It may seem like giving Gilligan and his writers a bit too much credit to connect the appearances of the eyeball with relevant characters' blind spots to lurking dangers, but this is Breaking Bad we're talking about, a series in which there are virtually no insignificant details. Consider the bizarrely prophetic words of the series' prop master Mark Hansen, who had this to say about the pink bear on a DVD extra included with the second season's home release: "With Vince, you just don't know what's going to be next. So you can't assume, like, 'Oh, we'll just burn the teddy bear,' because there might be a reason that it's burned this way. He might have something planned on down the road, two seasons from now."
As it happened, exactly two seasons from the season 2 finale, Hansen was proven shockingly correct. In the season 4 finale "Face Off," Fring indulges in his periodic ritual of going to the nursing home to taunt his mute, wheelchair-bound enemy, Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis). Unbeknownst to him, though, Walter has gotten to Salamanca first, and offered him a chance for revenge. Salamanca detonates a bomb hidden in his wheelchair, killing himself and blowing off half of Fring's face in an injury that is highly visually reminiscent of that burned, charred teddy bear, right down to Fring's missing eye (The gruesome effect was achieved with an assist from the VFX team from another hit AMC drama, The Walking Dead).
Fring, of course, never saw it coming, but viewers who had been paying close attention might have (for that matter, Fring's fate is succinctly foreshadowed in the episode's title). The pink bear represents just one example of Breaking Bad's intensive, near-impossible attention to detail – just one of the more intriguing facets of the greatest hour-long drama series of all time.
