Breaking Bad

Just watched the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad.

I saw seasons one through four a way back, when the fifth was still in production. And now I finally took the time to watch the final season.

So the thing I’m most interested about this show that it features a villain protagonist, Walter White (WW). There’s Dexter, there’s House of Cards, and on the manga side, there’s Death Note. I think those are the few series where the villain protagonist reaches depths that make it enjoyable for me. I could write a lot about each series I guess, but right now the one fresh in my mind is Breaking Bad.

As an American TV series, it needs to appear moral, just so that the creators can get away with doing it. If I were in their shoes, I would do the same, but think to myself this: A viewer will see what he wants to see. The people who really enjoy the villainism, will look for that and enjoy that. They will see in the end the good guys win, but it doesn’t really matter because they remember how for the most time the bad guys kicked ass and were having a good time.

My friend disagrees on this, but I think it’s important that the viewer brings his own part to the story, tweaks it to his liking in his mind. This is why good writers leave things open, so that the audience can interpret things the way they want to. In fact, the smartest viewers are solely on the ride for the enjoyment of a good story, which if the writers try to ruin at the last minute, will just make them think of a better ending and enjoy it in their minds.

That in mind, I’ll focus on the story over the long span, rather than the messages the authors might have wanted to give the mass audience in the last episodes. WW descending into villainism slowly is the overarching plot of the series. He is supposed to be a family man that in the end becomes a pure villain. Interestingly, he never stops caring about his family, even when it takes him into ridiculous situations where the family clearly hates him. It’s portrayed as his flaw, not understanding what the family really wants, but I just find it unrealistic that he would still keep feeling that way after all that he has done. In the end, he does admit he “did it for himself” and not for the family, telling it just felt so good. While this is a reasonable explanation for doing what he did, his emotional responses at critical times of the stor don’t really support the theory. It seems to me he was irrationally supportive of his family to the very end, to give the character a redeeming quality I guess.

I guessed it from the start that an American TV series would play out a villain protagonist story this way and I’m just annoyed at how my expectations were so well met.

And let me tell you how I would have written the story given the premise and early developments of the series. And let this be a reminder that the vast majority, if not all, of the media put through people working in the various industries will always be subject to watering-down of stories like this. Probably not because they could not pull it off, but simply because it wouldn’t sell. People want simpler stuff like this even if I don’t. I enjoy it of course, but no one will ever produce anything perfectly suited to my tastes, unless I do it myself. And if I do, likely not a great many people will enjoy to the extent I would.

A hero turned villain is one of the best tropes out there. But Breaking Bad fails half-way at it, WW may have become an unrecoverable villain by the end, but he is also dead by the time. Gus was a cool character — a cold blooded master-mind with his glorious drug empire. But being a side character, there wasn’t enough character development and he ends up a simple villain. Then we see WW climbing the rocky path towards the same position, only for him to stop halfway to deal with the normal people of his life. And die. I can just imagine Gus having had a journey just as exciting as WW but making it all the way to the top unlike WW. I wanted WW to become the Heisenberg, but he never truly did.

I wanted to WW realize the family was an excuse. That he did it for himself. And then carry out that thought. Even if he only had months to live. Just to accept that the family and the original cause was lost, but that Heisenberg was still there, a new life to be lived. With no money, no contacts, only his persona and skills — get back at the game, beat everyone. Make everyone dread the name of Heisenberg whose name titles so many legends that no one speaks his name easily. Forget the WW who cries when Hank is being killed. Bring in the Heisenberg who orders Pinkman dead without blinking an eye.

I guess storywise unredeemable villains like that don’t really work as protagonists. But I’m sure there’s a way.

Neo-nazi villains, seriously? Here’s people you can’t think of as anything other than pure evil so we won’t have to spend time on character development and exposition. I actually liked Todd for being such a nihilist. Regrettably, they never give any positive look on him, despite depicting his evilness in a “realistic” manner. In the Western moral scope he is just a child killer, promoted to torturer so that he can be killed off easily. A villain protagonist needs people more evil than him to be likeable I guess. Cheap trick though.

I liked it how things end up pretty badly for everyone. Hank dead, that I liked especially.

This article is from early 2015 when I first started writing the “daily” journals that form the bulk of this website. There aren’t very many entries from that time because it took until 2016 to make writing into a truly daily habit.

Comparing the raw journal entries, it’s clear my writing has improved a great deal since then. On this “old page” and all the others as well, I have edited the writing at the sentence level to make it more readable but tried to avoid editorializing my thoughts and changing the paragraph structuring too much. In my private journaling I always prioritize speed of writing avoid disrupting the flow of thinking, so the journals nearly always require further editing even for just my own consumption.