Horseradish Dip and the Mysterious Nazi

I'd be lying if I told you that these were not discouraging times.  Walter's once-reliable food cravings seem to be fading, and we're left munching on whatever food happens to make a passing appearance on the show.  This week we had bacon horseradish dip.  I was skeptical about it at first, not being overly fond of horseradish generally, but the unholy combination of all the fat in the bacon and the sodium in the potato chips combined to short out my brain, and I found myself compulsively shoveling chips into my mouth for the entire duration of the show.

This week's episode began with a bunch of people dying at a Jewish wedding.  In the back of the crowd (much like an Observer) was a man standing against a wall -- one of the older (though not old enough) guests recognized him just before all hell broke loose.  The rest of the episode revolved around finding how the people died and who this mysterious guy with the short-cropped hair and the glasses was.

Walter tests the bodies and determines that they've been poisoned with some sort of highly-specific agent that only affects people with certain genetic characteristics.  This is a clever idea but I didn't find it very plausible that it had been developed in the 1940s by Walter's father.  As he admits, DNA was not even discovered until later.  How his father could have left his "signature" in the 3-dimensional model of the poison's protein ... well, it's best not to ponder these things too much.

This episode introduced us to a darker side of Walter's character.  First we have him getting genuinely angry at Peter for selling his father's books, refusing to accept Peter's apology for it, blaming Peter for the deaths of the people at the wedding (an accusation that turned out to be baseless), then using the Nazi poison against someone in a public place.  Yes, only the one guy died.  But could Walter have really known it would work on just him?  And could he have done something besides outright killing him?

It also raises the question of who the Nazi was.  Walter said his DNA analysis showed that he was over a hundred years old.  That would be about right, assuming the man stopped aging during the Nazi period.  But how did he stop aging?  Was he ever a normal human being?  Or could he be something else?

It will be interesting to see if these questions are addressed later somehow, but I fear it will be forgotten.  The shows haven't seemed to interrelate much lately.

Very slim pickings on the food this week.  Walter is seen eating something, though he never says what it is and Fox did not provide us with a closeup.  The Nazi eats an apple at one point.  Whether this is a Biblical metaphor or a humorous explanation for how he stays young ("an apple a day") is hard to say, but I don't think we'll be following his example either way.