#right up there with the entire fly episode where a drugged up walt starts trauma dumping on jesse

[artificialcaracal]

I watched through all of breaking bad over the past few weeks and I can officially say this show is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Yeah I get that this show is a super serious drama and Walter White was the big scary knocking man when it came out or whatever but to me he is so absurdly horrible that it’s funny.

He ruined everything. Literally everything he touched turned to shit, literally every person he knows is either worse of (or dead) because of him and it’s absolutely hilarious how much one singular guy could fuck up the town of Albuquerque New Mexico. By the end of the series an entire drug empire has collapsed, the head of the Albuquerque DEA department is dead, and Walt’s wife and son, and in-laws want nothing to do with him.

And the best part is he didn’t have to do any of it. Not a single fucked up thing Walt did had to happen, and I’m not talking about “oh he didn’t have to cook meth blah blah blah” yeah we all know he didn’t have to cook meth it was made pretty clear at the start of the show that Walt could’ve supported his family without cooking meth. No I mean Walt is horrendous at being a criminal and for all his intelligence and knowledge of chemistry, he’s too stupid to realize that he’s getting in over his head trying to build a drug empire.

Walt has no idea how the drug trade or organized crime works, he just decides to grab Jesse, cook a bunch of meth and then looks at Jesse and goes “hey now sell all 20 pounds of the meth I just made lol”. Jesse of course, can’t sell 20 pounds of meth by himself because that’s an insane amount of product for one guy with no established connections (connections who aren’t dead, or locked in a basement somewhere of course) to move

Jesse then has to walk Walt through the concept of a distributor before going there to try and sell Walt’s meth to the only one he sort of knows, Tuco

Now Tuco is unstable as all hell and beats the shot out of Jesse without paying him. Jesse tells Walt that they should not work with Tuco. Walt of course is too prideful and impatient to listen to his supposed partner in crime and decides to work with Tuco anyway, and as it turns out the incredibly unstable meth distribution was unstable and endangered the lives of both Walt and Jesse. Walt literally watches Tuco beat a man to death with the most shocked and appalled look on his face, surprised that the idea that Jesse said was bad turned out to actually be bad.

Walt of course did not at any point have to work with Tuco, he decided to after being warned not to, and this pattern continues

1. Walt wants to make a lot of money really fast because he thinks making money in the drug business is supposed to be super easy based on exactly one news story he saw covering a major drug bust

2. Walt decides to make a deal with an incredibly dangerous person to make said money

3. Said dangerous person turns out to *gasp* be dangerous and endangers Walt and/or his family

4. Walt spends the next few days shitting himself trying to figure out how to kill the new threat he willingly exposed himself and his family to of his own volition

5. Walt takes a quick break to abuse the shit out of his partners (Skylar and Jesse) in attempt reassert his incredibly fragile and pathetic brand of patriarchal authority. Saul is also there to play world’s most unappreciated couple’s counselor.

6. Walt takes out the perceived threat at the cost of irreparably damaging the lives of everyone around him

At no point does Walt ever think that his cycle of behavior might be wrong, and that maybe he’s doing more harm than good by constantly endangering his family in the name of making a quick buck, because he feels all masculine and in control of his own fate now (despite constantly working under someone else, literally leaving his fate in the hands of one criminal empire after the next). Walt’s the sole breadwinner for his family! He can even buy his son a fancy car! (ignore the fact that Walt is constantly gambling with the lives of his wife and kids, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do to provide after all. ignore the fact that he already had stable employment opportunities available to him. He’s totally doing all of this for his family. He’s a martyr and a saint!). Not once does Walt think to spend his possibly last days around his loved ones, instead disappearing for most of the day to cook meth so he can fuel his ego by finally making a bunch of money using his chemistry knowledge (ignore the fact that he was given an opportunity to once again work at the billion dollar company he helped start and later sold all his stock in for a quick cash out). It doesn’t even occur to Walt to question if his goal is only making sure his family has money as he seethes at his son getting credit for financially saving the family due to Walt using Walt Jr’s fundraising site to launder his drug money. Walt refuses to own up to the fact that he’s actually cooking meth for his own personal fulfillment until it’s too late. Until he had nothing left to work for but himself and had to come to terms with the fact that yeah, everything he did was for him. Everything he did was to satisfy himself in the final days before he kicked the bucket, to finally squeeze out an ounce of the respect and deference he felt he was owed. The respect he already had but was too self-centered to see. The very same respect he would proceed to lose as he delved further and further into his life of crime, hurting the very people he claimed to want to protect.

And it’s so so funny how bad Walt wanted to live that life, that of a renowned and successful chemist, of a respected father and provider, of a man’s man, that he was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to do it. Willing to twist the world around him in an attempt to make it fit his own fucked up masculine fantasies. A world where he was finally, in his eyes, above everybody else, where he’d get his chance to be a big deal.

And it’s really quite hilarious seeing that he already had everything he so desperately wanted, as he lost it bit by bit. The only problem was Walt’s own insecurities and struggles with mortality finally getting to him.

It’s all so very funny, because all five seasons of breaking bad are Walt inventing problems for himself in a desperate bid to exact control over his situation. To avoid dealing with the reality that he’s dying. He’d sooner retreat into his little drug lord fantasy land than face the fact that he was going to die, and it was likely going to be soon. No amount of chemical problem solving could get rid of his cancer, better instead focus on making the purest meth possible. All the doctors in the world couldn’t help Walt kill the cancer that was destroying his lungs, better focus on killing his drug lord employer. He can’t make his wife completely deferential to him during his little mortality crisis, better go manipulate Jesse into becoming codependent on him so at least this random guy who used to be in his high school chemistry class sees him as a figure of total authority. Better go worry about cooking and selling meth to make loads of money irregardless of the consequences instead of dealing with the far more existential issue of dealing with cancer.

It’s all so funny because Walt was willing to sooner destroy his family and the lives of everyone near him than accept his own death. He thought he could live on through money (that his family no longer wants from him) or through a drug empire (which he never ran and now no longer exists) or through a product (a strain of meth that no one is able nor willing to produce anymore) and in the end he simply died, like he was always going to, but now leagues worse off than he was at the start.

That’s one of several tragedies in breaking bad. Walter White was going to die, there was nothing he could do about it, and all the horrible and destructive somethings he did do about it still meant nothing in the end.

Walt was going to die regardless of what he did, the only choice he had in the matter was where and how, and he chose to die alone and completely broke, bleeding out in a meth lab, having turned not just his family, but the whole city of Albuquerque against him.

And he made that choice in the first episode.

And he didn’t have to do that.

But he wanted to.

is that fucked up or what?

anyway very funny show would watch again