Thus begins the beginning of the end... that is the beginning of the end's beginning... of the end of Breaking Bad, after Hank... like all of us... simply needed some reading in the john and found out all about Walt and how Walt is the kingpin named Heisenberg...
Hank has always been the heart of the show, and technically the most important since Walt's been hiding things from Hank more than Skyler, who at this point is the kind of moll that Saul said Walt needed...
So no one wanted to get to the point where Hank might actually die, but what the writers seem to be doing is making Hank such an obsessive sore winner, you have to choose NOT to root for him... and not just in that Hitchcockian way of rooting for the bad guy since it's his ride and we're all riding on it...
At this point we know things are summing up and we know Walt's not going to win... But what's happening here and what started here was that Hank's not the person we want to win... and it works because, by the time the Nazis appear after... several episodes later... Hank gets Walter out by his money, I was rooting for them like when Burt Reynolds showed up to help Jon Voight and Ned Beatty in Deliverance...
Hank's insanity begins here and he pulls it off as good as he pulls his entire character off, who starts out a kind of obnoxious boob but then is revealed as a good man with a great soul who is vulnerable even more than he wants that revealed, but...
Again, not to be a broken record, but... this episode marks the end... at least for me... to root for the good guy.