Todd is actually pretty successful.
He learns to cook up a half way decent batch of drugs.
He can act as a go between and arrange for ten simultaneous jailhouse executions.
He can torture Jesse for information, he sees the value in using Jesse as a cook plus he knows how to motivate Jesse and keep him in line.
He is respectful and considerate to Walter.
Attaboy!
TCMF-2L
Todd was less interesting though, mainly because he had no conflict, no problem with what he did, no voice telling him that what he did and was doing was wrong that he had to talk down or beat into submission. He was just a good earnest unquestioning enlisted man doing his job completing the mission and the task at hand adequately but never with great skill or intelligence.
Walt had to come up with increasingly flimsy rationalizations to delude himself with until he finally embraced that he just liked being the bad-ass. Mike was the archetypal samurai living by an aging warrior’s code; yeah he’d have killed innocents too if he had to but he would have been angry about it.
I thought that was sort of interesting in and of itself though - I think we were all pretty shocked when he shot that kid with no hesitation (and he certainly wasn’t told to do that). And that it didn’t bother him, yet he somehow still comes across as this very non-malicious person. Even when he was keeping Jesse hostage, he still didn’t seem like such a horrible guy. He was just doing what he needed to do. I actually felt bad for him when Jesse killed him, though he totally had it coming.
Archetypical samurai living by an aging warrior’s code?
I reckon that’s what Mike kept telling himself but he was more bull-shitter than Bushido. The way he abandoned his granddaughter is the self-serving coward more than the noble warrior.
Plus this implied “never harmed anyone who didn’t deserve it” line doesn’t bear close scrutiny in my opinion.
Mike used his considerable talents to serve Gus and maximise the commercial success of an illegal drug business. Yet as an ex-policeman he knew exactly what the consequences of the illegal drug trade are. Examples from the show:
The crack whore in the hotel car park.
The crack heads Jesse went to collect money from. The ones who neglected their cute kid and then the wife killed the husband under a stolen ATM machine.
Jesse’s girlfriend Jane who died from the heroin.
Then you have the Los Pollos Hermanos drivers who get shot. Then you have Hank and all the other DEA agents killed. Brock’s older brother Thomas getting killed. The workers at the laundry, the shoppers in the supermarket when the Mexican cousins were shooting at Hank. The workers at the care home when the Gus killing bomb goes off.
Lives lost or put at risk. I can just imagine Mike is (was) telling himself he has standards and is a man of honour. I just don’t believe it to be accurate.
TCMF-2L
Todd feels to me a bit more like the incarnation of a concept than an actual character. He’s the personification of evil, just like Junior is the personification of breakfast. (Wait, did I mean to say innocence? No, I did actually mean breakfast.)
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing, though.
He is a bit one-dimensional. But then again, so is Hitler.
Wait, what? Weren’t the cops literally in hot pursuit of him when that happened? I don’t think he had much of a choice… he would be pretty limited in being able to care for her in prison anyway. His big thing was making sure she got the money he had stashed away, made all the more tragic by the fact that it was seized and she wouldn’t get it in the end.
I don’t think Mike would have tried to argue that he was “honorable”, but he had his own code he lived by and it was good enough for him. He really wouldn’t give a shit what anyone else thought of it.
Seriously? You guys have an incredibly lax definition of “evil”. I argued earlier that Walt wasn’t evil, and Todd certainly wasn’t. He was straight up stone-cold, yes, and probably sociopathic/psychopathic. But to me at least, for someone to be “evil” there have to be elements of sadism and intentional malice for the sake of malice and not for perceived self-preservation (even if those perceptions are warped or inaccurate). He shot the kid because he thought that was necessary to keep them from being caught (and he may have been right about that). If you call that evil, what do you call someone who would rape, torture, and murder a child just because it amuses him and he gets off on it? You’re just going to lump them in the same category?
Ramsay Bolton is evil. None of the major characters in Breaking Bad were.
You are making my point.
Mike was a criminal and as the police closed in he did what any criminal would do. Abandoned the kid and ran. The idea that Mike had higher standards than Todd, or any other common criminal, is something I don’t see.
If Mike truly had some kind of honourable code he would have sacrificed his own liberty for the kid. Instead he calculated she was safe and scarpered. Just like Todd realised they had been spotted by a kid on a motorcycle and calculated it was safest to shoot the kid. Just like Mike could have dispensed some kind of justice by killing Todd in retaliation but, realising Todd came from a criminal family, calculated it was safest to give him a pass.
My point remains there is no real difference between Todd and Mike.
TCMF-2L
Mike’s hardly “abandoning” his granddaughter, at least in the sense of hanging her out to dry - she’s still got a mother, so she’ll be just fine.
Tell me more about this Ramsay Bolton.
Seriously, this thread is totally failing at being a Breaking Bad vs Game of Thrones showdown. Come on, GoT fans! Where is your character analysis? Do your part. 
And don’t look at me. I’ve never watched GoT, so I’m excused.
And how would that have been better for the kid? He was an old enough guy that assuming they had a reasonable amount of evidence on him, any sentence he would have been likely to get would have been a life sentence.
So do Walt’s kids. Doesn’t matter. Real men provide.
The look into Mike’s backstory we get in the Better Call Saul spin-off gives some more insight into what makes Mike tick. I’m not a huge fan of BCS so far (to the point where I’m not sure if I even want to think of it as BB canon, at least in my own mind), but I think the parts with Mike in it are easily the best.
(Spoilers, etc. Do we need to say that at this point, even if it’s about a non-BB show? Anyway, spoilers, I guess.)
Mike feels responsible for the death of Kaylee’s father, i.e., Mike’s son. So he feels that he has to be a surrogate father for the kid.
Mike is really a lot like Walt.
His plan was to get away and disappear for good. How does that help the kid? At least in jail she could visit him!
More seriously, he left a left small girl alone in a public place. She could have been abducted or run into a road. A small risk but a truly honourable man would have puts the needs of the kid above his own liberty.
I think, in context, Mike did the most sensible thing. But I don’t see any honour, nobility, sacrifice or any of those things. He’s a dirty cop turned drug gang enforcer and murderer. I don’t see any difference between him and Todd.
TCMF-2L
Who does Todd care for? Who does Todd love?
Although it’s best if you also read the novels, there’s no excuse for not at least watching the show. 
It’s hands-down the most epic fantasy fiction of our time.
**** May contain spoilers ****
But anyway, Ramsay (he is bastard-born to a noble father and common mother so in the GoT universe he is given the bastard last name of Snow, but he is later legitimized by royal decree to become a Bolton) is a full-blown sadist. You see, the banner of house Bolton is the flayed man, as they traditionally practiced the skinning of some of their enemies. In the time of the events of the series, the practice has mostly died out (even though their universe is still a very barbaric place), but Ramsay is proud to keep the tradition alive and regularly flays people alive as a way to pass the time.
When he gets bored of his lovers, he also enjoys sending them out into the woods with a head start, then he takes some of his men and a pack of dogs with him to hunt them for sport as if they were animals. If they give him a good hunt, he honors them by naming new members of his dog pack after the girls that he’s hunted and killed.
He also takes another one of the major characters captive, and turns him into an obedient slave by breaking him down psychologically through repeated torture (minor flayings and beatings and forced starvation), and oh yeah, he cuts his cock off and sends it to his dad. Then when he later marries a girl who happened to be a childhood friend of the same character, he makes him watch as he somewhat brutally rapes her.
So yeah, that’s the kind of thing I see as evil because he acts purely out of sadistic impulses. Some people here seem to equate the term with any sort of sociopathic behavior, even when it’s done purely in the interest of self-preservation, and I just don’t think it’s appropriate to apply that term and put these two types of behaviors in the same category.
As mentioned up thread he is infatuated with Lydia and shows genuine tenderness as he leads her blindfolded, at her own request, through the dead bodies in the desert when the drug making gear is being stolen.
Also he is respectful, attentive and considerate to Walter. The Nazis end up giving Walter a barrel of money because of Todd.
Hell, Todd even takes care of the tarantula from the motorcycle boy he shot.
Plus at no point does Todd show any gratuitus cruelty beyond being cruel to get a specific result.
TCMF-2L
Fair points, for the most part.
I don’t know about the tarantula, though. I’m sure that the poor creature would have been happier tarantula-ing about in the desert, rather than being stuck in a jar.
I’ve actually wondered what happened to that tarantula following Todd’s demise. That is one loose end they never tied up, damn it!
I think you’re wrong, here. We have no evidence that Mike would shoot an innocent to save his own skin. You can speculate all you want, but he didn’t actually kill any innocents in the series, and even tried to avoid killing people he thought “had it coming”, such as Walt. You might not agree with his metrics of who had it coming, but he seemed to hold to it. The only person I can think of Mike killing who wasn’t currently a lethal threat to him was the Salamanca twin who survived the hit on Hank. If that guy didn’t have it coming, I don’t know who did.
Todd basically shot Andrea because he couldn’t master basic chemistry, and had to force someone else into slavery to do it for him. The closest thing we have to evidence that Mike would do that is Gus’ threats to Walter. I’m not sure that Mike would be the tool for that particular job. Gus always had other strong men that we knew about. Mike didn’t handle every job.
If nothing else, Todd is a particularly dim bulb in comparison to Mike. Neither are actually evil. Both are a bit calculating, and capable of brutality. One is pretty damn stupid. Mike may have eventually come the conclusion that he had to kill Drew Sharp, but it wouldn’t have been his first reaction. If we’ve boiled them down to amoral killing machines, intelligence and situational awareness have to count for something.
Any attempt to try to equivocate selling drugs to murder belies a profound misunderstanding about how drugs work.
I don’t know about the GoT to BB comparison. I couldn’t really make it past a few episodes of GoT. I liked the giants (I can forget the inverse square law when watching TV), but the dragons broke my sense of “gritty”. Either way, the worlds are pretty damn different, and you’ll have to do a lot of moral calculus to get its morality to map onto BB’s. We have a hard time mapping our morality to people in our own countries a century ago, much less a world where (from what I understand) stabbing your way to the top is almost a universally accepted practice.
(my emphasis)
Those words don’t mean what you think they mean. You’re looking for equate and reveals, respectively (or similar).
I didn’t see this mentioned but didn’t Walt poison a young child?
