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.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (36)
sorted by:
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)