10.03.11
Breaking Bad forgets what country it’s in
I really enjoy the AMC series Breaking Bad.
Gustavo Fring, Walter White’s boss in meth manufacturing, is one of the finest characters on current television.
Let’s give Giancarlo Esposito, the fellow who plays him, a big round of applause.
However, for last night’s episode it pains me slightly to note a lapse in reality in scripting.
Jesse Pinkman thinks the little boy, Brock, has been poisoned by his vial of ricin, produced by Walter, secreted away in a cigarette, for use at some future date on Gus.
The entire episode revolves around this. And at one point Jesse pleads with Brock’s mother, Andrea, to tell the doctors at the hospital about ricin.
In the real US, the moment she does, the jig is up for Jesse, Walter and Gus’s meth operation.
That’s because suspicion of ricin reported in the hospital at any state activates the national security network. Homeland Security and the FBI get called in, no matter how small the connection.
Five years ago I wrote about how it works here, for the Register.
In this case, an Arizona man named Casey Cutler was rounded up and convicted on a terror charge when his roommate went to the emergency ward with a respiratory illness, but reported he thought he might have been poisoned with ricin because Cutler was fiddling around with castor oil.
It doesn’t even really matter if no ricin is present. When the national security infrastructure is tripped, all Hell breaks loose.
I wrote:
[Once] the word ricin was uttered, it had to be reported to the federal network. When that happens, an array of responses is tripped, including the summoning of a Phoenix SWAT team, and WMD units from the Arizona National Guard and the FBI.
And that standard overwhelming federal response would assuredly mean the end for Jesse Pinkman, Walter White, Gus Fring and the high tech super meth production facility they run.
The only way out for the script writers: Having Andrea never mention ricin to Brock’s doctors at hospital. Or leaving the question in limbo for the final episode, probably a cliff-hanger, next week.