If while she attempted to stab Heisenberg and they fought over the knife it was forced out of their hands and went spiraling through the air, eventually landing with enough force to slice Holly's throat with an almost instantaneous fatality.
What does Skyler and Walt do after this? What about Jr?
How do you think that entire scene plays out and what is the response from fans/media?
Walt and Skyler blame each other.
Don't know what Jr does.
Fans blame Skyler for trying to stab Walt in the first place.
The show runner probably intends for it to somehow be Walt's fault.
I don't care about a troll who doesn't pay for his opinion telling me how to review movies.
It would have been poorly received. I've seen kids shot on shows by villains but a baby knifed to death is really pushing it when you want people to care about the characters responsible for it
The graphic depiction of infanticide that you suggest would never be allowed to air, so the question is moot.
shareIntriguing question - thanks for asking it! It would have certainly Greeked up the tragedy!
However, I think it would have been disastrous timing. At that point they were less than two episodes away from the series' climax. You've worked hard to build up all this tension, and with Holly's death you'd have let most of the air out of the tires. No matter how any of the three remaining family might have reacted, every one of those options would have crippled story momentum, right then and there.
In the story world, the scene had the family firmly and finally turn against Walt, eliminating any hope he had of mutual escape and reconciliation, which was already a pretty far-fetched idea. Huge obstacle! Now he needed to escape on his own, regroup, and find a way to get around it. With Holly dead, there would be no "getting around" anything. It's over. No tension-filled, brilliant phone call from Walt, because Skyler, for one, then wouldn't care about his attempts to rescue her from culpability in his affairs. In her mind, how would that compare to her culpability in the horror of Holly's death? She'd have either already killed herself or turned herself in. There would be no phone call.
From a narrative POV, the knife scene wasn't meant to be an end in itself, but a means of extending emotional tension. They needed to extend that tension because they still had to reach Jesse's rescue and Walt's final business. In the meantime there was going to be a relatively subdued chunk of narrative in-between (Granite State). This is a key strategy of classical (or Hollywood) narrative, proven effective over the last 110+ years of cinema, a format that TV series mimic in elongated form. Specifically, in the last act keep building tension to the climax, but just before it lands, put in a dramatic "pause" where your hero must regroup, forced to come to a fateful decision. If pent-up tension isn't idling in the background, building up in the back of viewers' minds, then there is no slingshot effect going into the climax. And you need that.
If you kill Holly - and name any reaction you like among the three surviving family members - much of your hard-won tension is now vented at that point, two episodes before the finish line. It's full-stop to dwell on the horror of the dead baby, with the emotional impact of that death continuing to resonate right through the next two episodes. It was the same with Jane's death; the story had needed to allow time for that full-stop horror to settle before ramping up again. But at the point of Ozymandias, less than two episodes before the final, there's no time left for that. You'd have stolen huge energy away from the final ordeal involving G&E, rescuing Jesse, avenging Hank, and so on.
Instead of the hero-helping image of Walt changing Holly's nappies and giving his fatherly monologue, and him reversing course and giving Holly back safe-and-sound, the audience's mind would pulse with recurring images of the bloody knife and dead Holly and devastated Walt, Skyler, and Walt Jr. These images would be so powerful that the distraction would effectively be permanent given the limited time left in the series.
Managing an audience' emotional connection is a delicate matter, and BB was one of the best at it. Put simply, dead Holly was much less useful than abducted Holly, given what they still needed to accomplish with the story at that point. It's a question of weighing short-term against long-term impact. And nothing is more important to preserve than the fullest impact of a series' climax.
"You must not judge what I know by what I find words for." - Marilynne Robinson