condition and impending demise, for maximum tragic), but now I’m enjoying a big warm fuzzy 
This is the best ‘extra crystal’ I’ve seen. Onya.
Walt doesn’t look happy at all when he says Jesse’s name in the car with Badger and Skinny Pete…
And someone said Vince Gilligan said Walt still intended to kill Jesse, until he saw him again.
I find that a bit odd though; he had plenty of time to cool down since the petrol in the lounge room episode, and they’ve been through a lot together… but then I guess Walt often struck me as a bit odd; prone to being an utter dick when rubbed the wrong way.
I felt the exchange while Jesse was holding the gun was disappointing; in my mind it should have gone more like this:
W: I’m sorry, Jesse. Go ahead, if it’ll make you feel better.
J: (hesitates) I don’t think I need to, Mr White [or maybe ‘Walter’]. (pockets or drops the gun, makes for the door) See you in hell.
Actually not enough ambiguity, or perhaps too much was wrapped up with a bow, but overall it was good. I explained that the Grey Matter background wasn’t a big issue, yes, I would have liked to know what happened, but primarily I was responding to a point in the review. People pretty much went nuts over something incidental that I wrote. It’s okay that everyone else doesn’t care.
Did anyone else notice the cornflower blue color reference when Todd was talking about Lydia’s blouse?
In a series that does nothing unintentionally, I have to think that was an intentional Fight Club / Chuck P reference, yes?
What was more unrealistic, to me, was that if he could bang the window like that to have the snow fall off, then slamming the car door would CERTAINLY have achieved the same result. But really, I wasn’t all that concerned about that at the time. 
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When Marie called Skyler, she mentioned that all kinds of tips had been called in to the police, to have them running around looking for Walt and spread them thin. Walt almost certainly called them (or had Badger and Pete do it) to have the police focus on places where he wasn’t going to be, in order to do things like sneak into Skyler’s place.
And really, Albequerque isn’t a small place - population of over 550,000. While he is the most wanted man in the city, and probably the state, there’s only so many policemen/DEA agents to go around and look for him. As long as he doesn’t accidentally cross paths with a police officer who knows what he looks like (the neighbour described him as looking like the unabomber, but really, that could describe any number of people), it’s not all that far fetched for him to go around undetected, particularly since he was also orchestrating those fake calls to the police as well.
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Let’s all dwell on the terrible irony that, given her revived chain-smoking habit, Skylar will probably wind up with lung cancer.
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I guess you could read pretty much anything into it but I don’t see why it has to be anything more than Jesse daydreaming about doing the one thing he felt accomplished at in order to escape his living hell.
Walt sees Jesse as being the reason that Hank got killed (because otherwise, Hank would have been twisting in the wind, never getting any closer to busting Walt), and the reason that Walt lost all but $10 million of his vast fortune. So yeah, when he thought that Jesse had partnered with the Nazis (who had stolen said fortune) to start making meth again, of COURSE he wanted to kill him.
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It least it sold me that it wasn’t a flashback.
And if it was a daydream, IIRC it’d be the only dream sequence amongst a whole bunch of flashbacks and flash-forwards.
I only think the sequence was a daydream because the tools are too nice to be in a shop class (as pointed out earlier) and Jesse’s face is too devoid of scars for it to be a flash forward. Also, IIRC, the photography had the typical dream sequence trademarks that are not present in the flash forwards…
I thought it was an AtCo casette, with the clear front and black back.
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This. I think he may have used their talking shit against him as a fear leverage (he didn’t need to say anything about it—they knew what they’d said on TV) but in reality I don’t believe he felt betrayed by them over that specific issue as it was clear what they were doing on TV was no different to what Walt insisted that Jesse do (commit murder) way back when some guys had stolen their stash–dealing with a PR problem, basically. If anything, I think what Gretchen said about him rang true, and that might have been what brought about his final return to being Walter White, the at heart good guy. It was the mention of the meth that moved him to action.
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It’s a curious thing that Jesse managed to feel so much guilt at the same time he considered himself to be blameless.
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Blameless is your word choice, not mine, but it’s not curious at all…people often misplace their own guilt in order to deal with it. I’m surprised you’ve never noticed. It is a coping mechanism in the face of overwhelming guilt. Think of all the people who live their lives blaming their parents or society for their problems. This isn’t a stretch for a show that seems acutely aware of the duality of human nature.
Yes, definitely felt this was real real rather than TV real. Honestly, at that stage is the entire ABQ police department STILL going to be on full alert for somebody that could literally be anybody 24/7. If anything, knowing he’s back in town would have the opposite effect of actually making them put a couple of guys on Skyler’s house.
What I saw when Walt watched the interview was not a response to THEM - it was his own memory of being that ‘sweet’ guy he used to be, once upon a time. He looked…wistful. And then, apparently, he snapped back to practicalities again. Walt was in a busy, intense, harried state at that point. He HAD to stay focused.
All the mention of the meth did was remind him not to wander off down Memory Lane, or he would fail at wrapping things up…which was SO Walt. Mostly anyone else would have been so into their ‘poor me’ wailing at grieving over their own impending demise that it wouldn’t even have occurred to them to neaten things up on their way out.
They did him wrong. He knew it. They knew it. Otherwise, there was no point in his making the comment that this was their opportunity to ‘make it right’. And in their faces, you could see both relief and understanding - they got it…as much a scared rabbit can get that there’s a way out with a dog that snarls instead of eating them on the spot. What was cool was seeing just how little needed to be said for them all to get it - that they knew one another so very, very well - and it that, he handed them back a little nostalgia burn, too.
Layers and layers and layers…yum.
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Yes, exactly! My dad used to sing that song to us, and I played it later myself. The guy in the song is not a good guy or a bad guy. He’s just a guy who has to confront some fights and some losses. But in the end? He goes out on a really pretty decent ‘note’.
And I love that they did all of this in NM and finished up with an homage to Old West legends and myths. Just like Heisenburg has become a mythical creature in the area. Do you honestly think, after the whole thing is over, that some rock bands and maybe some country bands wouldn’t be writing tunes about Heisenburg, too? Because, in a sequel…
He did have to go back to the house to get the ricin, so he did have to make an extra stop.
