It's one of my favorite TV shows, probably my favorite if I had to pick. Lately I've just been watching scenes on Youtube, but one scene struck out to me as a clever thing the writers did. So the part where Skylar is explaining how they've had money coming is becuase Walters been gambling, is a gambling addict and is shockingly good at it because of his intelligence making him good at counting cards and whatnot. If you piece together earlier scenes and look between the lines it's clear that this story is a lie, that actually he's been making his money by cooking and selling meth.
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The real secret gem is that Skylar cheated on Walt and Holly isn't his.
But the writers didn't realize people would hate an emasculating bitch-wife so much so they abandoned that leaving only some clues.
This has been my head canon since it aired. Skylar fucked Ted before she left her job the first time, and the story about "Mr. Grabbyhands" was a lie to Marie to cover it up.
Everything points to this: Skylar's evasiveness over why she originally quit, that "Happy Birthday Mr. President" apparently wasn't the first time she did that for Ted, that Ted's secretary hated her from the jump, etc. They absolutely fucked before their affair shown in the show. The only leap of logic is whether it led to her getting pregnant.
The only thing I wish went differently in the show was for Skylar to get her comeuppance like everyone else. It's probably more realistic that she got away with everything though, since women usually do in real life.
Edit: and then I just scrolled down to find that you covered all of this. Fuck it. I'm leaving it, even if it is redundant.
Your version is more succinct.
I'd like an epilogue scene 20 years later when Skylar finds out the money for Holly and Walt Jr didn't really come from Gray Matter guys but from Walter.
And it's too late to refuse it so she has to live with the fact that Walter actually did it all for them. He did what a man does: a man provides. Walter wins in the end.
That would be so epic.
Yeah, I was team Walter the whole show. People have this "breaking off point" where they aren't rooting for him anymore.
I don't understand why Walter doesn't get to wear the anti-hero label like others do. A person doesn't need to be moral for you to root for them. Henry Hill in Goodfellas is probably less moral and certainly less cunning and intelligent and compelling as a person, but you root for him because of the context of the movie.
(I don't personally believe that Henry Hill never killed anyone in real life considering the company he kept; it's just he can't admit it, unlike other crimes for legal reasons).
With Walter White it's the whole "his heckin ego" thing. Well yeah, he's got a chip on his shoulder and yeah he's got an ego but it's because he's brilliant. But if all he had was "muh heckin ego" and wasn't ballsy and took serious risks that could have gone extremely poorly even to protect others like Jesse, and was a coward, he wouldn't be in the anti-hero class like the Punisher or Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Yes, I understand in their two cases they kill criminals rather than strictly speaking becoming one, but there's plenty of films where people become criminals and we quasi root for them, such as Blow, Goodfellas as mentioned before, Casino, The Godfather, and dozens of other mafia movies.
But with Walter White, anytime he does anything immoral he's framed as a monster, whereas Michael Corleone is looked at as this nuanced deep character who you still root for.
I don't think Walter's ego was even the problem.
The go-to ego example is Walter refusing Gray Matter money, but did Walt refuse it for his own view of himself, or did he do it for Walt Jr's benefit?
We see him freely admit to mistakes over and over in building his drug empire, degrading situations, he doesn't ignore his failings. On the other hand, Walter tells Jr in the hangover black eye scene that what he remembers of his own father was him being weak and pathetic from disease and smelling of death, and that he doesn't want Jr to remember him that way.
So refusing Gray Matter money is Walt 'providing' for his son - providing a strong, manly father image. Another case, Walter reluctantly gets talked into using the donation page to launder money, but stops it after he sees the effect on Walt Jr; he didn't stop it because he wasn't getting the credit - he knew before he did it he wouldn't get the credit - but because of Walt Jr getting all into begging for money.
This maybe breaks down in season 5, but the writers had to finish their arc of hero to villain and they shoehorned in a bunch of stuff to make Walt into a comic book villain; he's literally on the side of nazis and shoots children, almost literally says "I'm the worst person in the world and did it all only for myself", come on - it's so hamfisted compared to 1..4. Season 5 is more an indictment of the writers than of Walter, I'd say.
On your season 5 writing ham fisted, in hindsight I feel like better call saul was also the writers trying to shove their views even further. Sort of like how the Wachowski homo brothers made the 4th movie reboot in an attempt to "reclaim the redpill" and other cases where writers inadvertently write something based and then get ticked off about it.
Well with Better Call Saul, it was like they wanted to write the anti-Skyler White in an attempt to show "we're feminists". Also they put in flashback scenes to try and recontextualize Saul Goodman and Walter White respectively. I see scenes from Breaking Bad revolving around both characters and you frequently see comments saying something like "I thought this was cool at the time, but it seems pathetic knowing what we know from BCS" as an example of a sort of comment. We all liked Saul Goodman. Again BB was competency "porn" and Saul Goodman was part of that.
We have in BCS Mike straight up tell Kim Wexler that he thinks she's made of tougher stuff than Saul Goodman. Saul Goodman, the guy who the writers previously described as a survivor, like a cockroach who'd somehow find the way to be the only one to survive a nuclear armegeddon; this lawyer lady is being told she's made of tougher stuff. And how do they do the convincing of that? By making her so stoic she essentially doesn't resemble any woman I've ever seen in real life. Her stoicism would be noteworthy in a man, and essentially never seen in a woman. So their way of getting around things is making her like a statue in terms of showing emotion.
Likewise with the ending. We waited all those seasons to finally see Saul Goodman set up shop and get to work, and they just time jump and skip over all that, and then he gives himself a worse prison sentence to make Kim like him again and prove his brother wrong. If they wanted to do a redemption thing, Nacho's redemption was the way to do it. That felt earned. The last season of BCS felt like they had no idea what to do in my opinion and how to have a satisfying conclusion to his character. I really don't think his character needed a conclusion at all. If it were merely a prequel showing him getting up and establishing this golden age of him operating as Saul Goodman, that would have been a satisfying show. But they wanted to recontextualize Breaking Bad, including by making Gustavo Fring explicitly gay. Sure, he seemed a little gay with that one flashback scene in BB, but they went ahead and just plopped a scene out of no where with Gustavo flirting with a man. Why? To score some woke points? You almost single handedly pumped out two almost completely shows that were devoid of gay crap which is unheard of in the modern day and you couldn't resist.
You've hit on what went wrong with Breaking Bad in the writer's room: woke shit. Gilligan I think is just like 80s empowerment woke, but he's got the usual Hollywood types all around him.
Gilligan wanted to tell a story of a hero that becomes the villain. They had Walter say he was doing it to provide for his family, and had evil Gus say a man provides, because to them that's just what toxic men say, it's never true, and nobody believes it. It makes him an egotistic liar to even say it. In their mind a strong man that provides for his family, both monetarily and spiritually, is a terrible thing.
So they think they're making Walt look bad, but the male audience at least said 'hell yeah a man provides' and he looks like a hero. Season 4 Walt is a fucking badass.
Season 5 comes around, they have to wrap it up, and they're like why is nothing we do making people hate Walter?! Maybe if he's literally Hitler they'll hate him.
I love Breaking Bad, but it's flawed in some big ways. I don't even rewatch season 5 at all.
When?
The Fly? Every episode is basically Walter saying "gee I really screwed up last time, but I won't make the same mistake again!" just not as on the nose as that one.
At what point is he admitting mistakes in “the fly”?
Thank you for putting into writing what I have always felt for a long time.
Yes, Walter developed an ego, but it was out of necessity. He had to build the Heisenberg character to make sure he didn't come across another Tuco and get his shit pushed in.
Then later on, just about everything he did was in some way justifiable, such as the (well-merited) deaths of Gus and Mike.
Walt and Jesse had warned them multiple times what would happen if they tried to cheat him out of his part of the empire. Then they tried to kill them both anyway and Gale had to die to ensure they lived.
Everything Mike says to Walt in his death monologue is exactly how Mike undid himself. His ego and pride in thinking he could continue the meth empire without the two who had first laid the golden egg. All he had to do was leave well enough alone and everyone would have profited.
But no.
They had to call in the Aryan Brotherhood (who were Gus and Mike's clean-up men btw) to tie up loose ends who probably would have wound up dead sooner or later anyway. Lydia as well - that was Gus & Mike's mess to clean up, not Walt's.
Not sure where you're getting that info...there's no way Jack would be working for Gus.
I was rooting for him until I saw how he turned against Hank/Jesse. I recently rewatched it, and he's very much a villain the whole time. It makes it fun, I love the show more after rewatching it, but he's absolutely the bad guy (among a cast of bad guys/gals)
But he didn't. He did it all for him. He said so in the final episode. "I did it for me. I liked it."
"You can't just have your characters announce how they feel. That makes me feel angry!"
He also said he believes there's "some combination of words, certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all of this". Like for instance...
S01-S04 Walt would say those words to Skylar in the end because that's what she needed to hear to move on, and also to protect the money he's laundering through Gray Matter from her asking too many questions about it. If she finds out the money is from Walter she'll reject it out of spite.
S05 Walter we're supposed to believe is now a totally different person who when he was calculating how much he needed and how many more deliveries before he could get out was secretly loving it and lusting after Tuco's job. He got off on killing the guy with a bike lock. In the Fly he's delirious almost to the point of telling Jesse about his role in Jane's death, yet has the presence of mind that the whole episode was just a way to obscure his criminal lust from Jesse. And he arranges a complicated scheme to get the money to his kids but he never really cared about that at all - just did it for fun I guess.
S05 Walter is obviously absurd and totally out of character, but they had to finish their arc and they had screwed up on making Walk less liked over time because the writers didn't understand actual people's (at least men's) morality is so they had to go 180 degrees all in one season.
Yeah he says a lot of things in earlier parts of the show just to hide things or to say what Skylar needed to hear to move on. When he has nothing left though, that’s when he actually can be honest for once.
What do you mean by this?
Walter could have been telling the truth the one time at the end, even though it's betrayed by his actions of providing through extorting Gray Matter guys, or that he was telling the truth the entire time before, which is consistent with his actions throughout.
In the narrative there's simply no contest over which interpretation is correct; the only reason to believe his 'confession' is that you want to believe and outside of narrative the writers' intentions; they said they're going to make Walter the evil bad man by the end.
And why would you want to believe it? Well, like the writers you've probably been indoctrinated in this idea that a man providing is outdated and toxic, when the reality is it's ingrained into a man's very being by nature itself.
As I explained before Walter was supposed to be more or less unliked already by S05, but the writers' own morality is upside down on manliness so accidentally made him more heroic. Same way they were out of touch on Skylar being hated, they made a similar mistake with their main character.
He had the money, giving it to his son can still be a logical choice while still the entirety of his meth cooking actions are selfish. I don’t really see what the betrayal is in that.
lol what
Meth dealing is toxic. Providing isn’t. Are you using?
Can't help that, if that character is actually played by a biological female that it's the ugliest woman I've ever seen.
I have seen worse, but I know what you are feeling
Okay, ugliest white woman I've ever seen.
My post was a joke, but where did you find this/ where are the clues? I've never picked up on it. Also Skyler is already completely emasculating b - wife. The reason she's so hated is because almost every man knows a woman who does the passive agressive things she does. I don't think a more emasculating character has ever been created without going into woke shows where they create that character as someone to root for which Skyler isn't.
I wouldn't doubt what you're saying that it might have been in the original plan and some DNA of that original idea is still in there, I just haven't seen it. It's in line with her characterization.
Even before Walter "breaks bad" she's very much not in love with him and just barely engages with him. She sucks before he does anything crooked, illegal or immoral. She just uses his actions as an excuse to quadruple down on the unsupportive wife behavior she was already exhibiting in episode 1.
In interviews Gilligan says they were shocked at how much hate Skylar got so changed her story to make her less hated, so we have it straight from the horse's mouth that she was initially going to be even worse than on screen.
Skylar lied to Walt about why she left Beneke Fabricators; she told Walt it was because of the 'fumes' whereas her sister says it was because of Mr Handsy (?). She was known for her sexy Marylin Monroe impersonation. Then when she goes back she almost immediately sacks up with Ted. So she left because of some sexual impropriety, which was probably more than just some type of Christmas party incident like she told Marie since she's a flirt and a liar.
Holly was unexpected, if you're having an affair you might not have or use contraception.
I think there were some other little clues I've forgotten by now, but knowing she was originally going to be less likable, she's a flirt, sexual impropriety at work, she does have an affair, Holly was unexpected it adds up.
edit: one I forgot, when she's going back to get a job at Beneke Fab the secretary obviously loathes Skylar and tries to prevent her from even talking to Ted - secretary is going to know the gossip and that's not a reaction for a mere victim of assault from a guy who isn't there anymore (Mr Handsy supposedly Ted's late father).
For me I stopped liking her when she went full Lady MacBeth. She supported Walt until it got scary for her, but instead of walking away or turning Walt in she still chooses to benefit from Walt's activities while shaming him.
Of course any criticism of a character that is a woman, it gets called misogyny.
My mind is blown.
Meth, when? He's a chemistry teacher
That's true, but Hank Shchrader used his connections with the DEA and leverage over Walt's cancer diagnosis to force him to cook meth for him. Walt confessed this in a video. It was a big twist. Hank didn't realize that the Heisenberg he was searching for was inside of him all along. He just needed belief in himself for it to shine through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpPm2KAcwbQ
It's always the feds
Show was good when it came out (not top 10 or anything like that), it aged terribly. Skylar's acting suck. Jesse's acting sucks. The story goes off-track in season 5 (hurr durr i got evidence of who heisenberg is but I'll do it all in secret on my own! Also, DAE hate le nazis XD).
Also Gus Fring is in every show now for some reason. He's even in video games. Speaking of Gus, you know Walt is going to kill you, why would you go see Hector who also wants you dead!?! And has nothing left to lose since his entire bloodline is dead??? This makes 0 sense.
It's a good show saved by Walter's acting and a few interesting storylines/twists.
based take
can't obviously speak too much on the topic, but real me is putting together a list of the 100 greatest TV shows ever made, and of all the "usual suspects" journos and redditors tend to name, the only "GOAT" show that actually deserves to be in the Top 10 is Sopranos.
Game of Thrones was garbage, especially at the end
Wire was great, but no memorability
Simpsons had a peak, then fell off
I mean Breaking Bad was good, it had its moments. It took some balls to do what they did with Gale, or Amanda. Some of the storylines were good. Acting from Walt was on point, the idea of the show was great, but on the other hand, you got episodes like The Fly (made by the last jedi guy) or when she sings that awful song, or even Saul becoming a caricature of himself and he already was a caricature. It's arrogant, full of itself, often trying too hard to look smart.
Look at the prequel-sequel Better Call Saul. They have a ten minute scene of Mike draining a battery to catch whomever is spying on him. Or that idiot Chuck and his mental illness I didn't give a single fuck about. Or that girlboss Rhea whatever her name was and her stupid storylines. "Guy doesn't want to leave his house so they can build a bank" who the fuck builds a bank in the middle of nowhere ANYWAY. It lasts forever, it's boring as f, and I gave up on the show in the last season because I literally couldn't take it anymore.
Sopranos was just okay too, but that's me not liking Italian Americans at all (I hated godfather too). "Look at me, I eat pasta, I have greasy hair, and I talk with an italian accent! Also I commit crimes and main people, admire me!" Nothing personal, I don't like criminal families shows.
Game of Thrones was great when it was still based on the book, then it fell apart. Those two idiots can't write.
Wire was good, my problem was watching it too late. It aged poorly.
Simpsons was great season 1-5.
Walking would be up there for first seasons. So would Battlestar Galactica. I'd count House in there too (same problem as Simpsons.
Walking Dead? Yeah, under Darabont it was gold, but every successive showrunner had no idea what to do with it. They trashed the Negan arc (and the whole final third of the show) by killing Carl.
Was great, but I think the problem was it fell into a trap of being too formulaic for its own good. There's only so many illnesses you can write episodes about.