“This was the first dollar I ever made, I’d like to take it with me.”
“Sorry, Bogdan, I own this place and that now.”
Uses the dollar bill in the soda machine
Now, I don’t care who you are, that’s being a vengeful, spiteful, evil dick just to be one.
There’s a bit of logical insanity about it, to borrow a phrase from Dan Carlin about WWII. The answers are logical, it’s the questions that are insane.
Maybe Walt was justified to let Jane die. Maybe he was right to turn Jesse into a hit man to off Gale. He had good reasons to blow up Gus by way of explosive grandpa. Maybe you can even defend him poisoning Brock. Etc. etc. In each and every case, it’s possible for Walt to argue that he had no choice, it was them or me, whatever.
But what the fuck kind of person are you, and what kind of life are you living, when those are the kinds of things that you constantly have to keep justifying?
Yes. The writers went out of their way to show just how petty and spiteful he was. He gained nothing meaningful from doing this. It was pure spite.
I’m sure that he also took a lot of satisfaction from the underhanded way they got Bogdan to sell, and to sell at an unjustified discount.
Granted, Bogdan was not exactly an angel in all of this. He was trying to unload what he thought were major EPA difficulties without telling the buyer, but that just gave Walt (and Skyler now that I think about it) a way to justify screwing him over.
Skyler could be a whole new conversation. She compromised her values for the sake of family (Hank’s rehabilition), but once she had done so there was no turning back and one thing just led to another.
Was she sort of the opposite of Walt? Did she truly act for the sake of family and then had no choice but to continue in order to protect herself and her family from the fallout?
I see it as a spin on “man corrupted by power” plot line we’ve seen time and again. While I don’t see WW as the MOST evil character in fiction, he’s certainly up there.
I mean, anyone who peddles drugs is pretty much the scum of society. But to keep roping Jessie in? And to endanger his own family? Yeah, that goes way beyond nice guy who gets off track. He’s right up there with the worst of the drug lords by the time he dies.
To return to the OP, here’s Walt’s body count as per the BB Wiki:
Killed personally by Walt:
Emilio and Krazy 8. Two drug dealers. Two of Gus’s goons. Mike. Lydia. Seven Nazis, including Jack.
Ordered killed by Walt / Walt directly connected to the deaths:
Gale. Gus. The goon who was in the room with Gus. The ten guys in prison.
Deaths more indirectly connected to Walt:
Jane. Everyone who died in the plane crash. Hector the exploding grandpa.
The Wiki also lists Hank and Gomez, but I guess it’s up for debate. Do you blame Walt, or just the Nazis? And if you count them, do you count Drew Sharp and Andrea, who are killed by Todd?
Also, YMMV on how directly or indirectly responsible Walt is in some cases.
The “sliding scale” of blame is an interesting thing. Is Walt the ultimate source of all the evil on BB? Some of it? How much? Sometimes it feels like he’s this force of nature, and when he puts on the Heisenberg hat it’s like opening Pandora’s box. But this world is full of violent criminals. How much of the violence happens even if Walt never breaks bad in the first place?
As “The Wire” established, there’s always somebody new on the drug scene, and they generally get there by stepping over the bodies of someone else.
Virtually all the “players” Gus, Jane, Hector, doubtless would have met bad ends anyway.
Now, Hank and Gomez, little bit different. I think that Hank’s death was the only one that Walt even felt the slightest twinge of remorse over, because even though he didn’t pull the trigger, he knew that he might as well have.
Gale, saving your own live, even at the cost of another (relatively innocent) life is fairly easy to justify. If Walt had never gone down the road, what would have happened to Gale? My guess is that Gus’ operation would have gone down at some point and Gale would have found himself as a Walter, force to train his own replacement and catching a bullet when he was done.
Hank launched a rogue investigation, instead of playing by the book and giving what he had to his bosses at the DEA. He needed to be the hero who took down Heisenberg, instead of the doofus who couldn’t see what was right in front of him. And that’s why Hank and Gomez are out there by themselves in the middle of the desert, with no back up.
Hank breaks bad in his own way, and pays for it. So he partly has himself to blame.
There was a observation somewhere that the show was a meditation on compromising your principles, what would it take to make anyone break?
The Walter White asshole test. How long does it take you before you go: “THAT is going too far, I’m out”? Everyone line up according to where you draw the line, and we’ll rank you on the evil scale.
Which is disturbing enough in its own right. But then I get the feeling that Walt is looking at me and saying: “Yeah, I shot Mike. Now I’m ordering a hit on Jesse. I know you feel sick. But, hey, you were with me for the meth cooking. You were with me when I killed Krazy 8. You were with me when I let Jane die. Maybe you were looking at me sideways when I blew up Gus and poisoned Brock, but you were still with me. You’re in this handbag to Hell with me now. You don’t get to cherry pick. When you were rooting for me, you were looking into a mirror. Well, you still are. And you don’t get to choose when to look away.”
And maybe he has a point. Then again, maybe he’s manipulating me, manipulative bastard that he is.
The very first batch they cook, Jesse inspects the product and says that its awesome and Walt replies “its basic chemistry”.
So again, I don’t think that his abilities are supposed to be anything genius, just trained.
Humblebrag.
I’m still not sure what to do with the plane crash, in terms of what the moral of the story is. It can’t be “don’t cook meth, it causes plane crashes”. That’s absurd.
Also, concerning Walt’s capability for love and empathy: Walt’s pseudo-fatherly concern for Jesse is partly the cause of the whole thing. Walt refuses to give Jesse his share of the money because he thinks that Jesse will spend it all on heroin and end up dead, leading to Jane blackmailing Walt, leading to clusterfuck.
Also, another cause is Jane’s dad caring so much about her death that he’s distracted to deadly incompetence.
So, “not giving up on your kids causes plane crashes”? That’s even more absurd.
And of course, no one actually holds Walt responsible for the crash. Except for Walt himself. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t feel the need to protest so much in his speech at the school.
The plane crash sort of just hangs ominously over the show, as a reminder that sometimes bad things get out of control, and who the hell even knows what it all means, or who is to blame for what.
I’m not so sure. The writers established very clearly that Jane was careful. She choked to death only because of Walter’s actions (moving her out of her safe sleeping position when trying to get to Jesse).
Not everyone who uses heroin dies of it. Jane might have gone on living for another fifty years–long after her father would have retired from his air-traffic-controller job.
So, yes: a strong case can be made that Walter was responsible for the plane crash. Indirectly responsible, perhaps, but still responsible.
I don’t think the plane crash is intended as a moral lesson for the audience. It’s just another way that Walt screwed up other peoples’ lives (however indirectly). He wanted to be able to rationalize Jane’s death to himself but the plane crash made that much harder. Letting a junkie die to “save” Jesse was a horrible but necessary act to Walt, but it’s much harder for him to rationalize away two planes full of innocent people. Still, he continues anyway.
Walt is a bastard and both he and the viewer continue to see horrible consequences pile up because of his actions. A better man would have stopped long before, Walt couldn’t even stop after the plane crash that he clearly feels guilty for. It’s another moment the show uses to flesh out Walt’s character. He just keeps doubling down, forgetting about each tragedy after a little while. He cares enough to feel bad about each consequence, but not enough to stop his dangerous behavior.
The moral is that Walt is an awful person; the plane crash and his reaction to it just reinforces that.
One could argue that Jesse was also partly responsible for Jane’s death (and by extension, the plane crash). After all, it was his influence that got Jane back into heroin. She was successfully going through rehab until Jesse came into her life.
I still think Jane’s death was mostly Walt’s fault and the plane crash mostly her father’s fault, but Jesse definitely had a hand in getting Jane into that situation.
Wow, that’s not the way I saw it at all. More the other way around. Jesse hadn’t even tried heroin before he met Jane. Maybe you have a point, thought. Jesse probably wasn’t the best influence on her either. But it definitely went both ways.
Jane was no angel. And she didn’t want to get clean. Not really. She was going through rehab reluctantly.
When blame is handed out, no one seems to think give Jane her share of it. And I get that. She’s cute. I like her. In fact, I like her so much that’s it’s painful to watch any scene that she’s in now.
But she got Jesse hooked on heroin, and blackmailed Walt. Plus, she was constantly hurting her dad. She was an addict, she was greedy and manipulative, and she wasn’t all that smart. And Walt was right: Jesse, Jane and a bag full of cash would have been a recipe for disaster.
(And don’t anyone give me “but they had decided to get clean”. Have you guys met an addict? Or, heck, even a smoker? That’s how they always talk. They’re always getting clean… tomorrow.)
Walt doesn’t so much protest as rationalize why the crash wasn’t as bad as it could be, applying statistics and facile arguments to a crowd likely containing grieving children. His arguments were akin to a concentration camp guard congratulating himself for not actually operating the gas chambers, or a doctor whose gross negligence caused multiple deaths who focuses only on his successful treatments. Walt never accepted any degree of culpability for any death, and thought he could negotiate his was out of any situation up until Hank’s death.
Stranger
What an absurd assertion. There’s an extremely high demand for narcotics because, well, drugs are fun. Some people help fill the demand at extremely high personal risk to themselves - and that risk is caused by the fact that society has decided that they get zero avenues of recourse if they are ripped off in their business (due to narcotics being illegal) other than violence. And it’s not like they are pushing drugs on people that don’t want them. As the saying goes, the product sells itself.
It’s been a while since I watched the early seasons, but I recall Jesse being the initial bad influence. IIRC, Jane was his landlady, and had a zero tolerance drug policy because she was a recovering heroin addict. I thought she threatened to come down hard on Jesse if she saw him using or dealing drugs. But then they grew close and Jesse introduced her to meth, and she fell back into bad habits and introduced him to heroin in return.
Jane and Jesse were definitely on a bad path. Those promises about how they were going to get clean “their way” were totally empty, and they would have been dead within a year, probably sooner. That doesn’t excuse Walt, of course. But it definitely wasn’t a simple, clear-cut situation. There was a lot of blame to go around. Jesse got Jane back into drugs, Jane introduced Jesse to heroin and tried to blackmail Walt, Walt put Jane into a lethal situation and then let her die, Jane’s father went back to his dangerous job before he was ready.
I haven’t seen those episodes in a while, either. I’m happy to be corrected on the Jesse-Jane dynamic, if I’m misremembering or if I’ve missed something.
Wait, where did I put that box set…
OK, so Jesse first invites Jane to smoke weed. She declines, explaining that she’s in recovery and going to meetings, and weed is a stepping stone. Jesse says that he respects that.
They have their wonderful romance, plus a not so wonderful moment involving Jane’s dad.
Combo gets killed, causing Jesse to go into one of his patented funks. He says he’s going to smoke some meth, and asks Jane to leave. Tense moments. She ends up joining him instead.
A scene some time later with the apartment full of drug paraphernalia and Jane smoking meth…
Then they’re shooting heroin, with Jane teaching Jesse the ropes.
So, yeah. Status: “It’s complicated.” I guess it all went to heck during a tense time. Anyway, should you be hooking up with drug dealers and meth users in general / Jesse Pinkman in particular if you’re in recovery? No. Should you hook up with a girl who is in recovery if you’re a drug dealer and meth user in general / Jesse Pinkman in particular? No.