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Breaking Bad - Season 5, Part 1 - Sundays on AMC
- Thread starter Cornballer
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The One Who Knocks
Member
I have the same theory in that Walter is going to team up with Todd. Where Jesse factors in I'm not too sure but the gif of the child being shot makes it abundantly clear that Walter doesn't particularly care, or at the very least, not nearly as much as Jesse. In addition to this, Walter's "evil" nature (note, I truly believe Walter is evil but I'm just leaving it as "evil" for those who question that) has continuously led him to make immoral and cold decisions in the past whereas Jesse has never done it to such a crazy extent. This is extremely clear in the Lydia situation, where Jesse will do anything not to have another body on his conscience whereas Walter doesn't really care. It seems very plausible to me that Walter will choose Todd's disciplined yet cold-blooded nature over Jesse's disciplined yet moral nature if given the choice. Todd will willingly kill others if necessary, Jesse won't.
I'm not too sure about the rest though, the show could go in a plethora of different directions at this stage.
EDIT: Spoiler tags removed.
Cornballer
Member
Ah, that would explain it.
Kano on the Phone
Member
Todd is going to step in as Jesse steps back.
Also, why are people spoiler tagging speculation? It doesn't make sense.
SpeedingUptoStop
will totally Facebook friend you! *giggle* *LOL*
After Walt teams up with Todd, Todd gonna eventually try to plug Jesse then Walt plugs Todd and the Jesse plugs Walt and the Jesse gets to plug SkySky.
Extra Sauce
Member
It's not a rule, just a courtesy. Some people want to be as surprised as possible when watching. The final twist of S4 was posted here before it happened, because someone guessed it.
It's more than okay to speculate openly all you want, but if you have a very specific, very important twist in mind and you think there's a good chance it's right... blacking it out is a potential kindness.
The One Who Knocks
Member
The way I see it is for two reasons, first because somebody claimed awhile ago that "people were making speculation based on promotional material or trailers yet pretending it isn't" (to paraphrase). Although what I had posted is honestly not based upon those things, if some people are suspicious of this then I'd rather give them the choice to check.
Secondly, as Reuenthal posted, if the speculation ends up correct it may end up dampening somebody's enjoyment of the show. Although personally I don't mind speculation as long as the basis is firmly in currently aired episodes, I can understand why some people might.
And then there is also because the post I was responding to was spoiler tagged so it was better to be safe in replying than not. It was presumably spoiler tagged for the first or second reason.
Cornballer
Member
Yeah, if people could stop doing that I'd appreciate it. It gets confusing when people start mixing up speculation and actual spoilers. If you don't know what's going to happen, don't spoiler tag it.
So we can pick and choose the parts of the show we want to ignore?
I haven't seen anything here that isn't wild speculation and a pure guess. One of them may become true, but they are far from spoiling anything. Nothing like that whole plant scenario which when I saw it knew they were right. That was crazy and a good catch.
When Marie asked Walt if the issue was that his cancer was back, Walt didn't say no it wasn't back. He just said that it wasn't the issue... When was the last time we heard a qualified medical expert say Walt was in remission? Season 2 or at best 3.
smokeymicpot
Beat EviLore at pool.
I don't see Todd being the next Jesse chances are he is the next Mike. Walt and Mike are a big problem. Mike doesn't like how Walt works. He just seen Todd do a full measure.
This is hilarious, but would work better if they horizontally flipped the second part so they're all facing the same direction.
Slurpy2k20
Member
Fuck I love this show. And the kid didn't need to get shot. They could've made up some bullshit like they were doing maintenance. He didnt look old enough to know better.
BobTheFork
Member
I can't see Todd moving into Jesse's position. Todd is a long damn ways from having the cooking knowledge (I don't see Walt re-teaching someone) and Walt trusts Jesse in a way I don't see extending to another person. Of course something has to give now. We know Jesse won't put up with a child dying because of what they do, but I don't think Walt is going to see what happened as a problem (they couldn't just let the kid go).
Bolded part is what will get him kill imo. I can see him going off doing something stupid and trace back to Walt.
I called it since they met todd that either he will end up being a "victor" or Walt's "Jessie"
He seems to have his hair back in the intro of the first episode of this season.
blainethemono
Member
the scene where he buys the machine gun is a year into the future though, and he coughs in the bathroom and just looks generally haggard. looks like a dude with nothing to lose basically
Cancer has always been the motivating factor for the show. They can't separate it from the reasons why Walt has made such a huge character shift. Thematically I can't imagine them doing anything but have Walt succeed in everything he's tried to do as a drug kingpin and end up sitting on his throne as the big winner and then die silently with nobody around to witness it like Pacino at the end of Godfather 3.
Having hair doesn't mean no cancer, it just means no chemo. And if anyone's going to eschew chemo...
It still is one of my favorite disney movies tho, love the meaning behind it lol
Battersea Power Station
Member
Heh. Interesting analysis. I think I see the show completely differently and disagree with all your points. But that's the beauty of a piece of art.
FantasticMrFoxdie
Mumber
It's definitely fallen out of the show's vocabulary except as a passing reference, but I think that's their intention. Cancer was a huge part of the first season and that's why I think it'll be a huge part of the last.
Battersea Power Station
Member
I think it will play some part, but I don't view it as Walt's motivation; it simply gave him an excuse for his sociopathy.
I also think Walt is going to be a miserable wreck by the show's end, like literally begging for death to bring him a sweet, merciful escape from the hell that has become his life.
The only reason I can't just assume that Walt has always been a sociopath is that he had so many years of relative normalcy. I think something inside him just snapped, and I think it was in the episode when he quit the carwash. Which I guess is the first one.
I think there's evidence he's always had this kind of behaviour in him, through what little we know about his career and relationships before the show started.
Selfishness and hubris sure, but I don't know about sociopathy.
Lazy Jones
Member
After seeing Left 4 Dead on Jessie´s desk I thought Mike or Walter would kill the waterhose dude.
You have to have the character go into a positive area so that when he gets ripped down into the most grave negative it is that much more impactful.
Walt "winning" as Vince has put it, is absolutely necessary if he is to, as the audience has been led to expect, have a tragic downfall for the finale. The penultimate act must have the polar opposite charge of the final act, so if Walt's going down at the end of this season, it is vital for him to be in a decent position at the start.
Eh. What we understand of his behaviour is pretty similar to his behaviour now (and at the beginning of the show), so I don't see why you'd assume it'd have a different cause. All getting cancer did was change his priorities.
What exactly am I reading here? So I guess by this logic, if the people making the show learn how to hack a satellite from a library computer, then depict Team Walt doing it on the show, then we, the audience, don't need to see the ways in which they gain that knowledge? Or we just presume they know it inherently?
Simple fact: You can't pull off a heist like they did without knowing lots of very special information. Most of which they are ignorant to (based on what we know of them) or was simply outside their collective areas of expertise. So some of that acquired knowledge to pull the heist off has to transpire on-screen for said audience to believe it.
I think this episode failed to visualize and communicate some of those points (for me anyways), and most people are just giving it a pass because there was interesting, engaging, and well-shot action to satiate us.
Don't forget Lydia, though -- she's clearly a logistics coordinator. I've done that job, and you pick up all kinds of information about various shipping methods. (As I was watching the show, I told my wife, "I hope they remember to get the seals (the little metal strips) back on, or everyone will know exactly where the robbery happened." Glad to see they showed that, although I'm not sure where they got seals with duplicate numbers so quickly.) I'm not sure what specific elements you think they couldn't've picked up from her.
Exactly that. Some stuff doesn't need to be explained, like Walt knowing when to start the water to best reduce the chance of the output methylamine being diluted. We've been watching him be an expert chemist for 4+ seasons now, so we can assuming that Walt's handling any chemistry-related stuff on the show. Much like how we didn't need to see him look up how to make a pipe bomb. We figure that he can figure it out on his own.
However, NONE of the characters have been established as having preexisting knowledge of the proper order of cars on a freight train, so if they took that measurement of 814 feet and buried their tanks there because of such knowledge, then you pretty much have to show them learning it at some point.
It's Lydia's job to know this information.
Trent Strong
Banned
It's even worse than that though. That 814 feet just happened to be the distance from a road to a bridge so that Walt and crew would be hidden under the bridge and couldn't be seen while they stole the methlymine. It was a pretty absurd heist.
The problem is that there's an extra step there: knowing that the information even exists in the first place. I imagine that most everybody is aware that two liquids, especially a relatively small amount dumped into a huge container, aren't going to mix right away. That's something we all learned as early as our first glass of chocolate milk. So we take something that's common knowledge that we already know (liquids don't mix quickly without agitation), and combine that with the fact that we can make the logical assumption that Walt is fully aware of exactly how fast the water will start to dilute their methylamine.
However, I doubt that the fact that there's specific rules governing the order of freight train cars is common knowledge to a whole lot of people. So yeah, we know it's Lydia's job to...
.. Wait a second. We don't even know what her job actually IS, do we? I had assumed that she was some sort of corporate attorney, given her presence at the DEA meeting back in "Madrigal". But if that's the case, why would Hank and the DEA guys have gone to her to ask her to point out the foreman of the warehouse?
Either way, let's assume that her job is to monitor freight shipments to and from Madrigal business and clients. Without knowing ahead of time that the "proper car order" is even a thing, we have no way of knowing that she'd be able to give the guys a rough estimate on where to set up the tanks. All we got was the line about how she would know the exact car the night before.
That's the funny thing, too, is that on several other forums, there's a bunch of different theories as to why Jesse was measuring out that distance. Some people claim it's because they needed to use the bridge to hide under, some are claiming that it's because Lydia had already told them which car it would be (completely ignoring that the scene with her telling them that came after the scene with them placing the tanks), and some are going with the "rough location due to car order", which I personally find the most plausible, but if that's actually what the episode was meant to convey, then it failed horribly.
It's sad, actually, because I've loved the show since it premiered, in a lot of ways due to its attention to all the little details. This one thing is a huge oversight, and it's really disappointing that the show made it.
There are about two and a half cars on that bridge, so assuming a standard railcar length, it's about 200 feet long (not considering the hookups, which would make it even longer). So they have a ton of room to work with and still have the car end up somewhere on the bridge -- it doesn't have to be completely on the bridge, because as you can see in the video, it isn't. So he's like like "814 FEET THE ONLY VIABLE DISTANCE," he's more like "oh, good, it's between 600 and 1000 feet, just like the map said."
She's obviously a logistics person. That's why she can access the inventory, that's why she handles the shipping, that's why she can get methylamine in the first place. She is absolutely going to know the correct order of cars on a freight train. Hell, I used to vaguely know that and I never even handled railcars when I worked in logistics. That tanker car is worth millions and millions of dollars and you don't think she's going to have every possible bit of information when it moves? You need every detail.
Actually, now that I think about it, her handling logistics explains why she's so stressed out all the time.
I wasn't as bothered by that, though. They didn't HAVE to hide under the bridge, it just made their jobs a little easier. They could have just as easily used the excavator to dig a hole that they'd spring out of when the train was stopped, or disguised themselves people joyriding some motorcycles like the kid and just buried their equipment. Lots of options, the bridge was just a coincidence that made their jobs a little easier.
Or, like, under tarps.
Trent Strong
Banned
But what are the chances that there's a bridge within miles of a road, let alone within a few thousand feet. (I don't know why this episode bothers me so much. There have been tons of unrealistic things on BB before, and it's never bothered me.)
And how did they know where the train would stop? It could have easily stopped hundreds of feet earlier, which would have meant using a very long hose.
It was very convenient that the train stopped exactly in front of the truck. But hey, the show often plays fast and loose with stuff, I thought the giant magnet was a lot worse.
Fine lines. He might not be a sociopath, but he has always had an extreme case of narcicism, which is almost as bad.
Trent Strong
Banned
Yeah, they broke into that police station really, really easily.
If anything, it probably should have taken about 7 times the distance to stop once they applied the breaks.
That, admittedly, I have no idea, but isn't New Mexico hilly as fuck? There's going to be a bridge across every little valley like that, isn't there?
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