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OT: Breaking Bad - Warning Spoilers in This Thread

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Lafleurs Guy

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Jul 20, 2007
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As Breaking Bad nears its' conclusion folks are talking a lot about it. Two episodes away and the offseason Movie/TV thread is aflame with BB posts. However, some folks may not have seen the show so I'm creating a thread here where folks can discuss with spoilers. If you haven't seen the show and don't want to have the show ruined. Please depart now.

You have been warned.
 
LSHAP, here's a reply to you from the other thread:

Judge Walt by the sum of his actions and yeah, he's done some muthaf***n evil stuff. But in the complicated head of Walter White, it's always about devising a strategy to get from here to there without hurting anyone. But of course, the dramatic nexus of the show is that something screws up, a situation comes to a head and someone gets hurt, leaving Walt to say, once again, "We can't change what's happened, so let's move on!"

Walt's not fundamentally evil, he's a control-freak who's in denial that he can't control everything. He didn't kill the kid, he gave him a carefully controlled illness ("Look Jesse -- he's alive! He's fine!"). As far as Jane, my memory is that he didn't kill her, he just controlled the situation by not saving her (though truthfully, I don't remember his involvement in that scene very clearly). When it all came to a head last week, Walt took a desperate stab at controlling the situation by giving away everything he'd worked for in order to save Hank. Given the choice between saving all his money and saving a life, he chose life.

There's an exception: that episode where Walt put out a multiple hit on Mike's guys in prison was pretty evil, I admit, even if they were anonymous criminals.

But overall I think Vince Gilligan has taken great pains to make Walter White a study in contradiction, not outright evil. That's why we're still rooting for Walt to win even after five seasons of destruction, because we took the journey with him from naive wimp to Heisenberg, and we still see the committed family guy inside the Meth-Lord.

Well, at least I'm still rooting for him (though I'm not sure what's left to win). Maybe the rest of you moral guys are hoping for Jesse to knock him off.
The rationalization of evil (something Walt is an expert at) is evil in itself.

What's more evil - the guy who does something bad knowing it's wrong, knowing he'll feel bad about it but does it anyway or - the Sociopath who has no sense of morality to begin with doing something bad? Walt KNOWS that what he's doing is wrong but does it anyway.

As for not killing Jane - I don't think that would stand up in court (even if you did have Saul in your corner.) I know I wouldn't acquit him... And the kid, yeah he survived. But it could've gone the other way. And how do we justify what he did to Jesse in the end? That certainly was preventable wasn't it? And to top it off, he rubs it in the kids' face that he let Jane die.

Just because he feels bad about commiting these acts it doesn't excuse the behaviour. At the end of the day they are his actions and he owns them. I can understand killing the drug dealers in season one. You really could argue that he didn't have a choice there. But it's gone so far beyond that now. Nobody is all-good or all-evil - it's not black and white. But Walt is an extremely dark shade of gray. I know I wouldn't be inviting him over for burgers on a Sunday afternoon.

And at the end of the day the whole disaster could've been avoided if he'd taken the job at Gray Matter. The producers were very smart to include this because it underscores that the man had options. He just CHOSE a different path.
 
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