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[SPOILERS] Breaking Bad - Final Season - Final Two Episodes


Mya Stone

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Last topic got over 400. Pretty sure approximately 64% was discussing Jane's death from 3 seasons ago.

How bout that Lydia? She's gonna kill someone, isn't she? :P

Not sure if she'll do more than she already did in orchestrating the death of the Phoenix crew.

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You are the one guilty of that. The writers made their intention clear when they changed the original script from Walt first injecting Jane then secondly to Walt turning Jane to finally Walt setting off a chain of events that leads Jane to turn.

I won't argue that Walt caused the plane crash in the sense that he could've forseen it, but they would never have included it if it wasn't intended to show it as a result of his actions. Walt has cancer, but he is the cancer in his community. Maybe this started with me misconstruing Pinkie´s words, but the way I read it, he wanted to remove all guilt from Walter from the plane crash, and if you do that, that entire pool-teddy-season looses much of its meaning.

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Can you detail the instances in which Hank broke the law?

Hank left the seat up after realizing Walt was Heisenberg. From what I've been told, that's a serious offense.

He did cover for Marie's kleptomania didn't he? My memory's kind of fuzzy because I haven't done a rewatch in some time, so maybe he didn't know.

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Hank left the seat up after realizing Walt was Heisenberg. From what I've been told, that's a serious offense.

He did cover for Marie's kleptomania didn't he? My memory's kind of fuzzy because I haven't done a rewatch in some time, so maybe he didn't know.

He covered for her in the same way cops let other cops off for speeding. I see nothing wrong with it. It's certainly not breaking any laws.

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Tyweezel said:

Can you detail the instances in which Hank broke the law?

I believe the whole chain of events with Gomie and Jesse were illegal. An agent doesn't have carte blanche to mike up a suspect/witness and start gathering evidence, especially one where they suspect the person might get killed. You need oversight from a judge to allow that.

The results speak for themselves as to why 3rd party review is necessary to keep cops in check. Hank pushed a secret investigation that got both agents killed due to lack of backup, Jesse was enslaved, and the DEA and judicial branch will never know what happened.

If Hank ever succeeded, I could see Saul Goodman destroying his case by showing all the instances of gathering evidence against Walt illegally. If Walt's case were thrown out, he'd actually have immunity from getting charged a second time.

He covered for her in the same way cops let other cops off for speeding. I see nothing wrong with it. It's certainly not breaking any laws.

I'm pretty sure that's illegal, even if cops show preferential treatment all the time.

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I believe the whole chain of events with Gomie and Jesse were illegal. An agent doesn't have carte blanche to mike up a suspect/witness and start gathering evidence, especially one where they suspect the person might get killed. You need oversight from a judge to allow that.

The results speak for themselves as to why 3rd party review is necessary to keep cops in check. Hank pushed a secret investigation that got both agents killed due to lack of backup, Jesse was enslaved, and the DEA and judicial branch will never know what happened.

If Hank ever succeeded, I could see Saul Goodman destroying his case by showing all the instances of gathering evidence against Walt illegally. If Walt's case were thrown out, he'd actually have immunity from getting charged a second time.

I'm pretty sure that's illegal, even if cops show preferential treatment all the time.

I can't speak to the legality here, but none of this undermines my contention that Hank was a good man. Doing something illegal is not itself evidence of a bad character.

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http://douthat.blogs...aking-bad/?_r=0

it’s worth pointing out that one of the show’s most impressive and important achievements has been the construction of a compelling, interesting, entertaining good person, capable of competing with Walter White, the anti-hero, for the audience’s attention and interest and affection.

That person is Hank Schrader, Walt’s D.E.A. brother-in-law, who (I said there would be spoilers) breathed his last in Sunday’s episode, taken down by the clutch of neo-Nazi gangsters who seem to be emerging as the real winners from Walt’s long descent into criminality. Hank was introduced in the first season as the jerkish, bullying foil to a put-upon, underappreciated protagonist who back then had the audience’s sympathies. But over time the apparent foil been gradually revealed as, if not the show’s hero, then at least it’s (if you will) anti-anti-hero: A better husband than Walt, a better father (figure) to Walt’s children, and the only man in law enforcement capable of consistently putting his brother-in-law’s twisted genius to the test. In the course of the show, as Walt has sunk to ever-lower depths of turpitude, his brother-in-law has been given the classic hero’s arc: The repeated testing, physical and moral and physical again; the near-successes in which the prize is plucked away the last moment; the temporary falls from grace; the persistent brushes with despair. And he has followed this arc without either turning into a plaster saint (the flawed, crude, bullying character of Season 1 is still recognizable in the Hank of Season 5) or doing anything bad enough to make him an anti-hero in his own right. (His one huge moral lapse, the beating of Jesse Pinkman in Season 3, took place under extenuating circumstances and was followed by Hank taking full responsibility and accepting his potential dismissal from the D.E.A. without a fight.)

This willingness to let a major character be genuinely heroic — again, not flawless or entirely saintly, but heroic all the same — is something you don’t see on a lot of the “Sopranos” imitators that now crowd the cable landscape, where the pursuit of grittiness increasingly means making everyone an adulterer, everyone a crook, and writing characters who tend to converge in corruption, until it’s anti-heroes all the way down. And it’s very easy to imagine a version of “Breaking Bad” in which Hank wasn’t allowed to occupy a steady moral center — a version in which he was on the take from the cartel, for instance, or a version in which he was a good cop but a lousy philanderer of a husband, like Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire” or countless other examples on lesser shows.

But the fact that he lived and died essentially uncorrupted, having chased an evil man without entering deeply into that same evil himself, has been crucial to the distinctiveness of “Breaking Bad,” and to its dramatic success. It’s not only that having a good man on Walt’s tail has given the audience a moral stake in events, a sense of personal interest that’s increasingly slipped away in the grim, “isn’t everybody just awful” later seasons of a show like “Mad Men.” It’s also that in the lived reality of human beings, everyday heroism and moral decency aren’t actually as rare — or as easily crushed by the world’s Tywin Lannisters — as you would think from turning on a lot of prestige television these days. And so having a good man on Walt’s tail has actually made “Breaking Bad” more realistic than shows that deliberately write virtue and heroism out of their storylines entirely.

Raylan Givens is the only other such white hat character that comes to mind. Very refreshing.

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Last topic got over 400. Pretty sure approximately 64% was discussing Jane's death from 3 seasons ago.

How bout that Lydia? She's gonna kill someone, isn't she? :P

I think she is the key antagonist. We saw that she controls the Neo Nazis and, more importantly, Todd. Therefore, she also controls Jesse and the meth empire. She is the one handling all of the distribution. The Neo Nazis aren't connected enough to handle big-time distribution, so they need her (unlike Walt, who was the cook no longer cooking). I think this means she knows what they did to Walt, and definitely is keeping tabs on him and his family. Suddenly, a double-crosses Walt vanishes and his family is talking to the police. LYDIA DOESN'T FUCK AROUND. I really think she will put a hit on the White family, and once they die Walt wants vengeance. Then he sees the blue meth hitting the streets and knows it can't be Todd. So Walt, with nothing left, realizes he should save Jesse from slavery and torture, even if it is just to finally kill Jesse.

Nobody really talked about this when I first posted it: I think the Old Yeller analogy is a red herring for Jesse but really applied to Hank. Take everything from Hank's death and think of it as if he was a rabid dog. Walt was crushed and fought against putting him down, the tough guys knew it had to be done, and even in his last moment Hank showed his teeth. I really want to know what people think about this since there was a lot of emphasis on the analogy.

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