Recently, I put my head to the long-running question: How did Walt poison Brock? Vince Gilligan and crew have been unusually dodgy regarding how Brock was introduced to Lily of the Valley. Food tampering seems the likely mechanism. (I've interpreted the use of Glass Block Windows in the hospital during Brock's stay there as a reference to the 1982 Chicago Tylenol poisoning murders - killing through product tampering.)At the 2013 San Diego ComicCon, Gilligan addressed the question:
I don't think Gilligan is quite straight with his fans here. The trouble with a juice box is that once it's opened, it's hard to reseal. The damned thing keeps leaking. So, some other product was tampered with. But what product?
Much later, in the episode 'To'hajiilee,' Andrea asks Brock whether he would like string cheese or squeeze yogurt for lunch. Brock replies, "Both." String cheese seems unlikely as a poison vector, but what about squeeze yogurt?
There are not many squeeze yogurt makers. I quickly settled on Stonyfield Farms' Organic YoKids Squeezers as the likely target, in part because Stonyfield Farms is based in pristine, organic New Hampshire (BrBa goes to New Hampshire in 'Granite State'), and in part because it was bought out in 2001 by Group Danone, a French multinational concern, and maker of Dannon Yogurt. (Multinationals that buy out smaller brands catering to various food niche markets are satirized by BrBa - specifically, Madrigal Electromotive's purchase of Los Pollos Hermanos, among many other fast food restaurant chains).
So, how easy is it to tamper with YoKids Squeezers without detection? Pretty easy. Here is a photo of an unopened squeezer on the left, and an opened squeezer on the right. Little blue tabs on the neck fold back to reveal the opened container, but the tabs can easily be reset after tampering, with only an easily-overlooked light-blue strip marking the tampered product. Unwary kids and adults wouldn't even see the mark.
It's easy to see why Vince Gilligan might get dodgy here, and work through extreme misdirection. Directly-identifying the product would have been an invitation to a massive lawsuit.
How Walt got the tampered product to Brock is still a mystery. I doubt Walt entered Brock's school. Too many eyes there. Had to be something simpler. Walt may have just walked to Brock on the sidewalk and handed the product directly to him. After all, in BrBa, there were hints that Brock already recognized Walt.
“That’s an excellent question,” Gilligan says. “The writers would always tell the story of the Evil Juice Box Man. The way we worked it out on our timeline is he had just enough time to do it, but it would’ve been very tricky indeed.” They figured he crushed the poison up, stuck it in a juice box, and got into Brock’s school. “That’s our inner story, the writers and I, for how it happened. It would’ve been very tricky timing, but he was a motivated individual at that point.”
I don't think Gilligan is quite straight with his fans here. The trouble with a juice box is that once it's opened, it's hard to reseal. The damned thing keeps leaking. So, some other product was tampered with. But what product?
Much later, in the episode 'To'hajiilee,' Andrea asks Brock whether he would like string cheese or squeeze yogurt for lunch. Brock replies, "Both." String cheese seems unlikely as a poison vector, but what about squeeze yogurt?
There are not many squeeze yogurt makers. I quickly settled on Stonyfield Farms' Organic YoKids Squeezers as the likely target, in part because Stonyfield Farms is based in pristine, organic New Hampshire (BrBa goes to New Hampshire in 'Granite State'), and in part because it was bought out in 2001 by Group Danone, a French multinational concern, and maker of Dannon Yogurt. (Multinationals that buy out smaller brands catering to various food niche markets are satirized by BrBa - specifically, Madrigal Electromotive's purchase of Los Pollos Hermanos, among many other fast food restaurant chains).
So, how easy is it to tamper with YoKids Squeezers without detection? Pretty easy. Here is a photo of an unopened squeezer on the left, and an opened squeezer on the right. Little blue tabs on the neck fold back to reveal the opened container, but the tabs can easily be reset after tampering, with only an easily-overlooked light-blue strip marking the tampered product. Unwary kids and adults wouldn't even see the mark.
It's easy to see why Vince Gilligan might get dodgy here, and work through extreme misdirection. Directly-identifying the product would have been an invitation to a massive lawsuit.
How Walt got the tampered product to Brock is still a mystery. I doubt Walt entered Brock's school. Too many eyes there. Had to be something simpler. Walt may have just walked to Brock on the sidewalk and handed the product directly to him. After all, in BrBa, there were hints that Brock already recognized Walt.
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