"No. I am the one who knocks."
What does it really mean to “break bad”?
"Some straight like you, giant stick up his ass,
all of a sudden at age what, sixty, he's just gonna break bad?"
"Breaking Bad -- to break bad, is an old Southern expression
that I heard a lot growing up in my home state of Virginia.
And what it means is to raise hell."
A man gets a cancer diagnosis and decides not to go quietly,
but instead to raise hell -- to cause trouble, to go wild,
to make a real disturbance.
Essentially, when we talk about “breaking bad”
we’re talking about leaving behind moral and social norms --
abandoning the law or ethics as constraints
that stop us from doing what we feel like doing.
Generally when people think of the title Breaking Bad,
they think of it purely as description
of Walter White’s transformation into the evil Heisenberg.
But if we look closer, we realize that Walt isn’t
the only one this title relates to --
the motley crew of characters around Walt also break bad,
to some degree, in one way or another.
"I’m not saying it’s not bad. It’s bad. But it could be worse."
Strikingly, almost all of the featured characters on the show
offer a mirror of Walt’s journey in some way --
whether they embody a form of evil he adopts along the way,
a philosophy Walt uses to justify himself,
or a different path Walt defines himself against.
St. Augustine wrote that evil was just the absence of good,
but in practice, wickedness takes all kinds of different forms and identities.
While they range on “badness scale” from flawed but decent to deeply evil,
all together the supporting characters of Breaking Bad
yield an almost encyclopedic study of evil.
So in this video, we’ll look at the unique type of wrong
that each of 7 supporting Breaking Bad characters brings to the table.
We’ll start with the most minor, seemingly harmless transgressors on the list,
and work loosely toward the more serious forms of evil --
a little like Dante descending through the circles of hell.
"If you believe that there's a hell."
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Walter, Jr. represents the wrong of ignorance.
This kid’s “sins” are more or less universal to teenagers --
he is obscenely rude to his mother,
"Why -- Why you gotta be such a --
a bitch?"
and interferes with her efforts to protect him.
"It's my mom's fault. My--My dad-- he is a great guy."
Everything remotely “bad” that Walter Jr. does
stems from the fact that he does not know better.
He’s completely in the dark about his father’s doings
until the episode “Ozymandias.”
"If--If this is true, how can you keep this a secret?"
As a result he misunderstands most of what’s going on
between his parents and makes Skyler’s life a lot more difficult.
This seems like an innocent enough fault compared to the others on this list,
but on the other hand, in Dante’s Inferno,
ignorance is one of the three blasts of Satan’s wings in the center of hell --
the inverse of God’s omniscient or all-knowing nature.
For Dante, sins of the intellect were punished even more severely
than sins that were purely of the will.
So in other words,
not knowing or understanding what you do,
or believing in some false justification, doesn’t get you off the hook.
"I--I read online, she's not even allowed to be mad at you."
Within the story, Walter Jr -- this lightest of sinners --
represents us, the audience,
and our willingness to explain away Walt’s bad behavior,
"Badass, dad."
long after we’ve been given plenty of reason to face the light
about who Walt really is.
"They say that you're some kind of drug dealer?"
"No, just--come inside, please, now."
"I'm gonna make you a deal, Walt.
I won't tell Hank... and I won't tell your children...
or anybody else, and nobody will hear from me."
Skyler White demonstrates the philosophy of necessary evil.
She believes it is morally necessary for her to do bad things,
for the good of protecting her family.
Skyler is a controversial character with audiences,
so it’s worth taking a moment to clarify what we’re counting as her actual bad deeds.
When the show aired, some judged her most for getting in Walt’s way,
but when Skyler’s nagging her husband she’s still on a morally upright path;
and when she sleeps with Ted, it’s hard to condemn this as “infidelity”
when Walt has already destroyed all trust in their marriage
and used a combination of force and manipulation
to prevent her from divorcing him.
Instead, Skyler’s transgressions of morality and law
come when she decides to aid Walt.
She helps cover up Walt’s activities, suggests a money-laundering scheme,
cons Bogdan into selling the carwash,
"U.S. Code Title 15, Chapter 53--" "Sub-chapter 1--"
"Section 26-06."
"Satisfied?"
and then does the actual laundering.
Skyler breaks bad for one reason -- to keep her family safe.
The irony is that while Walt is always proclaiming
that he’s doing all this for the family, that is actually Skyler’s priority.
"Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family."
Initially she wants nothing to do with Walt or his drug money.
"I'm out, but I will provide for my family."
"Not with that money."
But after the cousins attack Hank,
Skyler sees how much danger she and her family are in.
"Something tells me that Hank is here because of you."
From there on out, her priorities shift from doing what is right,
to doing what is best for her loved ones.
"I don't want my son to find out that his father is a criminal."
So Skyler shows how easy it is for people who consider themselves virtuous
to do bad things with the justification that there is no other way.
"Why would you go along?"
"I'll be asking myself that for the rest of my life."
We see Walt using this logic of necessary evil all the time
to rationalize his behavior,
even though in his case it’s far less genuine over time.
"Everything that I do, everything, I do it protect this family."
"So buying a car... that was protecting your family?"
"Damn. Chick's got an ass like an onion."
Hank Schrader is guilty of commonplace, everyday evil.
As we discussed in our Hank video,
this guy eventually becomes something of a hero in the show,
but Hank at the start embodies the kind of mean, inconsiderate behavior
we encounter all the time in mainstream society --
like casual racism,
"Eh please señor sente! Eh, no DEA, please, eh?"
sexism,
"You ever smoke anything, Wendy? Sausages don't count. [Laughs]"
bullying,
"Sky, got any more chicken? Emeril here is going to need a fresh pack.
Bam!"
and other obnoxious dehumanizing treatment.
"Siéntete!"
So this early Hank represents societal evils, expressed in small, commonplace ways.
“Gomey, go beat your piñata.”
His tendency to stereotype and put people in boxes
doesn’t just make him unpleasant; it makes him less effective as a detective
--
"Try rolling it, morons! It's a barrel.
It rolls! Jesus."
it’s a big part of why it takes him so long to catch Walt.
"Nothing personal, Walt,
but you wouldn't know a criminal if he was close enough to check you for a
hernia."
Even if any one of his transgressions isn't that big of a deal,
"I want Shania Twain to give me a tuggy."
cumulatively they show that normalized, socially accepted unkindness can be insidious.
"That's why they hire men.
Hey, it's not gonna bite you, alright?
Looks like Keith Richards with a glass of warm milk."
Just look at how deeply he gets under Walt's skin,
feeding the spite and resentment that drives Walt’s start in crime.
Over time, while Hank overcomes this side of himself
to become a better detective and a better man,
we see Walt adopt this bullying, toxic behavior more and more.
"Right now, what I need is for you climb down out of my ass.
Can you do that? Will you do that for me, honey?"
"The people who work here are like family.
I can't let that all fall apart because of a couple of bad years."
Ted Beneke’s type of wrongdoing is taking the easy way out.
Skyler’s boss, lover and major pain in the neck
might seems like a small fish troublemaker compared to others we meet.
Nevertheless, Ted commits major tax fraud
that results in $617,000 worth of back taxes and fines.
Ted wants to keep his dad’s business afloat, so he takes a shortcut --
"My priority is getting my business back, and putting my employees back on the payroll
so they can pay their mortgages."
"Right."
an illegal one.
When confronted about the money he’s hidden from the IRS,
Ted refuses to hold himself accountable.
"Maybe there's some way you could, uh, undo what's in there."
"You want me to un-cook your books?"
Again he’d rather chose the easy path of denial.
"What if your kids found out?"
"You know what, truth is, I haven't thought that far ahead, Skyler."
Then, after Skyler gives Ted an actual way out by giving him money,
"To the tune of $621,552.33."
instead of doing the right thing, he just does what makes him feel good --
"Is that yours, outside?"
blowing the cash on a fancy car.
"You know, I can't be driving a piece of crap to customer meetings.
You got to present that successful image."
Ted represents how easy it is to slip into serious wrongdoing
by refusing to analyze your actions and opting for shortcuts.
"There will never be a better deal, Ted.
The deal is you pay your back taxes, you pay your penalty,
and you don't go to prison."
And this is exactly what we’re seeing in Season-three-Walt,
as he likewise gives into flashy purchases, tortures Skyler with his inflated ego,
and is in deep, deep denial about why he does what he does.
"I am not a criminal. No offense to any people who aer."
"My husband is an illustrator so we travel a lot,
Paris, Italy, Denmark..."
Marie reflects the evil of ego,
which we might argue is the core source of Walt’s evil.
"Say my name."
As we discussed in our Marie video, Marie is kind of a scaled down version of
Walt.
She’s spiteful, dishonest, self-obsessed and megalomaniacal.
"I'm sorry, but these--these scans are not that difficult to read.
I could take one look at Walt's and tell you immediately how he's doing."
"Really."
Most of us probably know someone like Marie,
who’s a narcissistic, selfish and impulsive person --
but essentially harmless.
"I have aged shockingly well, haven't I?"
Marie’s worst qualities are kept in check by her loving relationship to Hank.
"Do it now! Give her back."
But Walt takes this self-obsession to the extreme,
demanding that the world bend to his will and causing innumerable casualties in the
process.
"We're done when I say we're done."
So while a little ego and self-centeredness is something most of us can forgive,
if it’s not tempered by positive forces like a moral code or a powerful love,
this form of evil can rapidly grow out of control.
"Consenting adults want what they want."
Gale Boetticher represents the evil of avoiding responsibility for your actions.
The karaoke-loving chemist Gus recruits to create his lab
is a timid, good-natured man with a genuine appreciation for opera,
vegan cuisine and, famously, Walt Whitman’s poetry.
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me."
He is a self-described libertarian,
"I'm definitely a libertarian."
which means he believes in political liberty and freedom of choice above all else.
And while Gale leads a progressive, eco-conscious lifestyle,
his political outlook allows him to feel no qualms
about mass-producing highly addictive meth.
"I'm not supplying it, they will get it somewhere else.
At least with me, they're getting exactly what they pay for."
At first, Walt sees a kindred spirit in Gale,
"I.. love... the lab, because it's all still magic."
and -- before he comes to see Gale as a threat --
Walt likes this mirror of himself: he’s a professional, intelligent chemist
who makes it look perfectly civilized to engage in this kind of work.
"Jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds,
attending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with.
You know what world."
Gale is a neat, sanitized, friendly version of a criminal,
and he almost seems like an innocent, a man just doing a job he’s been hired for,
who doesn’t really deserve to be taken out.
But Gale reflects the falsehood of ignoring the consequences of your actions
--
pretending that evils you’re participating in don’t exist,
because you’re not personally connected to the results of your labor.
Just like everyone else in this ecosystem,
Gale made the choice to engage in
the highly damaging, dangerous and illegal drug trade for profit.
So Gale makes us think about the way that ideals that sound good in the abstract,
can be dangerous and ultimately evil if taken to their logical outcome in practice
--
freedom of choice without any restraints leads to a society
that fails to protect its citizens from boundless danger and greed.
"Gale loses. Simple as that."
"[Laughs] [Screams]"
Jesse Pinkman represents evil that repents and wishes to be good.
He genuinely cares about being good,
even though he keeps getting pulled back into doing bad things.
"It's gonna have to be you." "What?"
"Jesse, do it now! Do it fast!"
Jesse never stops punishing himself for all the bad things he’s done --
he even punishes himself for bad things that aren’t his fault.
"A friend who worked for me got murdered.
It was my fault. I put him on that corner."
Jesse demonstrates the toll evil actions, both intentional and unintentional,
take on a good person’s soul.
"I don't know what's wrong with me, Mr. White. I--"
"Hey."
[Crying] "I don't know how I could be so stupid."
But his remorse can’t undo the destruction and death
his actions have caused,
so it doesn’t make anything better; it only makes him suffer.
Jesse’s repentance serves to highlight Walt’s growing darkness.
And perhaps the fact that he embodies this repentant evil
is one of the key reasons Walt keeps Jesse around --
he likes to think this desire for good is part of his makeup,
when in reality Walt declines to repent or suffer for his sins.
"Really, I blame the government." "You either run from things, or you face them."
In our next video, we’re going from bad to worse,
with 7 Deadlier Ways to Break Bad.
We’re going to look at the remaining supporting characters on Breaking
Bad
to decode the kinds of bad they embody and how they reflect Walt’s moral descent.
"Maybe your best course would be to tread lightly."
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