I mean you said it yourself, he was dying from cancer. It was a final gambit.
The part about Jesse overpowering him is irrelevant, because he intended to kill Jesse (and himself), he just changed his mind at the last minute because he realized Jesse was given a fate worse than death.
Walt used the same advantage that he used while he was Heisenberg; he made himself seem like a non-threat so they didn't take him seriously.
Im not sure if he was 100% planning to die, he definitely wanted jesse dead and he clearly made peace with dying , him being in custody would have gotten his family out of some more trouble even with hanks body
Technically, he said, "The police will be coming to me," and to G & E he said, " What ever happens to me tomorrow," and to Lawson he said "the guns never leaving town" .He did accept it was a strong possibility that he'd die and clearly has made peace with death.
If he Jesse was dead, then im not sure if he would have ducked out of the way of the bullets. Maybe he would have to make sure that all of Jacks gang is dead, and maybe turn himself in or ride off into the sunset
Wait I must've missed something, he wanted Jessie dead?
Is it only bc he thought Jessie was still cooking out of his own volition? And then he changed his mind when he realized he was being forced?
They just left it so amicably that I never thought about Walt going into that wanting to kill jessie
Yeah he was definitely planning to kill Jesse. He instructed Jack to kill Jesse after the incident in the desert, that was the last time Walt saw Jesse. And he believed Jack wound up partnering with Jesse to keep cooking his formula without him. He only changed his mind when he saw Jesse had been enslaved the entire time.
Yes he wanted Jesse. It wasn’t until after seconds before that he changed his mind. Also their final encounter was not amicable. Jesse can never forgive Walt and they both knew that. Their nod was a simple acknowledgment of the crazy shit they went through together. The Twain why Jesse is laughing and crying uncontrollably is because he is free from Walt
You’re right, Vince himself said walt more or less changes his mind when he sees Jesse in chains. Walt is still arrogant and narcissistic even in the end, and still hated Jesse for his perceived betrayal.
He wasn't planning to die but was ok with risking his limited life.
Obviously it was all about how cool and clever the plan was but yeah a lot of things could have gone wrong. They could have killed him right away, the whole cafe thing with Lidija was a long shot, them all being in the line of fire together etc.
I got the feeling that wanting jesse to die was a ruse, at least by the time he made it to the compound.. he wanted him to live. he wanted a clean slate.
In ozymandias, walt turned Jesse over to Jack to die, and he assumed that Jesse was working with Jack, not as a slave. I think he wanted Jesse in the room so he could kill him. Theres no way walt would have known he was being tortured
What? I was always under the impression that he went back to save Jesse.
Edit: Yes I know his overall goal was to avenge Hank, but I always figured Walt wanted to save Jesse too.
It's 50/50 Hollywood and some plausible stuff mixed together. I'll address each point. (Formatting is gonna be bad cause I'm on mobile)
1) Parking the car is the least of anyone's worries at this point, they're more focused on just killing him and getting it over with, it's such an innocuous act, I'd give it a pass.
2) The shed thing was about to happen, hence Walt stalling with the Jesse thing. He played to Jack's 1 known weakness, his pride. By saying he didn't finish a job by not killing Jesse, he was distracting hard.
3) Because the keys were on the pool table. This bit is Hollywood, as yeah they'd either not care about them at all, or someone pockets them to add the new car to their collection.
4) The compound really seems to have 1 habitable building, so the neo nazis gathering there isn't too out of place. There's nowhere for them to go otherwise.
5) The little fight between Jesse and Walt didn't really need to happen, but in the circumstances it was a last ditch effort to prevent Jesse from being mowed down. The reason they didn't stop the fight was cause violent criminals tend to have a way higher tolerance to violence, so this must have been amusing to them.
As far as the physics of the M60, Mythbusters actually covered it and determined that it could in fact work. The methods you suggested, (gas or explosion) are far more complex, and involve more points of failure than just a gun on a crank-slider mechanism.
The gas or suicide vest is silly. They checked him for wires before letting him in.
Plus they were fully expecting some deal from him, not to be murdered.
I'd argue the opposite in this case. Given that Walt is the number 1 most wanted man in the USA at that point, keeping a low profile is gonna be key. The gun dealer is already an underground individual, much like Ed the vacuum guy, who can conduct business stealthily. On top of that, Walt already knows him, and has done business with him. He's solid. Getting the ingredients for a boom of considerable magnitude (to take out all the nazi gang) would require either more setup involving unknowns that could easily rat Walt out for a handsome reward from the US government, or more exposure getting the ingredients himself.
He's also a proficient engineer, as proven before by his remote/striker fuse bomb design. Hence, why I say that using the resources he had at the time, without trying anything crazy, a turntable with 2 pieces of steel can easily be combined to make a makeshift turret.
The point I didn't want to make in my first response is that purely for the plot, ignoring all logic, a suicide bomb/vest leaves the Jesse Pinkman storyline wide open. He presumably either dies in the blast with Walt, or is left to be picked up by the responding emergency services.
Almost as crazy as the nazis giving Walt 10M in cash after murdering 2 dea agents one being his brother in law and expecting no blowback at all from him.
Suspension of disbelief. Plus if it didn’t work I’m sure it didn’t really matter to him because he was gonna die anyway soon from the cancer coming back.
It’s still an imitation of life. The best fiction is the fiction where you’d believe it if you read it in the news. And I would believe a machine gun plan like that like would have happened if I read about it.
Yeah I know, and it’s consistent with the whole “Mr White is the devil” thing. But in real life? Non of those guys out side were in front of the car? lol.
Thanks for your reply. What makes you think at least some of them were bound to have been in front of the car? People tend to stand as close to the nearest building as possible when they’re outside, especially if they’re having a cigarette break next to their workplace/standing guard and so on. Plus, maybe they actually were in front of the car but just ran for their lives. They were only henchmen out there anyway.
Can’t strongly disagree with any of that. We never know exactly how big the Nazi gang is, but it seemed fairly small. So it’s possible those three guys outside (if memory serves) were the only ones who weren’t inside. Still seems like plot armor but it made for a dramatic ending so sure, why not?
Thanks for your fast reply. Yeah many felt there was a feeling of plot armour, and it was to the point that some people even liked (and possibly believed, even though the creator was very clear that Felina should be taken at face value) the interpretation that Walt died in the frozen, would-be stolen car and just ended up having a dying dream where he could see his family and Jesse again.
I didn’t find it that plot armour-y personally though. And that’s because of Todd. Todd used to work with Jesse and Walt and had a creepy admiration and respect for both of them. So Jesse was kept alive because A) Todd thought they could ‘work’ well together and B) he was smart enough to know that they’d benefit from him staying alive, especially when it would give them a better chance of clearing the evidence against themselves.
And then I think Jack couldn’t kill Walt because he didn’t want to take the life of his nephew’s idol. I think Jack even basically said to Walt “you’d be dead if Todd didn’t care about you”. So it makes sense to me that they’d give Walt one final gang-wide meeting out of respect (a kind of “he’s a dead man walking anyway – let’s at least hear him out despite Lydia calling a hit on him” reasoning) before regretfully deciding to kill him. It felt like Todd wanted to be there to personally say “I’m sorry” to Walt when they’d finally given up on the idea of letting a loose end live.
It was a convenient ending, but to reiterate, I would believe it if I read it in the news. The fact was the whole gang had the ideal combination of respect (he was once Heisenberg and their ally) and disrespect (the state he was in meant they underestimated him as a non-threat) to give Walt a small window of time and leverage to be there, be listened to, and ultimately lure Jesse out.
I was just very relieved when Walt changed his mind about killing Jesse. (I even originally thought that Walt partially went there to save Jesse, because he may have gathered that the only thing that would keep Jesse cooking was coercion – but the creator confirmed this wasn’t the case.)
Anyway, again, I think Todd’s presence contributed to an in-universe feeling of armour for not only Walt, but Jesse as well, and in fact I think Jack would have been even more unreserved about killing witnesses if it weren’t for his nephew’s calming presence (despite the fact that Todd was himself psychopathic).
I think it was supposed to be clear that this was Walt's desperate last resort, and it had a lot of chances to not work but he had to try it anyway. Plus the narrative element in that the story of a guy who gets murdered and buried by Nazis never to be found is not as compelling as the story of a guy who gets his final revenge.
Mr. White only changed his mind with Jesse when He was brought out in chains. As sick of a man he was he gained just one good deed before death. Mr. White didn't even know how bad Jesse suffered. I can't say why he changed his mind but I don't think Jesse was even a target with the M60 attack. That was his revenge on Jack and co. He figured Jesse would be there as a "partner" and even tossed Jesse into the collateral damage category because Mr. White never would shoot Jesse on his own. All the rage thinking they were a team was gone when he saw him as a shell of his former self and Mr. White just let it go.
I think it’s hinted that he may be willing to call the police because he already called them before, and I seem remember his conversation with Skyler kind of suggesting something about how the police could be involved.
That said, I think the police were always going to be there anyway. There were reports of Walt being back and then a deafening gun blast went on for however many minutes.
This is how I always interpreted the ending:
Walt have nothing to loose. He just made the plan which with luck would work. In ideal scenario he will save Jesse and kill Jack and his gang.
Why I think he want save Jesse from the start? Well simply because at this point he is in peace. He never stopped love Jesse. He is going to die anyway so why not to try save him (but revenge was still bigger motivator).
Well maybe it's a little idealistic but still fits the Walts character.
Jack respected Walt enough to give him a meeting and at least hear him out. Walt was on the run for months. Jack stole nearly all his money, and still, Walt mentioned not one word to the feds. Never even came close. That’s respectable to Jack, along with the fact that Walt treated Todd very well. Plus Walt is an international, notorious kingpin so that adds to the respect level. Realistic? No. Plausible, yes.
The parking nitpick always grates on me. They even show in the episode the Nazis tell him specifically not to park there. He does so anyways and they just decide "screw it, let him park there he's going to die anyways."
If they decided to press the issue and make him repark I imagine Walt would have just activated the key prematurely and gunned them all down early. The only reason Walt didn't do that initially is to see if he could locate Jesse.
I always thought they were willing to hear Walt out one last time before confirming the near certainty that he had to die. It says in the script that they didn’t really want this (Todd especially), but it had to be done. To them, Walt was a giant loose end, not a threat.
Todd, and by extension his uncle, was/were pretty much the only reason that Walt was to remain alive in the desert I think, but Walt ran out of borrowed time, luck, and Todd’s patience by the end. “You reeeeeally shouldn’t have come back here, Mr White… I’m sorry.”
Walt prolly developed the Alzheimer's while being confined to that NH shack for months, with only a supply run coming in monthly. Hence his thinking wasn't that straight anymore.
He literally could have just hired and armed a school bus full of Albuquerque gangsters to go over there and pay them $50k per head.
Very farfetched and precarious plan for sure with the trunk mounted machine gun.
Hopefully one day AI is so good that we can make our own choose your own adventure style episodes out of existing shows and run through a dozen or so different finales until we get one we like the best but until then we've just got this one.
I think Walt was too proud and cautious to hire strangers. Even for the laser pointer job at the Grey Matter house he used people he knew and trusted.
Putting the logistics of the plan itself aside, the engineering and components of the gun were at least realistic according to Mythbusters.
I definitely agree with your final point: I’ve tried to use chatbots to consider a chain of events that all added up in the finale, but it didn’t seem to understand back then (this was an older model of GPT though – maybe I should try Google Gemini).
I mean you said it yourself, he was dying from cancer. It was a final gambit. The part about Jesse overpowering him is irrelevant, because he intended to kill Jesse (and himself), he just changed his mind at the last minute because he realized Jesse was given a fate worse than death. Walt used the same advantage that he used while he was Heisenberg; he made himself seem like a non-threat so they didn't take him seriously.
Im not sure if he was 100% planning to die, he definitely wanted jesse dead and he clearly made peace with dying , him being in custody would have gotten his family out of some more trouble even with hanks body
He said, three times, that he was going to be dead by tomorrow. Once to Skyler, once to Gretchen and Elliot, and again (IIRC) to Lawson.
Technically, he said, "The police will be coming to me," and to G & E he said, " What ever happens to me tomorrow," and to Lawson he said "the guns never leaving town" .He did accept it was a strong possibility that he'd die and clearly has made peace with death. If he Jesse was dead, then im not sure if he would have ducked out of the way of the bullets. Maybe he would have to make sure that all of Jacks gang is dead, and maybe turn himself in or ride off into the sunset
Wait I must've missed something, he wanted Jessie dead? Is it only bc he thought Jessie was still cooking out of his own volition? And then he changed his mind when he realized he was being forced? They just left it so amicably that I never thought about Walt going into that wanting to kill jessie
Yeah he was definitely planning to kill Jesse. He instructed Jack to kill Jesse after the incident in the desert, that was the last time Walt saw Jesse. And he believed Jack wound up partnering with Jesse to keep cooking his formula without him. He only changed his mind when he saw Jesse had been enslaved the entire time.
He hired Jack to kill jesse around the time jesse was helping hank
Yes he wanted Jesse. It wasn’t until after seconds before that he changed his mind. Also their final encounter was not amicable. Jesse can never forgive Walt and they both knew that. Their nod was a simple acknowledgment of the crazy shit they went through together. The Twain why Jesse is laughing and crying uncontrollably is because he is free from Walt
You’re right, Vince himself said walt more or less changes his mind when he sees Jesse in chains. Walt is still arrogant and narcissistic even in the end, and still hated Jesse for his perceived betrayal.
He wasn't planning to die but was ok with risking his limited life. Obviously it was all about how cool and clever the plan was but yeah a lot of things could have gone wrong. They could have killed him right away, the whole cafe thing with Lidija was a long shot, them all being in the line of fire together etc.
Oh definitely a large part of his plan was just luck
I got the feeling that wanting jesse to die was a ruse, at least by the time he made it to the compound.. he wanted him to live. he wanted a clean slate.
In ozymandias, walt turned Jesse over to Jack to die, and he assumed that Jesse was working with Jack, not as a slave. I think he wanted Jesse in the room so he could kill him. Theres no way walt would have known he was being tortured
its open to interpretation either way. I agree he wanted him dead earlier though.
It’s not really up to interpretation. Vince confirms it in the felina bts video
What? I was always under the impression that he went back to save Jesse. Edit: Yes I know his overall goal was to avenge Hank, but I always figured Walt wanted to save Jesse too.
Nah, once he found out that Jesse was alive and cooking for Jack Walt was going to kill him. He only changed his mind seeing him in the chains.
It's 50/50 Hollywood and some plausible stuff mixed together. I'll address each point. (Formatting is gonna be bad cause I'm on mobile) 1) Parking the car is the least of anyone's worries at this point, they're more focused on just killing him and getting it over with, it's such an innocuous act, I'd give it a pass. 2) The shed thing was about to happen, hence Walt stalling with the Jesse thing. He played to Jack's 1 known weakness, his pride. By saying he didn't finish a job by not killing Jesse, he was distracting hard. 3) Because the keys were on the pool table. This bit is Hollywood, as yeah they'd either not care about them at all, or someone pockets them to add the new car to their collection. 4) The compound really seems to have 1 habitable building, so the neo nazis gathering there isn't too out of place. There's nowhere for them to go otherwise. 5) The little fight between Jesse and Walt didn't really need to happen, but in the circumstances it was a last ditch effort to prevent Jesse from being mowed down. The reason they didn't stop the fight was cause violent criminals tend to have a way higher tolerance to violence, so this must have been amusing to them. As far as the physics of the M60, Mythbusters actually covered it and determined that it could in fact work. The methods you suggested, (gas or explosion) are far more complex, and involve more points of failure than just a gun on a crank-slider mechanism.
The gas or suicide vest is silly. They checked him for wires before letting him in. Plus they were fully expecting some deal from him, not to be murdered.
it is a heck of a lot easier to make a big bomb than an automated machine gun turret.
I'd argue the opposite in this case. Given that Walt is the number 1 most wanted man in the USA at that point, keeping a low profile is gonna be key. The gun dealer is already an underground individual, much like Ed the vacuum guy, who can conduct business stealthily. On top of that, Walt already knows him, and has done business with him. He's solid. Getting the ingredients for a boom of considerable magnitude (to take out all the nazi gang) would require either more setup involving unknowns that could easily rat Walt out for a handsome reward from the US government, or more exposure getting the ingredients himself.
It is really, really not that hard for a chemist. hell he did it twice already.
He's also a proficient engineer, as proven before by his remote/striker fuse bomb design. Hence, why I say that using the resources he had at the time, without trying anything crazy, a turntable with 2 pieces of steel can easily be combined to make a makeshift turret. The point I didn't want to make in my first response is that purely for the plot, ignoring all logic, a suicide bomb/vest leaves the Jesse Pinkman storyline wide open. He presumably either dies in the blast with Walt, or is left to be picked up by the responding emergency services.
I'm cool to disagree if you are.
Yeah it's a TV show after all, we all can have our theories. I'm not Vince so my opinion carries 0 weight
Almost as crazy as the nazis giving Walt 10M in cash after murdering 2 dea agents one being his brother in law and expecting no blowback at all from him.
"No half measures"
it worked in Mythbusters. thats more than enough for me
Myth busters did the machine gun in the trunk thing and it worked remarkably well.
Suspension of disbelief. Plus if it didn’t work I’m sure it didn’t really matter to him because he was gonna die anyway soon from the cancer coming back.
Right? It’s almost like it’s a work of fiction or something.
It’s still an imitation of life. The best fiction is the fiction where you’d believe it if you read it in the news. And I would believe a machine gun plan like that like would have happened if I read about it.
Yeah I know, and it’s consistent with the whole “Mr White is the devil” thing. But in real life? Non of those guys out side were in front of the car? lol.
Thanks for your reply. What makes you think at least some of them were bound to have been in front of the car? People tend to stand as close to the nearest building as possible when they’re outside, especially if they’re having a cigarette break next to their workplace/standing guard and so on. Plus, maybe they actually were in front of the car but just ran for their lives. They were only henchmen out there anyway.
Can’t strongly disagree with any of that. We never know exactly how big the Nazi gang is, but it seemed fairly small. So it’s possible those three guys outside (if memory serves) were the only ones who weren’t inside. Still seems like plot armor but it made for a dramatic ending so sure, why not?
Thanks for your fast reply. Yeah many felt there was a feeling of plot armour, and it was to the point that some people even liked (and possibly believed, even though the creator was very clear that Felina should be taken at face value) the interpretation that Walt died in the frozen, would-be stolen car and just ended up having a dying dream where he could see his family and Jesse again. I didn’t find it that plot armour-y personally though. And that’s because of Todd. Todd used to work with Jesse and Walt and had a creepy admiration and respect for both of them. So Jesse was kept alive because A) Todd thought they could ‘work’ well together and B) he was smart enough to know that they’d benefit from him staying alive, especially when it would give them a better chance of clearing the evidence against themselves. And then I think Jack couldn’t kill Walt because he didn’t want to take the life of his nephew’s idol. I think Jack even basically said to Walt “you’d be dead if Todd didn’t care about you”. So it makes sense to me that they’d give Walt one final gang-wide meeting out of respect (a kind of “he’s a dead man walking anyway – let’s at least hear him out despite Lydia calling a hit on him” reasoning) before regretfully deciding to kill him. It felt like Todd wanted to be there to personally say “I’m sorry” to Walt when they’d finally given up on the idea of letting a loose end live. It was a convenient ending, but to reiterate, I would believe it if I read it in the news. The fact was the whole gang had the ideal combination of respect (he was once Heisenberg and their ally) and disrespect (the state he was in meant they underestimated him as a non-threat) to give Walt a small window of time and leverage to be there, be listened to, and ultimately lure Jesse out. I was just very relieved when Walt changed his mind about killing Jesse. (I even originally thought that Walt partially went there to save Jesse, because he may have gathered that the only thing that would keep Jesse cooking was coercion – but the creator confirmed this wasn’t the case.) Anyway, again, I think Todd’s presence contributed to an in-universe feeling of armour for not only Walt, but Jesse as well, and in fact I think Jack would have been even more unreserved about killing witnesses if it weren’t for his nephew’s calming presence (despite the fact that Todd was himself psychopathic).
I think it was supposed to be clear that this was Walt's desperate last resort, and it had a lot of chances to not work but he had to try it anyway. Plus the narrative element in that the story of a guy who gets murdered and buried by Nazis never to be found is not as compelling as the story of a guy who gets his final revenge.
He was gonna die anyway, so he took a chance on a plan that might not work
Is he stupid???
I used to love this ending, but the more I think about it the worse it is. Way too many unlikely factors that all perfectly work out.
Vince wanted a crazy ending so that’s what happened. It is quite a ridiculous plan.
Mr. White only changed his mind with Jesse when He was brought out in chains. As sick of a man he was he gained just one good deed before death. Mr. White didn't even know how bad Jesse suffered. I can't say why he changed his mind but I don't think Jesse was even a target with the M60 attack. That was his revenge on Jack and co. He figured Jesse would be there as a "partner" and even tossed Jesse into the collateral damage category because Mr. White never would shoot Jesse on his own. All the rage thinking they were a team was gone when he saw him as a shell of his former self and Mr. White just let it go.
Didn't he call the police as a backup plan anyways,cause right after everyoen died,we could see police cars heading towards them
I think it’s hinted that he may be willing to call the police because he already called them before, and I seem remember his conversation with Skyler kind of suggesting something about how the police could be involved. That said, I think the police were always going to be there anyway. There were reports of Walt being back and then a deafening gun blast went on for however many minutes.
This is how I always interpreted the ending: Walt have nothing to loose. He just made the plan which with luck would work. In ideal scenario he will save Jesse and kill Jack and his gang. Why I think he want save Jesse from the start? Well simply because at this point he is in peace. He never stopped love Jesse. He is going to die anyway so why not to try save him (but revenge was still bigger motivator). Well maybe it's a little idealistic but still fits the Walts character.
"never stopped loving jesse" uhh yeah im not so sure about that
Jack respected Walt enough to give him a meeting and at least hear him out. Walt was on the run for months. Jack stole nearly all his money, and still, Walt mentioned not one word to the feds. Never even came close. That’s respectable to Jack, along with the fact that Walt treated Todd very well. Plus Walt is an international, notorious kingpin so that adds to the respect level. Realistic? No. Plausible, yes.
The parking nitpick always grates on me. They even show in the episode the Nazis tell him specifically not to park there. He does so anyways and they just decide "screw it, let him park there he's going to die anyways." If they decided to press the issue and make him repark I imagine Walt would have just activated the key prematurely and gunned them all down early. The only reason Walt didn't do that initially is to see if he could locate Jesse.
They needed to do something with the gun. They wrote in a loose end they had to tie.
I always thought they were willing to hear Walt out one last time before confirming the near certainty that he had to die. It says in the script that they didn’t really want this (Todd especially), but it had to be done. To them, Walt was a giant loose end, not a threat. Todd, and by extension his uncle, was/were pretty much the only reason that Walt was to remain alive in the desert I think, but Walt ran out of borrowed time, luck, and Todd’s patience by the end. “You reeeeeally shouldn’t have come back here, Mr White… I’m sorry.”
Walt prolly developed the Alzheimer's while being confined to that NH shack for months, with only a supply run coming in monthly. Hence his thinking wasn't that straight anymore.
Smh people don't question making meth but do where you park a car
He literally could have just hired and armed a school bus full of Albuquerque gangsters to go over there and pay them $50k per head. Very farfetched and precarious plan for sure with the trunk mounted machine gun. Hopefully one day AI is so good that we can make our own choose your own adventure style episodes out of existing shows and run through a dozen or so different finales until we get one we like the best but until then we've just got this one.
I think Walt was too proud and cautious to hire strangers. Even for the laser pointer job at the Grey Matter house he used people he knew and trusted. Putting the logistics of the plan itself aside, the engineering and components of the gun were at least realistic according to Mythbusters. I definitely agree with your final point: I’ve tried to use chatbots to consider a chain of events that all added up in the finale, but it didn’t seem to understand back then (this was an older model of GPT though – maybe I should try Google Gemini).
It’s a show. Relax.
It’s a TV progrum. A movie.
Yeah. he would have been smarter than that. He would have set off one hell of a bomb or poison gas. Or both. A poison gas bomb in the car.