<p>Re Marie, I do think there should have been a scene between her and Skylar. Maybe there will be next week. But their relationship has gone through so much and now they have both lost so much.</p>
<p>There’s a big timeline gap about what happens to Jesse during the intervening months while Walt’s hair and beard grow out in New Hampshire. It’s possible that the next episode will flash back to fill in that time gap – obviously Jesse’s position when last seen was untenable to sustain very long, but he’s far too important a character to be killed off without our seeing what happens. We can guess from the status quo with the DEA at the end of the last episode when they are still hot to trot to capture Walt that there has been no big bust of Todd & the Nazis in the interim. </p>
<p>(From a legal standpoint, Walt would have had more leverage if he had ratted them out to the DEA right after Hank was killed - he could have asked for witness protection for his whole family, plus he could have told Skyler & Flynn the truth about how Hank was killed. He also could have found a way to hide the money barrel first, so he would have salvaged something. Unlike Skyler alone, Walt had a huge amount of info to trade.)</p>
<p>Wow, those are all great points calmom! </p>
<p>I’m not sure what I hope at this point. I kind of feel sorry for everyone!</p>
<p>I’d like to see Jesse triumph somehow.</p>
<p>Calmom has good points, but Walter seems to buy into the idea that ratting is not okay.</p>
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<p>Oh, I don’t know. Speaking as a synthetic organic chemist (kind of like Walt’s training!), I know a LOT of very smart, very talented chemists who are still unemployed/underemployed after the collapse of the pharmaceutical industry several years ago. By collapse, I mean that many (if not most) of the US-based research labs in big pharma - think Pfizer, Wyeth, Merck - went through wholesale layoffs of their chemistry staff as they outsourced much of that research to China and India.</p>
<p>I know very smart people right now who have been unemployed for 7+ years - either because they didn’t want to relocate after their job disappeared, didn’t have the temperament for entrepeneurship, and/or couldn’t find a teaching job. (Believe me, there are parts of the the Northeast and MI right now where a PhD Organic/Medicinal chemist would be LUCKY to find a job as a high school teacher.) I know lots of very smart, accomplished chemists who just got out of chemistry altogether. Shoot, I think that I read that the discoverer of Lipitor was fired from Pfizer when they shut down some labs - and lipitor made what, billions of dollars for Pfizer?</p>
<p>In fact, when my research lab closed, there was some black humor in the halls about making black-market drugs, and this was before “Breaking Bad.” So no, that part of the story doesn’t seem so crazy to me and the other ex-research chemists I know.</p>
<p>Not to mention - drug kingpins and meth cookers can make a LOT more money a LOT more quickly than most other jobs you can get with a chemistry background!</p>
<p>Scout59,
I found your post above so disheartening.
We witnessed the pharma collapse from the sidelines…contacting reps a d tech service regarding our antibiotics became chaotic.</p>
<p>If im not being too nosy, what path did you follow employment-wise?</p>
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<p>Thanks for your reply. Interesting. Full disclosure: my son’s own high school chemistry teacher has a PhD from a top university, and given his real-world situation and Walt’s fictional situation, I have wondered wondered about the industry in general. But my kid’s teacher seems like a a well-adjusted family person with smart accomplished kids of his own–unlike Walt who is unhappy, and harbors bitter grievances and resentments. He enjoys his job, and is my kid’s favorite teacher. He’s a great educational asset, who does an organic chem class post-AP–rare at the HS level. He watches BB, and uses the science for illustrative purposes, and points out the hits and misses. My son knows not to use hydrofluric acid to dissolve bodies, but to go with a base, and why. </p>
<p>As with Walt, he has a moonlighting job, but in his case it’s not drug kingpin, but consulting. </p>
<p>Actually, I’d like to see more teachers with his level of educational accomplishment in our public schools–by choice–as in Finland, which has arguably the best educational system in the world. In Finland, one of the keys seems to be that the teaching profession has the status of physician, college professor, or investment banker, and the difficulty of entry is also equivalent to those professions.</p>
<p>Musicmom - if you think it was disheartening to read, just think how crazy it was to live through!</p>
<p>When my research site closed, my D was just starting her senior year of high school - talk about your bad timing! I scrambled and found a job around here that had nothing to do with chemistry… at all. Funny thing is, it’s been 6 years since the site closed, and I still miss chemistry every day.</p>
<p>So, now I’m working on my teaching certification. I’m taking my last class right now, and next semester I start student teaching as a high school chemistry teacher. Just like Walter White, except without the ego and the drive to build an evil empire.</p>
<p>So what I’m getting from some who question why Walt White took the route of making meth rather than a more conventional route (2nd job, life insurance, ect.) is that while he was perhaps part of his life a mild-mannered family man teacher, yet inside he had the makings of a Heisenberg all along. It just needed the right ingredients? Or the sun, moon and stars to align? Wasn’t this something he thought he could do temporarily and after making the money he could revert to what he had once been? But the power and potential to always go bigger took over? And was more exciting to him than the life he once had? Is it all just a chess game to him now?</p>
<p>I agree with your assessment Miller. He thought he could do a couple of cooks, make some big money, set it aside and be done. It was only when he got into it that he turned to the dark side, the REAL breaking bad. It’s like sometimes when you realize you could get away with something that is wrong, the chance of getting caught is slim and the excitement high. Probably how Marie felt when she shoplifted.</p>
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<p>He’s all set then! (But it does sound like the kind of teacher who would keep the kids’ attention!)</p>
<p>Thanks, scout, supplying your story post chemist as chemist.
I wish you all the best teaching, sounds like you’ll do great.</p>
<p>Like laticher, I also think teachers with advanced degrees and real passion for teaching is a laudable goal. In NJ, it’s more common than some states.
Our son is in his third year teaching music in public school and is loving it. He has a masters and considers himself an educator/musician. He performs with several groups locally and in NYC.
Love when he shares stories of his beginning instrumentalists and how they progress rapidly when theyre into it.</p>
<p>PS I’m a microbiologist and although I don’t enjoy some of the newer stresses in the field, I will miss the actual work with a vengeance when I retire in 5 or so years. I hope I DO get to choose my time, we’ll see.</p>
<p>I think the added ingredient for Walter White is the cancer diagnosis-- at the time he “broke bad” it is likely that he believed he would be dead in a year. So maybe some excitement and danger in his life was one of those things on his bucket list-- and in any case, he wasn’t worried about the consequences of getting caught. His impending death from cancer changed the risk/reward calculation somewhat.</p>
<p>I think he started off with the idea of making a quick million or so and quitting, but got addicted to the money and sense of power – plus of course he got dug in ever deeper and deeper by all the things that kept going wrong with his plans. The show is built around something of a myth that he is brilliant, but from my point of view he is actually quite stupid and keeps making one dumb mistake after another. Again and again he comes up with some “ingenious” idea to get himself or his crew out of the latest impending crisis situation, but the fact that he is in constant crisis is an indication of his overall incompetence and mismanagement. (And that goes back to personality flaws that may very well be at the heart as to why he didn’t make it as a chemist in the first place. He’s very good at short-term planning and strategizing, but a bumbling idiot when it comes to big-picture thinking. In that respect, he makes Todd look like a genius).</p>
<p>calsmom, all your points are valid…except the last one! Yucko todd</p>
<p>The other piece to the puzzle is that Walt didn’t expect to live more than a year so he never developed an exit plan. As I read it his plan was to cook and sell as much meth as he could in the short term then die leaving Skyler enough money to support the family on for at least a few years.</p>
<p>I’ve got to say that I was a little disappointed with this week’s episode (one before final). There’s too much to be said and done with too little time left to have Walt go on the lamb. It almost seemed like a filler episode? Hoping for fireworks next week.</p>
<p>In talking with my son tonight, after going over all kinds of possible scenarios, I said,“I think I’m just going to clear my head, watch the show, and see where it takes me, rather than try to predict an ending I hope happens.” I’ve loved the show so far, and I don’t want to end it by waiting for something to happen that never does and be disappointed in the grand felina of things.</p>
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<p>IIRC, in season 1 Walt calculated a very precise amount that he wanted to make to ensure his family’s well-being, something like $757,000, and then he was going to get out. The problem was, he kept having the money taken from him, they has supply problems, etc. so he had to keep making more. Eventually he just got so caught up in the process that, with his cancer in remission, he just wanted more and more.</p>
<p>I keep wondering about the parallels between Walt and Gus and thinking about the ricin. Does anyone else think that, in the same way Gus poisoned his enemies in the Mexican cartel and swallowed the poison himself to avoid their suspicion, Walt may use the ricin against Todd and his neo-Nazi uncles? The difference being, Gus had set up an exit strategy for himself to save his life while Walt is already a dead man walking.</p>
<p>I just hope Lydia is there to share in the mass poisoning.</p>