Season 4
I’ve lost all my notes so I’ll just go by what I remember and what I can recall from Wikipedia’s descriptions of each episode.
I couldn’t remember when it was that Gus Fring, played by Giancarlo Esposito, walked in and casually slit the throat of his watcher.
It was the beginning of this season. That watcher’s name was Victor and he had proven to Walter, I guess, that he could make meth just as easily as Jesse. The whole point of killing Gale in the previous season was to protect Jesse and Walt. (Remember that Walt always has his self interest at the forefront of his mind. He may have protected Jesse in having Jesse kill Gale, but Gale was being trained to replace Walt, in the long run. This small theme (that Walt is the only one capable of making this meth), comes up several times.)
Body count = 200.
In episode 4, I think, Mike is riding in the cargo hold of a truck which gets attacked by people from the Salamanca gang, I believe. They kill the driver. Shoot up the truck. Mike was able to flatten himself to the ground enough that he was grazed on the ear, and then when they open the truck he kills the 2 goons.
Body count = 203.
The Salamanca gang uses gas to kill two of the men guarding the chicken truck that’s transporting meth in its containers. Body count = 205.
In one of these episodes which lead to a long arc, Walter creates ricin in the lab, puts it into a tiny vial and tries to persuade Jesse to kill Gus. He has an opportunity when Gus, Mike and Jesse go down to meet the Salamanca gang, but he refrains or is interrupted. Jesse has been hiding this vial in a cigarette, which he keeps upside down in his carton so he knows which one it is.
In a flashback, we learn that Gus and his former lover, Max, approached Hector with their crystal meth and Hector, who is now the bell ringing invalid in the nursing home, had Max shot through the head and forced Gus to watch him bleed out. This explains some of the long running hatred between the cartel and Gus. It also explains, to an extent, Gus’s meticulous nature, and it confirmed that he is gay. Body count = 206. (But this one wasn’t related to Walter in any way.)
A sniper attacks Gus’s distribution operation and one of his guards is killed. Count = 207.
Episode 10 of this season is called “Salud” which is a toast, like to your health, I guess. It’s also the season where Gus poisons almost the entire Salamanca gang [I know I’m getting these names wrong. This is not the Salamanca gang, it is the Mexican cartel, and Don Eladio, who had killed Max so many years ago, is the leader of it.] It begins as an episode where Jesse is brought down to Mexico to cook meth as pure as Walter White can and then Jesse learns he is being “sold” in a sense, to the cartel. (Another theme that will come up later in the series, toward the end: slave labor.) Gus prevents Jesse from drinking the tequila, but he drinks it himself because he has taken some pills to help counteract the poison. It barely does, but it does the job by killing Don Eledio and all the other bosses. I believe I counted 9 or 10. One person has to be killed because he didn’t drink the tequila. The Wikipedia page says Jesse commits that killing which I know must be true or it would have been done by Mike. So body count is now 217 or 218, depending. Don Eladio is played by Steven Bauer who didn’t have too much of a career after being so prominent in Scarface with Al Pacino. A quick glance at the wikipedia entry for the character explains that the cartel is made up of 3: Hector Salamanca, Juan Bolsa, who is killed in one of the earlier seasons, before the creation of Gus’s superlab, and the Salamanca psycho twins that were killed earlier. Don Eladio took over and was the one who started ordering the shooting up of the delivery trucks, and the sniper who killed one of Gus’s guards.
The whole series, in some sense, is a fight between Gus Fring and the two men who ran the cartel. Walter’s accidental involvement, which is where our point of view is, and really begins, in a sense, with Jesse, just makes it possible for Gus to take his revenge. By having a chemist who can make a better product, Gus has the power to strike back after twenty years.
Finally, in the last episode, after a whole of plot twists and turns, Walter, in order to kill Gus, persuades Hector Salamanca to connect a bomb to his bell. Gus goes to visit Salamanca to torment him, along with his bodyguard Tycus who replaced Victor, the one that Gus killed with a box cutter. With Gus standing in front of him, Salamanca rings the bell repeatedly until the bomb goes off, which kills Tycus, Salamanca and blows half of Gus’s face off. Gus walks out of the room, but keels over and dies. Later in the episode, Walter rescues Jesse who has been kidnapped and, for the second time, forced into slave labor to make methamphetamine. The two men who kidnapped him — I’m not sure who they work for. They may work for Gus who they don’t know yet is dead. In any case, Walter kills both of them and rescues and Jesse, and in order to prevent his brother in law Hank from discovering anything, they burn down the lab.
I’m not sure if either of them knows this, but they have independently been saving each other from being killed. First Walter insisted that he needed Jesse to cook (and that was probably true because of the physical demands it made on him) and later, Jesse refused to cook anything if they were to kill Walter. So despite their almost constantly hostile and even violent relationship, there is an attachment between the two of them that really exists.
Body count for this season: 222 or 223, including the flashback killing of Max from twenty years ago.