Starting Five

1. Mr. Brightside

(It’s just the price I pay/Destiny is calling me…)

“It was only a dream, it was only a dream.”

On Monday, one day after the series finale of “Breaking Bad”, “Felina”, aired, comedian, former “Weekend Update” host and passionate golf commentator Norm Macdonald tweeted, “I was a huge fan of Breaking Bad but I must confess I did not understand that ending at all.”

Two days later Macdonald returned. “One thing seems clear. (Walt) never made it out of that car in the snow, surrounded by police. That’s where he died, his final prayer unanswered.”

Followed by: “But the police came in force, and they surrounded Walt’s car. Then the fantasy begins with car keys falling in his lap.”

And it begins to make sense (credit Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker with coming to the same conclusion, by the way…also, disbelieve if you want, but I wrote what follows before I read Nussbaum’s piece)…

1) The keys magically falling into Walt’s lap…

2). The car starts, though one could argue that only moments earlier Walt had broken the steering shaft while attempting to hot wire the car…

3) Walt taps the driver’s side window and all the snow magically falls off…

4) The vehicle is surrounded by police lights but Walt escapes (the cops never notice the footprints leading to it?)…

5) Suddenly, Walter is in New Mexico, eating at a diner, on his birthday.  Yes, if you are Vince Gilligan, you cannot delay the plot, but if Walt’s already in the final throes of dying, you don’t need to do so…

6) Walter contacts and enlists Badger and Skinny Pete without much difficulty…

7) Walt is too cool and collected at the Schwartz estate in Santa Fe (“you’re going to need a bigger knife”) and he locates their home without much trouble. Someone at Gray Matter just gave him the address because he poses as a New York Times writer…?

8) Walter visits Skylar, and even lingers outside the apartment to catch one last glimpse of Flynn, though the complex is supposedly under surveillance…

9) The manner in which Walter appears to us at Skylar’s allows us to imagine the scene initially from the vantage point of Walt being absent and later from that of him being present. The wooden column can be a coffin…

10) Walt slips the Ricin into Lydia’s packet. How, since the packet appears untouched? Also, Lydia and Todd never sat at the same table before this scene and for the first time, Lydia is not seated at a table against the window.  And she’s a creature of habit?

11) This all takes place on Walter’s birthday, which is convenient. It’s also the day back in the pilot that he first learned of the lucrative opportunities involved in cooking and selling meth…

12) Walt has the time and talent to fashion an automatic, remote-controlled, rotating weapon in the desert. Purchases the equipment, constructs it…

13) The Neo Nazis never check the trunk…

14) The Neo Nazis allow Walt to park the car the way he wanted to. They even allow him to drive it…

15) The Neo Nazis don’t waste Walter immediately, but give him his audience with Jesse (this is all getting a little too “Tune in next week when the Caped Crusader…”)…

16) The only Neo Nazis not  immediately killed by the trunk rifle are the two villains whose deaths would most satisfy us: Todd and Uncle Jack. Jesse has the opportunity to strangle his tormentor while Walt is allowed to avenge Hank’s murder by shooting Uncle Jack…

17) Jesse gets away. Someone else can figure out why Jesse backed the escape vehicle out behind Walt the way he did. Walt, plagued with a guilty conscience during the long months of solitude in New Hampshire, may have been plagued by guilt over the fate to which he’d sent Jesse…

18) Speaking of which, we are given a lingering close-up shot of the New Hampshire license plate: “Live Free or Die.” Huge clue right there…

19) The episode’s title, “Felina”, is both an anagram and a reference to the lovely lass in Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” The Marty Robbins tape would have been one of the final things Walt encountered in a lucid state. Here is one stanza from the classic ballad:

Felina is strong and I rise where I’ve fallen, Though I am weary I can’t stop to rest. I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle. I feel the bullet go deep in my chest.

Not a one-for-one parallel, but certainly you can see a similarity.

 

20) Lydia phones Todd and Walt answers, allowing him (and us) the satisfaction of informing her that he has poisoned her. Again, a little too convenient, a little too clean.

21) Think about it: the episode begins with Walter in a car, surrounded by the police, and he has just injured his right hand by trying to jimmy the drive shaft. The episode ends with Walter on the floor of his beloved meth lab, his right hand bloodied and leaving a stain on a piece of equipment, as the police surrounding him.

22) The final clue? And again, there may be more hidden. One follower pointed out to Macdonald that his theory falls apart because when Walt visited Sklyar she tells him about the three masked men who visited to threaten her about mentioning Lydia. But what if that was all part of Walt’s imagination from an earlier episode? It’s slightly incredible that they eluded police surveillance, but that they all dressed like the Penguin’s henchmen from a Batman episode? Todd and the Neo Nazis thought nothing of wasting a half-dozen meth cookers in their street clothes, but now they’re all going to suit up in modified Ninja gear to break into Walt’s house? That sounds more like the stuff of Walt’s imagination.

Let’s run with this theory for a moment longer. Show creator Vince Gilligan appeared on “Talking Bad’, a live, nationally televised program immediately after “Felina” aired. Gilligan answered host Chris Hardwick’s questions in a straight-forward manner, but why wouldn’t he? It’s never the artist’s job to explain the painting.

Gilligan did provide a HUGE clue, though. He told Hardwick near the end of the telecast that his favorite show of all time, the one that most inspired him, is “The Twilight Zone.” Which ending, the on-the-surface finale, or this alternate-theory finale, is more in line with an episode of “The Twilight Zone?”

What about, a skeptic could ask, Jesse’s own dream sequence with woodworking? Okay, but what if that moment were real? We emerge from the dream to see Jesse a meth slave, alone, and that is the end of the scene. What if Gilligan were simply giving us one final glimpse of Jesse’s reality?

And so now “Felina” becomes crystal-meth clear. The amoral and terrible decisions that Walter White made in the two years since his 50th birthday, the short-cuts to financial security (Are you listening, Wall Street? America?), have tragic and collateral consequences for all involved. Marie loses her husband (as does Skylar). Flynn not only loses his father, but his positive image of him –forever. Jesse is a meth-slave version of The Gimp, forever confined to a subterranean hell hole when not cooking meth? Andrea is dead. Only the bad guys –Todd, Uncle Jack, Lydia — win. It is torturous to bear, which is far more in line with “Breaking Bad’s” theme.

Finally –and this time I mean it — imagine how giddy Gilligan, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn and the rest of the cast must have been as Hardwick and Jimmy Kimmel discussed the finale without grasping what they had really just seen. It’s a little like Lennay Kekua: all the clues were hiding in plain sight, but we just never paid attention to them.

2. The Space Between

For a film whose title suggest an inexorable fall to earth, “Gravity” is floating this morning upon universally rave reviews. Metacritic.com gives it a 97 (out of 100) while Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 98. Sandra Bullock will definitely be nominated for an Oscar while the film, which aptly is released in –wait for it–the fall, is an early Oscar favorite for “Best Picture.”

I like what A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote: ““Gravity” is less a science-fiction spectacle than a Jack London tale in orbit.”

You should know that Bullock, 49, was not the first or even second choice of director Alfonso Cuaron. He wrote it for Angelina Jolie, who is off directing “Unbroken”, then Marion Cotillard screen-tested. Then Natalie Portman was offered the role, but passed. Finally, Bullock. The feeling here is that people will see the film, which co-stars George Clooney in the Buzz Lightyear-sidekick role, and wonder how anyone BUT Bullock could have ever played the part.

As I’ve noted before in this blog, Bullock has now appeared in “Speed”, “Gravity”, “The Heat” and, wrapping it all up, “Forces of Nature.” She is every high school Physics teacher’s monster crush.

3. Separated at Birth? Tommy Rees, Woody from “Toy Story”

Our good friend Jones brought this comparison to our attention. Your thoughts?

4. Rhoads Rage

Twitter went bonkos over Iowa State coach Paul Rhoads’ post-game presser last night after he felt that his Cyclones were robbed in the final 70 seconds due to the officials’ failure on a goal-line fumble in a 31-30 home loss to Texas. I was a little more “myeh” or, as my friend Dan Wolken tweeted, “I give it 8 Gundys out of 10.”

Did Rhoads have a right to be upset? Yeahhhhh, but… a goal line fumble in a pack of behemoths is a difficult call. Certainly the following play was an obvious fumble –and I wonder why the refs did not give the Longhorns a touchdown, as the ball was over the plane of the goal line when Johnathan Gray recovered his own fumble.

Anyway, Texas won. Rhoads fumed, and got his 90 seconds of Twitter fame, which will not hurt recruiting, which means that Thayer Evans could be purchasing a new pair of cowboy boots in Ames about a year from now.

Oh, and this was a contest between two unranked teams. So, simmer down now…

5. TWTR

That will be the stock ticker symbol of “Twitter”, which released details about its Initial Public Offering (IPO) this morning. Last month the company announced that it would go public later this autumn, but yesterday it made its prospectus public for the first time.

The company, founded seven years ago, doubled its revenue in the first half of 2013 as opposed to the same period in 2012, but it is hemorrhaging money. It reported a net loss of $79 million in 2012 and $69 million for just the first half of this year. By comparison, I don’t feel so bad with this site.

Twitter has not set an initial stock price, but if I were them I’d make it $140 and adjust the number of shares available accordingly (stock price times number of shares = overall value). That’s a no-brainer.

Sure, there are concerns (what percentage of accounts are not actually potential consumers, @FauxJohnMadden?) but be bearish on this stock at your own peril.

When Google (GOOG) had its IPO in 2004, critics asked, “But how does Google make money?” Well, the stock price has gone from $85 per share at the August, 2004, IPO to $872 today, or 1,000% in less than 10 years.

Facebook’s (FB) IPO was pilloried, and rightly so, but look at the stock price about 16 months later. Yes, it opened at $38 per share and then fell as low as $18.80 per share, but if you bought it at the IPO and never sold, you’re up more than 20% in less than a year and a half. The stock is trading today at about $50.

Twitter is a winner, Tell your friends that a little bird told you so. Hashtag #Buy

p.s. In case you’re in search of a new nadir for American intelligence, shares of Tweeter Home Entertainment (TWTRQ) are up 530% today due to large volume due, it can only be presumed, on investors hearing news about Twitter’s IPO and assuming this is it. If you were savvy enough to buy Tweeter yesterday –or just dumb lucky –you’ve made a haul today.

The stock has gone from less than one penny per share to about four pennies per share. Pennies from heaven!

 Reserves

Last night’s special guest on The Grotto, our third episode and our first with a guest who didn’t have two preschool-aged children, was Arash Markazi. Or as I call him, “Guestlist” Markazi. Thanks to Arash for joining me and thanks to all who put up with my snifflecast (allergies). Here is your link.

Remote Patrol

No. 15 Washington at No. 5 Stanford

ESPN 10:30 PM

While Miley Cyrus twerks on SNL, Bishop Sankey and Keith Price will work at Stanford Stadium to topple the Cardinal. It’s a terrific Saturday from coast to coast, from noon to past midnight in college football, as from 12 p.m. until almost 2 a.m. you’ll be able to watch a top 10 team play, and more often than not versus another ranked opponent.