Regarding the “Walt disturbed Jane’s sleeping position, causing her to die” theory: It doesn’t seem likely that Walt himself believes that to be the case, because when he is full of hatred at the end of the show and taunts Jessie, he says that he watched Jane die, not that he killed her.
So that’s at worst just an accident.
In a way, Walt killed Jane by inaction; he could have done something when she was choking but chose not to.
That’s true, but it’s also true that the reason she was choking was that Walt had moved her out of her ‘safe sleeping’ position. It was unintentional, but it was still something Walt did.
It’s not as if he had simply entered the room and found her choking. She was choking because of a physical action that he had taken.
The “death of Jane” scene provides, probably, the quickest way to find out a viewer’s beliefs about what the show is about. The split in opinions about Walt’s accountability is clear and unambiguous: either ‘Walt was responsible to a marked degree,’ or ‘Walt was not remotely responsible because Jane was a loser who deserved what she got.’ People in the first camp are likely to see the show as being about the personality flaws that can lead to destruction of the flawed one and those around him, whereas those in the second camp are more likely to see the series as being the story of a man who did his best to provide for his family, but who met with bad luck and, ultimately, tragedy.
Actually it might be possible to predict a person’s political party affiliation from their opinion about the “death of Jane” scene, with a high level of reliability…
I suppose that Jane is a borderline case of drug pushing for Jesse in the same way as it is of killing for Walt.
At times on the show, we see Jesse actively pushing drugs. He tries to sell to recovering addicts at the NA meetings. He talks a gas station attendant, who had never tried meth before, into accepting a bag of blue as payment for gas.
But when Jane relapses, it’s her choice. We see her turn the door knob and go into the room where Jesse is smoking it up, even though he told her to stay away. Later on, he clearly doesn’t try to talk her out of it, even though she is supposed to be in rehab. But does he even have the moral right to? She could simply throw back at him: “Well, are you quitting? Didn’t think so. So hand me that pipe.”
Drug pushing by inaction? He’s a bad influence. Maybe she wouldn’t have relapsed if he hadn’t been there (although I get a feeling that any excuse would have worked for her). But he’s not doing it on purpose. He’s flipping her over by accident, and then it’s just easier to leave her like that.
I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I don’t think you’re giving most viewers enough credit. That scene, like many, is ambiguous. Walt clearly bears some responsibility for Jane’s death. And he clearly feels guilt about it, as seen in the Fly episode. At the same time, Jane was clearly by no means an innocent. She was not only someone who got into drugs, and then enabled Jessie, she also decided that blackmailing Walt was a good idea.
I see no reason to try to simplify or label a complicated interaction.
I don’t doubt you, but plenty of other people DO have strong views of what the scene means–and those views conflict with the strong views held by other people. And all of it tends to converge around one of two poles: either Walt is basically an admirable-if-tragic figure, or Walt is basically an arrogant self-deluder whose prideful self-justifications harmed many.
(As it happens, I basically agree with you: Walt bears some responsibility, and Jane isn’t an innocent.)
“Jane isn’t an innocent” and “Jane is no angel” are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether and to what extent Walt is culpable for anything.
Exactly. And that response (and my agreement) indicate that you and I have a not-too-different basic view of what the show is about. By contrast, people who genuinely feel that Walt was a fundamentally admirable man doing his best to provide for his family, are going to agree with the proposition that ‘Jane had it coming’ and/or ‘Jane would have died from her drug use eventually, anyway,’ and feel that her failure to be angelic does absolve Walt.
And, I maintain, these polarized views are very likely to be predictive of political party affiliation.
Jane shmane, she was awful and ruining Jesse and Walter didn’t even have an active hand in her death, he just did nothing to prevent her death. On the scale of 1 to Hitler thats about an Archie Bunker.
Poisoning Brock, tho? Oh hell yeah, that’s straight up evil.
From my perspective:
(1) Watching Jane choke to death when he could have prevented it merely by turning her over was the moral equivalent of choking her himself.
(2) If he was certain that his plan would not result in Brock’s death or significant long-term harm, then it was less evil than what he did to Jane.
Your perspective is fucked.
She died because she took a huge dose of heroin. Had she not done that, she would not have died. She’s not his kid, or even his friend. He had no responsibility to help her.
Throw on the scales the fact that she had threatened him with blackmail. She was not some random person dying in front of him that he could have saved, she was a hostile. Saving her under such circumstances would have been the action of a real good person, which, while we may disagree about the depth of Walter’s evil, not of us think he’s a “good guy”.
Walt was responsible to a marked degree, but only because of the bad luck of being part of an oppressive system that doesn’t allow adult humans to make decisions about what to put into their bodies, and to engage in free trade without the risk of incarceration in order to meet the demand for those personal decisions.
So, a little of bit of the first point, a little bit of the second point. Do I contribute to your dataset?
No, that’s a fucked perspective. It doesn’t matter who she was or how she ended up in that position. When he could have prevented her death with so little effort, not expending that effort was as good as killing her.
This is no different from saying that he had a motive to kill her, so he did.
All it does is give him a reason to want her dead. It doesn’t make him less responsible for it.
Can people really not understand the concept of agency here? If that’s the case, we may as well make a Bad Samaritan law that anyone who is in a position to possibly save someone’s life and fails to is also tried for murder. Jesse, by that logic, is also just “as good as” responsible for killing her, since he enabled the heroin use that actually caused her death. Of course, she’s not responsible at all for doing the thing that caused her death. Because… she’s cute? Or something.
It was cold for him to stand by, absolutely. But what really bothers me about the whole Jane thing, and the condemnation of Walt’s character in general, is it is completely dismissive of the complexities of his character and the situations he finds himself in. Nobody is up in arms about the fact that he killed Gus and that was a case of blatant premeditated murder, unlike Jane’s. But it’s a lot easier to justify killing Gus, since he was a very powerful threat to his own life as well as the lives of his family and anyone can appreciate that the situation was to kill or be killed. Same thing with Krazy 8 (his first kill, the drug dealer locked in the basement who tries to shank him). Same thing with the drug dealers he runs over with his car and then shoots in the head execution style. In that case, he did it to save Jesse’s life, something one might even reasonably consider as a heroic deed. Hell, nobody’s even mad that he slaughtered a bunch of guys at the end in cold blood because, hey, they had swastika prison tattoos! (and yeah, they killed Hank)
It’s abundantly clear that he had a great deal of empathy for Jesse, Hank, and his family (despite the fact that yeah, he enjoyed doing what he did for his own sake, he was still genuinely looking out for them). He acted like a prick on a number of occasions, and he hurt people. But he was not an “evil” person setting out to do harm just for the hell of it, and on many occasions he actively tried to minimize the collateral damage that resulted from his actions. I’m not saying the guy deserves a medal, but that the judgments people regularly pass on him are excessively harsh and fail to appreciate the nature of the larger-than-life scenarios one finds oneself in when you have a work of dramatic fiction like this.
He is not culpable for anything wrt to Jane. He owed her no duty of care.
It was morally wrong. But not illegal or unlawful.
Nobody’s charged with murder, but duty-to-rescue laws aren’t that uncommon
If it was morally wrong, then he was culpable. That’s what culpable means.
Right. If she had been an innocent and unrelated bystander, Walt *would *have saved her. So he has to make an active choice not to.
Or, rather, she dies while he is in the process of making a choice. Lucky Walt. She sure made it easy for him.
BTW, I’ve been going back and listening a bit to the Insider Podcast, and it’s funny to hear the writers, cast and crew and argue and debate over whether the Jane incident was murder or not, in the same way that everyone else does.
If any you think that we’ll come up with an answer to this conundrum, BTW, then I have bad news for you. I’ve seen this song and dance a few times already. This isn’t an equation with a right answer. It’s a freaking machine for creating interpretations. So, if we’re doing this, it’s for the journey, not the destination. Just so y’all know.
Jesse certainly feels responsible. That’s why he is so torn up over it. The blue funk he goes into isn’t just about sadness and loss. That right there is guilt.
There’s blame to go around, for Walt, Jesse and Jane herself. And then, in the episode “Fly” (when Walt says that he is “sorry about Jane” and almost confesses to having been there), Jesse philosophically tries to clear everyone’s name. “It’s not your fault. It’s not mine neither. It’s no one’s fault. Not even hers.” Because “we are who we are”.
Really, Jesse? It sounds poetic and all, but should we be buying it? Are you even buying it yourself? Good job rationalizing, though. It’s like you’ve been taking lessons from Walt.