Walter changes as the series progresses, at what point do you think he become a true
villain protagonist
@Mods - can you change the title to "When did Walter White become a ******* ?(Unboxed Breaking Bad spoilers) "
When he lets Jesse’s girlfriend die
That put the cake in the oven. The icing was applied when he poisoned the kid.
When he started cooking meth. Meth is illegal. Only bad guys make meth. It kills people and destroys communities.
Just kidding.
Probably when Gretchen offered to pay off his medical bills and he refused because he’s an emasculated weenie with delusions of grandeur. That’s when it stopped being about helping his family and became about his ego and injecting excitement into his life. I’m surprised they introduced that plot point so early since it undercut a lot of the sympathy I had for Walt up to that point.
Absolutely this. I was at a broadcast industry seminar at which writer Vince Gilligan spoke and he referred to this moment as being the only thing the exec producers confronted him about in order to say “are you sure you want to do it this quickly?”. He knew he wanted to slowly turn Walt into a Scarface figure but the trick was always to do it slowly and smoothly. The death of Jesse’s girlfriend was a calculated risk in the plot but to him and the other writers it felt the right thing to do anyway.
I don’t think he was evil not to help Jane. I doubt he was certain how to help an OD’ing person, and in the moment, he might have been worried about incriminating himself if he touched her and she still died. The fact she was a ‘bad influence’ and blackmailing him made it even less evil.
He had access to far deadlier poisons, yet he chose to use a safer one.
This could still be argued to be for the greater good as it was part of a plot to kill an evil man who was a direct threat to him and his family.
I’d actually put it as late as the train heist. He was more than willing to murder two innocent and harmless men to gain money he didn’t need in a situation. The very next episode, he throws away a huge golden parachute out of the meth business and back to normality out of pride and a lust for power.
Agreed.
I think it’s kind of amazing how deeply invested we all are in Walt’s twisted mental universe when we’re willing to step up and defend him letting Jane die. Hey, I do it too.
But imagine Walt is your neighbor. Then one day you find out he willingly let a girl OD’ing on heroin die without trying to help, because she was a liability to his meth business and a bad influence on his drug-addicted, meth-cooking protégé.
The sane reaction to that isn’t really supposed to be, “Yeah, I can see how that makes sense, I might be cool with that. Besides, it’s not like it’s the worst thing you’ve done, so whatever.”
But here we are.
To be honest, I’m not really sure that I ever stopped rooting for Walt. Of course, he also gets a huge break toward the end of the show, when he’s up against the Nazi gang, who are even bigger bad guys than him. So that lets him score sympathy points again.
I think that was the turning point of him turning evil. However, since it was a crime of omission rather than commission I don’t think he was a full-fledged villain at that point. He didn’t actually kill Jane, even though he might be responsible for her death.
For me I think it was when he had Jesse kill Gale. At that point he chose outright murder to protect himself. That was the irredeemable point.
Really, it was in the first or second episode, or so. Whenever it was he decided to cook. It was absolutely earlier than anyone in this thread has said so far. Making and using a chemical bomb? Killing a guy with a bike lock? Hello?
But we didn’t buy him as a villain at the start, because it was Hal, it was Bryan Cranston, because he was a lovable milquetoast chemistry teacher.
Later, it was because he was so fucking badass cool. And he was still Bryan Cranston.
But, that was Vince and Bryan fucking with us. And being astonished out of their gourds over what we were willing to put up with before seeing Walt as the bad guy. They’ve both made comments in interviews to that effect (as I remember it, anyway). Vince struggled in his efforts to get the viewers to see the changes in Walt, rather than viewing that character as a badass hero.
And many of us hung in there anyway, to the very last episode.
And that, more than anything else (but along with everything else that was awesome and superb and creative about that show) is the testament to that show’s greatness. Walt broke bad very early, but we went along for the ride anyway.
The story around the net goes that the original script was for him to flip Jane, but AMC wouldn’t allow it. Ever since I heard that, it always colored my perception of Walt. They never showed him kill Jane, but he never really had enough remorse to wash his hand clean either.
Early on, when he’s in a store and another twitchy tweaker is buying meth making supplies, and Walt just rolls up on him with tips, then confronts him in the parking lot – “Stay out of my part of town” I realized, Walter White is in some sort of strange mental state. He remains a twitchy, nebbish, geek – right down to quoting Walt Whitman to throw Sharader of his trail. But the whole show was really just like it ended … and I missed much of the ending episodes but still, they wrapped it up nicely …
I did it for me.
There’s lots of this. So many times I’ve yelled at my TV screen, “Walt, no, don’t do that” When he admits his fuge state was a fake to a psychologist. When he starts to burn the money. During the fly episode when he almost admits killing Jane. Walt would just tell me to eff off if he could – this is about him, not anyone else.
This, though I personally believe that rather than Breaking Bad being a story about Mr. Chips becoming Tony Montana, Walter was always Heisenberg and “Walter White” was a mask. Heisenberg just needed the prodding and encouragement to rip the mask off.
This was the point for me.
I mean I’ve committed felonies buying AND selling drugs, synthesizing meth doesn’t strike me as immoral, rather drug prohibition does. So I was on board until this senseless murder.
Jane threatened Walt for cash remember, Walt never threatened her.
You could say this about ANY transformation story, chicken or egg.
I think the supposed premise of the story didn’t translate. Instead of being a nebbish guy who was always drawing the short end of the straw the Gray Matter backstory made it seem like he was always kind of a smarmy asshole with an inferiority complex and he never related to others very well. So instead of a good guy turning bad it was more like a jerk becoming an even bigger jerk.
People say how amazing it is that BB made people root for the “bad guy,” like it’s never been done before even on TV. Sopranos, anyone? The Shield? Viewers/readers root for the protagonist even if he’s a villain since the author usually makes them relatable or entertaining (and bad guys pulling off crazy plans is really fun). If you’re not invested in the protagonist the story probably won’t work for you.
BB at base is an escapist power fantasy for adult men who feel like they’ve been put upon, especially middle aged guys who can relate to Walt and feel like their intelligence hasn’t been appreciated by the world. The type of people who make up a lot of the internet, come to think of it.
This, of course, is true, but there’s something different about Walt. The characters on Sopranos and The Shield, and for that matter someone like Richard III, *know *that they’re the bad guys. They know, and we know.
Walt, on the other hand, is constantly trying to fool himself, and us, into thinking that he’s the good guy. Then it becomes not a matter of simply rooting for the bad guy, but rooting for the good guy until you realize that he’s actually been a monster all along, and then decide whether you should still continue to root for him or not.
Maybe my moral compass is whacked, but even to the finale Walt never did anything I’d say was BEYOND REDEMPTION. The worst he came for me was Gale.
Many fan favorite characters on Game Of Thrones have racked up multitudes. If Walt was the same you’d think he sacrificed Junior to make a bath of meth or something.
I’ll just comment on this as well. This I agree with. I think it becomes fairly obvious after a while that Walt has always been a psycho in sheep’s clothing. That’s why I think the show is as much about deception, and about what is hidden under the surface, as it is about transformation. Walt isn’t the only character that this applies to, either. Almost everyone on the show has something to hide. Hank hiding his panic attacks under his tough-guy persona. Marie with her kleptomania. Gus hiding his drug business behind his chicken restaurant front, and Saul doing the same thing with his lawyer business, etc. Maybe the only “pure” character on the show is Junior.
However, there are certainly characters on the show who turn away from the light and go to the dark side, even if that’s not really what is going on with Walt himself. Skyler does it, and maybe Hank, and Jesse is constantly in a moral squeeze between the two.
I think there is a major difference between how we are introduced to Walter White and Tony Soprano. Tony was a terrible person from episode 1 all the way to the series finale. He was charming and funny, and even showed vulnerability, but the audience never saw him as anything other than a ruthless mafioso. (Other than a few flashbacks to his childhood that came later in the series, anyway.)
Walt was set up to be sympathetic from the start. He’s working two jobs to get by, he has a child with a medical condition, his wife seems slightly overbearing, and he just found out he has lung cancer. The bad things he does in the first few episodes are: (1) he starts making meth to sell to people who of their own free will wish purchase it, and (2) he kills one person in clear self-defense and a second in mostly-self-defense. These aren’t good things, but I think their bad-ness is qualified.
In the first episode of “The Sopranos”, Tony gleefully runs a guy down with his car then mocks the wounded victim. The guy wasn’t any threat to Tony - he just owed Tony money. Walter White in the first season wouldn’t dream of doing that (although he does much worse later on).
Early on Walter White makes some terrible choices, but I strongly disagree with the idea that he was a monster all along. That is essentialist thinking. He was flawed, sure, but there are countless people in the world with similarly large egos who don’t end up committing multiple acts of murder. If the acorn of pride is the same as the oak of monstrous moral behavior, then Steve Jobs should have been locked up very early in his career.