YMMV / Breaking Bad S2 E13 "ABQ"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Following his daughter's death, why does Donald Margolis apathetically allow the Wayfarer 515 and the JM21 to collide with each other? Was he so distraught over Jane's death that he didn't bother to inform the planes about the impending collision while trying to distract himself from his loss, or did he feel in his grief that other people needed to suffer just like him?
  • Earlier, Donald had the chance to lash out at Jesse, but instead he sadly and silently takes her "Apology Girl" drawing and leaves peacefully. Did Donald not blame Jesse for Jane's death, or did he silently blame Jesse for her death but was too broken to lash out?
• Ass Pull: The Reveal that Jane's father Don is an air traffic controller (something never mentioned prior), and his grief over her death leading to him becoming distracted at work and accidentally causing a mid-air collision which kills 167 people. Technically speaking, the plane crash was foreshadowed via flashforward cold opens in four episodes during the season, and Don and Jane talked a bit about his work in the previous episode, but the flashforwards were so vague and uninformative that the twist ending seems to come completely out of nowhere and could not possibly have been foreseen.
• Broken Base: The plane crash is either a Contrived Coincidence that's a Cliffhanger Copout after all the vague flash forwards and build up or it's a great metaphor for how Walt's actions have consequences he can't imagine. Specifically, viewers are sharply divided over whether it is appropriate to blame Walter for the plane crash.
• Genius Bonus: The air disaster has some similarities to the 1986 Cerritos disaster, when an Aeromexico jet and a private plane collided over the skies near Los Angeles International Airport. The air traffic controller monitoring the two flights was named Walter White. The sole difference is that 15 people in houses were killed when Aeromexico Flight 498 slammed into a residential neighborhood.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Don shows up to work obviously unfit, and he causes a mid-air collision with numerous fatalities. In 2015, the clinically depressed pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 deliberately crashed his plane into the side of a mountain in France, killing 150 people — although the Breaking Bad incident was an accident caused by a depressed air traffic controller, whereas the latter was intentionally done by a pilot.
• Inferred Holocaust: Given how the mid-air collision takes place over a populated suburb, there's a very high chance that there would be casualties on the ground from falling debris. Although Walter confirms that this didn't happen in the following episode, noting how much of a miracle it is.