According to Gilligan on Talking Bad, once Walt found out that the blue meth was back on the streets he intended to kill Jesse along with Jack and his crew, but at the last minute his better half took over instinctively.
I think he would have killed him if Jesse was actually partnered with Jack as Walt assumed. When Walt saw that Jesse was a prisoner and cooking against his will, he might have had a change of heart.
That’s how I thought it went down.
How did Walt get the ricin into Lydia’s sweetner? I knew when they had the shot of her tipping the sachet in that it was poisoned so I rewound and watched the whole restaurant scene again. Lydia is playing with the sachet before Walt joins them and has it in her hand all along.
He was probably at the table before she arrived and planted the sweetener then. She is so predictable.
Yeah, I thought of that but they’re not at the same table by the window, and he has no way of knowing which sachet she’ll pick up. I suppose he could have laced ALL of them, haha.
Some other cool moments from the finale: Todd’s “Lydia” ringtone made me laugh, and Walt deliberately ensuring he’d be found in the meth lab secures his “professional reputation” as Heisenberg and the originator of the blue meth. He was clearly put out when Badger and Pete told him Jesse’s stuff was even better than his.
Exactly. He says something to that effect in his meeting with her. Her: “How did you know to find me here?” Him: “We met here at 10am for months. You’re kind of a schedule person.”
There was only one. She asks for more.
Fricken cool. I had no idea. I’m sure I saw that when it originally aired, but I didn’t remember it last night.
The Badfinger lyrics to Baby Blue at the close were awesome.
“Guess I got what I deserved
Kept you waiting there too long my love.
All that time, without a word
Didn’t know you’d think, that I’d forget, or I’d regret”
Science!
He called it: she’s a creature of habit. He knew the restaurant they would meet at, the table she would sit at, and the sweetener she used. You’ll note there was only one in the little rack she took it from, so perforce she took the doctored one.
Bearded, swollen Jesse (right before he got into the car) looked so much like Zach Galifianakis I chortled a bit.
Good stuff, but after the scene with the Schwartzes, things played out a bit predictably, I thought. All well and good.
It’s hard watching things like this, wanting to feel the importance of them but wondering if you’re undercutting your receptivity by that very want. It feels like it peaked with the episode before last, and that’s… fine. That was one of the most incredible hours of television I’ve ever seen.
My favorite finale is still Six Feet Under. Oh how I wept.
That was a really inspired piece of music for the finale. Coupled with his “I liked it I’m good at it. It made me feel alive” comments it really brought into focus just how much he was in love with being Heisenberg.
I would rather have a somewhat predictable and satisfying conclusion than for them to do something too ambitious and over-reach. It’s hard to throw too much of a curve at people when most of your cards have already been put on the table and the entire internet has already spent several weeks collaboratively speculating about how things are going to play out. Breaking Bad’s production team were smart enough to know that this wasn’t the time to flip over the table and say “HA, I bet you didn’t see that coming”.
I agree with Brad Genz, that this was a brave, confident way to close out Breaking Bad. Great series, great finale.
Just going to say that I called this back a long while ago!
Blips, did he try once earlier? It’s seems likely, but I can’t remember.
I enjoyed the last episode, but it was all a little too easy. It was more a convenient wrapup than anything else, and went a more obvious route with final events than I would have expected.
I did love his last meeting with Skylar, where he can finally admit the truth to himself.
Also, props to getting Badger and Skinny Pete in for one last scene.
I don’t think the plot of getting the money to his son works. It’s just too much. The DEA could believe, perhaps, that Grey Matter set up college funds for Walt’s kids. They’re not going to believe a corporation gifted 9+ million to son of a notorious drug dealer just for the hell of it.
Doesn’t have to be the corporation. Could easily be the two individuals themselves. It would actually be pretty easy for them to spin a story about how it was a personal gesture from two people with money to spare in memory of their former partner whose life went so tragically bad, etc.
Basically, they’ve got cash coming out the ass (per the characterization of Gretchen and Elliott), and they could literally just set Walt’s cash in a storage room somewhere and do it with their own money to avoid the difficulty of immediately laundering Walt’s cash. It seems from the characterization that they would have more than enough money to do that without needing to immediately touch Walt’s cash. Because that is effectively what Walt is using them for; as a plausible (read: wealthy) front to get his cash to his family.
No, it still sounds like bullshit. People don’t gift 9 million dollars to non-family. The DEA is going to see right through that. If it were that easy money laundering would be (more) trivial. As I said, they could set up college funds; people would believe that. They could donate 9 million to a charity. But a 9 million dollar trust for an individual? That’s going to set off all kinds of alarms. You don’t think Flynn is going to see through that?
They could get the money to him to a circuitous process, like hiring him and over-promoting him in their company and throwing bonuses at him over the years, but I don’t think that’s what Walt had in mind…
It’s going to fail. Maybe that’s the point; that Walt is still delusional that he can get his “legacy” to his children. But, it didn’t seem played that way in the show. It’s also possible it’s really just to make Gretchen and whatshisname squirm; if they don’t follow through they think they’ll be shot, if they do they’re going to end up in the middle of a shitstorm of an investigation that could ruin their lives and tank their company. But, again, it doesn’t seem played that way in the show.
I think this ending was a ‘bad’ ending for the guy, which he deserved(or earned as he might say). I think fans are reading it as him winning in some way.
For instance, he does NOT get to leave his family in a good position, or even anything close to that. Look where they live now! He left his wife with a card to play but what of it? She plays the card and gets out of trouble but now everyone knows she was in on it, hence having a card to play. She might even not be able to get completely out of trouble with it, who knows? The kids will either hate him(oldest) or not know him at all(youngest). He even has to face his selfishness head on. The kids’ money? There are any number of ways they might try to weasel out of that, it’s nowhere near a done deal that they ever deliver. He dies knowing all this was his fault.
So he killed some people. It was one of those ultimately empty gestures that people do to convince themselves there was a purpose or reason. He cannot undo whatever they did to earn their deaths, he won’t be around to see what he accomplished, if anything.
I thought it was a pretty awesome ending. That last song on the soundtrack took it from a high level to something classic.