{"id":2487,"date":"2013-09-27T17:22:07","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T22:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2013-09-30T10:31:48","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T15:31:48","slug":"its-going-to-be-worse-than-we-think-some-speculative-thoughts-about-felina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=2487","title":{"rendered":"The G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung Will Be Televised \u2014 The Breaking Bad-Felina Theory of Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Spoilers ahead for anyone who isn\u2019t up-to-date on their\u00a0Bad <\/em>episodes.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trying to outsmart Vince Gilligan and his writers, who may be the smartest writers in the world, is a loser\u2019s game. There are a lot of reasonable theories out there, almost a collective speculative wisdom. Jesse is\u00a0likely<\/em> to blow up the lab. Walt is\u00a0likely<\/em> to die. Another White\u00a0may<\/em> die\u00a0as well. \u00a0But whatever we think is going to happen, whatever we\u00a0want\u00a0to see happen, we\u00a0are\u00a0going to be surprised. \u00a0Plenty of people\u00a0knew\u00a0Hank was a goner when Uncle Jack and his crew showed up. No one thought Walt would try to bargain for his life with money.<\/p>\n

Back in\u00a0Ozymandias<\/em>, when Walt tried to talk his way out of Hank\u2019s execution, when he gave up Jesse to the nazis, and then told him about watching Jane die \u2014 these were events that no audience member imagined. But when they happened, they seemed inevitable. That\u2019s what separates\u00a0Breaking Bad<\/em> from the pack.<\/p>\n

In addition to characterization, there is masterful foreshadowing. The audience can always see\u00a0some <\/em>of it coming, but it\u2019s like a magic trick where it turns out we weren\u2019t even looking in the right place. We all saw Draw Sharpe riding a bicycle, we may even have known it was important, but like the one-eyed pink bear in the White pool, we had no idea what it meant.<\/p>\n

The speculation that Jesse is going to destroy the lab is not a stretch. Jesse wants to die, wants Todd to die, and wants to end Heisenberg\u2019s blue once and for all. We were reminded in the\u00a0Ozymandias<\/em> flashback that cooking meth is potentially deadly. Labs blow up, and Jesse has learned enough to blow one up. While an explosion would be dramatic, as a call back to the pilot, Jesse is more likely to mix up some phosphene gas. If Walt happens to be there at the time, looking for his own retribution — his saving Jesse\u2019s life will not be much of a stretch either \u2014 not because he forgives him, but because once again, Walt\u00a0needs<\/em> him. He needs somebody he can trust to get the money to Skylar and to tell Flynn how he tried to save Hank\u2019s life. This was foreshadowed last week when we learned that the Vacuum-man is not going to take the money to Skylar. Walt \u00a0has no way of delivering it, nor does he have any chance of explaining to Flynn what happened and how he tried to bargain for Hank\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s how it\u00a0might<\/em> go:<\/p>\n

Remember Skylar\u2019s Lady MacBeth moment?\u00a0\u201cWhat\u2019s one more?\u201d<\/em> It was a surprising enough pronouncement that we paid attention to it, yet it was perfectly within character. She thought Pinkman was a threat to her family. She doesn\u2019t know a lot of what we know. She knows from Marie that Pinkman was with Hank, and she probably believes he was killed along with Hank and Gomez. . If \u00a0Jesse comes to give her the money, or approaches Flynn, she may think he\u2019s there to kill her, or she may think he knows enough to put her in prison. While it\u2019s not likely that Skylar spoke to the police after Todd\u2019s scary visit, it\u2019s not unlikely she managed to get herself a gun just in case he came back.<\/p>\n

The twist we didn\u2019t see coming will be that Skylar shoots Jessie before she knows why he\u2019s there. \u00a0This not only gets her arrested for murder, but makes it look like she was even more involved with the business than she was.<\/p>\n

After her arrest for Pinkman\u2019s death, any nazis who survived Jesse\u2019s labocolypse<\/em> (which could be all of them) decide to take out one of her kids (my money is on baby Holly) to make sure Skylar stays quiet about Lydia. We know this is their\u00a0modus operandi<\/em> based on the murder of Andrea. But maybe the twist here is that they don\u2019t wind up\u00a0shooting<\/em> the baby. \u00a0Marie is hiding in a closet with Flynn and Holly, trying to save them from the nazis. She smothers the crying baby inadvertently, or to save herself and Flynn. (This certainly puts an interesting spin on Cranston’s remark that the ending would be a\u00a0“holocaust.”<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Any way you figure it, at least one of those kids is gone. Holly is the most likely because of symmetry. The show has a great sense of balance, and is constantly self-referencing. Jane was somebody\u2019s daughter too.<\/p>\n

Flynn might just survive, a damaged being, left to mourn or not with an even more damaged Aunt Marie, if she doesn\u2019t become insane or kill herself. And if you want to wipe\u00a0everyone<\/em> out, maybe it’s Flynn visiting a dying Walter in a prison hospital, who puts the old man out of his misery by smothering him with a pillow.<\/p>\n

As for Gretchen and Elliot, we know the catalyst for Walt\u2019s return to New Mexico was the Schwartz\u2019 appearance on\u00a0Charlie Rose<\/em>. We never learned what really happened that caused Walt to abandon Gretchen and leave Grey Matters. Theories of a Madrigal connection abound, and we were just \u00a0reminded by Elliot that \u201cSchwartz\u201d means black in\u00a0German<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A German conglomerate, nazis, Heisenberg, and Schwartz \u2014 Is there \u00a0a theme here? Wait a second, death by phosphene\u00a0gas<\/em> in the very first episode? Mass murder? The slaughter of innocents? Sounds like a future dissertation, and one that up till now most of the critics have missed.<\/p>\n

What if Walter found out something awful about the company that caused him to leave Grey Matters? What if the cook with Jesse wasn\u2019t the\u00a0first time\u00a0he\u2019d broken bad, or at least had the opportunity to do so? \u00a0Maybe he found out his work was being used for an illegal purpose, and abandoned Gretchen so he could figure out what to do, whether to go to the police, or go along. When she married Elliot, he decided to stay silent for her sake, and take the buy-out.<\/p>\n

Gilligan has hinted that there might be some kind of “redemption” for Walter. If there is, it might come from his decision to save Jesse — even if it’s done for pragmatic reasons and it leads to Jesse’s death later. Possibly, he may expose the even bigger criminality of Grey Matters.<\/p>\n

The Grey Matters connection will be key. We are going to learn something in the last minutes that puts an entirely different spin on everything that came before, but turns out to have been, like Gus Fring, hiding in plain sight the entire time.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Comments are always welcome. Marion is feeling like Carrie Mathison toward the end of Homeland’s first season when she had all that stuff pinned to her wall. But unlike Carrie, Marion’s theories really are gibberish. However, if you found this at all entertaining, you might like her very affordable\u00a0books<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Spoilers ahead for anyone who isn\u2019t up-to-date on their\u00a0Bad episodes.) Trying to outsmart Vince Gilligan and his writers, who may be the smartest writers in the world, is a loser\u2019s game. There are a lot of reasonable theories out there, almost a collective speculative wisdom. Jesse is\u00a0likely to blow up the lab. Walt is\u00a0likely to … Continue reading The G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung Will Be Televised \u2014 The Breaking Bad-Felina Theory of Everything<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[496],"tags":[801,795,802,803,794,793,800,799,797,798,778],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2511,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/2511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}