Walter knows better, has non-evil options, and still *chooses *to be amoral. The GOT characters live in a world where aggressive, violent, brutal fear creating behavior is actually required to maintain power and survive in many situations.
I’ve never read or watched Game of Thrones, but from what I’ve read characters have done in that series I don’t think you could say Walt is worse.
I detest drug use, but I used to work behind a bar so really it would be hypocritical for me to criticise anyone (even a fictional character) for selling drugs.
As for the plane crash…
Pretty much my thoughts. It’s all too disconnected. I also don’t think his guilt is relevant. Plenty of people feel guilty for things they can’t reasonably be blamed for.
Yeah I just don’t agree with GRRM here. GoT has both overt evil like Joffrey and Ramsay Bolton, and subtle evil, like Cersei and Littlefinger.
I’d say Cersei is the match of Walter White in believing she can manipulate everyone to her will, being just as ruthless and then ultimately being destroyed by her own arrogance and hubris. She killed her own husband, in order to assure that her incestuous children got onto the throne.
Or there’s Littlefinger, also just us much a match as a manipulator as Walter White and causes the entire war of the five kings killing tens of thousands (or more?) just to “create chaos” so he could advance his own position.
Sorry, no match in my opinion. GRRM’s characters are worse than Walter White.
Yet all of those people had various degrees of legitimate personal - in most cases, crappy families - or cultural explanations for their evil. Walter White was evil because he felt like it.
The only person somewhat similar to him was Littlefinger, and even his massive inferiority complex is understandable, considering his background. Besides, he’s arguably less evil in the books.
Look at it another way: Martin’s monsters, by and large, are beasts with no moral core, no way to tell right from wrong. They wouldn’t know how to be good people even if they wanted to. Whereas Walt was a good person, once. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and knows that it’s wrong. It’s this exercise of free will that makes him the more evil person.
He implicated Skylar and Jesse–both small-time criminals anyway–in massive felonies. He aided and abetted the murder of that kid on a bicycle. He murdered nearly all of his business associates, with great premeditation. He kept making and selling meth long after his health conditions no longer necessitated it. He exposed himself in a convenience store.
During the show’s run, Walter’s justification for everything he did was always that he was doing it for his wife and family.
In the final episode Walter admits to Skylar he did it all because (I paraphrase) he enjoyed it, because he was good at it and because it made him feel alive. This can easily be interpreted as he was an absolutely immoral, thrill killer doing it for kicks. Or pure evil.
Then again, perhaps he was making a final sacrifice and telling his wife what she needed to hear so he got one final moment with his daughter.
TCMF-2L
Dude - you can’t compare a retired chemistry teacher making a bit of crystal to cope with cancer and support his family to a bunch of middle-age inbreds running round killing their friends, families, lovers, enemies and whatnot.
End of
I have always disliked that scene. In season 1 he makes his intentions clear to Jesse, to earn money.
In season 2 when he thinks he has a buyer for a large order and his tumor has reduced, he says to Jesse that he is done when the transaction is complete.
His intention was always to leave money for his family.
Then why keep doing it, even after he’s got enough money for a small village’s worth of families ?
And even in the first season, it’s quite clear he’s lying to himself - remember when he tossed an entire batch of meth that was slightly less than perfect (but still waaay better than any meth out there, especially Jesse’s shitty crank that he still managed to sell just fine) ? Imperfect as it was, it was still a sellable product, and it would have made a bunch of money.
But that’s not the point of the venture. The point of the venture is to prove once and for all that Walter White Sr. is smarter than everybody else. Again and again and again.
It is possible the show was badly written or changed character’s motivations between the beginning and the end. It is also possible Walter was telling his wife what he felt she needed to know.
But from early on Walter had an offer (of charity) from his old partners at Gray Matter to cover all his medical bills which he declined out of, at best, pride. His preferred option was a life of crime.
He then continued to manufacture drugs long after it was involving murder, long after it was endangering himself and his family, long after he had made so much money he could never possibly justify needing more.
As for looking after the family, Jesse became like a son to him and yet, by the end, Walter tried to have him killed. And well before the end, as already mentioned, Walter stood and watched as his (virtual) son’s girlfriend died.
With a heightened sense of his own mortality, the idea he was just living out all his personal desires is supported by his behaviour throughout.
IMHO of course.
TCMF-2L
He was a monster for wearing those fugly shoes all the time. And for walking around in those tighty-whiteys.
I agree. Walt isn’t actually quite as evil as we sometimes remember him. Which got me thinking a bit.
Walt made a lot of high-grade meth and killed some people (arguably bad people). He was also an indirect catalyst for other people being killed and hurt (including several good and innocent people). Plus, he had an eerie knack for completely ruining the lives of anyone close to him (and sometimes anyone close to them again, a couple of steps removed - see Jesse).
Maybe you could blame him for the plane crash, too, although certainly not directly. More in a butterfly effect sort of way. And maybe you simply can’t reasonably put that one on him at all.
So, when it comes to facts and figures, he’s not a planet-eating, billions-of-people-murdering, galaxy-destroying Marvel supervillain. But hey, how much evil do you want from one high school chemistry teacher? Walt is the evilest guy in your neighborhood, not the world. He’s potentially pretty freaking bad news indeed… if you live in his postcode. Not that I’m defending him. It’s a matter of perspective, is all.
Is he a bigger monster than anyone on GoT? Well, I’m certainly no expert on that show, but I’ll venture a guess and say: No, I don’t think so. The interesting part is that he’s now up against that kind of competition… and that we feel a vague sense of disappointment if/when it looks as if he doesn’t stack up. We think of him as more evil than Hitler, and then when we look at what he actually did, it looks more pedestrian. Which is unsatisfying, somehow.
But think about it: It actually makes sense that Walt’s evil exploits look overblown in the colder light of day. Walt always had a massively inflated ego. I think that maybe the “biggest supervillain ever” impression we have is Walt’s crazily inflated sense of self-importance spilling over into our memories of him. In his own mind, he’s not just a regular criminal, he’s (cue thunder and lightning) the GREAT AND TERRIBLE HEISENBERG! Then we do a fact check, and the air comes out of the balloon some, leaving this crazy egotist looking a lot smaller, sadder and more deflated. As bad a cookie as he is - and I don’t deny that he’s a bad cookie - maybe a lot of that perceived evilness comes out of his own power fantasy.
Which I suppose is mostly the point of Walt in the first place: The power fantasy, and us buying into it, in all sorts of ways.
Isn’t it ironic? Well, maybe not ironic, exactly. Probably just interesting.
HE.
SHOT.
MIKE.
For no other reason than ego & pride. Mike wouldn’t give him the names of his men in prison; Mike chewed him out and blamed him for everything. Walt couldn’t handle that blow to his pride, so instead of letting Mike disappear, he killed him.
Pure evil.
This is interesting mostly because so much of the early discussion about Breaking Bad went like this: “I sympathize with Walt, he’s doing it for his family. He’s not evil. He’s my hero.” “Um, no, dude, he’s murdering and hurting people for the sake of his own pride. He’s just telling himself that he’s doing it for noble reasons. He’s the bad guy. Wake up.”
Then at some point Walt realized just how much of a hard-on he was getting (sometimes literally) from being “THE ONE WHO KNOCKS”, and the whole thing sort of switched. So now, maybe, we have to tell the same people who used to defend him, and who believed his schtick that he was doing it for his familiy, that: “No, dude, maybe he’s not really Doctor Doom on steroids or the second coming of Sauron, that’s just Walt lying to himself again, just in the opposite direction.”
First we all tried to bail him out and give him a pass for all the nasty things he did. Now we’re talking him up to win the evil contest, and want him to be Bogeyman number one. It’s the funniest thing, really.
I guess **Stranger **sort of summed it up:
But I want to amend it some:
Walter White basically wanted to be a superhero, and then, when he couldn’t be one, he wanted to be a supervillain. Like all people who fantasize about being either superheros or supervillains, he’s actually a pathetic, friendless loser.
No, he began by telling himself that was the purpose.
He used circumstance to gain a moral scaffolding for what were fundamentally immoral actions. He probably believed it himself almost the entire time, but the final scene indicated he had finally come to understand himself as well as the audience (should have) understood him by that point.
The first person Walt killed without valid reason, like self defense, was Gail. Gail did not harm Walt or give him any valid reason to kill him, Walt commanded Jesse to kill Gail only because his death would solidify Walt’s position in Gus’s operation.
I wonder if the final scene isn’t just Walt deluding himself again.
We talked about this in the threads around the time of the final episode. At the end, Walt gets the money to his family by way of Grey Matter, then wipes out the Nazi gang in action hero fashion. He then goes and caresses the meth making equipment in the lab, before snuffing it with a smile on his face. Sure, he also admits that he did it all for himself and his ego. But he gets to die as some kind of hero, or if not, at least as a really cool kind of villain.
I noted, as did others, that the final episode has an unreal feeling about it. Some people on the interwebz insisted that it was actually all Walt’s dying dream as a he lay dying in New Hampshire. I don’t think that’s the case, at least not literally, but there is a sense of that, in a meta-narrative sort of way. As I put it at the time, it was a power trip fantasy ending. Walt gets to be cool in the end. “Yes, I did it for myself. It was an ego trip. But still, don’t I make an awesome bad guy?”
Imagine if the penultimate episode was the final episode. Walt dying from cancer, as a broken and pathetic man, with nothing to show for his life of crime, and his family left in a world of crap because of him. Would he be able to truly accept that version of himself? I’m not sure if that one ever really sinks in.
It’s Gale.
Anyway, Walt did have a reason to kill Gale. Gus wanted to kill Walt. As in kill him right there and then. But Gus needed a cook to whip up the Blue. No Gale, no cook. So then Gus would need Walt to cook again. So no killing Walt.
Of course, that may not be not a *good *reason to turn Jesse into a murderer and Gale into a corpse. But it wasn’t totally in cold blood.