Walt wasn’t stuck with the tumors, the tumors were stuck with Walt!
Yes. She started hearing imaginary raccoons. And in the same episode Walt chases a fly, and then he sees the fly everywhere, possibly imagining it.
Yeah, that’s delicious. I’m sticking that right in there in my collection of BB interpretations. Even if it’s not a literal tumor, the metaphor is fantastic.
(Meanwhile, **Wesley Clark **is looking at me, then into his drink, and is wondering what he started. Someone needs to pull me away from this thread now.)
There was mention of Peter Desaga’s development of the critical features of the laboratory burner that then became known as being designed by Robert Bunsen. However, to be fair, Michael Faraday had already designed a very similar burner more than twenty years previous, and nobody held a patent on the “Bunsen” design.
Whether Walter is or is not the genius he supposes himself to be is irrelevent. (FTR, he’s not doing anything a well-trained graduate-level chemist couldn’t do, and it is unclear why he has relegated himself to the role as a high school teacher with a moonlighting job washing cars as experienced laboratory chemists are in high demand and Sandia National Laboratories, one of the Department of Energy FFRD&C National Labs which is heavily focused on chemistry and physics, is right there in Albuquerque; even without a PhD someone of his competence could certainly get a position as a senior technician that would pay substantially more than high school science teacher.) Walter believes that he is better than everyone else around him, and clearly acts out in passive-aggressive ways until his brush with mortality gives him the desperate courage to actively lash out.
Since the show gives only slight hints about his past history with his family and Gretchen and Elliott we can only guess at what causes him to be such an underachiever in all areas except cooking meth and blowing the holy loving fuck out of drug lords and white suppremicists, but he left Gretchen (as described in their conversation in “Pekaboo”) after overhearing her father dismissing him and Gretchen not responding. Walter is basically the meth cooker version of the quiet guy who gets fed up one day and goes on a workplace shooting spree for no apparent reason. So, whether he is “evil” or not is up to your classification of what counts as evil, but he’s certainly an asshole, and was one before the show started. The nice, charitable family man is a facade for an angry, bitter, entitled jerk.
Stranger
Probably the worst thing he did was poison Brock (the kid), though the kid lived. Other than that, he didn’t really do that much “evil”. The people he killed were all involved in the drug business and either had it coming, or at least knew the risk they were taking. He didn’t kill Jane. You can say he should have saved her all you like, but you can’t possibly say he was culpable for her own decision to OD (yes I know the technical COD was choking, but a person who’s not severely intoxicated tends to wake up in that situation and not die).
I don’t remember the scene in enough detail but on the Internet (so it must be true) it is suggested Walter was trying to rouse Jessie when Jane rolled onto her back. In other words it was his actions that set her death in motion.
Regardless of that, Jessie was like a son to Walter, but he stood there, waiting and watched as Jane died. He chose to let her die because it suited his purposes. That’s pretty cold.
Much later when he decided he wanted Jessie dead (this was when the Nazis caught them in the desert) he made sure to tell Jessie he had watched Jane die, that he could have saved her but decided not to. He was relishing that. Stone cold.
TCMF-2L
Just a final point from me (hopefully :p) on this whole thing:
Remember the Charlie Rose interview with Gretchen and Elliott in “Granite State”? When confronted with the uncomfortable fact that a meth kingpin was a co-founder of Grey Matter, Elliott basically dismisses Walt’s contribution completely. He explains that Walt was someone who was there early on, but who didn’t really have much to do with founding the company, and much less with turning it into what it became.
So, is he stabbing Walt in the back here? Doing damage control for the company? Maybe.
But what if he’s just basically telling the truth?
Just a thought, is all. And at least some in-universe evidence that Walt’s version of his time at Grey Matter isn’t the only version.
Even if Walter White thinks more highly of his contribution to the success of Grey Matters than is actually true, he still sold his shares very early, before his co-founders made enough to make them billionaires. Even if he didn’t make a billion, he could certainly have made ten or fifty million had he waited a little while. So part of his bitterness is due to regret.
The first time, he was trying to save Jesse.
When he can’t get in touch with Jesse, and finally breaks into his house, it’s obvious that Jesse is getting in to heroin. It’s also obvious that Jane is the one who brought this into his life. Walter knows that Jesse will disappear into H addiction unless something seriously nasty wakes him up. He is clearly heartbroken as he makes the decision, and sobs once she’s gone, but he sacrifices Jane to save Jesse.
But when Hank is killed due to Jesse’s collaboration, Walt loses it, and tries to wash his hands of him. In the last episode, of course, we see that some piece of Walt is left, he can’t stand to leave Jesse in this terrible state.
And just because it’s cool:
The counter-argument (not a justification, but just a theory as to why Walt may have more empathy) is that Walt really felt that Jesse was like a son to him, and also felt that Jane was actively killing Jesse by inducting Jesse into herion addiction. Jane & Jesse, with a pile of money Jesse earned, would (Walt thought) no doubt go on an epic heroin bender, which would either make Jesse a hopeless junkie or kill him.
Walt knew he had no way to pry Jesse away from Jane - Jesse loved Jane passionately. He thought Jane was just a cold blooded junkie user who was leeching off of Jesse for heroin money, and would drag Jesse down with her into the junkie gutter. So letting Jane die wasn’t just good for Walt - it was even better for Jesse. Jesse, stoned on heroin and made stupid by passion, was on the path to self-destruction and only Walt could save him - or at least, so Walt thought.
Edit: ninja’d by TruCelt.
Malthus, TruCelt,
Your points are correct and relevant.
However also relevant is Jane was blackmailing Walter. She was at that point a threat to Walter and those he cared for. ‘Sacrificing Jane to save Jessie’ sugar coats it a bit too much plus it isn’t actually, morally, his choice to make.
Although I do agree there were conflicting motivations at play.
TCMF-2L
Oh, agreed - it was yet another example of a situation set up by the authors where Walt doing something self-interested could justify it (if only to himself) as something for the good of another - leaving things nicely ambiguous.
My only point is that it did have an ambiguous angle. Murdering an inconvenient blackmailer, or saving Jesse from junkie-doom? Or six of one and half a dozen of the other? The viewer can decide what his real motive was … though over the course of the series, it becomes notable that Walt ‘has to’ justify more and more harm to others.
I think that might be going too far the other way… Walt did spend decades working fairly shit jobs to support his family, who he truly seemed to love.
And I think there’s ample in-show evidence that Walt is an in-show chemistry genius. I think that speculating otherwise is just looking for a different angle purely for the sake of looking for a different angle.
As for why he has such a terrible job, my assumption was always that it was a combination of his hubris and his prickly personality. Maybe he had a good chemistry job for a while after Gray Matter, but his poor interpersonal skills got him into someone’s poor graces, and then his massive pride kept him from ever apologizing, etc.
Back to the original contention, Walt isn’t even close to as evil as quite a few GoT characters, GRRMartin is just plain being silly to say so. There are a few who are outright sadistic monsters, and then there are a bunch more who will kill for any reason with no regrets whatsoever. To the end, Walt always tried not to kill, and he clearly felt regret… just not enough to stop doing what he was doing.
Meh. He knows good lab procedures, cleans and uses the appropriate glassware, understands basic organic chemistry theory, and follows a careful, disciplined approach to his ‘lab’ work (i.e. his ‘cook’). That isn’t genius; it’s just basic competence for a chemistry or chemical engineering graduate student. That other people are impressed with the quality of his ‘product’ is a reflection on the very poor process used by most other cooks to produce methamphetamine. A “99% pure” product is a low standard for pharaceutical production. Ditto for manufacturing toxins and explosives; if there is a better-than-average chemistry grad student who hasn’t mixed a small batch of nitroglycerine or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, I haven’t met him or her.
The only evidence or supposed expert opinon that Walter is actually a great chemist (rather than a better-than-average meth cook) is Gale Boetticher’s opinion, and frankly, who knows how good of a chemist he is? Oh, he makes a good cup of coffee? Great, go get a job as a barista.
Stranger
The hail-Mary surgical pass was the removal of part of a lung.
If I recall correctly, after Walt walked into the grocery store naked, they checked for a brain tumor, because of this odd behavior. They found nothing, and ended up blaming it on a “fugue state”. He was well into his criminal behavior at this point, but no brain tumor was present.
Jesse talked about his aunt because he was concerned that the cancer had gotten into Walt’s brain (because of Walt’s obsession with the fly). There’s no evidence that he was right.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that the writers intended Walt’s behavior to be due to a brain tumor.
The limiting factor in meth production is not genius, but precursors. The best chemist in the world can’t do magic, if you can’t get precursors for the reaction(I HATE the word cook) you can’t produce meth period.
The marveling over the purity of Walt’s meth was silly, any chemist would know even if your purity from initial reaction was low just concentrate the wanted product and eliminate unreacted precursors and impurities through A/B or whatever duh!
Now the way they should have written it is Walt is so smart, he toiled for days and nights and found a novel precursor route to producing meth! An unlisted and uncontrolled source for precursor, perhaps it is not a direct reaction etc.
This is not unknown, when GHB became schedule 1 and GBL became listed, underground chemists found a new pathway using GABA instead. GABA is sold by the pound by health food stores, and the reaction pathway produces nitrite gas and is not dead simple like the GBL>GHB reaction. This would have made more sense.
Well sure, but if you get a 99% pure batch the first time, you waste less precursor and time.
As cited by an earlier poster, the P2P reaction Walter uses normally produces 50% good-good and 50% decongestant based on the chirality of the molecule - which is why it was replaced, in our world, by reactions based on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
Even if we posit that you can then run Chemistry Stuff to separate the two products and end up with a block of 100% good shit (which I’m not even sure is doable), the 50% decongestant does not turn back into phenylacetone and whatnot. It’s good for the trash.
He did find a way to produce near-perfect fuck-you-up meth from a precursor and method that typically results in 50% waste. That’s pretty good.
As I remember, when the show was on the air, someone pointed out in an article someplace that if the meth really was that pure, it wouldn’t have been that bright color blue. But it looked cool on TV.
I dunno, I feel like you’re applying niche-knowledge real-world standards to a fictional universe. When Gilligan and Co were writing a scene in which Walt’s meth is being described as 99% pure, do you think they were thinking “Walt’s meth is awesome” or “piffle, only 99% pure? sure, he’s a competent technician… but any serious industrial process would be making meth that was 99.999% pure.”
I think the combination of:
(1) Walt makes the best meth ever, and figured out how to do so very quickly
(1a) Gale, who is the best trained professional chemist that Gus can find, is in awe of Walt
(2) Walt was involved in founding a company worth billions
(3) Walt was involved with a team that won a Nobel prize
(4) Walt uses his brain to think his way out of many very difficult situations over the course of the show
All together are sufficient to convince me that the null hypothesis is that Walt is in fact damn good at Chemistry.
Gale also listens to bad opera and makes shitty faux-Indian music videos of himself, so, perhaps not the ultimate arbiter of taste, style, or technical proficiency.
Walt’s opinion of himself is that he’s more awesome than everyone around him, but then, he’s gone to significant lengths to surround himself with very average people instead of staying at Grey Matter or going to work as Sandia where he might find the company of similarly intelligent people. He underestimates Hank’s accumen at his peril, and despite his ability to “think his way out of many very difficult situations” he ultimately traps himself by overestimating how far that will get him. (He does outwit Lydia, but she’s another one who thinks she’s too smart to be caught or tricked.)
Walt is smart to be sure, but not smarter or more clever than many of the people I work with, and the chemistry he performs in the course of the show is nothing terribly special. Walt has just picked a ‘field of endeavor’ which isn’t particularly represented by the intellectual elite.
Stranger
I agree. One of the most fascinating things about this show is the polarized reactions to Walt. As we have seen in this thread, some viewers are very eager to defend and excuse Walt’s conduct–and that would be much less notable and interesting, had the writers made excusing his conduct that easy. (As in: someone with a brain tumor may not reasonably be held accountable for all his actions.)
Walt’s actions and decisions were his own.
Good point. Walt was making decisions in the service of his pride, long before the events of the pilot episode.