Yeah you totally missed the point. If you cannot see parallels between how empires were created in those cases (and if you think killing a few people is worse than hiring private security to gun down striking workers or working poor immigrants for ridiculous hours in dangerous conditions or forcibly displacing…

No, not at all… What friend did he let himself get fooled into usurping?
2 smart men (Walt shows it with his meth recipe/science tricks: Oedipus shows it by outsmarting the Sphinx) who think they can defy fate (Walt with the cancer diagnosis's potential to financially lead his family to ruins:Oedipus with the Oracle's…

Jesse had not only ratted him out and betrayed all trust, but he had basically tricked him into killing his own brother-in-law (inadvertently). I never said Walt is awesome (which I absolutely hate about all the smug moralizing folk who are out to prove anybody who can identify with/ see how he is the hero of the tale…

This episode was the pinnacle of Walt being a TRAGIC hero. Whatever he may have done before it, in this episode he loses everything due to dramatic irony and forces beyond his control (and though his decisions played into them, many other actors also convened to bring them about) and if anything shows his true…

"I don't see how people could consider that Oedipus guy the hero of this story, he seems like a dick, he murdered a couple travellers for pissing him off and repeatedly threatened to execute people if they didn't do/say what he wanted them to… I mean sure he had a shitty situation what with the foot pinning and…

I think the whole bargaining scene would be a better match for that… Or a more Curb-esque rewrite… I could see Larry David Walt "I don't know, what is the proper amount of money to give to spare a DEA agent's life?" "Do I have to leave a tip for the guys burying them?" "Do we really gotta shake hands? I gotta tell…

I just thought of something that made the whole loss of Walt's family even more tragic. At first I was thinking that it was kind of sad irony that the one time they wouldn't listen to him lie was the one time he wasn't lying (that he didn't kill Hank, in fact was trying to save his life) but still he was a monster…

@avclub-e129a878f7b0e5aa9ac09e0282f64ea6:disqus The Aryans didn't get hit because they had overwhelming firepower. And actually, thinking about it, I may have given them too little credit as a fighting unit from the first shootout in terms of weapon handling. I was thinking these guys were probably all just ex…

@persia2:disqus I think if he told where Hank was buried he might have sort of given up the game though. He was playing an absolutely heartless villain who would take Holly as some sort of long-promised punishment (shades of Gus?) for betraying him, and I believe he weighed the option and decided in his character that…

It's not quite as simple as the channel deciding for itself (its all about the advertisers) although I assume they could easily find advertisers who wouldn't mind a show like this letting a few fly

Phony cursing is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps

A$AC Schrader

Yeah I remember somebody last week mentioning the irony of a massive shootout taking place on the GPS coordinates identified on a lottery ticket. It takes a whole other even more messed up dimension now that Walt's brother in law (+partner) that he was desperately trying to save in his last seconds is under the ground…

Not to get too arm-chair academicky but it really does feel like this show as an overall arc has really captured the idea of the clash of the Apollonian [rationality/logic/individualism] and Dionysian [chaos/emotions/masses] as Nietzsche proposed as being the magical property of Greek tragedy (and why he felt most…

@avclub-6a2ec3076bb494e5c64eb1a422d9fe3d:disqus No worries about offending me calling me a gun nut (although my interest is more in the tactics and history of warfare than the guns themselves), I've spent a lot of time reading up on some esoteric subjects that have no purpose in real life and I know this, and love any…

There's not really anything saying that Huell has anybody else so I don't see this as being too contrived.Or perhaps he also understands the risk (not just to him, but also to his supposed family if in fact they do exist) and is willing to listen when they tell him that he shouldn't call other people, which would be…

@freaktown:disqus The type, color and number of barrels was KEY to the lie. And the fact that he had rented a van (as opposed to just using somebody's truck). If Huell didn't tell them that they would have had no chance of fooling Walt

There was an AA-12 , 2 pistols, 2 AR-15's and a BAR. No machine guns at all (BAR is the closest, and its an automatic rifle). But the AA-12, BAR and the AR's looked full auto. But due to the slow motion, the dive for cover behind the SUV's engine block wasn't really as long as it seemed (and due to the camera shot…

Walt has never been shown to be a truly cautious person as much as he has fancied himself as one. He has always been somewhat of an idiot who gets lucky and is good at thinking on his feet to correct the mistakes caused by his inexperience in criminal enterprises. And I could see how he could just say to Saul to get a…

Am I insane, or is the sound of a warped cassette like the coolest thing ever? There's something really spooky about pitch shift/ghosting (but maybe thats just because it reminds me of the Jonestown death tape)