Breaking Bad

[Wes]

In my opinion, there's no real way to defend/explain/rationalize Gus ominously stopping at just the right moment to go stare out in Walt's direction in the parking lot anyway other than in the words of Marlo Stanfield: That's some Spider-man shit there.

I think the writers just can't help themselves with Gus, he became a pulp/comic book-style supervillain this season, complete with a semi-tragic origin story. I can live with it, it's part of the show's DNA that it's a crazy crime comic story that likes to let its bad guys go a little out there now and again, and it does it well. Plus Esposito is completely nailing the character they've given him (what a painful reminder of how utterly they wasted him in the unfortunate final season of Homicide...if they'd given him anything to work with, there's no question Esposito gone have gone a long way towards filling the Andre Braugher void.)

I do, however, worry about the resolution of this Brock poisoning thing. Earlier in the season, before I came to embrace Gus as Dr. Doom/The Kingpin, I had some trouble buying into his plot to win over Jesse that involved assumptions that Jesse wouldn't murder the hell out of the two shotgun-toting guys assigned to scare him and take over forever with the money, leaving Gus to solely depend on Walt again. But this one is potentially even more convulted.

If Gus did it, his plot depends on him super secretly knowing about the killer cigarette all season long, on Jesse not noticing the cigarette missing for the few hours in which it had to get to Brock and instantly work on him, on Jesse pinning the blame on Walt and on an armed, rightly paranoid, murder-capable Walt not blowing a revenge-bound Jesse away or them killing each other, leaving Gus with no one to make his supermeth. That is a very complex, unlikely series of events that has to happen in pretty tiny window of time.

If Walt did it...I think the degree of difficulty for making this all happen in that amount of time possibly doubles (we have to assume that Huell is a Ricky Jay-level master of misdirection to swap cigarette packs during his brief frisking of Jesse, and the entire plan hinges on Jesse actually bothering to heed Saul's calls to come in that afternoon, plus Walt still has to get Saul or Huell to tell him who Brock is and then go poison him) and there are similar logic leaps in play (everything then depends on Jesse realizing what happened before Tyrus wanders by to happily kill Walt, Jesse actually going to Walt and not beating Walt to death or blowing him away), but this feels like it could be the kind of huge moment the season is building up to, as Walt shoots past the entire cast on the evil scumbag scale. It would also nicely set up a final 16 episode of Jesse working for new drug lord Heisenberg and Jesse then needing to find out that Walt was either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of Jane and Brock so he can decide to kill Walt.

So, yeah, I'm a little worried about them resolving the actual details of this latest plot point and it following on the kinda sloppy business with Ted Beneke's return, but I'm willing to hold off to see the reveal of what actually happened next week because of how wildly entertaining Season 3 and the back end of this season have been.

[Kormod]

Giancarlo Esposito does a good job of demystifying the parking garage scene in this video (be warned though -- the video contains some spoilers for the season finale):

Inside Breaking Bad 412: End Times [HD]

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

I buy Esposito's explanation in that promo video. But the Michael Bay movie music underneath it is pretty hilarious.

If Walt did indeed poison Brock, that's pretty huge. It's a point of no return -- he's completely unsympathetic after that (not that he's ever been the most lovable character, but at least he's had enough moral fiber to be a rationalizing hypocrite and not just a monster). But it is definitely the kind of weird risk that he would take. I'm kind of hoping that it was an accident, which seems to be the most plausible explanation.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that it makes no sense at all that either Gus or Walt would have poisoned Brock. Even if it made strategic sense from Walt's point of view, it's extremely unlikely that he could have pulled it off. If anything, Brock was accidentally exposed to the ricin, or just has a bad flu and everyone's paranoid.

[Wes]

I rambled a bit and probably lost the point, but I agree that neither of the two of them poisoning Brock is that plausible in the given time frame or works out as a logical plan by anything other than the "evil supergeniuses are always able to predict things exactly" cliche.

But it felt like Jesse's claim that there was no window for Brock to have taken the cigarette was meant to be taken factually, and for it to be a coincidental illness would seem a bit dramatically limp for a season finale. By contrast, they intentionally leave Walt's whereabouts that day unknown and ending the season with a revealtion that makes Walt a huge, irredeemable monster even more than before seems like the kind of thing they'd go for to set the status quo for the final run of episodes.

Esposito's explanation of the parking lot scene explains how he was playing it, but even he eventually admits that it comes down to "Gus is really, really smart and always knows things" to get around how Gus is able to go from "hmm, poison?" to "Walt is ready to blow up my car" at that exact moment. That said, it was totally worth watching to be reminded of what he's like out of character and for the moment where he refers to Pinkman as "this young cat."

[Kormod]

There's a theory floating around the Internet that the third and final time Walt spinned his gun at the beginning of Sunday's episode (http://youtu.be/_rzjS4hzR8E)), the gun pointed towards a plant called Aconitum, and that Walt used the plant to poison Brock:



From what I've read on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum), Aconitum poisoning isn't always fatal, which makes it plausible that Walt would want to use it instead of ricin, if he were to indeed poison the child. This still, however, doesn't account for the fact that Walt's theft of the ricin cigarette is pretty much impossible and that poisoning Brock would require some Metal Gear Solid shit way beyond the ability of Walt, even with the Heisenberg hat on. Interesting nonetheless, though.

[Shaggy 2 Grote]

That sounds like a crazy internet theory to me. In my limited experience working in television, I don't think any writer, director, or producer has or would ever hide a plot point in the way that internet commenters seem to think they routinely do. I do love reading these theories, though.

[cutout]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that it makes no sense at all that either Gus or Walt would have poisoned Brock. Even if it made strategic sense from Walt's point of view, it's extremely unlikely that he could have pulled it off.

Think I agree. It seems like an accident that came at a time when it happened to polarize things further and make everyone paranoid. Maybe Brock found the cigarettes accidentally and just wanted to experiment with smoking.

[Kormod]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that it makes no sense at all that either Gus or Walt would have poisoned Brock. Even if it made strategic sense from Walt's point of view, it's extremely unlikely that he could have pulled it off.

Think I agree. It seems like an accident that came at a time when it happened to polarize things further and make everyone paranoid. Maybe Brock found the cigarettes accidentally and just wanted to experiment with smoking.

This couldn't have happened, unless Brock took some ricin out of the vial and then put the vial back in the cigarette -- remember, Jesse had the cigarette on him the morning Brock was poisoned and didn't see Brock at all that day until the hospital scene..

To my mind the most plausible theory is that Brock's sickness has nothing to do with ricin or Aconitum. All the other theories seem to require too many aberrations of judgment on the part of the writers.

[Hugman 3.0]

People seem to be forgetting that the poison was in a vial hidden in a cigarette wrapper. It wasn't a smokable cigarette.

[mostlymeat]

Gus used poison on the cartel, and Walt can make his own poison. They wouldn't have needed to use the cigarette to poison Brock and Jesse still could have thought either one of them did it, but Gus or Walt thinking that poisoning Brock would turn Jesse against the other is really far-fetched.

I think Gus was genuinely surprised when Jesse told him Brock was poisoned, and this surprise of foul play is what made him aware that something else fishy is going on in the parking lot.

[cutout]

Oh right, you couldn't smoke it... Maybe Brock found and opened the vial b/c he thought it was drugs? Hard to think of scenarios that aren't convoluted.

[crumbum]

I didn't think so right after watching the episode, but I now agree 'Walt did it' is the most likely scenario in terms of the overall story arc being set up for the next season. As Wes pointed out a coincidental illness is too convenient to be satisfying, and it seems to me there is no way that Gus could have reasonably expected Jesse to react the way he did at finding the ricin missing, so Gus didn't do it. However Walt has been driven deeper and deeper into a corner all season and in the context of the sometimes absurd plotting of this series, Walt thinking he could use the poisoning to manipulate Jesse into helping him out is not so hard to believe.

The most interesting thing to me this season has been the way they've shown Walt spinning out of control, getting more desperate and erratic and paranoid, suggesting that this is the kind of pressure that's needed to push someone like him over the last moral line in the sand.

[Paul DeLouisiana]

The most interesting thing to me this season has been the way they've shown Walt spinning out of control, getting more desperate and erratic and paranoid, suggesting that this is the kind of pressure that's needed to push someone like him over the last moral line in the sand.

I think you're dead on with this. I feel like we actually see this moment of crossing over when Walt is under the house laughing hysterically. That is a really unsettling scene and that's got to be when Walt finally cracks. In interviews he always talks about how his character isn't going to please a lot of viewers and the literal meaning of 'breaking bad' and how well intentioned men turn evil over the course of time. We'll see.

[Hugman 3.0]

I didn't think so right after watching the episode, but I now agree 'Walt did it' is the most likely scenario in terms of the overall story arc being set up for the next season.

It also makes sense with how he had the whole Gus scenario "figured out" when Jesse came at him.