context; personal nonsense
The first time I tried watching Breaking Bad was when the series had ended but was relatively fresh. At that time I guess my comprehension was not good. Because I stopped at the episode when there is a single fly in the lab. My interpretation at that time was that the episode was a comedy filler but upon rewatching that arc I couldn’t be further off the mark. So it’s fair to say I did not understand what was going on.
series spoilers
I don’t really know what to say. The whole point of this season seems to be watching W.W. be a monumental piece of shit. In the previous seasons you had at least a modicum of a reason to root for him because apart from his origin story he was in a tussle against powers greater than himself. Now he is just being a garbage human being for no reason.
I think it is just a logical culmination of how badly W.W. is characterised in the series. He goes from someone who is “cut off” from a multi-billion dollar endeavour for $5000 bucks of rent money to someone who wants to be the king of meth slingers at any cost. The transition is not subtle because it turns out he was a sleeper hardcore badass all along and he just needed the consciousness of mortality that a cancer diagnosis brings about to be doing his thing.
So far I have been viewing the series as somewhat of a fantasy setting which has made the whole thing acceptable premise-wise and very enjoyable. But towards the end as they are wrapping it up I don’t feel compelled to see it through for a reason other than the sunk cost.
I feel like Jesse has been much more sympathise-able throughout. It is not a surprise he did not “apply himself” with a teacher like W.W.
I’d have to disagree. The whole show is about how Walter allows his pride devour his life. He’s too prideful to accept the handout from his former business partners. He gets a taste of being powerful and good at something, something he felt was stolen from him by said former business partners, and his pride feeds on it.
The show only wants you to root for him in the first season. By the second season Walter is the antagonist and Jessie is the protagonist.
As Walter’s ambitions become more grand and his pride grows and grows he eventually gets got, all his mistakes and failures finally ruin him.
::: Ending Spoiler The last episode puts this plainly. Walter rescues Jessie not to help Jessie, but to try and clear his own conscience. He only does it so that someone, anyone, looks at him fondly. Since he destroyed his family that just leaves his protégé.
Then he shows his true colors by crawling into the lab, his place of contemplation and pride and destruction, and finally dies. :::
Walter White is a man only to be pitied and reviled. Chuds look up to him because of course they do, they can’t understand that the show is mocking them and showing them that their own arrogance and pride destroys everything around them. Almost every time Walter is “badass” is when he’s abusing others or he’s lying. He’s the definition of a coward and paper tiger.
You’re supposed to hate him, not love him.
I get what you are saying and agree with it. But my point is that the last season is not entertaining at all, something which I felt the previous seasons were.
Agree with all of this, I also have to add that the only reason Elliott and Gretchen were his “former” business partners was because Walt chose to leave the company, purely because he chose to break up with Gretchen over feeling inferior because of her family’s wealth. He made some of the worst decisions of his life because he couldn’t take the hit to his own pride (which, given how he would later go on to treat Skyler, was clearly backed by misogyny), and would blame everyone but himself from that point onward
Honestly, I think that stuff makes it clear that the underlying factors that led him to becoming “Heisenberg” were there loooong before the series started, and it’s not hard to see how the pieces fit together with the early seasons, and with that in mind I find the last season to be a pretty logical conclusion for where the story was headed
His actual behavior didn’t change, he just stopped hiding it and started being honest with himself, and it was very clear that things were heading this way in the previous seasons
cw: sexual assault
…And to be honest? If someone could watch Walt attempt to rape Skyler literally at the start of season 2 and still see him as a sympathetic character to root for all the way up to season 5, then alarm bells just start ringing in my head 😅 Not accusing OP of anything, for some reason it seems to be an often forgotten about scene, but he was never anything more than a pathetic, despicable man
Not to mention Walt trying to force himself on the school principal near the start of season 3
It is not sympathetic but as I watching him duke it out with a man who is a major distributor of a highly addictive and dangerous drug (fried chicken) it made sense for me to want Gus to lose.
That isn’t to say that the show has any kind of extra-personal analysis, it doesn’t. The show is rooted in and based on liberal vibes based non-analysis. It understands that there is something wrong in the American culture that produces people like Walter White, filled with cowardice, impotent rage, greed, and pride, but never thinks about analyzing how, why, or what is wrong with American culture. So the show falls back on intra and inter-personal analysis. How Americans abuse each other because they can’t address their actual issues because of pride and cowardice.
The Wire does a much better job of analyzing the larger picture, even if it is also a fundamentally liberal analysis. But as much as I love The Wire it doesn’t foment the white-knuckle tension and rage as well as Breaking Bad does. But that mostly comes down to storytelling style I think. The Wire plays out very realistic while Breaking Bad uses Tarantino-esque hyper-reality as dramatic flair to heighten the narrative.
Anyways this is just rambling now. I like the show a lot, for a lot of reasons but mostly for the drama and cinematic flair of it all, not because of its biting criticism.
That all said I did have issues watching it the first time. I had to stop in the middle of season two because I hated Walter White so much. But when I went back into it with the understanding that Walter was the antagonist and Jessie was the protagonist I enjoyed it quite a bit.