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.
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.