“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

In conceiving this essay, the initial plan was to separate it into two parts: how do you deal with your own fragile-yet-monstrous ego, and how do you deal with the ego of another person? Except the more I puzzle over it, the more I realise how intertwined the two concepts are. I remember the contemporary discussion of Breaking Bad, especially during the gap between the two parts of season five; many were observing how the morality of the show centered entirely on the choices of Walt to the point of subsuming multiple characters under him (especially Jesse and Skyler). This reached its apothesis when the final episode, “Felina”, aired, with it largely being seen (and sometimes dismissed) as bending the universe itself to allow Walt to get what he wants – I particularly remember people being galled that a homeless man whose face was national news walking around his hometown looking like the Unabomber faced zero trouble from the police.

One thing has always puzzled me though. The show hypocritically castigates Walt for his self-centeredness – literally raining hellfire down upon his head for it – only to centre its entire world and morality around his choices, making him its only mover and  shaker to which everyone else responds. Fine, I agree with that. But isn’t it also an act of hypocrisy to centre the majority of critical discourse around castigating Walt for his choices? I don’t mean criticising the show for underwriting the other characters or the implausibility of “Felina”; I mean going back to the first episode, pointing at Walter, and saying how obvious it should have been that a depressed chemistry teacher was irredeemably evil even before the meth. It’s really a variation on the Baby Hitler argument – everyone says they’d go back in time and kill Baby Hitler, but that’s not particularly helpful in helping us identify which babies will grow up to be Hitler now.

A lot of morality feels reactionary to me, regardless of politics – curing instead of preventing, and often punishing instead of curing. People rewatch the pilot and treat it as a memory instead of a fresh experience, regarding their inability to immediately know Walt would poison a child as a personal fault as opposed to a perfectly reasonable reaction, and they project their anger at the child poisoning onto the guy flipping dead matches into his pool. People love to act as if expressing a moral judgement has any consistent effect other than personal satisfaction; even within the context of series, nothing Jesse or Skyler or Hank* or Mike says does anything to stop Walt, and indeed the latter gets murdered for provoking Walt’s temper. The only thing in the entire series that makes Walt stop is when someone points out he’s succeeded at his goal.

*It amuses me that he casts moral judgement on Walt without knowing it (“Tagging trees is a lot better than chasing monsters.”).

When I puzzle over Walt, I think about how his self-image is largely based around his material existence. The take on BB that I can’t support – even as it’s presented by authorities as high as Vince Gilligan – is that he’s a brilliant liar. He eventually becomes a competent one, provided he’s talking to someone who has no idea who he actually is, but he’s incapable of even lying to himself for an extended period. His hubris in season 5-A is rooted in success at a genuinely difficult task; his depression in the pilot is rooted in genuine economic despair. A fragile ego goes both ways, and it takes only a little success or failure to knock him one way or the other. He’s very good at shaping the world to look how he wants to see it, but he’s equally shaped by it in turn.

I go back to his behaviour in the pilot, and I see him caught between total passivity and outright tantrums (“Fuck you! And your eyebrows!”). One of the few times he expresses himself in a way that’s assertive without becoming aggressive is in the talking pillow scene, where he lays out his exact motivation without babbling out a litany of justifications. It’s a rare moment where he allows himself to be vulnerable, by which I specifically mean ‘open to attack’. Skyler’s response is pretty much what he fears it would be, where his motivation is criticised; it’s Marie, of all people, who gets where he’s coming from and argues to concede to his wishes.

This is one of the few moments where Walt definitely makes the correct moral decision and Skyler definitely makes the incorrect one. Walt is both taking and acceding control here, putting his motivations out and allowing the universe to react as it sees fit. He doesn’t even fall into the common mistake (that I have made) of thinking that expressing his feelings will automatically make people see things his way (I think he’s surprised as anyone that Marie is the first to agree). Conversely, Skyler looks like a complete asshole here, thinking that if she were in his position then she would want as many days on this world as possible, so obviously Walt would want the same thing.

And actually, it’s not even that Skyler’s approach is immoral, it’s that it’s impractical. You can’t really make people want things they don’t want. We here at The Solute have criticised the dramatic structure of Breaking Bad, but it does fit with the basic dramatic idea that people get what they want and then they pay for it; one thing I marvel at is that Hank would definitely have survived the ending if he’d simply gone to the cops and immediately told them everything, but he was so driven by the need to Punish our misbegotten teacher-cum-meth-cook and by making him suffer as intensely as possible (and also preserving his ego) that he got caught up in his own scheme. And, you know, he succeeded! Hank set things up so that Walt suffered the absolute maximum he could have. Meanwhile, the upshot of that talking pillow scene is that Skyler did, in fact, succeed at her goal of convincing Walt to take on the treatment.

Perhaps it’s best to separate one’s inner and outer world to a degree; the external world being one of eternal compromise and, at best, 75% fulfilled goals whilst one’s inner life is the source of unleashed joy. Looking at it from the egoist’s perspective, perhaps the best thing is to pick one star and follow it, using that as a guide through the world as opposed to some sense of constant unrestrained joy. From the perspective of navigating those with egos, perhaps it’s best to let them have them. I mean, if you want to escalate every situation be telling every idiot you meet that they’re an idiot, I guess you’ll get what you want. I just keep thinking how so much of the show could have been avoided if Hank hadn’t been such a dick to Walt about everything for no reason.