I have come to the sad realization that my addictions are stronger than me. I have struggled with addiction since I was 17 I am now 40 years old. I have a wonderful wife that is a teacher and 3 teenagers. I thought I could win this battle but I fail time and time again. Sometimes I feel like maybe it's because I don't want to give them up (addictions) My wife and I have been together 16 years. I have put her through so much of my shit. In the past I have been verbally abusive, lied too many times to count, manipulated her, when gambling was my drug of choice I would spend my entire weeks pay. Gambling has just been one of many addictions I've battles along with just about every major hard drug ever known. My wife and kids have had to bear the brunt of my weakness. Fortunately, I have managed to keep my addiction away from them. Last April I picked up a new addition methamphetamine. My mom had just been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and I turned to my demons to cope just like every time before. Not long before that I managed to quit cocaine which I had been using regularly for 10+ years prior. When my mother died my meth addiction spiraled out of control. By October of last year I was staying awake for several days at a time, isolating myself in my room and bathroom only to come out to re-up. That month I had a near death experience that I thought at the time had saved my life. Now I think it was just a meth induced psychosis. However it did force me to get clean. And I stayed clean til July of this year before I relapsed again.
We used to live about 12 mi. South of where we are currently. That's where all my addict "friends" live. every time I relapsed into some drug that I chose to indulge myself in, that's where I run to. I had tried to convince my wife in the past that to be successful at sobriety long term I had to get away from that town (I actually grew up there) My drug use started there and thats where my brain would always lead me back to. It's like the town had a spell on me. I tried so hard to fight the beckoning to go there cause if I did I knew what was about to go down.
This year in July I found out that my 14 year old daughter was sexually Assaulted by a 24 yr old man that lived here in our apartment complex. We found out because she snuck off to the beach and we found out, grounded her and took her phone. We usually did phone checks but it always turned out good so at that point we had built a trust with her in regards to her phone. That was a huge mistake. When we took her phone we found all the correspondence between her and this man and it described to us that evidently he was preying upon her, giving her drugs and luring her over to the Hotel across the street from our apartments. This devestated me. I took full responsibility for everything that happened to her. I told myself that it was my fault that I should have protected her. That's my job. The entire time her mom and I thought she was playing with friends up near the front of the complex. I told myself that I failed her as a father. We did file charges on the man and he was charged with aggravated sexual Assault of a Minor and solicitation of a Minor. When he lured her into the hotel room she was 13. I fell into a pit of self loathing. I was already in a lot of pain from a Gastric Bypass Surgery that id had in June. I couldn't eat which was another weakness I had. That past year off meth I would cope with my issues by eating. I had put on a tremendous amount of weight. to the point that I was in excruciating Pain just from walking. I had the bypass to nip that problem In the bud and lose the weight. Unfortunately while the surgery changed me physically it couldn't change me psychologically. So I was still addicted to food. Junk food, sweets etc . It was in lieu of the meth at that point. so I figured that with the bypass and me being clean for several months, I was doing the very best I could do. I am on SSDI for Bipolar 2 and I believed with my new thinner drug free me, I would soon be off SSDI and on the path to finally becoming successful And getting off SSDI forever.
So after all this went down and me playing a pity party with myself and unable to scarf down snack cakes and milkshakes I became more vulnerable to that voice that had up to that point more less silent after several months clean. The voice slowly became louder and louder as the days went by I was suffering emotionally. Being Bipolar didn't really help me out even though I was on medication they soon felt like they stopped working and left me in this extremely vulnerable state. This whole time I'm blaming myself for what happened to my daughter and dwelling on every other mistake I'd made.
After about a month I seemed fall slowly into a deep depression so bad I couldn't get out of bed. My body ached all over. I just felt sick. This is during Corona also, so the stress from being locked down it all just compiled and compressed Down to where my life at that point was unstable once again. Before I knew and I am not exaggerating, I basically went into some kind of zombie mode and went to Alvin with the intention of scoring something. I ended up getting cocaine. I told myself it would take the edge off. I would try to convince my brain this was entirely the wrong way to go, but no matter what I'd tell myself, I just kept going. So I scored the coke and did it locked up in my bathroom all night lying to my wife telling her I was constipated. I knew that was wrong to do but I couldn't admit to her I'd relapsed. I finished the coke in one night. So come the next night there I was again driving the 12 miles back. This time I copped some crystal. And again I was back in the bathroom sick. Yeah I was sick. I'd relapsed petal to the metal cause once I snorted a rail of crystal and it took away all my sorrow, I mentally decided fuck it I'm all In. I already screwed up. I was a failure. Screw it. enjoy the freedom from pain and misery.
So here I am , I don't even know how many days later on my 4th score. I did admit to my wife I relapsed Saturday and told her I just didn't know if I could keep fighting. I told her that I considered suicide and I was in so much pain and I didn't feel confident I could go back and fight this on top of every thing else. I was just being 100 percent honest. I didn't want to lie to her. She of course forgave me and told me she just wanted me to feel better. I know she does but I just don't feel that I can go back to the suffering. I didn't know if I could confidently battle this. As of right now I ask myself can I get sober again? Do I want to be sober? I can't honestly answer that question.
I do know one thing for sure I refuse to put my wife through the hell of my addiction again. Or my children even though they only see the byproduct of it. (me sleeping through the day) and feeling ill. (comedown) they have never seen me use and I know that isn't an excuse cause it's wrong no matter how you try to present it. It's bullshit. I already seen the stress starting to emerge in her demeanor. She's quiet so she won't just come out and say it. She's being supportive. Again. But hell, I don't want her to be nice to me or supportive I want her to be furious. Ready to kick me out.
So that being said, making the determination that I was not confident in getting sober and slightly questioning if I even wanted sobriety, I will do what she should do. I am going to leave until I can get sober. That's not an excuse to keep getting high at all. ( I believe) I'm pretty sure of that. I determined that to be successful long term I cannot be anywhere near my hometown. There is no way. Cause I know as soon as some kind of tragedy strikes or I feel like I can't take anymore stress I'm back on auto pilot back to where I started. They do not deserve that at all. I know if I do get treatment it ultimately cannot be here. Bring Bipolar and my history my chances of completing a program are slim because all Id have to do is check myself out and go back to where the action is. On autopilot. That autopilot scares the hell out of me. That is not me that is something outside who I am that is controlling my every word and movement. I am officially powerless over this other person. That person lies, manipulates, sneaks money out of the bank and tries to cover it up. Hell don't even try to cover it up. Don't really care if she knows or not. I don't like that person who is not me but part of my psyche that emerges when shit hits the fan he tags me out I tag him in. I don't know who the hell he is. But it's not me. In my mind least. It's someone that is part of me but not ultimately me as a person.
So coming to those conclusions, I've decided to kick myself out of the house. If I am going to check into a rehab and try to once and for all live a life of sobriety it's going to be far from here. That way if I leave I have nowhere to go. I'm homeless. And my wife and kids to do not have to bear the brunt of my bad decisions. I am thinking about going to Arizona. To the desert somewhere that has in the past given me inner peace living there briefly in 2006. I think clean and sober when I imagine that place. So I believe that's where my heart is leading me. I know if I don't go or choose to get clean once and for all I will lose everything. That has to be something that is a consequence. I can't put them through this anymore. They are older now so I believe they can handle Dad leaving for a while I don't worry about that. One thing I do consider is coming back here and down the road from loserville. My hometown. I don't expect will I ask her to leave her career as a teacher at a school she loves and has many years at. I do not expect my kids to leave the schools or their friends because I can't get my life together. That's not fair. I asked in the past and begged actually and she didn't want to leave. I believe she had confidence that I could beat this addiction and we could live happily here. So this time I will not ask. I will go. I am no good and no use to anyone in my condition. I know it was a relapse but relapses for me are not minor slip ups. My addiction grows bigger and more out of control and the substances become harder and more dangerous. I refuse to let her find me dead on the bathroom floor of an OD. she doesn't deserve it. At least this way I am alive if I can convince myself I can achieve long term sobriety. It has to be for good this time. No half ass recoveries that last 6 mos or 1 year. I'm 40 now. This has to either stop or I need to go permanently. If she decides to come to Arizona after I have maintained sobriety and that what she chooses that is what I want. If not, I will at least be alive and able to be in children's lives.
Either way, the BS had to stop. I'm done disappointing my family and put them through unwarranted stress and pain. I have to me a man and take responsibility for myself and my decisions good and bad. This has gone on for entirely too long.
Thank you for reading.

[PI] No Fury Like A Dragon Scorned

Original Prompt: "You steal the gold of an ancient banking dragon, only to lose it all..." by JellyfishBattleship

It was at times like this that he preferred it when the world was a smaller one. Finding people was a lot harder in cities of hundreds of thousands than it had ever been in those sleepy little villages inhabited by a few dozen. Back then, there wasn't so much of a crowd for his chosen quarry to hide in, nor could they speedily move across the open ground between settlements. It wasn't that Arthur particularly minded going after those who had wronged him - in fact, he quite enjoyed it in a morbid sort of way - but, for once in the twenty-first century, he would have given quite a lot in order to have things be easy.
As far as anyone else in the world was concerned, he was Arthur Drake, the ever-so-slightly eccentric manager and owner of Bremner Financial; a bank situated in a renovated courthouse squarely in the middle of a campus city full of trust fund kids. His day-to-day life was, frankly, infuriating. It seemed that, whenever he strolled into work, fate forced him to listen to the tiresome bullshit from a gaggle of rich kids and their parents. Variable rate this and high-interest the other. They just wanted to stick their money somewhere so they could get slightly richer as the inexorable march of time sped them towards death. None of it really mattered. All he had to do was play nice, respond to them in kind and they all gave him what they wanted.
What he needed.
Unlike other banks, he primarily dealt in those with physical currency. Things that may or may not have been of legal tender nowadays, but still held remarkable value were they to be sold. Gold bars, rare coins... for the right people, he didn't even care if the items they wanted to store away were legal. He simply took a cut from those special clients and was able to live pretty comfortably as a result. He could do precisely what he wanted, safe in the knowledge that his rather unique vice was sated. It wasn't an addiction. It was a compulsion; drilled deep into his brain to the point it was as much an instinct as breathing. He might have looked the part, but Arthur was far from human.
Behind that fine tailored suit and usually affable demeanour was a being who had terrorised humanity for millennia. A dragon. And right now, that dragon was pissed off. So enraged, in fact, that Arthur had paired up his usual outfit with a set of sunglasses despite it being ten o'clock at night. No matter how hard he tried, his human form was refusing to sit correctly around him. He'd tried everything from calm breathing to hurling vitriolic abuse at his own reflection over the course of ten minutes; ten minutes spent pacing around the bank's vault in a frustrated fury. The one feature that refused to behave were his eyes. Now a set of blue spheres lodged in his skull with slit-like pupils that stretched vertically, he doubted that anything short of sleep would have calmed him down enough to return them to normal.
So he'd stopped trying.
There were far more pressing concerns right now that simple vanity. On what was meant to have been his day off, Bremner Financial had experienced its very first robbery. The police had been as protocol-bound and ineffectual as ever and, while none of his staff had been seriously injured, the group's ringleader had managed to force their way into his office and ransack the place. Arthur wasn't the only person at the bank who knew the non-biometric override code for the door, nor would he have fired or otherwise disciplined the one who'd let it slip. They might have been only human, but he'd grown quite attached to his employees. Not enough to divulge his identity to any of them, of course, but enough that he cared for their wellbeing. Mortals were fragile, after all.
It felt odd to care about them but, if it helped his persona and, in so doing, helped his 'addiction', then he'd jump through as many social hoops as were necessary. The items which took pride of place in his office were amongst the most valuable things he owned, relics whose age ranged from decades to centuries. Of all the wealth over which he obsessed, Arthur obsessed over them the most of all. So much so that he could recite them in an itemised list in his head. The neon-clad street formed the centrepoint of the city's nightlife district; a series of nightclubs, dive bars and the occasional upmarket establishment that drew in regular business all nights of the week and, after starting fights in four of them, he finally had a name to tie to the security footage.
His target, if the stories were to be believed, was a regular on the illegal gambling scene. In the days before he'd founded and opened the bank, so had he. One method of obtaining wealth was just as good as another and, with his draconic hearing, his opponents' poker faces were useless against him. They were mostly boorish drunks, not Buddhist monks. If there was one thing they couldn't control, it was their heartbeat. Hearing their hearts race whenever they got a decent pair of opening cards made things easier than actually robbing them. And, within moments, that train of thought brought Arthur hurtling back to how he had been robbed.
His fists clenched tightly as he felt a rampant stinging along the edges of his shoulder blades, the sensation causing him to freeze in the middle of the pedestrianised side street. For one second, his eyes darted around in their sockets, watching the passers-by for any sign of reaction. For the next, his eyes squeezed shut. As long as people ignored him, he could concentrate. He could feel his composure starting to slip again, the tremors in his upper body impossible to suppress.
Not now, he inwardly screamed, more than a little thankful of the relative darkness. He wasn't sure what people would have made of the spiked bulges tenting the back of his suit jacket, especially if his exercise in self-control had proven fruitless.
No amount of PR spin would have been able to deflect the sight of a highly regarded bank manager sporting a pair of wings from the public consciousness. In the age of YouTube and social media, reinvention was next to impossible. As a near-immortal mythical creature, his appearance would take centuries to alter to any meaningful degree. He could simply wait society out; wait for incriminating photos to go the way of the first crop of internet memes and return to society when only those of a certain age would recall what had transpired. But, even for dragons, Arthur was impatient. Impulse-driven. He wanted results now.
Eventually, he pressed on, finally able to spur his legs into moving again. Occasionally, he stole glances at the rest of his body - hands, legs, head - to make completely sure he still looked fully human. Or as fully human as his rage would allow him to be. The gambling den, somewhat stereotypically, was hidden in the basement of an otherwise respectable Thai restaurant. It was a place he knew reasonably well. Their green curry was amazing. So was the poker.
Contrary to his usual demeanour, Arthur completely ignored the greeter's attempt to ask if he had a reservation and continued straight on, navigating his way around the crowded tables as he went. A part of him knew that the man who had robbed his bank wouldn't be enjoying a meal with everyone else, but something compelled him to look anyway. Nobody looked remotely familiar and, one series of cursory glances later, he made a beeline for the server's entrance to the kitchen. "You can't go back there, sir...!" Eventually, someone's protest reached his ears.
"I won't be a minute," he called back, barely managing to keep calm as he allowed a waitress to pass by unscathed with a tray of food. Once she was clear, he continued on, catching the door with his palm before it swung shut. "I'm here to collect somebody." As soon he stormed into the kitchen and vaulted his way over the pass, the kitchen staff started hurling volleys of orders and bilingual abuse at him. A few plates clattered to the tiled floor in his wake but, like the greeter from before, he ignored the chaos he was creating. With every step, his composure continued to unravel.
This, he imagined, was how a drug addict felt when they were denied their fix. To him, accumulated wealth was a drug addiction. And no amount of rehab or cold turkey abstinence would cure it. He just had to cope as best he could. Which, right now, could have been better. "The fake freezer," he said, flatly, verbally pointing out the hidden entrance to the gambling den. "Open it. Last chance." Either plausible deniability or feigned ignorance led nobody to respond with anything beyond confusion. Confusion wasn't compliance. Not that it mattered. "Fine. Suit yourselves." He'd gambled here before. He knew which of the freezer lockers in the walk-in fridge was a cunningly disguised forgery. And, to prove that point, Arthur clamped his hand around the locker's steel handle...

...and tore the whole thing off the wall.

It took a couple of attempts, with the first buckling the area around the handle as though a cannonball had been shot at it from the inside. The second time his arm yanked backwards, however, the chefs who saw him could only recoil in horror as the bolt hinges ripped themselves apart under the violent strain. With remarkably little effort, Arthur slid the ruined door against the wall and, ensuring it wouldn't topple over and hit someone, he made his way down into the restaurant's hidden basement level. The cacophony had, as he expected, alerted the thugs manning the entrance to the gambling den below and, as he rounded the corner at the foot of the stairs, they were there to meet him.
"Not here for you," Arthur sighed, almost weary at the spate of interruptions over the past couple of minutes. Unlike the restaurant staff above, the two burly men either spoke no English at all or simply preferred not to. It didn't matter much. He really wasn't in the mood for conversation. At least not with them. Especially when they both laid hands on him in an effort to force him to leave. "I said, 'I'm not here for you'." Having not budged an inch, Arthur simply shouted over them. When they refused to back down, he took off his sunglasses... and growled.
It was an unsettlingly guttural noise, tinged with a bass far beyond anything a set of human vocal cords could muster. His slitted pupils shifted to regard one man, then the other. His low, measured command - in perfect, yet unaccented Thai - was enough for them to ascend the stairs. Their obedience was enough to make them run. He had only translated six English words for their benefit.

Go and look at the door.

Instilling fear was no longer a product of violence for him, but preferable to it. With the sheer power he could muster being leagues above even groups of men, a mess of mutilated bodies was something that would have only drawn attention. And, with the guards manning the door now fleeing in fear, Arthur was finally able to make a grand entrance to the gambling den. Reaching up to his collar bone, he calmly started to remove his jacket and tie. The white button shirt which lay beneath them was of no consequence; it was the cheapest part of his outfit by a country mile. He'd replace it tomorrow morning. But his jacket? That was a few hundred dollars of expertly crafted businesswear. If someone put a bullet in that, then he really would kill someone.
"Oh, Dawson...!!" The loud, sing-song voice followed the explosive sound of a door being kicked down, sending gamblers and staff alike scrambling from their posts. Niall Dawson already wasn't having the best of nights. Having lost four of the last seven hands, his cash reserves for the evening were noticeably dwindling. At first, believing the distraction to be a raid of some kind, he had seized the opportunity to load up his pockets with other people's money. But, when he heard Arthur Drake's voice calling his name, he froze. The deer in headlights look probably didn't suit him, but he couldn't help it. When the armed guards were tossed against the stone wall like ragdolls, the gamblers started to run for the exits, screaming as though the place had been set on fire.
"We need to talk, you and me!" While Arthur's face was unmarked, a wound was starting to stain his shirt red at the shoulder. Although his skin wasn't completely impenetrable, dragons were notoriously tough to kill. And notoriously good at shrugging off pain. So, when Niall finally gathered up the wherewithal to pull a snubnosed revolver from his belt, Arthur just... laughed.
A dark chuckle at the irony which only stopped when the cornered robber shot him in the gut. For a moment, Niall thought the scare was over. For a moment, he thought he'd be able to run for the door like everyone else once the man before him keeled over. Immediately after that moment, however, all he felt was the side of his skull being driven through the table at which he'd been sitting ten minutes ago.

His whole world went dark. But not for long.

"Rise and shine, dumbass." His eyelids finally pried themselves open to reveal the gravel-lined surface of the tallest rooftop in the city. With all of the emergency exits at the top of the building being situated on the executive level a few floors below, the roof was completely inaccessible to those within, home only to the protruding pieces of machinery that regulated the various utilities and systems the building's owners and inhabitants enjoyed on a daily basis. Niall had no idea how he'd got here.
Until he looked up at the man who had brought him. "You stole from me." Now shirtless, Arthur slowly paced around in front of the gambler he'd abducted. Being so high up, he saw no point in concealing his wings; a matching pair of leathery, dark crimson appendages with barbed spikes along their ridges that, at their best, made him the fastest moving thing in the city not powered by a jet engine. Finally, he could recite the list he'd kept as a mantra in his head to the person who needed to hear it. "An eight hundred-year-old antique coin collection. Two ornamental Chinese swords from the Three Kingdoms era. A Civil War-era rifle. A collection of Burmese rubies. Two original British seascape paintings..."
Niall whimpered as Arthur knelt down infront of him, fixing him with a stare from those inhuman sapphire eyes. "...and a marble sculpture titled The Dragon King's Soul. Do those sound familiar to you?" The robber wanted to back away. Of course he did. But where could he go? He was surrounded on three sides by a four hundred-foot drop, with a very angry... something on the other.
"You're going to get them back." It wasn't a request or even an ultimatum. Arthur was making a promise on Niall's behalf. Telling the man who'd robbed him precisely what he would do next. "I don't care how long it takes. I don't care if you get hurt trying. I don't care if it takes you the next fifty years and I've got to haul my ass down to a nursing home, speak to you on your death bed and ask where you're hiding them. You will give me what's mine."
Niall felt his pride - and mild intoxication - quickly falling away. He was completely focused on Arthur. And the debilitating fear that just looking at the man was conjuring up in the pit of his stomach. "Or we'll come back here. And you won't be sitting there." He slowly extended an arm, pointing towards the nearest edge. "You'll be dangling over there. You have two choices. One: I let you go on this little errand for me, I get my stuff back and we walk away both happy and, more importantly for you, alive. Or two: I tear you apart and leave you here to bleed out." Arthur's wings shifted inward as he pulled his shoulders back, stretching the muscles there.
It had been a while since he'd last shown off his wings and, even now, they felt a little stiff. "Besides... I'm your only way off this roof. And you're the only one who knows where all my stuff is. So... which is it gonna be?"

Despite the lengthy silence, Niall's response was predictable. "O-.. One."

"Good man." And, after roughly scooping up the petrified bank robber, Arthur launched himself skyward.

Gilliverse VIII

<<< Timeline VII
2009, continued

March 21-28, 2009: Kafkaesque
- Gus meets with Hector and hints that he orchestrated the deaths of Leonel and Marco and Juan Bolsa out of revenge, infuriating the immobile Hector.
- Walt and Jesse are now in full production in the new lab and are easily producing the 200 pounds of meth each week, as per their quota. Jesse finds that they're even overproducing, and is resentful when Walt refuses to allow him to remove the extra pounds from the shipment, particularly since he has calculated that Gus will net at least $96 million by the end of their three-month contract, while the two of them are receiving only a combined payment of $3 million despite doing all of the work. Walt, however, is unconcerned by this and simply brushes off Jesse's complaints as him being unappreciative.
- Hank is still recovering in the hospital, and Steve Gomez shows up to tell him that the blue meth has made a comeback in several states, thus confirming Hank's suspicions that Heisenberg has not yet been captured. Hank is nevertheless dissatisfied, and reveals that the only reason he's still alive is because he got a warning call a minute before his would-be assassins attacked him. Instantly suspicious of Walt, Skyler asks him if they, and he, are safe. Walt assures her that they are.
- Though Hank is now conscious and functioning, his legs are mostly paralyzed, and the prognosis is that he may not be able to walk again, even with months of physical therapy. His doctor tells Marie that the therapy he needs is unlikely to fall within their insurance plan, and they would most likely end up having to pay out of pocket, which could end up costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Walt meets with Gus at his distribution center to "clear the air." Hank's revelation that he received a phone call before the attack has led Walt to the conclusion that Gus was the one who diverted the Cartel assassins away from him and directed them towards Hank instead so that an attempted hit on a DEA agent would get the American and Mexican governments to crack down hard on the Cartel and close off the distribution of meth from across the border, thereby granting Gus complete control over the market from within the States. Despite having put Hank's life in jeopardy, Walt nevertheless expresses gratitude towards Gus for saving his own life and commends him for his strategy, saying that he'd have done the same in Gus' position. He also brings up the issue of not knowing what will happen when his three-month contract has expired. Gus promises him security for his family, and also brings up the possibility of extending their contract to a year, which would increase his earnings to $15 million. Walt considers it.
- Saul encourages Jesse to purchase a nail salon with which he can use to launder the money he makes from the meth business. Jesse flatly refuses, especially since doing so would require him to report his income to the IRS and thereby pay taxes. Tired of having to adhere to the quotas and responsibilities within his new job, and wanting a larger cut of the profits, Jesse decides to steal the leftover pounds of meth that he and Walt produce in the lab to sell separately to the members of his rehab support group. He enlists Badger and Skinny Pete in this endeavor, and during a meeting, they pose as two new members and initiate a conversation within the group where they mention the blue meth, piquing everyone's interest in it.
- Marie becomes increasingly frustrated about being unable to find a means to pay for Hank's physical therapy, as their insurance will not cover the therapists. Skyler finally offers to pay their bills directly using Walt's drug money. She fabricates a story of Walt being a compulsive blackjack gambler, saying that this has been the cause of their recent marital problems. She explains that Walt took to gambling to pay his medical bills after his cancer diagnosis, and after some losses, his winnings have netted them an amount with seven figures. Marie is left shocked and appalled, but agrees to take their money to pay for Hank's therapy.
- Walt expresses surprise in Skyler's ability to come up with such an elaborate story on the fly. Skyler tells Walt that she believes he is somehow responsible for the attack on Hank, and that she is "not forgetting that."
March 29, 2009: Fly
- Walt, suffering from insomnia, stares up at his smoke detector's flashing light while trying to get back to sleep. Later, he arrives with Jesse at the superlab, where they begin making another batch of meth. At the end of the day, Walt calculates that their yield, while above what they are required to produce, falls short of what he expects. Jesse, who has been secretly taking small amounts for personal distribution, suggests it may be from other losses from spillage, but Walt insists there is another reason.
- After Jesse leaves for the day, Walt sees a housefly in the lab which he fears could contaminate the meth-making process. He tries numerous means to swat it, even dangling precariously from the lab's catwalk, from which he slips and falls to the floor. When Jesse returns the next day, he finds Walt still in pain from the fall and demanding that they cannot start cooking until they get rid of the fly. Jesse worries about Walt's lack of sleep and suggests they go outside to figure it out. However, when Jesse leaves, Walt locks him out of the lab and goes back to find the fly. When Jesse disconnects the main power to the lab, Walt lets him back in so they can work together. Jesse gets some flypaper which they hang around the lab, as well as some sleeping pills that he secretly puts into Walt's coffee. He then recounts a story about his late aunt, who experienced auditory hallucinations as a result of her cancer spreading to her brain. Walt asserts that he is still in remission.
- As they wait to catch the fly, the two talk about their families. Walt expresses that he should have died already and tries to think of the perfect moment to have done so: after he had enough money, after Holly was born, before his surgery and before Skyler knew what he'd been doing. He finally decides the perfect moment to die would have been the night Jane died, telling Jesse of his conversation with her father Donald. He tries to calculate the chances of meeting both father and daughter in different scenarios on the same night despite having never met either beforehand, but finds the odds too astronomical to calculate. Jesse is distracted when he sees the fly near the ceiling. As he tries to use a step-ladder to reach the fly, an increasingly-sleepy Walt seems poised to confess to Jesse about his role in Jane's death. Jesse tells him Jane's death was nobody's fault, but he still misses her. Jesse climbs back down and, seeing the fly land on the ladder, swats and kills it.
- Jesse takes a sleeping Walt to a couch while he cleans up the superlab and prepares for their next batch. They later leave together, but Walt warns Jesse that if he has been skimming from their product, he will not be able to protect him if Gus finds out. Jesse denies taking anything and states that he isn't asking anyone to protect him. That night, Walt is again unable to fall asleep, and sees a fly landing on the smoke detector's flashing light.
March 30 - April 7, 2009: Abiquiu
- Hank is frustrated with his physical therapy. Marie gives Skyler the therapy bill to pay as they previously discussed. Walt attempts to pay with his drug money, but Skyler insists the source must be "unimpeachable." Walt takes her to meet Saul, who laundered his money in the past. Skyler is put off by his flippant personality and his scheme to buy a laser tag facility. Instead, she suggests a more believable business investment: the car wash where Walt previously worked. Saul objects, as the owner of the laser tag facility would ask no questions about the deal, while the car wash owner, Bogdan, is an unknown factor. Skyler offers to help launder the money by managing the car wash. Walt worries that this would make her liable for his actions, but she reveals she never signed the divorce papers, and if married, cannot be made to testify against him.
- Meanwhile, Walt warns Jesse about skimming some of their meth product, which he continues to deny doing. Jesse takes what he has stolen to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to give to Badger and Skinny Pete to help peddle. The two reveal they can't bring themselves to sell meth to recovering addicts, so Jesse shows them how easy it is by striking up a conversation with Andrea, a newcomer to the meetings. He soon becomes attached to Andrea while surreptitiously attempting to sell her product. Andrea invites him to her home, where Jesse discovers she has a son, Brock. From him, Jesse learns Andrea has a younger brother named Tomás, although she initially refuses to talk about him. Later, Andrea suggests they use meth, but Jesse declines now that he knows she has a child, and the two argue. Andrea insists she wants to avoid having Brock suffer from the same fate as Tomás, who, as part of an initiation to a local drug gang, shot a rival dealer at a street corner. Jesse recognizes the murder is similar to that of Combo a few months prior.
- Gus invites Walt to his home for a private dinner, telling Walt that he made many mistakes when he first began working in the drug business. He regrets that he did not have a mentor and warns Walt never to make the same mistake twice. Although Walt does not appear to understand what Gus is referring to, it later becomes apparent he is speaking of Walt's relationship with Jesse. The next day, Jesse travels to the corner where Combo was killed. He finds Tomás there, and confirms that not only is he working for a drug gang, but the gang works for Gus peddling the blue meth that he and Walt are making. Jesse quietly walks away, enraged.
April 8-14, 2009: Half Measures
- Skyler pushes Walt to accept her plan of laundering his drug money through the car wash. They continue to disagree, but are able to negotiate a plan that allows Walt to have some family dinners at home as a ploy to make the Whites appear reconciled. Meanwhile, Jesse begins to plot against those who killed Combo. He buys blue meth from the gang responsible, indicating that the people who killed Combo work for Gus. Jesse tells Walt about his findings and asks him to make ricin so he can exact revenge. Although Walt appears troubled by the gang's use of children, he dismisses the plan and tells Jesse to do the same. Jesse says, "I’m doing it. With or without you."
- Convinced Jesse is likely to do something rash that would endanger multiple people, including himself, Walt visits Saul and they hatch a plan to have Jesse sent to jail for a month to cool down. Meanwhile, Marie wheels Hank out of the hospital after winning a bet where she arouses him during a sponge bath. Mike makes an unannounced visit to Walt at home, telling him that he is not going to follow Saul's plan. He explains that Gus does not know of Jesse's intentions, but that if he follows through on them, he will find out and "take it as a problem." He then recounts an incident from his time as a cop, when he showed mercy by allowing a habitually abusive husband to live, only to have the man beat his wife to death shortly after. He tells Walt that he chose a "half measure" instead of killing the husband, and warns before leaving: "No more half measures."
- Jesse plants a poison of his own making in burgers his friend Wendy, a local prostitute, will bring to the gang members. However, Mike and Victor get to Jesse first, thwarting his plan and forcing him to go for a ride. They bring him to a meeting with Gus, Walt, and the dealers he was targeting. Jesse is furious to realize Walt has revealed his plan to Gus, but Gus tells him that Walt is his only friend in the room. After several tense verbal exchanges, the dealers agree to stop using children, and Jesse agrees to "keep the peace." It is implied that Jesse intends to drop his plans for revenge, although his relationship with Walt is damaged. He refuses to speak to Walt in the car after the meeting, and later won't return his phone calls.
- That night, Jesse hears about the death of Tomás, and rushes to the scene with his girlfriend Andrea. He realizes the dealers have killed Tomás because he is no longer of value to them, as they've agreed to stop using children. Jesse waits in his car near their territory, watching them and snorting meth for the first time since leaving rehab. He grabs a gun from under his seat, leaves the vehicle and starts walking towards the dealers. As Jesse draws his gun, the dealers begin to do likewise. Suddenly, Walt plows over both dealers with his car. He exits the vehicle with one still underneath, and another injured but reaching for his gun. Walt picks up the gun, shoots the dealer in the head, and tells Jesse to run.
April 15-16, 2009: Full Measure
- After Walt kills the gang members and Jesse goes on the run, Walt meets with Gus and Mike to negotiate for his and Jesse's safety, and for the continuation of his employment. Walt suggests Gus has two options: (A) kill Walt right there on the spot and eventually track down and kill Jesse, or (B) consider the incident a "lone hiccup in an otherwise long and fruitful business arrangement," let him return to cooking, and both agree to forget about Jesse. Gus leaves, appearing to have chosen option B, but informs Walt that he will be choosing Jesse's replacement.
- Walt arrives at the superlab to discover Gale Boetticher's car in the parking lot. Gale has been reinstated as Walt's lab partner, and Victor now shadows them everywhere, ensuring the two are never left alone. Gus informs Gale later that night of Walt's cancer. Gus says he intends to keep Walt on as long as possible, but must prepare for the "worst-case scenario." Walt, whose prior suspicions about Gale are soon reignited, correctly concludes that Gus is grooming Gale to replace him, and that he will be killed once Gale masters Walt's procedure.
- Acting on Gus's request, Mike visits Saul to find out Jesse's whereabouts. Saul refuses, claiming attorney–client privilege, but relents after Mike physically threatens him. Saul then allows Mike to look at a notebook containing a fake address for a trailer park in Virginia.
- Walt and Saul meet Jesse at a laser tag arcade; Victor is parked nearby and watches Walt and Saul enter. Walt informs Jesse of his situation, and explains that when Gale is confident enough to take over, they will be disposed of. Walt decides they must kill Gale. Jesse begs Walt, having made enough money from the venture to ensure his family are financially secure, to quit and go to the police or the DEA, but Walt refuses. He reasons that Gus can't stop production, and with Gale out of the picture, Gus would have no choice but to keep Walt. Jesse says he is not a murderer and can't kill Gale. Walt says he will do the job, and Jesse only needs to find Gale's address, as Walt is being heavily watched and can't manage it. Later that evening, Jesse calls Walt at home with Gale's address.
- As Walt is leaving his home to kill Gale, Victor arrives and informs him of a chemical leak at the lab. Suspecting a setup, Walt nevertheless goes with Victor. Upon arriving at the laundromat, Walt sees Mike, confirming his suspicions. Pleading for his life, Walt offers to cook for free and take them to Jesse. Mike, upon hearing this, demands Jesse's location, but Walt says he needs to call him and set up a meeting. Walt calls Jesse, who is sitting in the darkened laser tag building about to smoke meth. Jesse asks "Did you do it?" Walt says no, he can't now, and tells Jesse he is about to be killed. He urges Jesse to reach Gale and kill him first. Victor and Mike wrestle the phone away and when Walt quotes Gale's address to them, they realize what he has asked Jesse to do. Victor hurriedly leaves; Mike stays with Walt and attempts to warn Gale, but Gale fails to notice his phone ringing.
- Jesse arrives at Gale's house and pulls a gun on him. Gale pleads with Jesse, telling him that he doesn't have to do it. A tearful and shaking Jesse pulls the trigger as the screen cuts to black, with a gunshot being heard.
April 16-17, 2009: Box Cutter
- Jesse has just shot Gale to death on orders from Walt to foil Gus' plot to kill and replace them. Gus' henchman Victor arrives at Gale's apartment and finds him dead, surrounded by neighbors who have just called police. Victor finds a stunned Jesse sitting in his car and forces him to return to the lab, where Gus' employee Mike Ehrmantraut is holding Walt hostage. Mike, who is concerned that Victor was seen at Gale's apartment, calls to inform Gus. Victor, who realizes his own position is precarious because witnesses saw him at Gale's, has watched Walt work and starts cooking meth himself to prove that he has value to Gus, and that Gus does not need Walt or Jesse. Walt grows concerned when Victor proves better at the process than he expected.
- Meanwhile, Skyler observes his car in her driveway and, not wishing her son Walt Jr. to see it, parks it a few blocks away to conceal it. Concerned about Walt's apparent disappearance, she calls their lawyer Saul Goodman, but he has become paranoid because of Walt's falling out with Gus and is too busy checking his office for listening devices. Skyler hires a locksmith to break into Walt's condo, claiming she lives there. When he hesitates to do so without verifying her address, Skyler claims her purse was stolen and fakes a panic attack until he lets her in, but she finds little of interest. Elsewhere, Skyler's sister Marie struggles to maintain her composure while caring for her belligerent husband Hank, who is still bedridden after the attempt on his life.
- Gus arrives at the lab but says nothing. Walt launches into a nervous, rambling monologue of excuses and justifications, trying to convince Gus he needs him and Jesse alive. He claims it is Gus who is ultimately responsible for Gale's death, not them, and insists Victor cannot produce the high-quality meth Gus needs. Gus maintains his silence, even while changing into hazmat gear and selecting a box cutter from a storage shelf, while Victor grins in anticipation. Never changing his demeanor, Gus suddenly slices Victor's throat, startling the others. Through the killing, Gus simultaneously punishes Victor while delivering a stern message to Walt and Jesse. Gus drops the body to the floor and coldly eyes the duo to ensure his message was received. He quietly returns to his street clothes, then walks out of the lab, pausing only to say, "Well, get back to work."
- Later, Walt and Jesse dispose of Victor's body, the gun that killed Gale, and the box cutter in a barrel of hydrofluoric acid. During breakfast, Walt insists that Gale's death was necessary, but expresses concern that Gus will kill them at his next opportunity. Jesse doubts this, believing it will be too much trouble for Gus to find another drug manufacturer, and that both they and Gus understand the situation: neither can kill the other, so Gus might as well make them wish they were dead. The episode ends with police investigating Gale's apartment with the camera focusing on his lab notes, which have yet to be discovered.
April 18 - May 4, 2009: Thirty-Eight Snub
- Walt buys a Ruger LCR .38 snubnosed revolver from a black market gun dealer. Walt plans to use the concealable gun to kill his employer, drug kingpin Gus. Since falling out of favor with Gus, Walt believes Gus will kill him if he does not act first; when the gun dealer asks why Walt needs the gun, he insists it is strictly for self-defense. Later, Walt practices drawing the weapon. Elsewhere, Gus' henchman Mike drinks coffee at a bar and discovers dried blood on his jacket sleeve belonging to Victor, whom Gus previously murdered. Although Mike is silent, he appears to harbor conflicted feelings about what happened to Victor. Meanwhile, Jesse has purchased expensive gadgets, like a sophisticated sound system and the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, but remains miserable after having murdered Gale to save Walt and himself. After his friends Badger and Skinny Pete visit, Jesse has them arrange a wild party with dozens of people dancing, drinking and doing drugs to further distract himself.
- Later, while cooking meth at their lab, Walt waits for Gus to arrive so he can kill him. Instead, Victor's replacement Tyrus arrives with Mike, who informs Walt he will never see Gus again. That night, Walt drives to Gus' house and approaches with the gun, but before he can cross the street, Walt receives a call from Tyrus, who says simply, "Go home, Walter." The next day, as Walt approaches Mike at the bar, Mike tells Walt that he observed Walt tailing him to the bar. Mike then reveals he could tell that Walt was carrying a weapon in the lab. Walt suggests he and Mike are in the same danger, and Gus could easily kill Mike the same way he killed Victor. This visibly unnerves Mike, who appears to be aware of this. Walt asks that Mike get him in a room with Gus so he can kill him. In response, Mike punches Walt, knocking him to the floor, kicks him in the torso a few times and then leaves the bar.
- Skyler calls Walt to ask about buying the car wash where Walt once worked, which they plan to use as a front business for Walt's drug money. When Walt fails to act on the purchase, Skyler starts doing her own detailed research about the business's expenses and revenues. She later approaches the car wash owner, Bogdan, about the proposed purchase, but he angrily rejects her, making sexist remarks and condemning Walt for having insulted Bogdan when he quit the car wash. Meanwhile, Marie continues struggling to deal with Hank's deepening depression as he copes with physical therapy from having been shot. The bed-ridden and bitter Hank constantly ignores or insults Marie and, even after celebrating a successful session with his physical therapist, he refuses to share any of that excitement with Marie.
- After three straight days of partying, Jesse tries to keep hanging out with Badger and Skinny Pete, but they are exhausted and go home, along with all of the other guests in Jesse's house. Alone with his thoughts, a depressed Jesse breaks down and cries, sitting less than an inch away from his speakers at an extremely high volume.
May 5-6, 2009: Open House
- Walt furiously notices a motion-detecting surveillance camera that has been installed in the lab.
- Later that day, Skyler convinces Walt in a meeting with Saul to buy the car wash by mentioning how the owner insulted his manhood. She devises a plan to trick the owner into selling by having con artist Patrick Kuby pretend to be a water-tester who is shutting down the business out of concerns over contaminants. The owner promptly sells to her, agreeing to an even lower price than her original offer.
- Jesse is still feeling numb from recent events, attempting to clear his head with nostalgic go-kart trips. He continues to open his house up for all-night drug-fueled orgies, deliberately throwing piles of money in the midst of the chaos.
- Angry and frustrated by Hank's continuous cold shoulder, Marie resumes her kleptomania; she starts stealing objects from real-estate open houses, where she also makes up elaborate stories about who she is, but is eventually caught by a real-estate agent. A livid Hank pulls strings with a senior police officer to get her out of being charged. The same officer drops by the Schrader residence to seek Hank's help by giving him Gale's lab notes to look at. Hank initially shoves away the notebook, but begins to read it later that night.
May 7-17, 2009: Bullet Points
- Mike rides in the back of a Los Pollos Hermanos refrigerator truck on a meth delivery run. The truck screeches to a halt as it is forced off the road by a pair of hijackers. Mike pulls out his gun and listens as the gunmen pull the driver from the cab and shoot him in the head. Mike takes cover as the gunmen raise Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine guns and shoot up the trailer. After firing two volleys, the gunmen break into the truck, only to be promptly shot dead by Mike. Only after he steps out of the truck does Mike find that one bullet has grazed his right ear.
- Walt and Skyler prepare an elaborate story about Walt having a gambling addiction and a successful card counting method. They hope it will explain how they can pay for Hank's medical bills and purchase a car wash (that will actually be used to launder Walt's meth profits). Walt remains too distracted to put much effort into the charade and is worried how Walt Jr. will perceive him. During a family dinner at Hank and Marie's, Skyler and Walt tell everyone the gambling addiction story, but Hank and Walt Jr. turn out to be impressed by it.
- Later, Walt is shocked to learn that Hank is investigating Gale's murder. Hank says that he believes that Gale was the elusive Heisenberg and expresses regret that he was not able to arrest him. When asked by Hank to read about a chemical process written in Gale's lab notes, Walt notices a line from a Walt Whitman poem and a dedication: "W.W. My Star, My Perfect Silence." When Hank chuckles at the initials matching Walt's, Walt jokingly admits admitted to being "W.W," and says "you got me," before telling Hank that "W.W." refers to the poet, Walt Whitman.
- When Walt asks Hank about the investigation, he learns that the only leads are some fingerprints and an eyewitness spotted at the scene. Hearing about this evidence, Walt is spooked and worries that the police will connect Jesse to the murder.
- Walt goes to Jesse's house and is disgusted by its condition, as it is now being used as a drug den by addicts and vagrants. Jesse is adamant nothing can connect him to Gale's murder, but when he is asked if he picked up the shell casing from the gun (which could have his fingerprints on it), it is revealed he did not. When he is further questioned about the murder, Jesse starts to panic due to the memory of it and pays two druggies to kick Walt out of the house. Walt later laments to Saul about how the meth business is falling apart because no one is acting professionally, and rejects an offer to go into hiding.
- Jesse's detached complacence eventually leads to all of his meth money being stolen from his house, but Mike quickly recovers it and warns Jesse that he's on thin ice. Jesse is apathetic about the loss and recovery, leading Mike to tell Gus that Jesse's lack of professionalism is a problem for the organization, and they must intervene. Jesse does not show up to the lab the next day and Walter realizes that he has been kidnapped. The episode ends with Mike driving Jesse to an unknown destination. When he asks Jesse if he would like to know where they are going, the only reply is a simple "nope."
May 17-18, 2009: Shotgun
- Walt is racing to Los Pollos Hermanos to confront Gus about Jesse's disappearance. Worried about what will happen, Walt leaves a voicemail for Skyler and his children, saying only that he loves them. Walt learns that Gus is not in, and Mike eventually calls, explaining that Jesse is with him and will not be harmed, and tells Walt to go back to work.
- Over the course of the day, Mike drives Jesse to seven isolated drop-off spots all over New Mexico, where Gus's dealers leave the money from meth sales for pickup. Jesse assumes he was brought along to watch Mike's back, but Mike denies this and says he doesn't know why he was asked to take Jesse. While waiting in the car alone at the last drop-off spot, Jesse notices two robbers approach, one armed with a shotgun. He slams the car in reverse, rams into their car, and drives off. When Jesse returns, Mike hints that he is impressed. It is later revealed that Gus set up the entire scene so that Jesse would consider himself a "hero."
- Meanwhile, Walt and Skyler officially buy the car wash. After Skyler hears the voicemail Walt left earlier, the two passionately make love and she offers to let Walt move back in, but Walt leaves for the lab without giving an answer. Jesse has returned to the lab and explains to Walt that he will be working in the lab and also helping Mike with pickups from now on. Walt Jr. excitedly reveals to his father that Skyler already set the date for Walt to move back in, which seems to unnerve him. Seeing Walt Jr. drink from a Beneke Fabricators mug—whose boss, Ted Beneke, had an affair with Skyler—upsets him further.
- During dinner at Hank and Marie's, a brooding Walt gets increasingly tipsy on wine. Hank explains that he gave up investigating Gale further, having found a sense of closure in the death of the man he believed to be "Heisenberg," but lauds Gale's genius. A prideful Walt then insists that Gale was not a genius, and suggests that he was copying someone else's work. This convinces Hank to take another look at the case files, and he notices that the strictly vegan Gale had notes scribbled on a napkin from Los Pollos Hermanos.
May 19-20, 2009: Cornered
- Two guards ride in the back of a Los Pollos Hermanos refrigerator truck which is suddenly forced off the road by cartel hitmen, led by cartel member Gaff. They shoot the driver in the head, lock the truck, and use a hose to redirect the truck's exhaust into the ventilation system. They eat the driver's lunch while the hidden guards die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Gaff and his men then open the truck, and find a marked container of fry batter that contains meth for distribution.
- Skyler listens to Walt's voice message twice after researching Gale Boetticher's death on the internet. She wakes up a hungover Walt the morning after their dinner with Hank and Marie during which Walt suggested to Hank the genius who created the blue meth might still be out there. Skyler wants to talk to Walt about Gale. She suspects Gale's death is related to the meth operation, which leads her to pressure Walt to call the police due to the danger it presents their family. She suggests a hypothetical situation where one day an in-over-his-head Walt opens his front door and is shot in the face. Furious that Skyler does not understand the scope of his criminal operation, Walt responds that, in that scenario, he would be "the one who knocks." Skyler flees the house, taking Holly with her. She ponders escaping to Colorado, going so far as to drive to the Four Corners Monument, but ultimately reconsiders.
- Walt receives the keys to the car wash from Bogdan, and avenges his past insults by making Bogdan leave behind his framed first earned dollar, which Walt uses to buy a soda. Walt tells Walt Jr. he is not moving back home and buys a new Dodge Challenger to cheer him up. Jesse returns to the lab and Walt expresses doubt that Jesse was hired to help Mike due to stopping an earlier robbery, considering the whole thing a ruse by Gus Fring to create a wedge between them. Jesse is later called away by Mike before he can help clean the lab. Infuriated, Walt pays off three women at the laundry to do it, but afterwards feels guilty as Gus punishes them by sending Tyrus Kitt to deport them back to Honduras.
- Jesse and Mike scout a house selling the blue meth from the hijacked truck, but Jesse grows impatient and tricks one of the meth users into letting him into the house, where he knocks out the other. Mike notices the words "¿Estás listo para platicar?" written on the stolen container which translates to "Are you ready to talk?". Gus meets with Mike at a diner that night and decides to try and negotiate with the cartel. Outside of the diner, Jesse asks Gus, "Why me?" in reference to him being asked to help Mike during the previous several days. Gus responds by saying "I like to think I see things in people." Meanwhile, Skyler arrives home and demands that Walter return Junior's car, as buying lavish things threatens their cover story, saying "someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family."
May 21 - June 4, 2009: Problem Dog
- ASkyler tells Walt that she's negotiated the return of Walt, Jr's Dodge Challenger to the dealership, Walt angrily drives the Challenger to a parking lot, burns donuts, and strands the car on a cement parking divider, then stuffs the ownership papers in the gas tank, lights them afire, and blows up the car. Saul covers up the outburst, which costs Walt $52,000.
- When Walt later drops off approximately $274,000 — his biweekly profits — to Skyler, she is stunned by the amount, unsure how she'll launder his annual meth-lab earnings of over $7 million, in mostly $50 bills no less, through their car wash. Meanwhile, Hank visits Los Pollos Hermanos with Walt, Jr. and manages to get Gus's fingerprints on a cup.
- Walt convinces Jesse to use his new position as a henchman in the organization to kill Gus, and concocts a ricin poison in the lab that Jesse hides in one of his cigarettes. Mike brings Jesse along to a sitdown between Gus and the cartel. Jesse is told to make coffee for the meeting and contemplates poisoning the coffee, but he is interrupted before he can act. Mike is surprised when the cartel sends only one man to the meeting, who delivers to Gus an ultimatum. Gus, who had been prepared for a negotiation, rejects the ultimatum. Jesse contemplates shooting Gus as the cartel representative leaves, but decides not to. Mike later tells Jesse that Gus is impressed by Jesse's loyalty, but that he thinks it's "for the wrong guy."
- Jesse returns to his Twelve-step program group. During his turn, he discreetly shares his feelings about killing Gale, saying he shot a "problem dog" that otherwise did nothing wrong. Jesse angrily disagrees when the group leader tells him not to judge himself, and reveals to everyone that he had used the group as a market to peddle meth. The group leader finally expresses disapproval of Jesse. Hank meets with Gomez and Merkert and explains his theory that Gus leads a large meth operation. Although Hank's investigation into Madrigal Electromotive GmbH — the German parent company of Los Pollos Hermanos — was stopped by its attorney, Hank reveals that Gus's fingerprints on the cup Hank had earlier obtained from Los Pollos Hermanos match fingerprints found in Gale's apartment.
June 5 - July 2, 2009: Hermanos
- Gus is called to meet with the police and DEA, where he is asked about his fingerprints in Gale's apartment. He explains that Gale was a recipient years ago of a UNM college scholarship in chemistry that Gus created, and says that Gale had invited Gus to his apartment for dinner to ask him for money. Hank asks if Gus Fring is his real name, as there are no records of anyone with that name in his native Chile. Gus says he immigrated at the time of Pinochet's dictatorship, which he claims was notorious both for human rights violations and poor record-keeping. The investigators are satisfied with his answers, except Hank, who is still suspicious. Meanwhile, Skyler begins to hide Walt's meth money in a crawl space below the house.
- Hank later asks Walt to drive him to a mineral show, but reveals en route that he's really going to Los Pollos Hermanos to plant a GPS tracking unit on Gus' car. Walt is nervous since he is already on poor terms with Gus and because Mike has appeared and is watching him, but Walt ultimately gives in to Hank. Walt pretends to plant the tracker and goes inside the restaurant, where Gus meets him at a register. Walt hastens to assure Gus that he didn't plant the tracker, showing it still in his pocket, but Gus tells him to "do it." Perplexed, Walt plants the tracker on his way back to his car and leaves with Hank. Later, Walt (on video) and Mike each assure Gus that Hank is acting on his own and not as part of the DEA's investigation, but Mike advises Gus that Hank may pose a problem if Gus and the cartel go to war. Walt warns Jesse about Hank's investigation and again urges him to kill Gus. While he is at Jesse's house, Walt intercepts a text message meant for Jesse and suspects that Jesse is becoming loyal to Gus.
- Gus goes to see Hector in the nursing home and asks him, cryptically, if today is the day. Gus tells Hector to look him in the eyes, but Hector refuses. "Maybe next time," Gus says, and leaves.

Timeline IX >>>

[Star Wars Fandom] The fan wars, character bashing, and general toxicity of early Star Wars fan zines

Buckle up, folks, ‘cause this is a long one. I forgot I wrote this draft, but I dug it up again while looking for my old Disney Fairies stuff (I promise Star Wars is relevant to the Disney drama—more on that another time) and decided to finish it, because the world just has to know about the Church of Luke and Cathedral of Ford.
TL;DR: There was a period of about a decade where everyone in the Star Wars fandom jumped aboard Team Han or Team Luke, leading to a ship war of genuinely massive proportions. Also, bonus Han/Leia drama that essentially boils down to fans being horribly insensitive about 9/11.
The internet, particularly Tumblr, is well-known for its unique ability to provide a platform for even the craziest of fans to gain an audience. All of my posts so far have centered on the strange events that happen when anonymity and fanatical obsessions combine—whether it’s legions of women who want to fuck Claude Frollo, teenage girls writing about cannibalistic mermaid Founding Fathers, or angry antis whose idea of fun is writing fanfiction in which Peggy Carter is brutally murdered, the Internet is the place where everything goes down. The Internet is anonymous and largely uncensored, and it’s easy to keep your online persona separate from your actual life, making it the perfect arena for the weirdest, most niche drama, from actual cults to ship wars (or, as u/atomfullerene said, naval battles, which is such a good term that I will be adding it to my lexicon immediately.) But now, we’re trying something new (or, rather, something old-fashioned): we’re taking the ridiculous fandom drama offline!
If there’s any fandom well-known for being toxic, it’s the Star Wars fandom. Part of it is just because it’s such a large community—it consists of so many demographics that people are bound to disagree at some point. The other part of it is that people have a tendency to latch onto extremely specific parts of Star Wars and ignore or hate on the rest. Like, extremely specific. Certain fans will fixate on one very, very small aspect of the entire franchise, and treat the rest of canon like it’s trash (if they even acknowledge that it exists at all.) Nobody hates Star Wars like self-proclaimed Star Wars fans.
One of the things that people have a tendency to obsess over is relationships. Admittedly, a lot of it is because fans consider one half of the couple attractive and want to write fanfic in which that person has sex, but they can’t write pure self-insert fic lest someone notice and judge them, so they write plain old vanilla fic in which the attractive character has sex with his/her canon significant other. But there’s another component, too, which I think is often overlooked. Sometimes people see a fictional relationship, and they relate to it on some deeper level. They love the idea of those two people being together so much that they’ll do anything to defend their relationship, even when it’s unpopular or inconvenient. This type of intense devotion is what causes ship wars (or naval battles) and what drives a lot of fandom drama. Now there’s Tumblr and Archive of our Own to fight on, and before those, there were fan forums and fan sites... but what about even earlier? Back when Star Wars first came out, the internet as we know it wasn’t a thing yet. This presented a problem: there were fangirls, but no fanfiction.net. There were fan artists, but no DeviantArt. And there were ships, many of them, but no metaphorical Tumblr-esque ocean on which to have ship wars. But obsessive fans are nothing if not resourceful, so they didn’t let a silly little thing like the fact that the World Wide Web didn’t exist bother them.

DIY Fandom

Enter zines! A zine was a kind of DIY magazine, and there were hundreds of them. They weren’t exclusively a fandom thing—there were zines for all different subcultures and movements—but fandom did embrace them, and zines quickly became the primary way to share fanfiction and fanart before Archive of our Own was even a glimmer in someone’s eye. Zines varied in price, quality, and purpose. Some were dedicated simply to discussing franchises—fans would send in letters of comment, which were often like more concise, generally politer versions of the long, rambling posts you’d see on StarWars and the like. Other zines were dedicated to fanfiction of a certain couple (“ship,” short for “relationship,” though that term was not yet coined at the time many zines were created) or a particular character, but these were less common, especially in the very beginnings of a fandom. Some zines were a couple dozen pages long, others were the size of full-on books. Some were published on a quarterly or monthly basis, others were published over a timespan of years. There was a lot of variety in how zines were created and maintained, but there were generally two main constants, the first being that they were almost always self-published by small groups of individuals. No zines were ever produced by big companies—by definition, a fanzine is run by a fan. Because of this, they were almost always relatively low-budget affairs, and readers often had to choose between quantity or quality. You could have a really good, professional-looking, 300-page zine, but it would only come out once every few years, or you could have a much cheaper zine that released a new edition every month.
The second constant was that fanzines were generally kept pretty low-key, and this was true not just for Star Wars, but for most fandoms. This was because fan fiction and fan communities were not very accepted, and many zines contained NSFW material that had the potential to upset creators. Though some zine makers openly advertised their work, others kept it all very secretive, and trading and collecting zines became a sort of underground market. So this was the state that the Star Wars fandom was in in the mid-80s: the more enthusiastic fans produced and bought zines, which allowed them to contact each other before the dawn of the Internet.
For a while, this was fine, pretty much. One advantage of good old traditional snail mail is that you can’t hide behind a username for very long, and people knew each other’s real names (and sometimes addresses.) Fewer people were willing to start wars when they couldn’t cower behind a screen to avoid facing the repercussions of their actions. And, naturally, fan zines largely lacked the petty drama of modern sites like Tumblr, because you couldn’t just type “kys!!!!” in a box and hit send if you got mad. You had to actually go to the post office and buy stamps and write a letter and put it in your mailbox, and the vast majority of fans just weren’t willing to put in that amount of effort to make someone else angry because of a stupid disagreement. So early Star Wars fandom was actually kind of chill for a little white. People just wrote each other letters, mailed out fan fiction, and acted like normal human beings who happened to have a special interest in a particular sci-fi franchise.
Of course, nothing good can last, and if you’re a Star Wars fan, you should probably be getting a bad feeling about this right about now. Again, nobody hates Star Wars like self-proclaimed Star Wars fans.

The (First) Courtship of Princess Leia Fan War

So picture this. It’s the late 70s, A New Hope just came out, and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are massive fandom heartthrobs. Fanfiction about them is circulating in excess, and although debates about shipping are popping up, it seems obvious what’s going to happen. Luke is the hero, Leia is the princess, and clearly they’re going to end up together. That’s just how it works.
People were already reasonably sure that Luke and Leia would be the Official Couple of Star Wars, and Expanded Universe publications like the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye did nothing to challenge that assumption. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the first Star Wars Expanded Universe novel ever produced, and it was made with the intent of serving as a script for a low-budget sequel if A New Hope failed. Because of this, it lacked most of what you’d expect in a Star Wars book: there’s very little space travel, not a whole lot of cool aliens or robots, and, most notably, no Han Solo. Harrison Ford hadn’t yet signed on for sequels at the time of the novel’s publication, so Han and Chewie are simply absent. Instead, the book focuses on Luke and Leia trying to get ahold of some kind of magic Force Crystal McGuffin after crash-landing on a vague, very foggy planet. Though it’s lauded as being the first ever Star Wars novel, there are certainly a lot of fans who think Mind’s Eye has not aged well, and part of that is because it’s just a weird-ass book (it’s oddly sexist in some places, Luke acts like a massive dick throughout, and it feels more like a super generic 80s fantasy flick than anything), but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that there is a clear romantic subplot between Luke and Leia. (If you’ve ever seen Star Wars, you know why that’s squicky, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
Anyway, Mind’s Eye fueled the fire for Luke/Leia shipping, and most fans were pretty okay with this. However, fortunately, we do not live in the sad alternate universe where A New Hope flopped and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was its depressingly low-budget sequel. The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980 to audience acclaim, and, unlike Mind’s Eye, it featured Harrison Ford reprising his role as Han Solo. With the fanboys’ favorite smuggler back as a viable character, there was no need to portray Luke as inexplicably grown-up and mean—Luke could keep being the innocent farmboy/Jedi-in-training, and Han could be the badass cool guy instead. And, because ESB was not a low-budget science-fantasy B-movie with a plot strung together with the literary equivalent of bubblegum and duct tape, there was ample room for Luke to have real Jedi training on a cool swamp planet. This was great, but it unfortunately kept Luke rather preoccupied for the duration of the movie, leaving Leia and Han conveniently alone together without him. So, to many fans’ surprise, Leia and Han wound up getting the romance arc. This worked very well on screen—there’s a reason “I know” is one of the most famous lines from Star Wars—but it wasn’t in accordance with what people expected or what Mind’s Eye had set up.
Despite Leia and Han getting the real romance, though, Luke was not forgotten—what he lacked in actual chemistry with Leia, he made up for in innocent awkwardness that made many a fangirl go “awwwww.” The whole siblings thing was still in its planning stages, and it’s pretty obvious that that whole subplot wasn’t even a glimmer in George Lucas’s eye yet. Thus, it was totally A-OK for ESB to play up any little smidge of sexual tension between Luke and Leia for all it was worth. After all, nothing pulls in fangirls quite like a love triangle. So Luke and Leia, despite never actually hooking up (thank God), had their weird ship-tease moments and even an onscreen kiss (done for the purpose of making Han jealous, but still.) As you can probably imagine, this led to many Luke/Leia shippers staunchly defending their ship—while ESB didn’t say Leia had feelings for Luke, it didn’t exactly go out of its way to dispel that notion, and at the end of the day, Luke was still the Chosen One and Leia was still the fantasy princess. Star Wars had played lots of other tropes straight, so it wasn’t entirely out of the question to assume that it would play this one straight, too.
Now, if you’re familiar with literally any other fandom in existence, you probably already know why this was quickly becoming a problem. The combination of a hot usually brunet man, a cute usually blond boy, and an in-universe love triangle is infamous for fueling violent ship wars. It happened most famously in Twilight with Jacob and Edward, and again in The Hunger Games with Gale and Peeta, then again in all of The Hunger Games’ increasingly cliche successors. But it also, less famously, happened in Star Wars.
It didn’t take long after ESB for people to start writing letters of comment to the most well-known fanzines, arguing for why Leia should end up with either Luke or Han. Though these debates were somewhat civil at first, they quickly devolved into straight nastiness. Popular letter-of-comment based fanzines soon filled up with letter after letter from obnoxious fangirl after obnoxious fangirl, campaigning for Luke/Leia or Luke/Han and hating on anyone with a different opinion. Leia also got more than her fair share of hatred. She wound up with Han instead of Luke, what an icy bitch! She friend zoned Luke, what an asshole! Or, alternatively: she’s clearly in love with Luke and is stringing Han along, what a terrible person! She just wants two guys at once, what a spoiled little whore! And so on. I wrote a post about the post-Endgame ship wars in the Marvel fandom, and to be honest, you could probably just swap Peggy with Leia and it’d make just as much sense. Fandom has changed, but the ridiculous character-bashing has not.
Luckily for Leia, though, it didn’t take too long for fans to forget that she existed entirely. The ship wars lasted for a good few months, but then something really shocking happened. Return of the Jedi, the last of the OG Star Wars movies, was released, and with it came a terrible realization: Luke and Leia are brother and sister. Actually, no, not just brother and sister—twins, separated at birth.

Return of the Jedi and the Luke/Han Wars

That revelation caused mayhem. Han/Leia shippers rejoiced in a loud, annoying chorus of “I told you so!”s, and Luke/Leia shippers greatly diminished in number. Save for a small group of weirdos who hung back to proclaim that twincest is wincest (ew), most Luke/Leia lovers just kind of vanished, and people who had fiercely supported the ship retreated into the background. You may be thinking that the realization that two members of the love triangle are biologically related would end the ship war, and to your credit, you’re right. It did. Anyone who stuck around to whine about Luke/Leia not coming true was ridiculed by the fandom at large, and debates about who Leia should choose ended. But fans weren’t ready to end their ceaseless arguing just yet—if they couldn’t argue about ships, they’d argue about something else. So, in the absence of legitimate arguments in favor of the Luke/Leia pairing, fans removed shipping from the picture altogether. Instead, they focused on the characters themselves. No relationship drama, no debating over who deserves the princess—just good old-fashioned pitting one character against a different character in a desperate sort of fannish deathmatch.
Like before, fanzines filled up with letters of comment, but instead of obsessing over ships, this time they were obsessing over Luke and Han. Because complaining about other ships was no longer viable, people just focused intensely on the male halves of their respective fan pairings and all the ways they were wronged. One half of the fandom talked endlessly about Luke and all of the ways he’d been “mistreated” by his creators, which was no doubt because people were bitter that he and Leia turned out to be related. Fans complained that he never got the canon romance he deserved, his happy ending was half-assed, and he was forgotten about by fanboys who swarmed to Han instead. They complained that Luke’s lack of a love interest was purely unfair—he’s the male lead in an 80s science-fantasy film series, what is even the point of anything if he goes through all this trouble and doesn’t get a beautiful girlfriend? Clearly, the only reason Luke and Leia were made into siblings was because of some sort of terrible global conspiracy started by evil Luke-hating Star Wars fans who seized control of the whole franchise and/or brainwashed the movies’ writers into submission, and you would be insane to think otherwise.
Meanwhile, the other half of the fandom had its own meltdown in response to the Luke-lovers (yes, “Luke-lovers” and “Han-fans” were real terms used by real people to describe one another, because antis and stans didn’t exist yet—as a matter of fact, most common fan terms didn’t.) Han-supporters argued that Luke was clearly an irredeemable jerk who had secretly fallen to the dark side, and he was probably an evil murderer the entire time. Thus, Han was a better person and a more interesting character and just an all-around cooler guy that everyone loved. If you didn’t like Han Solo, you were a tasteless, childish moron who couldn’t see past the surface of Star Wars and didn’t understand its true message. What was its true message? you may ask. Who knows? Mostly it was just used as a meaningless argument to criticize anyone who liked Luke Skywalker as a character.
Fans quickly found themselves divided, and it became impossible to have any actual discussion because all the letter-of-comment zines were packed to the brim with people complaining about one another. Meanwhile, other fans jumped into the conversation to whine about how everyone else should just shut up, which certainly didn’t help matters because it just offended the ravenous Luke-lovers and Han-fans further. It was around this time that the names “Church of Ford” and “Cathedral of Luke” were coined; people started making fun of the obsessive crazies who spent hours writing letters about their favorite character by comparing their devotion to that of a religious fanatic. Except people weren’t ashamed of their obsession—they fully embraced the comparisons to a church, and the general response to criticism was largely “yeah, this is kind of like a cult. So?” Between the people yelling about Luke and Han, the people yelling at other people to stop yelling about Luke and Han, and the general complaints of everyone else regarding Return of the Jedi, letter-of-comment zines overflowed with hate even worse than the shit directed at Leia during the ship war. Content creators tried to retaliate by taking particularly gross fans off the mailing list and adding notes encouraging people to calm down, but after a while e of that not working, some zine authors just shut the whole thing down.
See, that was the good thing about fan zines—they were very small and very individualized, and people ran them as hobbies. That meant that when things got out of hand, it was up to the discretion of the creators to pull the plug. You can’t behave yourself? Cool, you just got taken off the mailing list. You’ve turned a zine into a battleground over an issue that doesn’t matter? Great, now the next two editions are cancelled. Hope you’re happy with yourselves. Barely anybody wanted to spend their weekends gluing together and photocopying dozens of angry, ranting letters of comment, so lots of creators simply stopped including them in their zines. After a few years of nonstop drama, the vast majority of fans—or, at least, adult fans with the resources to produce zines and the like—were sick and tired of all the nonsense, and the drama began to taper off. After all, it’s hard to have a fan war without a platform to fight on.
By the time the 90s’ rolled around and the Star Wars prequels came out, interest in the conflict had greatly dissipated. Most fandom discussion made a slow but steady migration to the Internet, which you might think would reignite the fire, but everyone was too busy talking about the prequels to really care about a fan war from a decade ago. Debates still happened, but they mostly occurred in odd little corners of the Internet that not too many fans frequented. Even when larger communities stumbled upon Luke/Han drama, the response was usually more along the lines of “look at these idiots, they created a whole Geocities page just to yell into the void about Han Solo” and less “YOU GODDAMN MORONS BETTER LEARN TO ACCEPT YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR, LUKE SKYWALKER.” However, the Luke and Han fandoms didn’t die—they still existed as separate entities that eventually learned to live and let live. Rather than keep trying to kill each other, they finally learned to operate in different spaces and stop interacting. The Internet made that type of specialization far easier, so fandom got more splintered. Luke-lovers went into one corner, and Han-fans into another. Animosity was there, but it was limited, and most people calmed down considerably.
Remember, though, this is still the Star Wars fandom, so nothing stays quiet for long.

Post-Original Trilogy Fanzine Drama

You might be thinking this is about the prequels, but nope! No, this is about the dozens upon dozens of EU books published after Return of the Jedi. Before Disney bought Star Wars and cancelled the whole Expanded Universe, these novels were very much intended to be canon. Unfortunately, their quality varied, to say the least, and many fans were simply not impressed by the futures they offered for fan-favorite characters. Sometimes the EU books featured pretty cool plotlines—Leia becomes a Jedi Knight and the Chief of State, for one thing, which Leia fans were quite happy with. Other times, the EU books were kind of a shitshow. Did you know that the red droid that broke down so Uncle Owen would buy R2-DR was force-sensitive and named Skippy? Or that Leia’s maternal aunt, Deara Antilles, was an Imperial spy who blew her cover by buying so many muffins that Bail Organa got suspicious? Or the time Han convinced Leia to marry him by kidnapping her and gambling for ownership of a planet? And these aren’t even the worst examples—there are much stupider things out there.
Needless to say, lots of people were not impressed with these stories, so they took it upon themselves to create their own unofficial materials. Fanfiction-based zines popped up quickly, and they grew exponentially through a clever combination of online recruiting and advertising in other, larger letterzines. There were dozens of these, but the one at the center of this conflict was perhaps the most well-known in this specific subtype.
You Could Use a Good Kiss, sometimes abbreviated to useakiss, was the earliest exclusively Han/Leia fanzine. It was unique in that it didn’t allow for long, ranting letters of comment, and it was never intended to really be a discussion board. It was a collection of Han/Leia fan fiction, art, and “filks” (basically pop songs edited so that their lyrics better match the characters and setting—do not google them unless you are prepared for cringe, they have aged very poorly.) And it was a large collection at that: the first edition totaled at a whopping 215 pages. As was to be expected, You Could Use a Good Kiss was incredibly popular-almost dangerously popular, in fact. Yes, this zine sparked some more stupid Luke/Han fighting, but that wasn’t even the main problem. The real issue was that fans had a tendency to become obsessively dedicated to You Could Use a Good Kiss, to the point where they forgot that the real world existed. You may not think this sounds like such a bad thing, and you’d be partially right—it wasn’t that bad at first. The authors and artists were flattered, fans were generally supportive, and though I imagine constant pestering for more content could become irritating, it was nothing compared to the violent fan wars of old. So what was the problem?
9/11. 9/11 was the problem.
No, seriously. Fans were so obsessed with You Could Use a Good Kiss that they just kind of forgot to care about actual important things, like the death of nearly three thousand people. After the events of 9/11, fans of the zine responded in a rather bizarre way, and creator Susan Zahn quickly realized that her readers literally could not conceptualize anything in the real world if it didn’t have a relatable Star Wars-y equivalent. Rather than respond to 9/11 with horror and sympathy for all affected, fans instead focused on using the news as inspiration for angsty Leia fanfiction. Some people acted bizarrely grateful for the entire thing, posting happy comments about how they could finally push through their writer’s block now that they had a real-life event to compare the destruction of Alderaan to. Meanwhile, others continued to pester writers and artists for more and more content and updates, with pleads for more fan fiction scattered between posts about how, like, "9/11 didn’t even matter probably, and, like, when’s the next release coming out?" "Hey, doesn’t America’s new foreign policy totally mimic [some random faction from Star Wars?]" "Wow, [random politician] is totally like Mon Mothma/Princess Leia/literally any other Star Wars politician!" "Woah, all these planes crashing are giving me some real inspo for cool space dogfights." "I hope the anthrax attacks don’t make mailing fanzines harder…" and so on.
Of course, this horrified the zine’s creators, who were very disturbed by the fact that their readers were so dedicated to the zine that they could not even stop and think for one second about why writing 9/11 AUs would be a bad idea. (Not to mention that some of the authors lived in areas directly impacted by the attacks, and instead of asking if they were okay, fans just begged them for more content.) Keep in mind, too, that this was immediately after the attacks happened—like, the day of, and the weeks afterwards. This wasn’t a bunch of kids who’d heard about 9/11 in stories from their parents or the news. Hell, they weren’t even kids—this was an adult zine. This was a group of people who saw the Twin Towers fall on live TV, and thought “holy shit! This would make a GREAT fanfiction.”
Thus, it came as no surprise that creator Susan Zahn felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing, particularly once 9/11-themed memorial fan fiction started making an appearance. She and many others found that their readers were so dedicated to the zine that they had zero ability to even think about anything that happened outside of it. People viewed reality through Star-War-colored glasses, which transformed tanks in Afghanistan to AT-ATs on Hoth and turned terrorist attacks to relatable fanfic inspo. This disturbed Zahn so much that she just pulled the plug on the third issue. She published a post on her website explaining why, and the reasons basically boiled down to her having less time and money to dedicate to fanfiction, her priorities drastically shifting after a plane crashed into the Pentagon a few miles from her home, and her fanbase being completely fucking insane to the point where it was starting to freak everyone out. She puts it more eloquently than I could:

Fandom is a fun and indulgent distraction, but it is NOT real life, and it should never be a substitute for real life. Part of the reason for my diminished enthusiasm has been because I've watched so many fans over the years allow this distraction to control and influence their lives and relationships. I've seen so many motivated by revenge or ego or the pure need to be accepted by others. Nothing made this fact sink home more than when I read comments from fans immediately following the terrorist attacks. One announced that she now understood how Princess Leia felt. Others immediately began relating these horrific and REAL events with the fantasy of Star Wars, etc., as if they were unable to relate in any other way. I can't begin to describe how much this disturbed me. I feel sorry for them and their apparent inability to understand or acknowledge the real world around them.

Or, TL;DR: “You guys are so addicted to Star Wars that it’s screwing up your life, so I’m putting you all in Star Wars Rehab until you learn to behave.”
Sadly, this was not the only example of people taking fandom way too far, to the detriment of their own sanity and that of others. The Han/Leia community was extraordinarily large and extraordinarily dramatic at times, and its response to things like stupid EU books and ships they didn’t agree with were oftentimes violent and over-the-top. More fanzines were created in response to increasingly dumb canon installments, but they suffered from the same problems You Could Use A Good Kiss had—readers would get ridiculously dependent on the zine for their niche fan fiction fix, and it would eventually result in creators being harassed by self-entitled fans desperate for more content. Fans would ignore real-life tragedies, write completely insensitive and inappropriate alternate universe stories, and just generally act like terrible people until anyone with half a brain cell was driven out of the community, and then the process would repeat itself until all the good writers and artists had left for better things.

The Decline of Han/Leia

This mentality eventually contributed to the slow but steady breakdown of the Han/Leia community. Big name fans trickled out more and more as fanzines closed down and readers’ behavior got worse, and it created a sort of positive feedback loop because one BNF leaving would trigger the departure of others. As content creators joined fandoms like The X-Files and, eventually, Harry Potter, the Han/Leia fandom found themselves without any good contributors. With nobody to maintain websites and host forums, archives of fan fiction were lost as URLs expired, and the whole community turned into a sort of digital graveyard. You could scroll through sites and see the remnants of a once-thriving group of shippers, but every other link was dead, and almost every story had been abandoned for years. This did nothing to encourage more people to join, so the ship faded into relative obscurity (well, not too much obscurity—this is Star Wars, where every background character has a three-page Wookieepedia article—but compared to other fandoms, it became pretty dead.)
Some would consider this a good thing—after all, it was annoying having to deal with Han/Leia smut being shoved in your face all the time if you were just looking for some action figures—while others were upset, partially because they enjoyed the ship and partially because the sheer nastiness of the community disgusted them. Regardless of public opinion, though, Han/Leia as a miniature fandom did not re-emerge for a very long time. It lied dormant for about two decades, sleeping underneath layer after layer of forum posts and decaying webrings, while the few people who had stayed popped up occasionally on Tumblr to complain about the lack of activity. But why would anyone even care about Han/Leia in the mid-2000s, anyway? It wasn’t like there were going to be any more movies or anything.
Then, in around 2014-ish, a miracle happened. Disney spent four billion dollars on Star Wars, and they promised to turn it into something fun and cool again. After years of stupid EU books that boiled down to glorified fan fiction, kiddie shows and cartoons that never quite lived up to their potential, and Christmas Specials created by people who were clearly high throughout the entire production, fans were very happy to hear that a big multimedia entertainment company would take control and stop George Lucas from putting out more unnecessary Special Editions. That on its own made the fandom rejoice. But Disney was anxious to make even more money off content-starved fans, and the Star Wars universe was big enough that there was ample room for sequels of all kinds, so they quickly announced that everyone’s dreams had come true: they were making another movie. Actually, not just another movie—another trilogy.
All the big name fans from before—authors and artists, writers and editors—popped out of the woodworks again, like nothing had ever changed. The old fandom debates started up, this time not in zines, but on Tumblr and Twitter. The old zine creators made fanfiction.net accounts and trampled over each other for Archive of our Own invites. You Could Use A Good Kiss #3 finally came out, ending its’ fans decade-and-a-half long Star Wars Rehab. People were so excited to see Star Wars on the big screen again that they abandoned their previous fandoms entirely, turning right back to where they started: with Luke v. Han fan wars and smutty Han/Leia romance fic. (It also helped that the Harry Potter and X-Files fandoms, the two communities old Han/Leia fans had flocked to after their own group’s decline, were finally starting to slow down. The last two X-Files seasons hadn’t been well-received, and everyone was starting to get sick to death of J.K. Rowling’s endless additions to the universe she created.) So it all started right back up again, and for a short period of time, the community was thriving again. Despite the general disjointedness of the EU and the nonsensical nature of most works within it, certain plots—like the aforementioned Leia is a Jedi plot—were very well-received, and people were trilled at the prospect of Disney making a movie about it. They figured Disney would go the obvious route—they’d take all the good stories from the EU and make them better, while cutting all the extraneous bullshit about muffin-loving spies and Skippy the Droid.
That’s not what happened, though :(
To the shock of many of the fans, Disney did the exact opposite of what they were expecting. They made the entire EU non-canon and instead took the movies in a completely different direction—a direction that, spoiler alert, killed of Han and Luke and left Leia comatose. I won’t go into too much detail about all the drama resulting from these decisions—that’s really a story for another time (and it involves more Disney Fairies than you’d expect)—but needless to say, the deaths of two main characters and the erasure of many of their descendants drove the newfound Star Wars fan community into the ground. Newbies flocked to Tumblr and Ao3 to write fan fiction about the new movies—Reylo became one of the most popular fan ships ever—but the old fans, by and large, hated the new Disney Star Wars. Some stuck around to fight with the new fans, but many of them simply left. The most popular fanfiction writers either deleted their accounts or started focusing on different fandoms, and you can actually see the point just after December 2015 where URLs started changing and tags emptied. And that was that. Drama occasionally resurfaced—there was a brief period where Tumblr tore itself apart over Breha Organa, who appeared on-screen for thirty seconds and had no lines—but the debates mostly just ended. Maybe one day there’ll be another “old” pre-Disney Star Wars renaissance, but until Skippy the Droid and Luuke come back, that seems unlikely. So that’s that.

Timeline VIII

<<< Timeline VII
2009, continued

March 21-28, 2009: Kafkaesque
- Gus meets with Hector and hints that he orchestrated the deaths of Leonel and Marco and Juan Bolsa out of revenge, infuriating the immobile Hector.
- Walt and Jesse are now in full production in the new lab and are easily producing the 200 pounds of meth each week, as per their quota. Jesse finds that they're even overproducing, and is resentful when Walt refuses to allow him to remove the extra pounds from the shipment, particularly since he has calculated that Gus will net at least $96 million by the end of their three-month contract, while the two of them are receiving only a combined payment of $3 million despite doing all of the work. Walt, however, is unconcerned by this and simply brushes off Jesse's complaints as him being unappreciative.
- Hank is still recovering in the hospital, and Steve Gomez shows up to tell him that the blue meth has made a comeback in several states, thus confirming Hank's suspicions that Heisenberg has not yet been captured. Hank is nevertheless dissatisfied, and reveals that the only reason he's still alive is because he got a warning call a minute before his would-be assassins attacked him. Instantly suspicious of Walt, Skyler asks him if they, and he, are safe. Walt assures her that they are.
- Though Hank is now conscious and functioning, his legs are mostly paralyzed, and the prognosis is that he may not be able to walk again, even with months of physical therapy. His doctor tells Marie that the therapy he needs is unlikely to fall within their insurance plan, and they would most likely end up having to pay out of pocket, which could end up costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Walt meets with Gus at his distribution center to "clear the air." Hank's revelation that he received a phone call before the attack has led Walt to the conclusion that Gus was the one who diverted the Cartel assassins away from him and directed them towards Hank instead so that an attempted hit on a DEA agent would get the American and Mexican governments to crack down hard on the Cartel and close off the distribution of meth from across the border, thereby granting Gus complete control over the market from within the States. Despite having put Hank's life in jeopardy, Walt nevertheless expresses gratitude towards Gus for saving his own life and commends him for his strategy, saying that he'd have done the same in Gus' position. He also brings up the issue of not knowing what will happen when his three-month contract has expired. Gus promises him security for his family, and also brings up the possibility of extending their contract to a year, which would increase his earnings to $15 million. Walt considers it.
- Saul encourages Jesse to purchase a nail salon with which he can use to launder the money he makes from the meth business. Jesse flatly refuses, especially since doing so would require him to report his income to the IRS and thereby pay taxes. Tired of having to adhere to the quotas and responsibilities within his new job, and wanting a larger cut of the profits, Jesse decides to steal the leftover pounds of meth that he and Walt produce in the lab to sell separately to the members of his rehab support group. He enlists Badger and Skinny Pete in this endeavor, and during a meeting, they pose as two new members and initiate a conversation within the group where they mention the blue meth, piquing everyone's interest in it.
- Marie becomes increasingly frustrated about being unable to find a means to pay for Hank's physical therapy, as their insurance will not cover the therapists. Skyler finally offers to pay their bills directly using Walt's drug money. She fabricates a story of Walt being a compulsive blackjack gambler, saying that this has been the cause of their recent marital problems. She explains that Walt took to gambling to pay his medical bills after his cancer diagnosis, and after some losses, his winnings have netted them an amount with seven figures. Marie is left shocked and appalled, but agrees to take their money to pay for Hank's therapy.
- Walt expresses surprise in Skyler's ability to come up with such an elaborate story on the fly. Skyler tells Walt that she believes he is somehow responsible for the attack on Hank, and that she is "not forgetting that."
March 29, 2009: Fly
- Walt, suffering from insomnia, stares up at his smoke detector's flashing light while trying to get back to sleep. Later, he arrives with Jesse at the superlab, where they begin making another batch of meth. At the end of the day, Walt calculates that their yield, while above what they are required to produce, falls short of what he expects. Jesse, who has been secretly taking small amounts for personal distribution, suggests it may be from other losses from spillage, but Walt insists there is another reason.
- After Jesse leaves for the day, Walt sees a housefly in the lab which he fears could contaminate the meth-making process. He tries numerous means to swat it, even dangling precariously from the lab's catwalk, from which he slips and falls to the floor. When Jesse returns the next day, he finds Walt still in pain from the fall and demanding that they cannot start cooking until they get rid of the fly. Jesse worries about Walt's lack of sleep and suggests they go outside to figure it out. However, when Jesse leaves, Walt locks him out of the lab and goes back to find the fly. When Jesse disconnects the main power to the lab, Walt lets him back in so they can work together. Jesse gets some flypaper which they hang around the lab, as well as some sleeping pills that he secretly puts into Walt's coffee. He then recounts a story about his late aunt, who experienced auditory hallucinations as a result of her cancer spreading to her brain. Walt asserts that he is still in remission.
- As they wait to catch the fly, the two talk about their families. Walt expresses that he should have died already and tries to think of the perfect moment to have done so: after he had enough money, after Holly was born, before his surgery and before Skyler knew what he'd been doing. He finally decides the perfect moment to die would have been the night Jane died, telling Jesse of his conversation with her father Donald. He tries to calculate the chances of meeting both father and daughter in different scenarios on the same night despite having never met either beforehand, but finds the odds too astronomical to calculate. Jesse is distracted when he sees the fly near the ceiling. As he tries to use a step-ladder to reach the fly, an increasingly-sleepy Walt seems poised to confess to Jesse about his role in Jane's death. Jesse tells him Jane's death was nobody's fault, but he still misses her. Jesse climbs back down and, seeing the fly land on the ladder, swats and kills it.
- Jesse takes a sleeping Walt to a couch while he cleans up the superlab and prepares for their next batch. They later leave together, but Walt warns Jesse that if he has been skimming from their product, he will not be able to protect him if Gus finds out. Jesse denies taking anything and states that he isn't asking anyone to protect him. That night, Walt is again unable to fall asleep, and sees a fly landing on the smoke detector's flashing light.
March 30 - April 7, 2009: Abiquiu
- Hank is frustrated with his physical therapy. Marie gives Skyler the therapy bill to pay as they previously discussed. Walt attempts to pay with his drug money, but Skyler insists the source must be "unimpeachable." Walt takes her to meet Saul, who laundered his money in the past. Skyler is put off by his flippant personality and his scheme to buy a laser tag facility. Instead, she suggests a more believable business investment: the car wash where Walt previously worked. Saul objects, as the owner of the laser tag facility would ask no questions about the deal, while the car wash owner, Bogdan, is an unknown factor. Skyler offers to help launder the money by managing the car wash. Walt worries that this would make her liable for his actions, but she reveals she never signed the divorce papers, and if married, cannot be made to testify against him.
- Meanwhile, Walt warns Jesse about skimming some of their meth product, which he continues to deny doing. Jesse takes what he has stolen to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to give to Badger and Skinny Pete to help peddle. The two reveal they can't bring themselves to sell meth to recovering addicts, so Jesse shows them how easy it is by striking up a conversation with Andrea, a newcomer to the meetings. He soon becomes attached to Andrea while surreptitiously attempting to sell her product. Andrea invites him to her home, where Jesse discovers she has a son, Brock. From him, Jesse learns Andrea has a younger brother named Tomás, although she initially refuses to talk about him. Later, Andrea suggests they use meth, but Jesse declines now that he knows she has a child, and the two argue. Andrea insists she wants to avoid having Brock suffer from the same fate as Tomás, who, as part of an initiation to a local drug gang, shot a rival dealer at a street corner. Jesse recognizes the murder is similar to that of Combo a few months prior.
- Gus invites Walt to his home for a private dinner, telling Walt that he made many mistakes when he first began working in the drug business. He regrets that he did not have a mentor and warns Walt never to make the same mistake twice. Although Walt does not appear to understand what Gus is referring to, it later becomes apparent he is speaking of Walt's relationship with Jesse. The next day, Jesse travels to the corner where Combo was killed. He finds Tomás there, and confirms that not only is he working for a drug gang, but the gang works for Gus peddling the blue meth that he and Walt are making. Jesse quietly walks away, enraged.
April 8-14, 2009: Half Measures
- Skyler pushes Walt to accept her plan of laundering his drug money through the car wash. They continue to disagree, but are able to negotiate a plan that allows Walt to have some family dinners at home as a ploy to make the Whites appear reconciled. Meanwhile, Jesse begins to plot against those who killed Combo. He buys blue meth from the gang responsible, indicating that the people who killed Combo work for Gus. Jesse tells Walt about his findings and asks him to make ricin so he can exact revenge. Although Walt appears troubled by the gang's use of children, he dismisses the plan and tells Jesse to do the same. Jesse says, "I’m doing it. With or without you."
- Convinced Jesse is likely to do something rash that would endanger multiple people, including himself, Walt visits Saul and they hatch a plan to have Jesse sent to jail for a month to cool down. Meanwhile, Marie wheels Hank out of the hospital after winning a bet where she arouses him during a sponge bath. Mike makes an unannounced visit to Walt at home, telling him that he is not going to follow Saul's plan. He explains that Gus does not know of Jesse's intentions, but that if he follows through on them, he will find out and "take it as a problem." He then recounts an incident from his time as a cop, when he showed mercy by allowing a habitually abusive husband to live, only to have the man beat his wife to death shortly after. He tells Walt that he chose a "half measure" instead of killing the husband, and warns before leaving: "No more half measures."
- Jesse plants a poison of his own making in burgers his friend Wendy, a local prostitute, will bring to the gang members. However, Mike and Victor get to Jesse first, thwarting his plan and forcing him to go for a ride. They bring him to a meeting with Gus, Walt, and the dealers he was targeting. Jesse is furious to realize Walt has revealed his plan to Gus, but Gus tells him that Walt is his only friend in the room. After several tense verbal exchanges, the dealers agree to stop using children, and Jesse agrees to "keep the peace." It is implied that Jesse intends to drop his plans for revenge, although his relationship with Walt is damaged. He refuses to speak to Walt in the car after the meeting, and later won't return his phone calls.
- That night, Jesse hears about the death of Tomás, and rushes to the scene with his girlfriend Andrea. He realizes the dealers have killed Tomás because he is no longer of value to them, as they've agreed to stop using children. Jesse waits in his car near their territory, watching them and snorting meth for the first time since leaving rehab. He grabs a gun from under his seat, leaves the vehicle and starts walking towards the dealers. As Jesse draws his gun, the dealers begin to do likewise. Suddenly, Walt plows over both dealers with his car. He exits the vehicle with one still underneath, and another injured but reaching for his gun. Walt picks up the gun, shoots the dealer in the head, and tells Jesse to run.
April 15-16, 2009: Full Measure
- After Walt kills the gang members and Jesse goes on the run, Walt meets with Gus and Mike to negotiate for his and Jesse's safety, and for the continuation of his employment. Walt suggests Gus has two options: (A) kill Walt right there on the spot and eventually track down and kill Jesse, or (B) consider the incident a "lone hiccup in an otherwise long and fruitful business arrangement," let him return to cooking, and both agree to forget about Jesse. Gus leaves, appearing to have chosen option B, but informs Walt that he will be choosing Jesse's replacement.
- Walt arrives at the superlab to discover Gale Boetticher's car in the parking lot. Gale has been reinstated as Walt's lab partner, and Victor now shadows them everywhere, ensuring the two are never left alone. Gus informs Gale later that night of Walt's cancer. Gus says he intends to keep Walt on as long as possible, but must prepare for the "worst-case scenario." Walt, whose prior suspicions about Gale are soon reignited, correctly concludes that Gus is grooming Gale to replace him, and that he will be killed once Gale masters Walt's procedure.
- Acting on Gus's request, Mike visits Saul to find out Jesse's whereabouts. Saul refuses, claiming attorney–client privilege, but relents after Mike physically threatens him. Saul then allows Mike to look at a notebook containing a fake address for a trailer park in Virginia.
- Walt and Saul meet Jesse at a laser tag arcade; Victor is parked nearby and watches Walt and Saul enter. Walt informs Jesse of his situation, and explains that when Gale is confident enough to take over, they will be disposed of. Walt decides they must kill Gale. Jesse begs Walt, having made enough money from the venture to ensure his family are financially secure, to quit and go to the police or the DEA, but Walt refuses. He reasons that Gus can't stop production, and with Gale out of the picture, Gus would have no choice but to keep Walt. Jesse says he is not a murderer and can't kill Gale. Walt says he will do the job, and Jesse only needs to find Gale's address, as Walt is being heavily watched and can't manage it. Later that evening, Jesse calls Walt at home with Gale's address.
- As Walt is leaving his home to kill Gale, Victor arrives and informs him of a chemical leak at the lab. Suspecting a setup, Walt nevertheless goes with Victor. Upon arriving at the laundromat, Walt sees Mike, confirming his suspicions. Pleading for his life, Walt offers to cook for free and take them to Jesse. Mike, upon hearing this, demands Jesse's location, but Walt says he needs to call him and set up a meeting. Walt calls Jesse, who is sitting in the darkened laser tag building about to smoke meth. Jesse asks "Did you do it?" Walt says no, he can't now, and tells Jesse he is about to be killed. He urges Jesse to reach Gale and kill him first. Victor and Mike wrestle the phone away and when Walt quotes Gale's address to them, they realize what he has asked Jesse to do. Victor hurriedly leaves; Mike stays with Walt and attempts to warn Gale, but Gale fails to notice his phone ringing.
- Jesse arrives at Gale's house and pulls a gun on him. Gale pleads with Jesse, telling him that he doesn't have to do it. A tearful and shaking Jesse pulls the trigger as the screen cuts to black, with a gunshot being heard.
April 16-17, 2009: Box Cutter
- Jesse has just shot Gale to death on orders from Walt to foil Gus' plot to kill and replace them. Gus' henchman Victor arrives at Gale's apartment and finds him dead, surrounded by neighbors who have just called police. Victor finds a stunned Jesse sitting in his car and forces him to return to the lab, where Gus' employee Mike Ehrmantraut is holding Walt hostage. Mike, who is concerned that Victor was seen at Gale's apartment, calls to inform Gus. Victor, who realizes his own position is precarious because witnesses saw him at Gale's, has watched Walt work and starts cooking meth himself to prove that he has value to Gus, and that Gus does not need Walt or Jesse. Walt grows concerned when Victor proves better at the process than he expected.
- Meanwhile, Skyler observes his car in her driveway and, not wishing her son Walt Jr. to see it, parks it a few blocks away to conceal it. Concerned about Walt's apparent disappearance, she calls their lawyer Saul Goodman, but he has become paranoid because of Walt's falling out with Gus and is too busy checking his office for listening devices. Skyler hires a locksmith to break into Walt's condo, claiming she lives there. When he hesitates to do so without verifying her address, Skyler claims her purse was stolen and fakes a panic attack until he lets her in, but she finds little of interest. Elsewhere, Skyler's sister Marie struggles to maintain her composure while caring for her belligerent husband Hank, who is still bedridden after the attempt on his life.
- Gus arrives at the lab but says nothing. Walt launches into a nervous, rambling monologue of excuses and justifications, trying to convince Gus he needs him and Jesse alive. He claims it is Gus who is ultimately responsible for Gale's death, not them, and insists Victor cannot produce the high-quality meth Gus needs. Gus maintains his silence, even while changing into hazmat gear and selecting a box cutter from a storage shelf, while Victor grins in anticipation. Never changing his demeanor, Gus suddenly slices Victor's throat, startling the others. Through the killing, Gus simultaneously punishes Victor while delivering a stern message to Walt and Jesse. Gus drops the body to the floor and coldly eyes the duo to ensure his message was received. He quietly returns to his street clothes, then walks out of the lab, pausing only to say, "Well, get back to work."
- Later, Walt and Jesse dispose of Victor's body, the gun that killed Gale, and the box cutter in a barrel of hydrofluoric acid. During breakfast, Walt insists that Gale's death was necessary, but expresses concern that Gus will kill them at his next opportunity. Jesse doubts this, believing it will be too much trouble for Gus to find another drug manufacturer, and that both they and Gus understand the situation: neither can kill the other, so Gus might as well make them wish they were dead. The episode ends with police investigating Gale's apartment with the camera focusing on his lab notes, which have yet to be discovered.
April 18 - May 4, 2009: Thirty-Eight Snub
- Walt buys a Ruger LCR .38 snubnosed revolver from a black market gun dealer. Walt plans to use the concealable gun to kill his employer, drug kingpin Gus. Since falling out of favor with Gus, Walt believes Gus will kill him if he does not act first; when the gun dealer asks why Walt needs the gun, he insists it is strictly for self-defense. Later, Walt practices drawing the weapon. Elsewhere, Gus' henchman Mike drinks coffee at a bar and discovers dried blood on his jacket sleeve belonging to Victor, whom Gus previously murdered. Although Mike is silent, he appears to harbor conflicted feelings about what happened to Victor. Meanwhile, Jesse has purchased expensive gadgets, like a sophisticated sound system and the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, but remains miserable after having murdered Gale to save Walt and himself. After his friends Badger and Skinny Pete visit, Jesse has them arrange a wild party with dozens of people dancing, drinking and doing drugs to further distract himself.
- Later, while cooking meth at their lab, Walt waits for Gus to arrive so he can kill him. Instead, Victor's replacement Tyrus arrives with Mike, who informs Walt he will never see Gus again. That night, Walt drives to Gus' house and approaches with the gun, but before he can cross the street, Walt receives a call from Tyrus, who says simply, "Go home, Walter." The next day, as Walt approaches Mike at the bar, Mike tells Walt that he observed Walt tailing him to the bar. Mike then reveals he could tell that Walt was carrying a weapon in the lab. Walt suggests he and Mike are in the same danger, and Gus could easily kill Mike the same way he killed Victor. This visibly unnerves Mike, who appears to be aware of this. Walt asks that Mike get him in a room with Gus so he can kill him. In response, Mike punches Walt, knocking him to the floor, kicks him in the torso a few times and then leaves the bar.
- Skyler calls Walt to ask about buying the car wash where Walt once worked, which they plan to use as a front business for Walt's drug money. When Walt fails to act on the purchase, Skyler starts doing her own detailed research about the business's expenses and revenues. She later approaches the car wash owner, Bogdan, about the proposed purchase, but he angrily rejects her, making sexist remarks and condemning Walt for having insulted Bogdan when he quit the car wash. Meanwhile, Marie continues struggling to deal with Hank's deepening depression as he copes with physical therapy from having been shot. The bed-ridden and bitter Hank constantly ignores or insults Marie and, even after celebrating a successful session with his physical therapist, he refuses to share any of that excitement with Marie.
- After three straight days of partying, Jesse tries to keep hanging out with Badger and Skinny Pete, but they are exhausted and go home, along with all of the other guests in Jesse's house. Alone with his thoughts, a depressed Jesse breaks down and cries, sitting less than an inch away from his speakers at an extremely high volume.
May 5-6, 2009: Open House
- Walt furiously notices a motion-detecting surveillance camera that has been installed in the lab.
- Later that day, Skyler convinces Walt in a meeting with Saul to buy the car wash by mentioning how the owner insulted his manhood. She devises a plan to trick the owner into selling by having con artist Patrick Kuby pretend to be a water-tester who is shutting down the business out of concerns over contaminants. The owner promptly sells to her, agreeing to an even lower price than her original offer.
- Jesse is still feeling numb from recent events, attempting to clear his head with nostalgic go-kart trips. He continues to open his house up for all-night drug-fueled orgies, deliberately throwing piles of money in the midst of the chaos.
- Angry and frustrated by Hank's continuous cold shoulder, Marie resumes her kleptomania; she starts stealing objects from real-estate open houses, where she also makes up elaborate stories about who she is, but is eventually caught by a real-estate agent. A livid Hank pulls strings with a senior police officer to get her out of being charged. The same officer drops by the Schrader residence to seek Hank's help by giving him Gale's lab notes to look at. Hank initially shoves away the notebook, but begins to read it later that night.
May 7-17, 2009: Bullet Points
- Mike rides in the back of a Los Pollos Hermanos refrigerator truck on a meth delivery run. The truck screeches to a halt as it is forced off the road by a pair of hijackers. Mike pulls out his gun and listens as the gunmen pull the driver from the cab and shoot him in the head. Mike takes cover as the gunmen raise Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine guns and shoot up the trailer. After firing two volleys, the gunmen break into the truck, only to be promptly shot dead by Mike. Only after he steps out of the truck does Mike find that one bullet has grazed his right ear.
- Walt and Skyler prepare an elaborate story about Walt having a gambling addiction and a successful card counting method. They hope it will explain how they can pay for Hank's medical bills and purchase a car wash (that will actually be used to launder Walt's meth profits). Walt remains too distracted to put much effort into the charade and is worried how Walt Jr. will perceive him. During a family dinner at Hank and Marie's, Skyler and Walt tell everyone the gambling addiction story, but Hank and Walt Jr. turn out to be impressed by it.
- Later, Walt is shocked to learn that Hank is investigating Gale's murder. Hank says that he believes that Gale was the elusive Heisenberg and expresses regret that he was not able to arrest him. When asked by Hank to read about a chemical process written in Gale's lab notes, Walt notices a line from a Walt Whitman poem and a dedication: "W.W. My Star, My Perfect Silence." When Hank chuckles at the initials matching Walt's, Walt jokingly admits admitted to being "W.W," and says "you got me," before telling Hank that "W.W." refers to the poet, Walt Whitman.
- When Walt asks Hank about the investigation, he learns that the only leads are some fingerprints and an eyewitness spotted at the scene. Hearing about this evidence, Walt is spooked and worries that the police will connect Jesse to the murder.
- Walt goes to Jesse's house and is disgusted by its condition, as it is now being used as a drug den by addicts and vagrants. Jesse is adamant nothing can connect him to Gale's murder, but when he is asked if he picked up the shell casing from the gun (which could have his fingerprints on it), it is revealed he did not. When he is further questioned about the murder, Jesse starts to panic due to the memory of it and pays two druggies to kick Walt out of the house. Walt later laments to Saul about how the meth business is falling apart because no one is acting professionally, and rejects an offer to go into hiding.
- Jesse's detached complacence eventually leads to all of his meth money being stolen from his house, but Mike quickly recovers it and warns Jesse that he's on thin ice. Jesse is apathetic about the loss and recovery, leading Mike to tell Gus that Jesse's lack of professionalism is a problem for the organization, and they must intervene. Jesse does not show up to the lab the next day and Walter realizes that he has been kidnapped. The episode ends with Mike driving Jesse to an unknown destination. When he asks Jesse if he would like to know where they are going, the only reply is a simple "nope."
May 17-18, 2009: Shotgun
- Walt is racing to Los Pollos Hermanos to confront Gus about Jesse's disappearance. Worried about what will happen, Walt leaves a voicemail for Skyler and his children, saying only that he loves them. Walt learns that Gus is not in, and Mike eventually calls, explaining that Jesse is with him and will not be harmed, and tells Walt to go back to work.
- Over the course of the day, Mike drives Jesse to seven isolated drop-off spots all over New Mexico, where Gus's dealers leave the money from meth sales for pickup. Jesse assumes he was brought along to watch Mike's back, but Mike denies this and says he doesn't know why he was asked to take Jesse. While waiting in the car alone at the last drop-off spot, Jesse notices two robbers approach, one armed with a shotgun. He slams the car in reverse, rams into their car, and drives off. When Jesse returns, Mike hints that he is impressed. It is later revealed that Gus set up the entire scene so that Jesse would consider himself a "hero."
- Meanwhile, Walt and Skyler officially buy the car wash. After Skyler hears the voicemail Walt left earlier, the two passionately make love and she offers to let Walt move back in, but Walt leaves for the lab without giving an answer. Jesse has returned to the lab and explains to Walt that he will be working in the lab and also helping Mike with pickups from now on. Walt Jr. excitedly reveals to his father that Skyler already set the date for Walt to move back in, which seems to unnerve him. Seeing Walt Jr. drink from a Beneke Fabricators mug—whose boss, Ted Beneke, had an affair with Skyler—upsets him further.
- During dinner at Hank and Marie's, a brooding Walt gets increasingly tipsy on wine. Hank explains that he gave up investigating Gale further, having found a sense of closure in the death of the man he believed to be "Heisenberg," but lauds Gale's genius. A prideful Walt then insists that Gale was not a genius, and suggests that he was copying someone else's work. This convinces Hank to take another look at the case files, and he notices that the strictly vegan Gale had notes scribbled on a napkin from Los Pollos Hermanos.
May 19-20, 2009: Cornered
- Two guards ride in the back of a Los Pollos Hermanos refrigerator truck which is suddenly forced off the road by cartel hitmen, led by cartel member Gaff. They shoot the driver in the head, lock the truck, and use a hose to redirect the truck's exhaust into the ventilation system. They eat the driver's lunch while the hidden guards die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Gaff and his men then open the truck, and find a marked container of fry batter that contains meth for distribution.
- Skyler listens to Walt's voice message twice after researching Gale Boetticher's death on the internet. She wakes up a hungover Walt the morning after their dinner with Hank and Marie during which Walt suggested to Hank the genius who created the blue meth might still be out there. Skyler wants to talk to Walt about Gale. She suspects Gale's death is related to the meth operation, which leads her to pressure Walt to call the police due to the danger it presents their family. She suggests a hypothetical situation where one day an in-over-his-head Walt opens his front door and is shot in the face. Furious that Skyler does not understand the scope of his criminal operation, Walt responds that, in that scenario, he would be "the one who knocks." Skyler flees the house, taking Holly with her. She ponders escaping to Colorado, going so far as to drive to the Four Corners Monument, but ultimately reconsiders.
- Walt receives the keys to the car wash from Bogdan, and avenges his past insults by making Bogdan leave behind his framed first earned dollar, which Walt uses to buy a soda. Walt tells Walt Jr. he is not moving back home and buys a new Dodge Challenger to cheer him up. Jesse returns to the lab and Walt expresses doubt that Jesse was hired to help Mike due to stopping an earlier robbery, considering the whole thing a ruse by Gus Fring to create a wedge between them. Jesse is later called away by Mike before he can help clean the lab. Infuriated, Walt pays off three women at the laundry to do it, but afterwards feels guilty as Gus punishes them by sending Tyrus Kitt to deport them back to Honduras.
- Jesse and Mike scout a house selling the blue meth from the hijacked truck, but Jesse grows impatient and tricks one of the meth users into letting him into the house, where he knocks out the other. Mike notices the words "¿Estás listo para platicar?" written on the stolen container which translates to "Are you ready to talk?". Gus meets with Mike at a diner that night and decides to try and negotiate with the cartel. Outside of the diner, Jesse asks Gus, "Why me?" in reference to him being asked to help Mike during the previous several days. Gus responds by saying "I like to think I see things in people." Meanwhile, Skyler arrives home and demands that Walter return Junior's car, as buying lavish things threatens their cover story, saying "someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family."
May 21 - June 4, 2009: Problem Dog
- ASkyler tells Walt that she's negotiated the return of Walt, Jr's Dodge Challenger to the dealership, Walt angrily drives the Challenger to a parking lot, burns donuts, and strands the car on a cement parking divider, then stuffs the ownership papers in the gas tank, lights them afire, and blows up the car. Saul covers up the outburst, which costs Walt $52,000.
- When Walt later drops off approximately $274,000 — his biweekly profits — to Skyler, she is stunned by the amount, unsure how she'll launder his annual meth-lab earnings of over $7 million, in mostly $50 bills no less, through their car wash. Meanwhile, Hank visits Los Pollos Hermanos with Walt, Jr. and manages to get Gus's fingerprints on a cup.
- Walt convinces Jesse to use his new position as a henchman in the organization to kill Gus, and concocts a ricin poison in the lab that Jesse hides in one of his cigarettes. Mike brings Jesse along to a sitdown between Gus and the cartel. Jesse is told to make coffee for the meeting and contemplates poisoning the coffee, but he is interrupted before he can act. Mike is surprised when the cartel sends only one man to the meeting, who delivers to Gus an ultimatum. Gus, who had been prepared for a negotiation, rejects the ultimatum. Jesse contemplates shooting Gus as the cartel representative leaves, but decides not to. Mike later tells Jesse that Gus is impressed by Jesse's loyalty, but that he thinks it's "for the wrong guy."
- Jesse returns to his Twelve-step program group. During his turn, he discreetly shares his feelings about killing Gale, saying he shot a "problem dog" that otherwise did nothing wrong. Jesse angrily disagrees when the group leader tells him not to judge himself, and reveals to everyone that he had used the group as a market to peddle meth. The group leader finally expresses disapproval of Jesse. Hank meets with Gomez and Merkert and explains his theory that Gus leads a large meth operation. Although Hank's investigation into Madrigal Electromotive GmbH — the German parent company of Los Pollos Hermanos — was stopped by its attorney, Hank reveals that Gus's fingerprints on the cup Hank had earlier obtained from Los Pollos Hermanos match fingerprints found in Gale's apartment.
June 5 - July 2, 2009: Hermanos
- Gus is called to meet with the police and DEA, where he is asked about his fingerprints in Gale's apartment. He explains that Gale was a recipient years ago of a UNM college scholarship in chemistry that Gus created, and says that Gale had invited Gus to his apartment for dinner to ask him for money. Hank asks if Gus Fring is his real name, as there are no records of anyone with that name in his native Chile. Gus says he immigrated at the time of Pinochet's dictatorship, which he claims was notorious both for human rights violations and poor record-keeping. The investigators are satisfied with his answers, except Hank, who is still suspicious. Meanwhile, Skyler begins to hide Walt's meth money in a crawl space below the house.
- Hank later asks Walt to drive him to a mineral show, but reveals en route that he's really going to Los Pollos Hermanos to plant a GPS tracking unit on Gus' car. Walt is nervous since he is already on poor terms with Gus and because Mike has appeared and is watching him, but Walt ultimately gives in to Hank. Walt pretends to plant the tracker and goes inside the restaurant, where Gus meets him at a register. Walt hastens to assure Gus that he didn't plant the tracker, showing it still in his pocket, but Gus tells him to "do it." Perplexed, Walt plants the tracker on his way back to his car and leaves with Hank. Later, Walt (on video) and Mike each assure Gus that Hank is acting on his own and not as part of the DEA's investigation, but Mike advises Gus that Hank may pose a problem if Gus and the cartel go to war. Walt warns Jesse about Hank's investigation and again urges him to kill Gus. While he is at Jesse's house, Walt intercepts a text message meant for Jesse and suspects that Jesse is becoming loyal to Gus.
- Gus goes to see Hector in the nursing home and asks him, cryptically, if today is the day. Gus tells Hector to look him in the eyes, but Hector refuses. "Maybe next time," Gus says, and leaves.

Timeline IX >>>

Addiction impacts the addict and those who surrounds them

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Read about gambling where to get help for problem gambling, with links to treatment centres and support groups. Skip to main content Anonymous UK Gamblers Anonymous UK runs local support groups that use the same 12-step approach to recovery from addiction as Alcoholics Anonymous. There are also GamAnon support groups for friends and family. Self-help tips for problem gamblers . Do: pay The Gambling Rehab Process. Although gambling addiction is a serious, potentially dangerous disorder, it can be treated with a combination of therapeutic modalities, recovery resources, and supportive psychosocial services. These therapies and services are available through professional treatment programs that specialize in addressing compulsive gambling, with or without a co-occurring How Long Does Addition Rehabilitation Last? Rehab centers generally offer one-month, two-month and three-month options. A 28- to 30-day program is generally the minimum recommended time to treat a substance use disorder. Those who have been living with addiction for a long period of time may benefit from a 60-day program, while some patients choose a 90-day program to give them the best chance Treatment clinics near me are now available for anyone who is worried about the route their addiction may be taking. We have a wide array of therapies available, from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to other workshops, discussions and guides to help visitors understand how their way of thinking has manifested in the form of an addiction. Many of the symptoms can include: Loss of interest Algamus is one of the only residential gambling treatment programs in the United States that treats gambling and only gambling. Many on our staff are in recovery from gambling disorder and understand the unique issues surrounding the gambling. We are an intimate program and our staff to patient ratio is almost one to one. Gambling Rehab Centers Gambling rehabilitation is a serious issue. In this page we will investigate symptoms, causes, effects, and treatment options for gambling addiction . If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, we urge you to seek out gambling rehab centers in your area to find a rehabilitation center near you. Clinics,.... Continue reading › Gambling addiction treatment centers In Nevada . List of all Gambling addiction treatment facilities - ratings, address, treatment models, maps, websites, and more. American Addiction Centers does not treat gambling addiction at any of our facilities. The information below will provide a brief overview of gambling addiction, but if you need help with this addiction, please go to FindTreatment.gov, an official page of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Gambling addiction can affect anybody at any time, and differentiates from an occasional ‘flutter’ for fun, or even a gambling problem that isn’t out of control, in that it can consume all aspects of your life. While traditional gambling prior to the digital age consisted of having to physically place bets at horse racing venues or bookmakers on the high street, modern day gambling

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Choosing the Best Gambling Addiction Rehab Program

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Feeling Confused - Rehab

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