Just as Breaking Bad’s fourth season is kicking into gear and heading towards it’s climax,
Walt and Jesse find themselves at complete odds with each other due in large part to Walt’s
continuously intensifying dispute with Gustavo Fring. After a physical altercation that leaves
Walt reeling, he returns home, takes a bunch of painkillers, washes them down with a couple
of beers, and sinks into reflective depression and delirium before he’s visited by his son,
Walter Jr, who happens to be turning sixteen on that very day.
It’s a terribly sad scene for Walt but it’s also awful for Walter Jr, whose special day is marred
by the sight of his drunk and stoned father, bloodied and beat up, mumbling and apologizing
about who knows what and crying his eyes out. He naturally can’t leave his father alone in this
state, and so he stays over while he sleeps it off. The next morning, Walt apologizes profusely
for how much of a disgrace he was while strongly emphasizing one particular thing:
that he does NOT at all want his son to think of him as he was last night. Walter Jr is confused,
and doesn’t really understand. And in response, Walt explains something that
has never been touched on once in the entire show in nearly four seasons up until this point,
and never gets touched on again. And yet it is a vital piece of information for
understanding what exactly makes him tick, so to speak, and what guides his actions.
It’s such a small detail, just a short 5 minute scene, but it tells us so much about this man and
fills in the gaps for a few things that didn’t necessarily feel out of place, but just weren’t
yet fully fleshed out. Childhood experiences shape the vast majority of people in innumerable ways,
and after hearing his story it becomes clear that this was the case for Walt as well. If you’ll
forgive me for speaking personally for a second, coincidentally I too experienced a family member
dying when I was nearly the same age as Walt was when his father died - around five or
six. And being completely honest, I hardly remember anything from the day it happened,
or the funeral. Just a couple of blurry, passing images in my mind’s eye. Maybe the vague echoes
of a conversation I heard that day. The general confusion I felt when confronting the concept of
death for the first time. Or perhaps a nostalgic dip into the sad feelings I felt, but just a dip.
Like most things from my early childhood, I can’t really recall this day all that well.
And that’s because while it was very sad for me, nothing about it shaped the person I became,
nothing about it truly changed my life in a gigantic way. It was a big, sad moment,
I grieved, and I moved on, and time slowly faded a bunch of the details away,
as it tends to do. And I’m sure that isn’t an unfamiliar concept for a lot of you watching.
Now, compare this to the way that Walt accounts this early childhood
experience to his son. He distinctly remembers the smell of the hospital,
all the people present, what they were doing, exactly how his father looked and sounded.
And that’s because this was a self-defining memory, something that completely impacted
him as a child and played a part in the way he lived life up until the end. That’s why
he remembers this experience so vividly nearly 45 years later. There is a deep trauma here,
and these life-shaping experiences that mold our psychology, viewpoints and ideals will
stick out in our minds in excruciating detail no matter how far in the past they occurred.
So why did this memory stick out to Walt? Aside from it obviously being very upsetting
to experience his father’s death so young, it was the MANNER of his death that stuck out to him.
Walt was terrified at the unrecognizable husk that was his dad. It struck him so deeply
that this was all that remained of the man that raised him, and it disturbed and upset him that
of all the many memories he had with him, THIS image of him twisted up, barely breathing and
not lucid is what stuck with him more than anything else. He realized that the lasting impact
of a person can be established from just a small little incongruent memory sometime near the end.
And this planted a seed in his mind. Due to having such an upsetting experience, fear festered. A
fear of his lasting impact being one similar to his father. And while cancer liberated him, it
also exacerbated this fear, because it increased the likelihood of him being remembered this way.
He knows how terrifying and sad it was to see his father like that and have it be all
he remembers of him, and so he does not want to be to those he loves what his father was to him.
He cannot stomach it. And it wasn’t just this scene where this fear was dwelt upon either.
Walter has said this before. And while I don’t at all think that characters absolutely need a
backstory to explain why they don’t want others to remember them in a way that they detest,
this explanation adds another layer and makes so much sense given Walt’s attitude.
Walt says it right here. In explaining why he doesn’t want to undergo chemo, he says that the
worst thing about this whole cancer situation is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that
he doesn’t want their memory of him to be so sad and opposing to what he wants. And now we know
why. So when faced with looming death, this is the one thing he avoids. He does not want to be
remembered as a type of man he dislikes, and so to do that he acts in opposition to that.
But the thing is.. who does Walter dislike? He dislikes himself, the person he has been for so
long, the person he views as weak, scared and lacking in any control. And as such,
he avoids being that part of himself and cloaks himself in the Heisenberg side of his personality
while maintaining that core. He avoids the very thing that his quote unquote old self represents.
Walt’s cancer diagnosis opened up a world of possibilities to him, but it also restricted him
in a way that I don’t think he really thought about or was consciously unaware of. Because
of the prospect of dying, he felt he could do whatever he wanted to grasp the power he desired
and it liberated him. But it also trapped him in a life where he was subconsciously terrified of
becoming a person that would leave that negative lasting impact that he didn’t want to leave.
So whenever possible, he HAD to act a certain way, he could not ever be the person he feels so
shameful about, because even given his positive results and remission throughout the series,
he still feels as if he could die at any time and leave that undesirable impact.
He is in control. Him. And that is vital, because he must control others’ views of
him to not end up in their minds like his father ended up in his. So to that end, he avoids being
the person he dislikes at all costs. And yet, the person he dislikes is the person his family
had grown to love, and while I did say that this scene was a horrifyingly sad moment for Junior,
it was also one that he notes as the most honest his father has been
in a year. People are multifaceted. We primarily see Walt through his own biased,
self-loathing lens, but the glimpses we see of him through other peoples’ eyes are very key.
And for this topic in particular, the glimpses we get of the person he was pre-diagnosis.
As much as he reviles him, that man is undeniably a part of him that cannot be cast off.
But while all Walt sees in the mirror is a coward, those around him see a sweet, caring, intelligent
and loving man devoted to his family. However, people are self-critical. We only see our faults,
and it is sometimes so difficult for us to find the merits that others see in ourselves.
And Walt’s tendency to see his faults is a big part of what turned him into a monster.
Walt no doubt never lived the way he desired, but that version of himself wasn’t as worthless as he
made him out to be. It’s one of the saddest parts about living with such a self-critical mindset
lacking in confidence. To others, we may be a wonderful person. But to us,
only the blemishes stand out, and we try to do whatever we can to hide them. And that’s what
Walt does. Weakness is a blemish, so he hides it, despite the fact that what he sees as weakness,
others may see as endearing honesty. And this combines with the compensatory way he
approaches life after his diagnosis - the freedom and ambition, the power he feels,
the ego he has always had and now begins to satisfy - they all make it so that he always wants
to appear in control and never wants to appear vulnerable, so he won’t be remembered that way.
And yet, this thinking of his is entirely flawed. This is a corruption in his mind,
making one of his primary goals to essentially leave a lasting impact on
his family total opposite to why they came to love him in the first place.
Walter is not a good person and he sowed the seeds of his downfall and made his bed,
but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for how the mix of his mental state and life experiences
made him feel resolved and obligated to leave his family with a memory of him that would contradict
everything they loved about him in the first place. In this way, he was ironically doomed to
become the type of person that would never leave the impact he desired. Or rather, he would leave
the impact of the man he desired to be - a man totally unfliching and confident and strong - but
the impression it would leave on those he loves would be total opposite to what he envisioned.
His family loves him for him, not for the version of him that he tries to portray to
the world of him being entirely strong and infallible and free of vulnerability. No.
They just want.. Walt. For his son, his wife, his family and friends - more than anything,
what they would want to remember him by would be his honest self. They just weren’t aware of a big
part of that honest self. If a vulnerable but loving, sweet Walter White was the last and
only thing that anyone remembered, everyone would be okay with that. Many of them would love that.
But that is the one thing that Walter White cannot stand.
As someone who has lived so much of his life feeling like he has no control, he feels a need
to overcompensate and portray a strong image for it to last forever. And so.. he gets his
wish. And in the end, his final impression on those he loves ends up being something
polar opposite to the crying, dependent father that Walter Jr. comforted all that time ago.
While the end result was heartbreaking, disastrous and regretful for Walt, in an
almost tragically hilarious way, his request was fulfilled in this one regard. This raw, trembling,
affectionate man is not at all the thing that his loved ones will remember about him. That will
be the furthest thing from their mind when they think of Walter White. Many thanks for watching.