I Watched Breaking Bad After Better Call Saul

honesty is good don't you think then do it yourself never make the same mistake he's just not the same I leave first does it matter if you voted for it it's the law Secrets create barriers between people congratulations yeah I used to not like carrots too I like to think I see things in people nothing but good days ahead very beautic one or two people who watch this channel may know that I'm a fan of the television show Better Call Saul I tried to drop subtle hints by for instance making an eight video series about it over the course of a year and referring to it repeatedly as the best show on television in the fourth video in the series I finally admitted that I hadn't seen breaking bad and it was quite the occasion I meant to bring it up earlier it just got written out of the first video's script and then there just wasn't a right time to mention it is I guess one excuse I could give I also just wanted people to listen to what I had to say but I've mentioned it again in several of the recent videos and it's always interesting reading people's responses I get everything from very serious comments from people telling me they're clicking off the video to very kind and Earnest comments that I should only watch Breaking Bad If I feel like it YouTube is a diverse and enormous world I will say it was definitely validating to see Giancarlo Esposito say this in a recent interview I contest that if you Breaking Bad first and then Better Call Saul that's great but if you're able to watch them backwards Better Call Saul first and then Breaking Bad you'll be illuminated in a different way so yeah I've been illuminated in a different way we could say well I watched Breaking Bad and I gave some of my initial reactions on a live stream but as I mentioned then there's a lot more on my mind I actually took like 25 000 words of notes as I watched the entire Series so if you're interested in checking out what basically amounts to me live tweeting the show but offline my full notes are available for channel supporters right now on the patreon and YouTube members page this includes all kinds of reactions and deep insights like oh Gus agreed to no more Child Soldier employees also for channel supporters there's a behind the scenes video explaining my process of systematically categorizing these notes and turning them into a script and there's a whole extra bonus video also of stuff that didn't fit in this video so check that out if you're interested by supporting the channel I'll start by saying yes I liked Breaking Bad it's a great show yes of course there's no doubt is it Superior or inferior to Better Call Saul I'm not sure that's an important question like it's fun to debate but that was never my intention in watching Breaking Bad and we're going to be comparing and contrasting the shows in ways that will hopefully be more interesting than a haphazard goodness assessment though I will do that too eventually because why not I don't think there are many other video makers who have covered Better Call Saul without watching Breaking Bad but it's possible there are others and I'm just not aware of them I didn't watch many Better Call Saul video essays on YouTube until recently one because I didn't want to unconsciously steal people's ideas and two because I knew there would be all kinds of Breaking Bad spoilers on that note by the way it was really amazing how great the community has been here on this channel we did those live streams before each of the last six Better Call Saul episodes and we've done a few since and there were very few people inclined to leave spoilers about breaking bad people really restrained themselves you all were very kind and nice if you're not subscribed and you weren't there then you're still probably kinda nice and I appreciate you joining our kind and nice Community if you would want to anyway I did have a few things spoiled I knew Walter died I knew Mike died I pretty much knew Walter killed Mike but I tried to not really think about it I had seen a funny tweet that prepared me for Jane's death thankfully as that's one thing I'm very glad to have had heard about beforehand I guess I can't say that much else was spoiled though I mean it's not really spoiling but obviously I knew that methamphetamine was going to get cooked and Gus and Hector would be involved in the general ways they were that Saul would do Saul stuff there's a lot I knew from having watched Better Call Saul of course but that's different than having things spoiled watching Better Call Saul gave me insight into the world Jesse and Walter enter and I got to see how these very specific and compelling characters interacted with that world I knew so well and I got to see the way that world developed on with Mike Hector Gus Victor Tyrus Lydia and so on like I got to see how all their story lines ended in the same way that most people watch Breaking Bad and then when they watch Better Call Saul they got to hear definitively that Walter died as well as seeing Saul's conclusion seeing how Francesca turns out and Gathering that Jesse duped the feds and probably made it on the run the two shows tie up different threads for each other Breaking Bad even shows us what happens to Ken wins and his nice little car so that was nice anyway let's start by acknowledging these two shows have a lot in common I mean they're set in the same world I'm very likely not the first person to point that out we could look at surface level stuff like the shows having the same locations characters visual compositions and even scene settings or we could look at deeper stuff like how both shows tell stories of protagonists working partially against their own interest as they try to work fully in their own interest the shows do a great job of creating tension for the viewers as our feelings about the characters go back and forth and everywhere in between the two shows use narrative devices like montages in very similar ways to over shape how we feel about the character's actions this of course in turn helps us learn about ourselves but I think it's a little early for that as someone once said there will be plenty of time for soul searching until then we keep going so let's keep going let's do a fun segment we love segments here don't we let me know in the comments your feelings about segments this segment is called top 5 important connections between Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul first up Mike's consistent sandwich preferences in Breaking Bad he obviously has his pimento cheese how's that sound and in Better Call Saul he also enjoys a classic pimento sandwich so that's important number two flooded engines we have Jesse telling Walton the second episode you're gonna flood it man not gonna flood it she is not going to flood all right then he follows us up with confirming it God damn it see flooded it and in Better Call Saul we have Phil the nice sound guy notifying our hero I'm not flooding over cranking it and we see him also follow up to confirm it yeah he definitely sledded it interesting stuff very important to dive deep into these details what does it mean philosophically for an engine to be flooded while I was joking at first but it is a limitation imposed by external factors it's something that can't be forced it shows how our protagonists react to limits and bad luck and it requires them to get creative the third important connection is heightened awareness of electromagnetic frequencies you can't even see it so how can you know just how bad radial frequencies and microwaves and cell phones and stuff are getting you very good foreshadowing I'm not sure I need to cite the Better Call Saul example of this though Chuck was much more refined about it of course number four long walks through the desert the beautiful desert a great place for a stroll both shows give us some great desert walks it's always a desert and five lastly and most importantly Breaking Bad has a woman in an electric scooter and so does Better Call Saul of course thanks I hope you enjoyed that segment okay let's move on to slightly less silly connections instead of silly let's talk sexy we get under the table action in both shows which is sort of interesting but it's not the only thing our two tragic couples have in common let's talk a bit more about some similarities and differences between our little lovebirds I think that's a nice way to get started here has it been pointed out yet that they both at some point have conversations about how they need to be fully honest with each other like this athlete honesty I'm all for that and in Better Call Saul we see if I have the urge to not tell you something then I've got to tell you right full disclosure interestingly this conversation is right before they get married and Walter and Skyler's no secrets conversation comes right before they have sex something the show makes sure we are aware of whenever it happens another difference is that Kim and Jimmy's no secrets conversation seems to be a lot more Mutual with Skyler and Walter Skyler sets out the terms and Walter agrees because it's convenient but with Jimmy and Kim it's different for one thing the episode opens on this chat they're having mid-conversation and anything that already happened we're not going back over all that let's just focus on from here on out it feels more collaborative we don't know who brought it up and it doesn't seem to matter Jimmy does have some worries about situations where it might be a hard principle to keep to especially situations where he might not want to tell Kim the truth which is ironic on rewatch because Kim would be the one to more significantly keep a secret the knowledge that Lalo is still alive but Jimmy goes along immediately with Kim when she reassures him they'll cross that bridge when they get to it with the whole you know what if it's hard to tell each other stuff thing Skyler and Walter's conversation also involves reassurance but it goes the other way gender wise the context is they just officially bought the car wash with Walter's methamphetamine blood money and Skyler is looking for reassurance that everything will be fine tell me again Walt gives the reassurance and that's the context of Skyler bringing up the let's be honest conversation as she wants more than just reassurance now she wants a firm commitment to honesty in both situations the honesty conversation is a precondition to moving forward in their life together but Walter is as disinterested in introspection in this case as Kim was with Jimmy before getting married just for different reasons when Kim and Jimmy have this chat before they tie the knot the viewer sees Jimmy as the one more likely to put them in danger similar to how when Skyler and Walt have the chat after buying the car wash with tainted money Walt is the one far more likely to put them in danger you can criticize Skyler's actions like her aggressiveness of eventually sending huel and Bill Burr over to Ted's to shake him down but she didn't get the cousins sicked on the family home with an ax she didn't get gasoline poured throughout the home and she didn't get Gus fraying directly threatening all the family members lives so what I'm saying is Breaking Bad let's be honest conversation shows the dangerous character doing the reassuring and better call Sauls shows the dangerous one being reassured being more concerned and therefore seeking reassurance of course Better Call Saul does such interesting character development that Kim does become substantially more dangerous than Jimmy for much of season six but we don't know that when they get married we just know that after Jimmy scammed Mesa Verde and let Kim be in the line of fire Kim responded to this by seeking the security of marriage we feel she's willing to go all in with him like someone else I know All In Kim goes all in with Jimmy and we see her trying to avoid thinking too hard about the decision she's making so we read their let's be honest chat as one person dangerous and concerned meaning Jimmy and the other person Kim seeming not dangerous but also far too unconcerned contrast that with Walter and Skyler where Walter is dangerous and unconcerned and Skyler is not dangerous but is very concerned she's as easily reassured as Jimmy is for sure my point is just out of the differing contexts are reflective of completely different relationship Dynamics and overall dynamics of the two shows it's really interesting to me to see the similarities because it sort of throws the differences into greater contrast like going back to both couples having under the table action go down we could look at the simple difference that Walt initiates and Skyler gets into it whereas Kim initiates and Jimmy presumably gets into it also a hand on a thigh is different than footsies Skyler is feeling it sexually and so is Walter in ways quite different from how we only barely see Kim and Jimmy's feet touching before the scene ends I don't care how much you like feet this scene is clearly coded more as romantic than sexual and it doesn't cut shortly to them having sex like we see with Walt and Skyler it cuts instead to them smoking which to be fair is pretty close they hooked up in the previous episode for the first time that we ever see though we know from the flashback a few episodes earlier that they used to be more overtly romantic so now that they're back to hooking up when Jimmy takes the job at Davison Maine and works part of the time at hhm the under the table stuff Kim initiates is because she's so turned on that he's there at a meeting with her their footsie action reads as hell yeah we're into each other and we're serious professionals together it's definitely erotic it just has that sort of romantic side to it back to Walter and Skyler he puts his hand on her thigh as the cop slash PTA meeting discusses the unsolved theft Walter committed and the firing of the nice janitor Hugo who helped Walter a lot when he was nauseous daily from chemotherapy Hugo was fired as a consequence of Walter's self-serving actions of course since presumably Hugo had been smoking weed for a while without having that cause him to lose his job until Walter got police attention on the school by stealing chemistry lab equipment causing Hank to look up Hugo's criminal record and then search his vehicle and house so Walter initiating this under the table action is not only intense and sexual more importantly it's an intense and sexual act he does as a way of distracting from the consequences of his actions or you could say it's arousal from the Badness of his actions but either way he's sort of sublimating guilt about his actions as therapists like me might say sublimation is the word in physics for when a solid substance turns gaseous without passing through a liquid stage first like dry ice and in psychological Fields sublimation is a word with a lot of Freudian baggage and one that isn't used much in day-to-day therapy but it's still useful for describing a type of psychological transformation that can happen when you look up the word in its psychological sense you see an emphasis on sublimation as the transformation of less socially acceptable urges into more socially acceptable actions finding an outlet for energy like creating music from feelings of aggression without ever hurting anyone or something like that but I don't think of sublimation as being so strictly related to the societal acceptability of urges feelings and actions I guess I see it in a more General way of being about how feelings transform to find an outlet for example if we're not comfortable feeling sad then when we're triggered to feel sad other triggers go off and we process the experience through another path I'm calling it sublimation with Walt here because when they announce Hugo being fired you see him first of a facial expression of guilt and it instantly transforms into I guess we could say arousal it's sexual for Scott Skyler and it's sexual for Walter too of course but it also seems to be an act of dominance and power seeking so it feels a little strange to call it arousal it certainly seems more about dominance than Kim's footsie stuff that's for sure it reminds me of the expression everything is about sex except sex sex is about power this is one of those quotes where no one seems to know who first said it and it's not literally true I don't think it certainly stretches the meaning of the word about but I think sex and relationships in general inherently do involve exchanges of power whether those exchanges are fluid flexible balanced healthy or mutually fulfilling is what's important and what I see as a fundamental defining aspect of a relationship for now the point is that Walter's guilt turns into an urge for sexual Power Note also has a difference that Skyler is unaware of the emotional source of Walter's passion does that come from Jimmy on the other hand knows exactly why Kim's feeling cute and turned on even if he might be a little pleasantly surprised that she shows it how she does there's another detail which is that Skyler is more than just surprised at first when she feels Walt's hand on her thigh she abruptly stops him she's shocked she changes her mind and gets into it of course but we don't see any shock or anything like that from Jimmy we don't even see his face because it's not relevant his romantic partner is not putting him in a position to have a strong negative reaction and then change his mind there's a one way-ness of the eroticism between Walter and Skyler a lot of the time which culminates in him sexually assaulting her and it doesn't feel out of character for him at all at other points he pushes himself on her as well on a fundamental level he doesn't seem to respect her as a human capable of her own choice and treats her as an object to be manipulated in his life the fact that he does everything he does without telling her violates the unstated informed consent and agreements of relationships you can't just be like well I didn't say I wasn't manufacturing and selling meth while killing people him lying to her and him assaulting her are connected in his General disregard for her agency and consent it's very hard to imagine Kim or Jimmy assaulting each other Kim does lie to Jimmy by omitting the information that Lalo is alive but to her credit she realizes how wrong it was and how toxic their patterns are and she actually ends the relationship to make amends and diminish future harm another difference in the relationship Dynamics in these two shows is when Kim gets into bad behavior with Jimmy it's because she has a passion for it it turns her on too when Skyler gets into bad behavior with Walter it's because she feels there's no other way to get her brother-in-law the health care he needs and then it's to try to keep her family unit cohesive her hand is forced far far more than Kim's Breaking Bad is more of a necessity for Skyler than it is for Kim in Better Call Saul we see the role reversal of Kim taking the lead with the breaking of the bad and while it's not even close to the same a reversal of this vaguely General type does rear its head in Breaking Bad one example is when Walter says he'll turn himself in if Skyler keeps the money and passes it on to the kids it doesn't seem like he was actually going to genuinely do this he just thought Skyler had already told Hank everything and was trying to salvage something for his wife who just said this that's Walter's Legacy but his offer to Skyler about keeping the money is absurd also because the cops track down and hold you accountable for the money as Skyler explains regardless what's interesting for our purposes here is that Skyler responds conspiratorially which Walter didn't expect she may be our best move here is to stay quiet it's hard to see this as really very similar to Kim and Jimmy's reversals though since there seems to be a big difference between Skyler suggesting they keep doing what they're doing to maintain the cohesion of their family contrasted with Kim at multiple points encouraging new risky Endeavors Kim used her initiative not just to maintain the status quo of Jimmy's dangerous actions but to have him join her in new dangerous actions this makes Better Call Saul a show about two people with very similar Tendencies drawing each other into danger contrasted with Breaking Bad being a show of two people with very different Tendencies regarding risk tolerance or aversion where the more risk-averse person is forced into a position of having a choice between either to continue to tolerate risk or to have her children's father permanently imprisoned compare that to Better Call Saul where if we look back to Kim's response to the squat cobbler incident obviously she was reasonably risk-averse back then but first of all we know she enjoyed stealing as a kid so those impulses are in there somewhere but more importantly as her life with Jimmy moves forward we see her motivated to actively commit fraud for instance with the Lubbock Texas Mesa Verde scam she comes up with and this is not at all motivated by self-preservation she wasn't going to lose her job or her family or anything by not doing that she just would have missed the opportunity to Excel for her boss she was seeking a larger than life feeling a feeling that Skyler certainly enjoyed when she felt it like when dominating Ted or Bogdan financially but Skyler wasn't doing that for the feeling it was just a nice byproduct she did what she did to decrease the odds that her family would be torn apart that's not necessarily a justification but what it is is an entirely different motive than what we see from Kim now we talked about their different relationship Dynamics like about who was dangerous and who was concerned and all that but of course if we're talking about that we need to talk about when Walter famously says I am the danger to Skyler so there are a few angles to see this from first this is in a conversation where Skyler is deeply and justifiably worried about Walter's safety and about the family's safety in general she's gone to the extreme extent of suggesting Walter turn himself in while acknowledging what this will mean for their family because she has a reasonable and Justified belief that Walter could lose his life otherwise to me the most prominent feature of Walt's legendary response is that it's not helpful from the perspective of showing understanding or support him being violent and dangerous can perhaps provide some protection to the family I guess but it also invites violence towards the family of course so there's no basis to claim that his dangerousness correlates with a net decrease in Risk towards himself and the family personally my partner assuring me their harmful and dangerous would make me more worried about the forces they might come into contact with not less so from a husband providing emotional support angle Walter fails to even try instead responding defensively to his wife's fear and using the situation as an opportunity to assert his self-image let's be clear about this though Walter is the danger of course it's certainly not a reason for Skyler to feel comforted but still Yes Walter is very harmful anti-social and dangerous with significant consistency but he either doesn't care or doesn't understand that this is more scary than it is badass for his wife at least if not for viewers who lack experience with romantic relationships we also do see Skyler catch Walters slipping and revealing they were in serious danger in Season Five Ghost frame is dead and he was the threat he was the danger I thought you were the danger Walter wanted to be seen as dangerous but only when it was convenient for him and Skyler bringing it up again here months later shows just how much of an imprint Walter's self-interested and scary words had when I think about his pride in being perceived as badass it makes me think of the scene After Jimmy gets beat up when Kim is helping nurse his wounds and Jimmy reflects frustratedly about how back in the day no one would have messed with him like this now of course it's not the exact same as Jimmy's talking about the past and Walter is talking about the present but they both glamorize dangerousness Jimmy acknowledges he misses his dangerousness as he believes it could have protected him in this case and Walter Embraces his dangerousness for the same reason claiming he sees it as a form of self-preservation the big difference is that Jimmy is sensitive to what his Embrace of dangerousness might mean to his loving partner and Walter is not Jimmy feels ashamed as he says because back then because I was one of them and he brings up going to therapy out of nowhere a promise he doesn't keep but one that he seems to mean at least somewhat when he says it they both have the priority of asserting their self-image and arguing that their dangerousness is or could be a positive thing but Jimmy has more interest in maintaining a healthy relationship and Walter has zero apparent interest or zero ability to have interest in having a healthy relationship Walter exits with the last word leaving Skyler absolutely shocked and terrified while he takes a shower to soothe himself Jimmy on the other hand sits there in Silence with Kim in one of his more vulnerable moments as they both wonder how his priorities may or may not keep shifting in the coming days weeks and months generally Jimmy is consistently more likely to feel pulled in opposite directions than Walter is Walter's more single-mindedly devoted to his aims and whereas Better Call Saul shows Jimmy slowly transform into Saul the transformation of Walter in Breaking Bad is far more immediate and rapid and then there's less of a change moving forward you might say but he goes from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher to a hardened murderer and I would respond yes that happens in the pilot entirely in the pilot frankly it feels like a lot happened before the pilot that I really wanted to better understand he's already got his path charted out morally speaking he gases Domingo and Emilio because it's them or him the same reason he has for letting Jane die the same reason he tells Jesse to kill Gail and when it comes down to you and me versus him I'm sorry I'm truly sorry but it's going to be him the same reason he kills all those incarcerated people the lawyer and of course Mike Four Seasons later on the subject of where this all came from and who he used to be I found myself watching Breaking Bad and wondering strange things about small details like how did he learn to drift so well when did he learn did he teach himself but going back to the pilot how long had he been pondering cooking methamphetamine seriously when he's on his ride along with Hank he corrects Hank that it's phosphine gas not mustard gas that would be the unintentional toxic byproduct of cooking meth if he knew this from being a chemistry whiz rather than already having studied up about cooking meth why does he guiltily say I think after phosphine gas I think yeah exactly the show seems to be implying he's been plotting since at least seeing the news report Hank put on or maybe earlier and regarding how much he already knows in the pilot I found it interesting that when he recorded the message to his family members thinking he'd die or get arrested in the desert he intuitively knew to say to all law enforcement entities this is not an admission to kill I am speaking to my family now I know you could say anyone would be aware of the importance of saying something like this and it's true that he could have just thought of it on the spot but for me it added to the uncomfortable feeling that I didn't understand this guy's backstory where he was coming from and why he was already fully informed about how to go about something like this in the stress of the moment I don't think I would have thought to say this is not an admission of guilt also think about how good a manipulation he is already in the pilot like the scene where he basically forces Jesse to cook with him you lost your partner today what's his name his slow measured pacing his perfectly crafted manipulation it was just a real shock to me watching the first time such a dramatically different side of him I felt he escalated so significantly already from the pool to the ride along to this side he's displaying it's like it's just been in him his whole life this dominant inclination this intuition for aggression just waiting to explode you got nothing square one and then he cuts any pretense of this being a negotiation and he concludes with saying either that or I turn you in so Walter in the pilot the first episode forces a 24 year old former high school student of his to cook methamphetamine with him on threat of imprisonment who knows maybe Jesse would have done it without Walter threatening all we know is that Walter didn't leave it as a choice really the pilot also shows us Walter assaulting a young guy for bullying his son I'm not sure if the guy Walter assaults is technically a child but even if he's an adult it's quite an insight into where Walter's at as the series starts but we're told this is an Abrupt break from his usual General temperament throughout the years this is an interesting point to contrast with Better Call Saul because Better Call Saul gives us a lot more background of Jimmy we even see him as a child in a flashback stealing from his family's store as cash register can you imagine Breaking Bad showing a 10 year old Walter in a flashback what would it be I'll tell you what I think it would be him as a kid getting insulted or teased and having a bunch of pent-up aggression in or at least that's where my mind immediately goes imagining child Walter hire me Vince no no I don't think Breaking Bad is structured in a way where a child Walter flashback would really make sense the why is an intelligence simply snaps who has her own YouTube channel and consulted on the script with me informed me that Vince specifically said on a Breaking Bad Insider podcast episode that he didn't want to give a lot of background about Walter in part because people would draw conclusions about certain details being the reason Walter is how he is I can definitely respect that as a creative choice I don't think everything needs to be explained explicitly we do see flashbacks in Breaking Bad to Walter decades earlier which give off the main impression of the Charisma and vitality that he used to have as well as traits that have stayed around like his physicalist scientific perspective as well as his ambition but in Better Call Saul we see not only a kid Jimmy but a young adult Jimmy before he became a lawyer let alone before he became Saul or became self-efficient as he does in fact go by Saul in some of those flashback scenes again giving us more understanding of where he comes from Saul Saul it's all good man get it we see that Jimmy used to be a scammer then straightened out and put his wolf in a sheep's wardrobe so to speak partially because he was forced to with the other option originally being prison but also because he genuinely wanted to change to contrast we're told Walter has always been this mild-mannered boring harmless guy maybe prideful and stubborn but not a wolf so to speak not one to work against others for his own self-interest one of the only things we know about his past is he left a company before it became massively successful because of Pride and discomfort in his relationships with Gretchen and maybe Elliot as well he may have been uncooperative and non-communicative going way back but he certainly doesn't have a history of scamming like Jimmy has I mean hey it's called Breaking Bad not staying bad though it is interesting also to ask whether any of the contextual or personal factors that led to Walter leaving gray matter at an unfortunate time were at all similar to the factors that ultimately led to him causing so much destruction the parts of Walter's story that were most compelling to me were when he fought against this Ark and tried to do the right thing like when he finally tells Skyler he'll get treatment for his cancer I actually teared up during this scene I'm not saying I wanted Walter to always be this nice person all the time but really I did love those rare situations where he merges his own self-interest with the interests of his loved ones and dependents those are the types of moral and personal conflicts I find most moving when we remember he's a human who can show love and not just in his preferred way as a distant provider but in the preferred way of his loved ones by being there for them Walt struggles to find the will to be present in his life in general I want to give a brief content warning now because I'm about to talk about depictions related to suicidality and some forms of self-harm so if you're not in the mood to talk about these heavy subjects for a few minutes you can click forward to the timestamp on the screen I want to give this subject some time though because because it's important and relevant to how Breaking Bad begins in the Pilot We of course see Walter get the news that he has inoperable Cancer and a dramatically limited amount of time left to live and though he seems eerily unbothered in the office with the doctor with the mustard on his lapel we do then see him up at dawn flicking matches into his pool clearly feeling very sad this is when he decides to do the ride along with Hank and develops or further develops his plan to cook and sell methamphetamine to try to find purpose and Power in his life it all obviously goes instantly awry I mean he's pretty calm after murdering people but it's the driving in a toxic vehicle that breaks down in the desert and then hearing Sirens thing that really gets to him at the end of the pilot we see him believe he's about to be arrested for manufacturing drugs and also murder and it's in this position that he tries to take his own life now it's lucky that Walter doesn't know how to fire the gun correctly and despite his intention the loaded gun doesn't fire but we have a lot more to say about fate and in luck later so for now let's emphasize the fact that he was ready to take his own life before being ready to face the consequences of his actions and continuing to be alive even if it meant being incarcerated also Emilio and Domingo had their guns to his and Jesse's head so I don't know whether Walter would have been locked up for life though I'm not a lawyer and I get that he wasn't really thinking straight but regardless as the first season progresses and especially in the intervention scene we see that Walter genuinely struggles to feel like his life is worth living his impulsive decision to try to shoot himself in the desert was not an isolated event as he deals with profound stress medically and financially by initially feeling like he has no choice but to give up he's clearly suffering in his emotional well-being and feels resigned to pass away without much effort his attitude spans from wanting to die to ambivalence about life and everything in between like neglect of his well-being there's that interesting moment when he gets his 15 million dollar a year agreement with Gus and then immediately speeds on the highway and closes his eyes letting himself get inches away from hitting a truck head on it seems like he's shocked and surprised by the truck and wasn't intentionally trying to end his life he was instead experimenting with giving up control in the most risky way possible not caring whether he lived or died he seemed to almost fall asleep immediately from the choice to let himself relax like his self evaporated after accomplishing more than he could have ever imagined he just didn't know what else to Hope or strive for he was brought back to reality shockingly but is able to then go calmly back to being within the lines under the radar until the next explosive risk whether intentional or not and then this scene shows him being the luckiest person ever of course but again we're going to talk about his relationship to luck later another point we'll make when we do is talking about his unbelievably lucky reduction in his cancer but to our point at the moment he reacts to this news by unrelentingly punching a paper towel dispenser a paper towel dispenser that is mirrored I'll add and he seems to look at his own reflection a moment before bashing it in it seems like he doesn't overall like his life or feel positive about it continuing indefinitely he takes it all out on the object similar to Jimmy in the Better Call Saul pilot when he has his face off so with the hhm trash can of course in the fly episode we also see a level of suicidal ideation when he talks about what the perfect time would have been for him to die you really almost feel for him at least Jesse does as he carries out the fly Endeavor long after Walter has given up on his fanatical Obsession but about this idea of wanting to die let me just say I'm absolutely sure that many people watching this video have felt like wanting to die before and I have too I haven't felt like I wanted to die for quite a long time luckily but I can think of once or twice in the last few years where I was extremely upset and overwhelmed and felt like life might be inherently negative if I had been less stable or had less supports around me moments like that would have been even hard harder I haven't dealt with a cancer diagnosis in the threat of imprisonment but suffering is relative I can't say I would handle Walter's situation better than he did I can only say that he felt like giving up on himself a lot the thing about feelings is sometimes they don't care about facts it happens all the time that people have thoughts and feelings about their lives seeming inherently negative and to some extent these types of thoughts and feelings are part of the experience of being human what's more important is how we respond to these thoughts how we make sense of them and how much we do or don't buy into them I understand this as a person but certainly as a therapist and I deeply need our societies to move in the direction of providing better support to people in vulnerable positions men in their 40s and 50s Like Walter are pressured by so many other social forces to keep their feelings inside and to avoid revealing any needs of their own and I think many suicides could be prevented if our society provided better support to people when they're struggling and just in general because unfortunately a lot of people take action on these passing feelings and thoughts we need to make Society overall more supportive to people's suffering and give people more good reason to feel hopeful about the future obviously when I say feelings don't care about facts that's not entirely true of course our feelings come from Facts but then they extend well beyond them feelings get Amplified repressed magnified minimized transformed sublimated but they do come from Facts originally and they are facts themselves of course but that's a separate Point anyway the fact that Walter was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and then the fact that his meth RV broke down in the desert after he murdered someone in it these facts influence him to try to take his own life the problem with suicide in my view is that feelings are selective with the facts that they're informed by and when a feeling is Amplified too much and we let it drive our action to do something like this we're almost certainly ignoring other facts that might be relevant and helpful in my mind one important often ignored fact is that things change can answers can go away and even if they don't things can change in many ways during the intervention a few episodes later Walter equates trying to stay alive to just spending a bunch of money to delay the inevitable and in describing it this way he's showing that he's not considering all the enjoyable facts that might occur during that time of delaying the inevitable when we much later hear him open up to his son about seeing his own dad suffering with Huntington's disease we see more detail about his initial motivation to reject the thought of fighting a disease not that that's a healthy way to respond to Medical trauma but he's informed by his experiences and it would have been nice for him to be able to have a healthier relationship to those past experiences but with the way the brain works when we're worked up emotionally by a subject as big as life and death it's hard to think clearly and we can tend to hyper focus on negative feeling facts without considering all the potential positive feeling facts there are always new facts to be made to be explored and to be lived I wanted to take take this time to talk about suicidality but I will address this enormous issue in a future video because it is obviously a profound subject worthy of its own focused discussion I hope it wasn't jarring to talk about it here because really it seems very relevant to Breaking Bad Walter seems to deal with significant mental health struggles it's maybe not as much of his physical health struggles but it's certainly up there mentally healthy people would be very unlikely to respond to a cancer diagnosis by identifying the mustard on the lapel of their doctor which is a sort of psychological foreshadowing of the infamous fly episode Seasons later when things aren't going well a lot of us can fixate on small details anything other than the matter at hand when we're working against our own health and the well-being of ourselves our future selves our loved ones or our future loved ones we call that a mental health issue because the mind isn't functioning how we generally want Minds to function we want Minds to process information in ways that contribute to the sustainability of the organism that the mind is linked to as far as where Walter's mind is at in the first season in the first episode he feels suicidal and a homicidal too I guess it's self-defense so it's not really homicide I don't really know but it's not clear where his limits were like let me ask you this what if Jesse was different and as soon as he realized Walter gassed Emilio and Domingo he refused to work with Walter ever again refused to see him and refuse to ever be involved together what do you think Walter would have done I thought of this question when I rewatched the pilot and it really stuck with me if he wouldn't have killed his former student what would he have done responses in the comments if you'd like we'll pause the discussion of Walter's psychology for a bit and give him a little break earlier we compared and contrasted Skyler and Walter as a couple on the one hand and Jimmy and Kim on the other but there were a few more connections I wanted to point out first of all it's interesting how cigarette smoking plays a role in both Dynamics for Jimmy and Kim had some mildly manageably self-destructive ritual that brings them together for Skyler smoking is similar a way for her to act out it's obviously worse for her to do because she's pregnant but if we're to believe her she smokes only three and a half cigarettes so not a good call but obviously we need to have a sense of proportion about it smoking plays a role in Walter's life too like when he smokes cannabis to try to get high enough to murder Domingo and then much later when he smokes a cigarette with Jesse outside the lavandaria in a state of resignation about the fact that Gus May kill them both at any time people smoke for lots of reasons but I think part of the appeal has to do with the psychological feeling of reinforcing the sense that you're doing what you feel like in the moment regardless of the consequences this is true of Walter smoking with lung cancer and Schuyler smoking while pregnant their smoking is much more isolated and situational whereas Jimmy and Kim smoke together throughout the whole series not really chronically but in specific and especially stressful moments consistently jumping off from this point I want to talk about when Skyler and Walter exchanged lines of dialogue that immediately brought to mind very similar lines between Kim and Jimmy when Walter finds out Skyler has been smoking while pregnant they have this exchange this is so unlike you you why really how would you know which he has no response to and she leaves the room since I watched Better Call Saul first as the creators of Breaking Bad intended I heard this exchange and immediately thought of the legendary conclusion of season five when Jimmy realizes how serious Kim is about sabotaging Howard's career for the Sandpiper payout he says Kim doing this it's not you the tension slowly builds and after it builds and builds we hear these wonderful lines you would not be okay with it not in the cold light of day wouldn't I we talked earlier about how Jimmy and Kim have a genuine role reversal take place and this is when it does since I've watched Breaking Bad I'm now qualified to make Breaking Bad memes so let me say this is the moment when Kim becomes Gisele Sinclair of course she does the iconic finger guns right after making the role reversal fully explicit as season five ends with her finger guns after season 4 ended with Jimmy's so both shows bring us these scenes of our protagonists being called out for having a flawed shallow or just incomplete understanding of their loved one as always the differences are as significant as the similarities for one Skyler is done smoking and Kim is just getting started expressing her wolfishness Kim's showing she has the desire to surpass Jimmy's wolfishness whereas Skyler's showing she well she's more just showing how helpless and alone she feels in an episode where she's forced to beg and plead with her own sister to just be mature and honest with her her husband then comes home as he likes to do once in a while and when Skyler is justifiably short with him he drops to cigarette pack he found in front of her and presses her about it he does this because it's the one area where he has moral leverage and you might notice that he doesn't call her out for it until she's giving him some completely justifiable attitude her statement that he doesn't even know her is an expression of the huge Gulf that's developed between them from all his dishonesty Kim is expressing a completely different sentiment and context from her similar dialogue it's interesting that both of their replies are phrased as rhetorical questions how would you know and wouldn't I this to me seems representative of how as the people most intimate with our protagonists both Skyler and Kim play a role of making our protagonists consider the effects of their actions on others or at least potentially consider it in these scenes we've been talking about Walters made to realize how much his actions have pushed Skyler away from him and Jimmy's made to realize almost sort of the opposite how much closer Kim is to his own scamminess than he realized a situation between Skyler and Walter that's much more contextually similar to the scene with Kim and Jimmy even if the dialogue doesn't line up so specifically is after Skyler tells Marie a piece of the truth about Walter having made all this money and then crafts this whole story about Walter counting cards when he asks how she possibly came up with that lie she says I learned from the best and we see Walter look almost as guilty feeling as Jimmy did after soaking in the meaning of Kim's finger guns the contrasts are significant though like that Kim's not claiming to have learned corruption from Jimmy she's more so saying hey I have that wolf in me too Jimbo but also I think it feels strange to take what Skyler says here too literally her lying to Marie seems less a function of Having learned it from Walter and more a function of being put in a position by Walter's actions where a line to her sister seems like her best option it's also a notable difference that she's not excited about meeting him where he's at dishonesty-wise whereas Kim feels positive and invigorated by her wolfishness Kim is not stuck between a rock and a hard place she's put herself in that hard place intentionally also Skyler's gone to that Hard Place explicitly to try to right the wrongs of Walter to try to mitigate the Fallout and negative consequences of his actions something tells me care because of you forgetting that and the episode ends here with his silence as she walks away this brings us conveniently to our next topic the theme of forgetting and moving on both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad explore how differently people can go about the process of moving on and the shows demonstrate many pros and cons of alternative approaches to moving on from events in our lives when we watched these shows we're made to reflect on the challenges we can sometimes create for ourselves when we try to force ourselves to move on in unnatural or unhealthy ways in the Better Call Saul video series we talked about so many different takes on this theme for example we saw Jimmy and Howard's different ways of processing Chuck's death Howard going to therapy apologizing to Jimmy for hurting Chuck and arguably taking too much responsibility and Jimmy not taking the slightest bit of responsibility for hurting Chuck definitely not going to therapy and above all not letting himself feelings about it until the very last episode Jimmy really took blocking out feelings to the next level I don't miss chuck chuck was alive and now he's dead and that's that finito life goes on so sue me Kim could match him and surpass him sometimes but as we see in their breakup and her turning herself in obviously she was more in touch with feelings like guilt shame regret and so on than he was even much smaller situations would show their differences as we went over in detail in part three where we talked about for example Kim initiating a conversation After Jimmy embarrassed them at the schweiker party and Jimmy turning on the radio to avoid the conversation Breaking Bad has its own instance of radio oriented blocking out of guilt and shame and see as much as the radio can be a tool to block things out it can also be something to itself be blocked out when for example it brings Walter the news of Donald margolis's self-induced death we can only assume Walter doesn't want to reckon with his responsibility in the death of this man's daughter and what that means in regards days portion of responsibility in the man's death himself as well as the deaths of all the victims of the plane crash of course we can attribute blame to Margolis for the plane crash and to his bosses for not ensuring he was ready to return to work after his period of grief but there's enough culpability to go around though because Walter doesn't think it's in his self-interest to feel guilt and shame he doesn't want to which sort of reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it except in addition to his illicit salary depending on it Walter's entire self-concept depends on it if he lets in the guilt and shame he'll be unable to see himself as a badass doing what needs to be done to provide for his family just like how if Jimmy resisted his urge to turn on the radio to block out feelings he'd struggle to see himself as an entertaining people pleaser and would instead see just how much he was really quite the terrible date it's interesting how breaking badge shows us Walter in season three turning off a radio broadcast to block out guilt and shame and then in season 5 we see him turn off a TV broadcast when Jesse is watching a report about the enormous search taking place for the child murdered by their associate Todd as Walter coped much easier with Todd's child killing than Jesse did he just wants to move on forward and not consider the terrible loss their activities cost his child's family let alone the horrendous suffering in the meantime with the uncertainty of The Manhunt but a few episodes later Walter is in quite a different place with respect to broadcasts and he's more than happy to let the TV broadcast stay on as it shows the report of the numerous victims he ordered murdered and for what it's worth he doesn't mind his baby Holly hearing it side note they recast Holly in season five and it really threw me off why couldn't they just get an actor who actually looked similar like they did when they recast Jeff in Better Call Saul anyway Walter here enjoys the news of the violence he committed drunk on the success of his plan the sense of loose ends being tied up and a little whiskey he Revels in this broadcast instead of blocking it out because here the pain and suffering being reported was exactly what he intended not an unintended horrible consequence of his self-interested actions and this is almost not worth saying but I still want to say it any viewers who think that Walter was justified in killing these incarcerated people are totally missing the point his actions here signify how unlimited his behavior has become how he's still willing to drive his trolley over as many people as possible if it means he gets to keep driving but with regard to the theme of moving on if you want to end up like Walter in your own life alone with no dignity or friends or family or positive Legacy then it'll definitely help to not feel guilt and shame but if your goal is to end up in a different situation guilt and shame are actually very healthy to feel sometimes like when you do something wrong our emotions of all kinds guide us in very helpful ways if we listen to their signals but there are many different ways people talk and think about this aspect of mental health and I never mean to imply that there's a one-size-fits-all solution I'll always remember back and forth I had with a client at a residential substance abuse treatment facility where I was a social worker five or six years ago I think it was outside of a group meeting like maybe just at their lunch or something when all the clients were getting food and I was just standing around and this client in front of their friends was just like hey man so like what if I don't want to dig up things from my past isn't some stuff just better left buried which is totally fair and I'm not sure how I responded but hopefully it was something like saying that yeah we all have the right to make that decision for ourselves and sometimes it's totally fair to not want to dig something up you just want to make sure that it's actually a choice first of all and that it's actually in your best interest to let the stuff stay Dusty and out of sight I have my ways of sort of determining whether it's worth the trouble of thinking and feeling upset about something from the past like I might ask myself what the costs could be of examining the memory and what the cost could be of not examining it not feeling things about it and so on if I feel like I've learned all there is to learn from it then sure maybe I'm ruminating and perseverating just going around and around and it's unhelpful no one wants to make themselves upset but you have to consider what the memories are doing in their current place if they're filed away nicely and in their right place then great but if they're all mixed around and you have taken responsibility for things that aren't your fault or haven't taken responsibility for things that are your fault then it's likely that pulling the stuff to the front can allow you to then file it back away more effectively the idea with this being that it can make your life experience and your behavior better day to day moving forward because you have a better understanding of what's gone down and why and how and when and who and so on when I say that people have all different styles of talking and thinking about how we move on I mean it's really interesting how what works for one person really might not work for another based on either personality differences or just differences in the situation and each person's context like take Walter in season one when he's obviously traumatized but unable to admit it to his family it comes out that he has cancer because Skyler cries not because he on his own decides to tell the family about it but either way soon enough Walt Jr confronts him that he's acting extremely weirdly relaxed and downplaying the cancer and it upsets Walt Jr to see this excessively repressive response later in the episode at the end of a school day Walter is pleasantly surprised by Walt Jr showing up in his classroom and wanting to hang out and go home with him instead of on the bus they sit there in Walter's empty classroom for a full 30 seconds of Silence with Walter very aware of his son's concern and then out of that tense silence Walter just says things have a way of working themselves out then there's another 10 whole seconds of silence and Walter is all satisfied with himself for the wisdom he imparted and the scene ends this is an example of one person's way of dealing with things or not dealing with things being entirely incompatible with another person's I don't want to say the advice is being used inappropriately by Walter since I guess it's fine for him to feel that way himself but he's stretching the wisdom extremely thin by thinking it would be helpful to his 15 year old son like sure things do have a way of working themselves out I guess but at this point Walter wasn't on board yet to treat his cancer and his son needed more than just some vague reassurance we see how unhelpful this platitude turns out to be and just how pained Walt Jr is by what's been left unspoken as it all boils up at the end of the episode maybe treatment isn't the way to go then why don't you just [ __ ] die already this line is 100 times more badass than I am the danger in my opinion but it's even surpassed by the raw power of while Junior's line in the intervention in the next episode all this stuff I've been through and you're scared of a little chemotherapy and yes I know that chemotherapy can be very hard I just think it's a very beautiful moment of Walter Jr standing up to his dad speaking truth from his experience and pointing out a huge flaw in Walter's logic because how is Walt Jr supposed to feel and how is he supposed to view his own life if his father doesn't demonstrate a willingness to try to live how much harder must it be for Walt Jr to view his own life as worth living if Walter doesn't treat his life as worth living how much cost is Walter trying to imply makes a life suddenly not worth living sometimes if we want things to work themselves out it helps if we give them a little push and when we're going through trouble our loved ones need assurance that we'll give our best push not just a placating Mantra that's meant to stop further introspection not everyone has the same need to stop introspecting and in fact I would argue it's something extremely unique to each individual that we all have our own unique needs when it comes to introspecting versus blocking things out when and where how and why we all have differences in this regard because we all have somewhat unique sensibilities and relationships to ourselves when I'm working as a therapist and doing my best to help people I need to tap into what works best for them I can't just expect them to be exactly like me and deal with things in the same ways I do they might have skills I lack or lack skills I have but what's absolutely certain is there will be differences it's not easy but it's also not extremely hard for me to avoid projecting my own coping mechanisms all the time because part of it being my job means keeping this professional and neutral approach in my mind as much as possible it can be more of a challenge in my personal life and especially in any situations where someone I'm very close with is struggling a significant amount what would make it a lot harder in these situations would be not just the degree of my loved ones suffering but in particular if I felt at all responsible for their suffering because that would raise the emotional Stakes for me you see this fairly often in life where someone wrongs someone else and then wrongs them a second time by trying to pressure them to respond to the harm in a particular way not giving them the respect to let them cope with it how they want to obviously if someone's coping with their suffering in a very harmful way it can be helpful and right for loved ones to try to get them on a better path but if they're just coping with it in their own way not a terrible way and the loved one encouraging a different approach is the main cause of their suffering this is when the advice being given is more clearly seen as self-interested we talked in the last Better Call Saul video about Jimmy's self-interested ways of encouraging Kim to move on and specifically we talked about their scene together after Howard is murdered in their apartment as he visits them to confront them about their attempts to destroy his career and professional reputation so they could get money in this scene together after they both try to live a normal Day to Keep Up Appearances Kim is clearly drained and we saw how Jimmy gives an apparently unsolicited pep talk we talked about about how Jimmy interestingly steals very specific wording and advice from Mike about moving on and we talked about the blurriness of the line between whether this is about moving on from trauma or moving on from guilt we could go off on a tangent about how in Breaking Bad Walter also steals wisdom from Mike with the learn to take yes as an answer thing but we'll stay on track for now when Mike originally gives this advice to Jimmy in his car after their time in the desert he's referring to moving on from both trauma and guilt but arguably the killing they did in the desert was in self-defense so I feel that Mike's advice seems to be more pertaining to moving on from the trauma of the whole experience but when Jimmy reiterates this advice to Kim I feel like he's referring much more to guilt rather than trauma no we can forget if he was trying to comfort her trauma response about all the stuff they experienced rather than assuage her guilt about all the stuff they've done I think their body language would be completely different a more accurate way to put it that takes into account how this episode goes on to show Kim Faithfully breaking up with him would be to say that Kim is deeply feeling guilt and is also definitely traumatized while Jimmy has some guilt and trauma but both are well under control and put in their place stuffed down deep note how just before their Dialogue on the bed in the last we see of them in the perfect day Montage Kim is transfixed by the space on the floor where they watch their old boss be brutally murdered and Jimmy is bothered that she's giving in to these feelings and walks away bruskly with what we can only assume is Smoke on the Water playing in his head after the Montage ends with Mike burning the evidence we see Kim and Jimmy in the scene we were just talking about where they're the furthest apart two people have ever been while on the same bed for Kim I think it's fair to say that the trauma and guilt were fused together as it would only make sense for them to be since she's a victim of witnessing violence well beyond her control while also being the immoral conductor of the horrible orchestra that played right into that violence we then don't see Kim and Jimmy for 25 minutes of the episode until we then see them go to the hhm memorial for Howard and both do a good job of pushing down their feelings and gaslighting a widow about her late husband having a secret drug addiction Kim gets an A plus on the assignment here that Jimmy can only sort of get a B on at best and when I say gaslighting I mean she drives the stake in just as Cheryl starts to cry maybe I misunderstood what I saw you would have known the first time I watched this absolutely jaw on the floor I immediately thought well given the context the lack of a body or alternative story regarding Howard's death as Kim says Cheryl would have known what she's actually communicating as Cheryl should have known and this is just the depths of depravity and heartlessness but Kim's expression at the end of the scene makes it clear that in her mind she was doing what needed to be done she was committing to the bit and Jimmy despite seeming all guilty looking at first is satisfied and even tries to say some gorgeously absurd words of encouragement it's over really over Let The Healing begin oh the healing is about to begin buddy the first time I watched this I saw Kim pause in response and genuinely thought she was going to end the relationship then and there but because Better Call Saul always keeps you guessing she kisses him with empathy instead of course breaking up with him soon after first terminating her licensure as a lawyer so they both performed well at the hhm memorial but we see that for Kim it was more of an act than it was for Jimmy then their stupendous breakup conversation gives us insight into how their feelings were filed away by this point from Jimmy we get okay what happened to him wasn't on us it wasn't your fault it wasn't my fault so not much accountability there and from Kim we see I was happy I was having fun just an outstanding line perfectly delivered showing she was passionately craving a level of self-criticism Jimmy had no use for interest in or ability to achieve all this is to say Kim was ultimately on the anti-forgetting team she's the same person who wanted to talk after the schweiker party and she turned in her license and ended her marriage to keep her dignity while Jimmy was happy just to move to a new residence and tell himself he was healing he was ultimately on the pro forgetting team for his years of being Saul though the finale of Better Call Saul shows it's not so simple I guess I went into depth on this point because how Jimmy and Kim respond to Howard's death is interesting to compare to how Walter and Skyler respond to two things Gus fringe's death and Ted's life-altering injury Walter notifies Skyler of his responsibility for the bomb at the elder care home that killed distinguished member of the community Gustavo Fring and he says I won he then hangs up the phone as he has a kink for abruptly ending conversation and of course it makes him look very cool badass and sigma gamma masculine not at all like a man unable to connect with his loved ones but Skyler brings the kids back to the home anyway not because she has any trust in Walter she pointedly tells him she's scared of him he demonstrates how irrational she's being and how unscary his life actually is by immediately driving out into the desert and getting a gun pointed at him by Mike who has every reason to kill him but instead they all hatch their plan to magnetize the evidence and while this complex plot unfolds of Walter covering for the consequences of his actions we see Skylar visit Ted who has been harmed as much due to Skyler's actions as Howard was due to Kim's with the huge caveat that Kim was originally harming Howard already whereas Skyler was at the very worst extorting him to Simply pay his [ __ ] taxes still Skyler causes vast unintended harm as well since Ted was only hurt of course because he was running from the hired dudes Skyler sent to scare him Ted is deeply intimidated and as he communicates this to Skyler she goes from apologetic to stone-faced and confident sort of like Kim at the hhm memorial or even like Walter back when he used a freak occurrence of the ATM machine debacle to get clout and intimidation points Skyler makes the same calculation that she might as well Flex the power she's being given here if it means cleaning up the situation somewhat as blown away as I was by Kim's lying to Cheryl I was as taken aback when Skyler ends this scene with Ted by simply saying good I had to replay this a few times to be sure that's what she actually said she doesn't seem sure of herself as she says it which is totally understandable we then see Walter who's in the anger stage of grief about the money Skyler gave to Ted he takes it out on his lawyer who you may know as Saul Goodman from the commercials Saul breaks up with him professionally due to General moral outrage and lack of interest in being involved in Walter's life anymore and Walter denies him the right to end their relationship when I say we're done I guess this makes Walter look cool to some people who may sort of lack empathy or understanding of adult relationships and situations but to me it's horrifying as I work with clients and understand that Saul's rights are being infringed but some people are very predisposed to lack critical thinking about issues like this I guess we'll talk about masculinity in a bit don't worry I'm saying all this and I've been saying all I've been saying since we were talking about this scene to give detail to a specific point so all this happens and more right Gus dies Walter takes responsibility for it Schuyler visits Ted Walter and the Gang magnetized the evidence Walter pretends to find the rice in with Jesse and goes into business again with Jesse and Mike while Skyler spends many hours depressed in bed after all this Walter comes back home and they have a scene on the bed after their own perfect days it's very striking that the shot of Kim as she processes the consequences of her actions with Jimmy directly mirrors the shot of Skyler processing the consequences of her sections with Walter the difference or one of the biggest differences between their situations is that Kim doesn't have two children with Jimmy but that's not the point and neither is the point that their posture is similar it goes deeper as we see Walter say you know it gets easier I promise you that it does in this case I don't need to speculate about whether our protagonist is referring to the passing of guilt or trauma as he makes it more explicit than Jimmy did what you're feeling right now about to Ted Ted represents guilt but schuyler's feeling a whole lot more than just guilt then there's a pause that we in the video essay World refer to as demonetization bait and after the beautifully slow pacing Walter says it'll pass following this in horrifying contrast to Jimmy's basic decency we see our protagonists force himself on Skyler and cuddle up to his regretful partner muttering rationalizations in her ear while kissing her with a borderline delusional sense of self-assuredness it's fascinating how Breaking Bad has this it'll pass scene between the main couple and then Better Call Saul does as well but for Kim it's the beginning of the end of their relationship but not for Skyler as she feels stuck Walter moves back in against her will and next thing we see of Skyler she's smoking in Marie's office and yelling at her to shut up having a real emotional breakdown on letting all her feelings out in a way similar to Kim on the bus after turning herself into Cheryl breaking bad cuts from Skyler crying to Walter calmly and happily measuring his yield not strongly affected by events the whole series has shown us Time After Time how Walter has the ability to let guilt pass conveniently over him like he has some sort of immoral force field like when he's given the mic at the school assembly about the mass trauma event of a plane crash he had more than the average amount of responsibility for I loved this scene because it was amazingly entertaining television but for our purposes here he he he says this look on the bright side it's just amazing like he builds his confidence he recites statistics of other plane crashes and then he says people move on he continues and the crowd is terribly uncomfortable it's Jimmy's Bingo moment times a hundred if we survive and and we we overcome this is one of the most humiliating things I've ever seen a protagonist do and it's just so powerful to see how his approach to moving on really sounds when given the mic to hundreds of deeply impressionable people suffering the worst event of many of their lives turns out traumatized people don't want to be told to move on who would have thought most guilty people don't want to be told to move on either in my opinion as is the case with most people having any feeling angry people don't like being told to calm down sad people don't like being told to cheer up and in the same way most guilty people don't want you to try to convince them they're not guilty this is something that I've actually heard of as a negative stereotype about therapy the idea that therapists like me exist to say it's not your fault to people or something like that but as I sort of indicated earlier a main goal with therapy is to take accountability for your actions and their consequences to empower yourself as much as it's a goal to avoid taking accountability for the consequences of other people's actions you can't really have one without the other and it's a very common cause of unnecessary distress for people to be viewing themselves as responsible for other people's actions but it's also very healing to understand your control when you do have responsibility for harm you caused because it allows you to build confidence that you can avoid causing similar harm in the future so most people would not want to talk someone out of guilt or be talked out of it but Walter is not most people and neither is Jimmy for that matter I'm not saying I would want or expect Walter to take the mic and say something about his role in causing the air traffic controllers distracting grief but it's just more noticeable that he doesn't have any ability or desire to connect with the audience he's speaking to when the mic is taken from him he says good and you just know that he's literally never going to think about that speech or it's Rippling consequences ever again so we've talked about Walter and Jimmy's more repressive approaches to moving on and we've talked about how they tried to convince their Partners to not feel guilt while having no capacity to actually help them process the emotions from the traumatic events they experienced we talked about how Kim had more freedom to take action on her guilt compared to Skyler because Skyler was looking at a situation where it was either go along with it all or raise two kids alone and Destroy her husband's life and reputation in everyone's eyes forever and we talked about Walter's General long-term ability to block out feelings but I want to return now to that moment of him turning off the radio announcing Donald margolis's self-induced death Walter winces and it's a real expression of pain and guilt now we could talk about how he's rewarded with money from Victor immediately and how the music he switches the radio to becomes the general soundtrack in Breaking Bad but we're going to have a whole sex question in a bit about how the show speaks through its medium so what I want to point out now is just that him changing the radio station in This Way shows he's feeling deeply intolerant to the stimuli that reminds him of his responsibility in Jane's death and even though he Bears significant responsibility for her death he's also traumatized by it by his close proximity to its horror and by the way he's been intertwined with it when he has to turn off the radio here it's what I would call a pro forgetting moment just like we talked about Jimmy ultimately being pro-forgetting as he transitioned into his life of being Saul and Kim was anti-forgetting as she made herself completely vulnerable to the possible consequences of her actions Jimmy Saul James's conclusion puts this into question and blah blah blah but anyway okay now I have an exciting announcement we have another segment are you ready for another segment everybody this one has a chart involved you're gonna love it this segment is called views on forgetting Pro forgetting versus anti-forgetting let's start with Pro forgetting and we'll start with our protagonist the first was the one we mentioned of him saying things have a way of working themselves out to Walt Jr in his classroom there may have been instances I missed but the next noticeable one to me was when Walter visits Jesse at the very nice rehab facility and a grieving early recovery Jesse doesn't get excited by Walter saying Saul has his blood slash methamphetamine money Walter gets a bit rustled up by this and says look Jesse lingering on things doesn't help believe me just try and focus on getting better okay Jessie responds to this by repeating Walter's words to him from when they were exhausted and trapped in the desert a couple months earlier and Walter had said how he deserved to suffer and had hurt his family members Walter in that scene actually showed he was crumbling under the LIE and when Jesse repeats it all back to him he's showing he was really listening and taking it in even if now Walter is back to his usual Pro forgetting mentality our next Pro forgetting moment for Walter is the people move on speech to the school assembly that we just talked about then later in season three in the situation where he gets Gail fired he says I don't think either of us would necessarily benefit from a prolonged now you could argue that this is a silly example of Walter repressing feelings in order to move on because he's so blatantly telling Gail they should just forget about it for his own self-interest saying whatever a lie or half truth he asked you to get what he wants but I think this is just a more obvious example of his approach he has generally and an example where it's more clear that he's lying to others if not also to himself in this instance he's ignoring or oblivious to Walt Jr's needs in this scene he's ignoring or oblivious to the community's needs in this scene so in this scene with Gail the difference is just that he's consciously choosing to ignore the other person's needs and feelings rather than being incapable and oblivious the next example is when he tells Skyler her feelings will pass as we talked about and you could ask well is he intentionally ignoring her feelings here like with Gail because it's similarly in his self-interest or is it more like the auditorium speech where he's unintentionally out of touch I think it's a a bit of both because he's out of control in how he craves control and he lies and manipulates to try to get control the next example is a non-verbal but it's a significant one as Walter forces himself back into the home against Skyler's will we see him unpacking and the expression he makes when he looks at Leaves of Grass speaks volumes like it was a book given by an old friend he smiles and places it on his nightstand it doesn't remind him of ordering Jesse to murder Gail and he doesn't have a reflexive reaction of intense guilt or pain he just has a quaint smile for the happy memories of his co-worker exposing him to some great writing by some guy with the same initials and first name as him for the purposes of civil human society our brains are not supposed to compartmentalize this well when we can separate the joy of a good book recommendation from the feeling of having responsibility for someone's death that's not ideal but just a very revealing moment for Walter maybe some Breaking Bad viewers see Walter as reveling in the book reminding him of the murder he ordered but unless there's some proof I'm missing for this I really don't see it that way it seems like he's just enjoying the memories of the book and Gail couldn't be further from his mind isn't this why he gets caught by Hank eventually was he so risky with leaving the book in his bathroom because he's a cool guy tempting fate or because he was so entirely disconnected from the world and from the things and people around him that he didn't mind having the book out because he could permanently sever the association of this book with a person he ordered killed or he couldn't not permanently sever the association might be a better way of putting it how many poops did Walter take reading poetry recommended to him by the person he was responsible for having murdered or was it just a Memento maybe it is to remind himself of killing Gail but that just seems wrong and absurd to me he seems to much more clearly be disconnected like he doesn't even think about other people people enough to be knowingly sadistic he just usually only thinks about people in terms of how they can or can't benefit him sort of to this point it's my interpretation that Walter never knew Gail had written a message to him in the front of the book I even wonder whether it's fair to speculate just how much Walter was or was not aware that Gail seems to have had a crush on him in relation to this and the question of Walter's awareness of his relationship Dynamics with others how aware is he of the father-son dynamic with Jesse we see him call Jesse's son a few times like when he helpfully extracts Jesse from a toxic environment in one instance of the short list of good things he does but I just wonder what he would have said if someone asked if he thought Jesse viewed him as a father figure would he shrug it off would he admit that he saw and treated Jesse as a son okay we'll come back to this in a second but let's keep going with Walter's Pro forgetting moments there's the time he says this to Skyler about moving on from all the things they've done clear sailing here on now I promise she challenges him on this later in the episode now that you're in charge it's it's what it's going to be smooth sailing from here on out I don't see why not well maybe he should have tried harder to see why not then there's the situation we mentioned of him turning off the TV when Jesse's watching the news of the search for the child their associate murdered then a while later there's the time when Walter desperately returns to blood money to Jesse and insists it's not blood money and says to him but soon you need to stop focusing on the darkness behind you the past is the past I hope you all heard him call Jesse's son again there and what a classic Pro forgetting moment for him as well you can say Jesse was being absurd and trying to give the millions away how he did but it's honestly not the worst idea anyone in the show has and his later scene where he throws money out his window like some sort of dark Robin Hood I mean that's just the hardest [ __ ] ever so Walter is again just imposing his own Pro forgetting ideology onto others we could talk about the relationship of the theme of repression and moving on in unhealthy ways to the work of Ed from best quality vacuum if you look around it's kind of beautiful thanks Ed Ed might very well view himself as doing good work by giving people Fresh Starts and let me ask you this what would you think of that if he viewed himself as doing good work Ed's business is the extreme extent of the will to move on and avoid the consequences of one's actions earlier when Walter is selling Jesse on ed services he says you know I really think that would be good for you Clean Slate again this is more like what he said to Gail than what he said to the assembly in the sense of it being to consciously manage things in his own self-interest and Jesse calls him out on this but again Walter is using the same ideology of not reflecting on the past okay that's it for Walter and his love of forgetting things moving right along let's look at a pro forgetting instance of an associate of Walters the guy who joined him in Ed's humble bunker the man the myth the legal Legend Saul Goodman when an upset Walter tells him Skyler wants to divorce him Saul says basically you'll get over it it's a Calamity but we live to fight another day after watching the entirety of Better Call Saul it's interesting to watch Saul be let's say a bit unsympathetic to the idea of losing a marriage he lost his in part due to his own involvement in all the same stuff as Walter and at the end of this scene we see him looking regretful in his car clearly thinking about Kim I'm joking of course I think he's bothered by his disgusting work he does encouraging someone to manufacture methamphetamine but it was just notable in this conversation with Walter how Saul really does easily gravitate towards the same ideology of not reflecting on the past and after a decent interval of time well there are other fish in the sea I actually have a video about my thoughts on that expression but regardless this is our solid Pro forgetting moment for Saul next up is Hector in a flashback with the cousins as kids he shows his authoritarian way of resolving their dispute over a toy this includes him saying it obviously only gets worse from there but yeah Hector is a big get over it type of guy unsurprisingly next we have a couple Pro forgetting moments from Jessie first being when he buys the biggest sound system ever and blasts it to block everything out after murdering Gail and witnessing Gus murder Victor in front of him the next Pro forgetting moment I noticed for Jesse was when he sort of jokingly tells Walter you get used to people beating you up you do kind of get used to it I realized while editing this video that I missed a much better example back in season 2 when Jesse says this to Walter I just want to forget yeah that's a pretty good example of what we're talking about next up we have Lydia a very fun character I knew from Better Call Saul of course Lydia makes it onto this chart because she amazingly has the gall to close and cover her eyes while stepping around the murdered people who her work necessarily creates lastly on our Pro forgetting side we have one instance for Skyler it's in the past we'll say more about this shortly now over to the anti-forgetting side first we have Hank who we see take some amount of accountability for the brutality he commits that's the way it happened accept the consequences next we have Skyler in the line we started this whole forgetting and moving on Section with the section this chart segment exists within something tells me okay here because of you forgetting that next we have three interesting examples that put Walter on the anti-forgetting side in some extremely Twisted sense Walter visits Jesse at his non-stop party home because Hank's investigating Gail's murder and he wants to grill Jesse for details about it to make sure there are no loose ends in doing so Walter brings up any and all memories of the night and this is actually one of the most striking scenes of Aaron Paul's acting in my opinion as he transforms from Carefree guy cutting people's hair to being re-traumatized by the memories of Gail calmly begging him for his life he snaps out of it and pays a friend a hundred dollars to remove Walter extracting him like a bad memory the next quasi-anti-forgetting moment for Walter is a few episodes later again when he visits Jesse huh what an interesting pattern eh Walter's upset that Jesse's getting closer with Gus because it could easily give Gus a reason to treat Walter as Expendable so he reminds Jesse how Gus was just trying to kill them saying explicitly truly think that you'd forget let alone Gail let alone Victor he goes on to remind Jesse of Tomas the child murdered by Jesse's Associates directly after Jesse tried to help protect him Jesse transforms in this scene as fully as he did in the earlier one also at his house except here he doesn't snap back to distancing himself from Walter instead agreeing completely with him a thing that felt annoying to me personally this is a side note but I just felt like Walter was often a lot less persuasive seeming than other characters seemed to find him like when he tells Skyler lies about Gretchen after she spent hours with her or Jesse here completely coming around to a life or death plan in a minute or so of Walter being blatantly manipulative but back to our topic I think it's fair to see why these two quote-unquote anti-forgetting moments for Walter have asterisks here the process of reflecting on past actions and facing consequences is in both cases intrusively imposed on Jesse by Walter to achieve a self-interested goal our last anti-forgetting moment for Walter also has an asterisk as it's when he leaves the news on of the many people he ordered murdered while he plays with his daughter this one has an asterisk not because he's imposing the ideology rather than really expressing it genuinely but because Walter really is not expressing much of an intention or idea here at all he's just completely disconnected from any guilt or other feelings and he feels nothing from the news reporting on what he did so he gives it three seconds and makes no discernible reaction really this is a neutral about forgetting moment he has no thoughts or feelings about what he's done and really couldn't care less if it's on the news speaking of broadcasts next up we have Jessie's anti-forgetting moments starting with when he was intently watching the news of the boy Todd murdered on their selfish Escapade in the desert and actually it's the same news broadcaster as we just saw Antoinette Antonio who I heard the next spin-off is going to be about but anyway we can see the vast difference between Jesse being genuinely anti-forgetting here and Walter just ignoring Miss Antonio speaking of broadcasts our second Jesse anti-forgetting moment comes right after Pete and Badger are watching a press conference about the further killing Walter did and Jesse being a person of interest to the DEA as a traumatized and on-the-run Jesse showers and recoveries at their place he chooses to shave his head and beard even though that makes him infinitely more recognizable which almost seems like an anti-forgetting moment in itself but I also thought it was sort of an anti-forgetting moment to turn down weed from Badger to want to be sober but really El Camino on a much larger scale is itself the story of Jesse remembering as it goes back and forth from present day to Jesse's memories his memories of the horrible experiences with Todd come back to him over and over and come to a climax right as he's in the standoff with the two fake cops one of whom was himself a painful relic of Jesse's past so there's the chart we did it now what do we notice well first of all Walter has far more a pro forgetting instances than everyone else combined and his span the full scope of his story that's not surprising and I also think we're not surprised to see Hector Saul and Lydia on the pro forgetting side exclusively it also makes some sense that Hank would come in on the anti-forgetting side though he was repressive about other things like Marie's stealing he ultimately has an arc of some sort of personal growth to go on note how Skyler is anti-forgetting early on but later after all the circumstances Walter puts her through she has her Pro forgetting line it's in the past in their ridiculous sweater outfits for the special occasion of handing over their fake confession that's when we see Skyler be explicitly Pro forgetting whereas she was anti-forgetting about a year earlier and I'm forgetting that with Jesse we see the opposite pattern he has his Pro forgetting moments earlier on and his anti-forgetting moments later and towards the very end this seems like an interesting way to frame their character arcs the only times Walter is anti-forgetting it's either to manipulate Jesse or it's him really just being neutral and uncaring about reminders of his horrible actions you could also look at a line like this one we didn't include where he's showing Skyler his big bag of money and has this emotional moment with her saying had to do I've got to live with them this immediately reminded me of James McGill's last words to the court in his famous speech in the finale with that it's interesting to contrast to two shows on this point where for Jimmy it's the ultimate resolution of his Arc for him to take accountability and for Walter it's a tiny blip and arguably a rhetorical trick to try to convince Schuyler to accept him in his blood slash methamphetamine money he is posturing in the anti-forgetting direction but really it's a hugely manipulative conversation not an instance of regret at all regret's a word we've only used a bit in this video but it's very relevant I guess it's like the opposite of forget you forget or you regret you forget to move forward from the get or you regret and go back to the grat again don't look it up just assume that that's right and that my lovely viewers is a segment bit long for a segment you might say Well it brings us to the end of the moving on slash forgetting section in general a segment nestled within a section I for one am glad we took the time to give a solid glance over the various ways characters approach the process of moving on so in the spirit of that we're going to move on to talking about the ways fate chance and luck factor into Breaking Bad we're introduced to Walter as a guy who may to some extent be cursed by Fate judging by the fact that one of the first things we see is his student Chad disrespect him and then Walter be forced by chance to clean Chad's expensive car then there's the fact that Walter is diagnosed with inoperable cancer which seems pretty unlucky he's also sick while American which is very bad luck finances wise but Walter really has a paradoxical relationship to fate luck and chance the pilot ends not only with his life being saved by a gun luckily functioning differently from how he intended but the pilot also ends with the Sirens he hears luckily being about the fire he caused and not about the worst crimes he was more immediately and obviously responsible for Walter is shown to be blessed as much as he is cursed in the next episode he manifests the RV's engine to start he looks to fate again soon by flipping a coin with Jesse to determine who kills Domingo a few episodes later it's siren time again and he pulls over but the cars Zoom past he's blessed again no man pursueth interestingly when he soon interacts with Elliot we see that Elliot has a certain kind of humble relationship to luck and acknowledges its role in his life congratulations to both of you hard work and yeah a lot of luck a lot and I know you could say well this isn't Elliot being humble it's Elliot downplaying how he worked against Walter to get where he is but I have to ask on what evidence is Walter a reliable narrator of what went down at gray matter we know that Gretchen considered the money they offered Walter to be rightfully his so he didn't get his fair cut but is there any reason to think this is Elliot or Gretchen's fault rather than Walter anyway I just thought it was interesting that Walter's personal enemy was happy to acknowledge being the beneficiary of luck it seemed very obvious to me to be in contrast with Walter who even by this early Point had been jostled around substantially by chance but didn't really have a healthy way of making sense of it we see him acknowledge the role of chance in the fly when he's telling Jesse about running into Jane's dad the night she died once I tried to calculate them with their ass and Walter goes on to apologize to Jesse for Jane's death but can't bring himself to really admit the truth he's drugged on sleeping pills without knowing it and absolutely wiped out from staying up for so long and it's interesting that him at his most vulnerable also means him going back to this acknowledgment of the role of chance and fate in his life in the same episode we see Elliot's self-reflection on his own luck we also see Hank give some advice to Walter about his luck with the cancer let's face it you know you were dealt a [ __ ] hand but um sometimes your luck can change seems like pretty good input acknowledging good and bad luck is an important thing to do because it helps us properly attribute responsibility which helps us learn and grow better a few episodes later I almost saw it as a bad luck situation when Walter Heisenberg tries to de-escalate tuko who's yelling at his partner and then to go unfortunately responds oppositely than intended and beats his partner to death in front of them tuko is such a wild card that this situation felt like Walter had almost rolled a bad roll of the dice he had tried to intervene and he'd rolled a snake eyes or something I didn't notice anything lucky or unlucky for a bit and then Gretchen happened to call their home phone on Walter's first day back at school a few episodes later his luck has changed and Walter gets the news that his tumor has shrunk 80 percent when the doctor usually hopes for 30 at best talk about fortunate in the next episode we see an earlier instance of him acknowledging the role of fate in his life when he gives a terrible speech to his family and family friends at his remission party this speech really illuminates his turbulent relationship to Fortune he says that when he got his cancer diagnosis he said to himself why me and he goes on to say the other day when I got the good news I said the same thing the most obvious features of this wildly short speech Walter gives are that he's suffering he's not understanding his life situation and he's completely disconnected from his loved ones he very clearly is not intentionally trying to be a nihilistic Downer he just was asked to speak and that's what came out it's sort of like Mike in Better Call Saul at the end of his legendary group therapy scene he wanted me to talk I talked I guess with Walt's why me speech we can see that he feels pressure from sensing himself as an unfairly specific Target of Fate both in the positive and negative directions he's acknowledging the role of fate in his life but he's exhibiting a lazy and unhealthy way of reacting to it and even showing that he hasn't been able to grow in his perspective over time and he doesn't seem to mind that he's letting out a way he unhealthily copes with his life and he's so disconnected that he can't begin to let himself understand or care about how it makes his family feel cut to him forcefully pressuring his underage son to drink hard alcohol and being an aggressive dangerous prick to his brother-in-law it sunk in for him how separated he is from everyone around him and he's turned his dejected feelings into brooding and erupting violence sublimated them in a bad way we could say to follow up on our moving on Section I should mention it's interesting how Walter tries to move on from this horrifying and scary family event he calls Skyler at work which is always a very thoughtful and considerate thing to do after scaring someone when he leaves her voicemail message he says I'm not exactly sure who that was yesterday but it wasn't me he says that as if it's an apology rather than the opposite it's the opposite of accountability very interestingly when Skyler is listening to the message in the next scene she's interrupted by Ted right before she hears this line about Walter not having been himself and this is when the flirting really starts getting going with Ted so it feels like the show is saying that at this moment Skyler should be spared the indignity of Walter's unaccountable and disconnected non-apology he says it wasn't him yesterday that's one way to live your life he doesn't introspect but he does finally fix the water heater which has gotten to an absolutely disgusting level can't blame that on fate that's pure human negligence it's also not Fate's fault he misses the birth of his child I mean you could say it's bad luck with the scheduling that his big drug deal was booked the way it was but that's obviously not how our responsibility and causation work since he did not need to be making and selling methamphetamine this episode has another instance of Walter indulging his hanging up the phone Kink here after a nice long pause of deciding to let Jesse Panic that all their drugs had been stolen rather than Walter having taken the stash to sell to Gus it felt like another Act of Fate later in the episode when he's sitting around worried and mulling over what to do about Jane now knowing everything and then the reason he finally leaves the house is that Skyler explicitly out of nowhere asks him to go and get diapers so he goes with the duffel of money to Jesse's and like when was he going to leave the house if Skyler didn't suggest it I'm sure he would have found a time to leave he never struggled much with leaving the house but it's just an odd bit of Fate not nearly as fate-based as the fact that he then runs into Jane's dad at the bar though and the fact that without knowing it's Jane's dad he manages to get inspired to go back to Jesse's with some intention and presumably initially less immoral than being largely responsible for Jane's death too bad Holly needed [ __ ] diapers I guess this is the big Act of Fate that we mentioned he acknowledges in the fly when succumbing to the sleeping meds and being completely exhausted but a healthy way to acknowledge the impact of Fate is to do so not at the cost of taking accountability for what is not Fate's fault and Walter doesn't include that part when he talks about that fateful evening it wasn't Fate's fault that he had a duffel of money to drop off in the first place okay well next up I think I guess the freak accident of the plane crash is some kind of Fate I mean obviously with its non-fate parts too of course oh and we talked about Walter's why me speech well there's a part two to that pep talk that he gives as Hank is in surgery and barely holding on to life in the other room Walter talks about hitting all green lights on his way to that same Hospital the day he had his lobectomy no one else is feeling the speech as usual but he's not only completely making it about himself he's doing it in this freewheeling verbose way he's enlivened and entertained by the memory of all the green lights and he draws out the story like a podcast host with time to fill he insists the story is about family and then makes it also about Hank at the end but it rings Hollow we have to briefly sidestep from talking about fate to talk about how Marie partially truthfully and very powerfully holds Walter accountable for being causally related to Hank's terrible suffering do you ever think about that Walt to you do you ever think about everything that you have put him through she really gives me chills with these lines and it's very interesting to contrast her here with Walter reminding Jesse of killing Gail to extract information from him Marie is forcefully reminding Walter of what he's done even though she doesn't have all the details right of course he's done far worse than what she says but Marie's aim is explicitly to make Walter feel accountable and to pressure him to consider why he takes so little accountability whereas Walter was just trying to cover his ass by grilling Jesse for details back to his green light speech three or four Hospital scenes later we can interpret it as him saying how he feels cursed by being blessed he hasn't really learned much since the why me speech in that he still doesn't really know how to make sense out of just the randomness of life on a lighter note why does fate arrange it so that this woman and the social worker are in the same outfit what's up with that that's what we in the therapy Biz call transference just kidding anyway is it fate that there's also a fly back at home with him at the end of his long fly day and night at work during the fly episode maybe it's his life that's contaminated a month or so later after the whole I'm the danger thing Skyler goes for a drive with Holly and visits the famous Four Corners Landmark where she flips a coin to presumably choose which state to move to Like Walter so early on she intuitively feels like leaving big decisions up to fate but not really actually because as the coin lands in Colorado twice she looks at her child and decides to drag the coin with her foot back over to New Mexico one might ask why she tossed the coin in the first place and I would say it's because she didn't know what it would feel like to genuinely Ponder uprooting her life I don't know if she has parents by the way I don't believe it's ever mentioned but her sister is a fairly okay support in New Mexico and all the people she knows are presumably there New Mexico is the home of her thriving short story career which is only mentioned in the pilot and barely ever again hashtag release Skyler's short stories I guess in the finale of season 4 when Walter's orchestrating the plan to entrap Gus with Hector at his care facility and Tyrus goes to check on the situation first we have the cutest circumstance of Fate possible a nice old lady calls to Walter in his hiding spot and he's just so lucky that he doesn't get caught how lucky he is that she doesn't get louder and how unlucky she is for sharing a wall with Hector moving on season 5's first episode has Saul break the news to Skyler about what happened to Ted during the execution of their plan he puts it this way an act of God there's no right there's no wrong it's just that's the best phrase it fits but what happened to Ted was both unlucky as well as the fault of Skyler Saul huel and Bill Burr finally in the latter half of the last season we get Jesse referencing this pattern that we've been looking at he's the devil yeah he is he is smarter than you he is luckier than you there's an almost mystical Aura to Walter's Relationship to fate and Jesse knows it's something they need to take into account in a way sort of similar to how in Better Call Saul Nacho's dad Manuel played the role of providing commentary on the theme of Revenge in El Camino we see the entire movie end with Jane giving commentary on this theme of how we relate to fate she says this to Jesse about the idea of going where the universe takes you I'm on where the universe takes me my whole life it's better to make those decisions for yourself her saying this as the last line feels like the show speaking like with Manuel and here saying well maybe some of the characters needed to take more responsibility and not rely on whims of Fate if they wanted things to go differently let's zoom out from this pattern to the general theme of what breaking bad as a show itself says to the viewer and I'd like to start with something much less vague than my interpretation of dialogue let's talk about the Show's music wow does Breaking Bad soundtrack really say some stuff I don't mean the outstanding original compositions by the show's composer Dave Porter those are amazing of course but in addition the other songs chosen really managed to create an amazing meta effect together with the scenes like even just in the pilot when we hear a 1975 reggae song by The In Crowd as Walter steals lab equipment from the school to make methamphetamine with a former student What A vibe the volume Fades out very very slowly as Walter explains a round bottom boiling flask to his new partner imagine seeing him taking the equipment but with completely different music when they cook for the first time it's an electronic Punk sort of song from 2006. compare that to the music when they cook months later the time Walter lied to Jesse about the methylamine expiring while lying to Skyler about visiting his mother once he gets his way and coercively obstructs Jesse and Jane from literally just living and enjoying their lives Walter is a jerk to Jesse as he gets picked up at the airport and here's how we transition into the Montage good morning to you too man brand new it's a song from 1970 by Blue mink and it's called good morning Freedom which just says it all I think it does make you wonder though who is free here the guy who got lied to and manipulated into being here or the one who doesn't seem like he could stop making methamphetamine if he tried but anyway that sort of thing where the lyrics of the song directly echoed Jesse saying good morning happens a bit including most obviously in the very second episode here a 1961 song by Clyde McPhatter starts low and is heard on Walter's car radio and then as Domingo runs into a tree the song gets louder and goes the music is a very in-your-face meta commentary to remind you hey you're watching a show we know and you know and we know you know and you know we know you know at the very end of season one after Walter and Jesse watch their new business partner slash enemy tuko kill a man in front of them the season and is on some beautiful Gnarls Barkley vocals I guess the idea being that Walter and Jesse are in a similar position of potentially benefiting from a soul-saving okay this is going to briefly turn into me just telling you my favorite music on Breaking Bad for a second one of my favorite songs comes in the situation when Walter is separating himself from his family through his battle with the enemy of dry rot which I think seems to be a somewhat legitimate problem but also not what he's making it out to be more of a problem than the fly but clearly not justifying such an over-the-top response it seems like from Walter who is on a brief Hiatus from making and selling methamphetamine and has a lot of spare energy temporarily we hear a broadcast reminding us it's 2008 economy-wise Walter makes his family bothered confused and uncomfortable and the next we see of him is at the store when he big dogs the other drug dealers to one of the best bands TV on the radio the dog wants a bone here signifying the lack of self-control or self-reflection Walter has in single-mindedly pursuing what he wants and obviously it's a very cool song so it perfectly emphasizes the feeling the show is going for which is Walter is cool you almost forget he was just a delusional disconnected goof of a father and husband no this guy but he's cool and then my other favorite song in the show starts when Marie breaks bad in her own way to the absolute coolest transition into a song I've ever seen in a TV show we hear the real estate agent she conned loudly vacuuming the floor yeah and a similar sound fades in but it's not a vacuum it's the amazing Fever Ray song If I Had a Heart but the show cuts from Marie's story to Jesse's and the song mostly applies to him living his scary life at this point by the way check out fever Ray's new album Radical Romantics it's unbelievably good and I've been listening to it non-stop this is not sponsored I just wanted to mention that if we're talking about music we should mention the ballad of Heisenberg by Los Cuates de Sinaloa the music video that plays in full at the start of an episode and ends with lines about how Walter's dead he just doesn't know it yet the show is always eager to emphasize its meta Lair and remind viewers it's here and it knows that this is all nuts the music aligns with the characters emotions and sometimes with ours too like for example when good old Ken wins gets his car exploded by Walter and we get a Soulful song Didn't I by durondo which has these lyrics As the credits start [Music] this Chill song does raise the question though about whether Walter is trying his best just to be a man per se and while 99 of viewers probably love what he just did here including me the beautiful tension of the show is in how you come away from the episode almost forgetting that Walter's son just told him to [ __ ] die already the examples are endless of chill songs substantially shaping how we'd otherwise view things happening in Breaking Bad even when things are going great for them they're manufacturing addiction they're cooking suffering but the beauty of the show is you think about that as much as the characters do another example speaking of addiction is when Jane and Jesse use heroin for the first time together a scene we see first in painful slow quiet detail then as Jesse uses it for the first time and Jane continues going in the wrong direction after just earlier in the episode ending 18 months of sobriety to use methamphetamine with Jesse we hear this sort of heavenly music playing Enchanted you could think this glorifies drug use but I definitely don't think it does in the context of the show I don't think the show glorifies drug use really since Jesse gets high and even Walter gets high often specifically in order to commit terrible violence and I think the show from very early on makes Jesse's situation seem sufficiently awful from his addiction let's move on from music and talk about what the show says through its medium more generally and let's start by noting how this Jane and Jesse High scene puts us into the hallucination with Jesse this is something the show does from the beginning with Walter in the very second episode starting to hear things as he teaches a class since killing someone yes Ben is this going to be on the murder what so that's a hallucination of course no reason to think his students were gaslighting him though that would be pretty funny for the whole class to just pretend that the kid said midterm The First Time the show breaks the fourth wall in this way of having us hear what Walter hears there's also the series Felina episode where we see Jesse thriving and woodworking until it's all a dream and he's back to being held captive we really felt the reality of what could have been much more than if he had just like talked about imagining or dreaming about that the show does other interesting meta stuff like I thought it was really wild how at the end of the third episode when Walters killed his second human he comes home and says to Skyler there's something I have to tell you I don't know about you all but as a Better Call Saul fan in 2023 watching Breaking Bad for the first time I genuinely had no idea what the heck Walter was going to say to Skyler I mean I didn't think he was gonna be like hey I just killed two people and started making methamphetamine but I did not think of the Fairly obvious fact that he was going to use that moment to tell her he has cancer I guess so he could get sympathy for that and then maybe kind of internally transfer the sympathy to his feelings about just murdering two people but the show chose to cut it out like Better Call Saul cut out many things artistically like Kim's response to Cheryl asking why she chose to turn herself in so because the show chose to cut it out when the next episode shows the family out by the pool having a barbecue and Skyler starts crying I definitely did not realize why it was and I fully thought she was crying at the story Walter was telling of how they met did anyone else think this when watching I it could have just been me because it seems like a weird misunderstanding but it's definitely like the memory of how they met that triggers her tears about his cancer but when I was watching the first time I thought she was in fact crying about just like the story of how they met I guess because it's a story of how a man 12 years older than her repeatedly came to the restaurant she worked at and pretended to do crosswords to get her attention but no I guess the story just bothered Skyler because she thought of Walter's cancer not because it was a story of how their relationship is built on him misrepresenting himself so yeah intentional misdirection or not this was an especially interesting creative choice to show made Breaking Bad finds many ways to engage us at a meta level like when Walter asks Hank this about quote unquote criminals criminals like the one you I mean what do you think it is that makes them who they are Hank has absolutely no idea and no capacity to Hazard a gas Walter gives a slightly surprised expression to this and it makes you wonder how much better his own answer is or isn't imagine if he asked Hank this about criminals and Hank was like oh well I think we criminalized behaviors that stem from structural and societal failures and the existence of criminals is more a testament to Poverty as a policy Choice rather than any sort of inherently immoral aspect of human behavior but no that would be a different show I mean he just goes to pee and that's it it seemed like Walter was maybe testing the waters to see what Hank would say about him and his motives either for fun or because he can't introspect and he's wondering what someone would say who can in a similar vein at the hospital when Hank's in surgery Walter sufficiently wins over Walt Jr who tells him about a book He's reading that follows the DEA agents who arrested Pablo Escobar he says to his dad that Hank told him good guys never get ink like the bad guys do and Walter makes the guiltiest expression ever it feels like the show's saying to the viewer in this moment you know you wouldn't watch this if he wasn't this bad not many people would necessarily watch a TV show about a guy running a small business to pay for his cancer treatment we want chemical warfare piles of cash and an exploding head on a turtle but also Walters just absorbing that his son is more ethical than him the mat to his mic the show rewards expecting the unexpected and you learn to anticipate something shocking like when Hank has Walter in handcuffs I watched him was like no something isn't right I think it's the fact that there's no music while Walter sits there in the police car it just makes you hold your breath and then of course Walter's business partners show up to do their thing sometimes Breaking Bad likes to make a meta message through repetition when Walter recruits Todd which is by the way absolute loser Behavior but anyway he says to Todd listen and apply yourself this is of course what we saw he told Jessie when Jesse was his high school student he also said it to one of his current students the answer is no apply yourself this kid probably doesn't resonate too much with his annoying teacher's words but Jesse in his own way is kind of motivated by it as is Todd however what they're motivated for is to work for Walter making drugs one last interesting meta moment I want to mention is when they're trying to kill tuko and they think they have finally got him but they're so bad at it and I found my pretty pacifist self thinking can you please just be better at killing so I can just relax the show has a way of making you root for them to be good at what they do just like when they steal the methylamine from the train in season five you want them to succeed until Todd shoots a kid and then you remember that violence is inherently wound up with the cool stuff so overall the show weaves irregularly enforced meta narrative that reminds the viewers that are absorption in the show is based on the art form's ability to block out moral judgments and impose very subjective limits on how we experience reality we see the world from the character's perspective several times but really all the time in the normal third person objective point of view we're still seeing a biased perspective because for example we're seeing Walter holding Holly instead of seeing Gail's grieving family or something we only see stuff like that selectively and we're invited to move on from it as the characters do this is unrelated and might be a strange question but would Walter have definitely not cooked meth if he wasn't diagnosed with cancer as I said earlier it seems like he was already thinking about it when Hank played his spot on the news and Walter realized they busted a drug dealer with seven hundred thousand dollars that's unusual isn't it that kind of cash it's not the most we ever took Hank only offers him the Ride Along because Walter is very interested already pre-cancer diagnosis so I don't think it's exactly true that Walter started manufacturing drugs as a reaction to the depressing shock of a terminal cancer diagnosis just like it's not true that he started making methamphetamine to pay for his cancer treatment since he obviously had another option that wouldn't put anything at risk except his pride his depressed feelings fueled his cooking and his treatment bills did too don't get me wrong but neither were sufficient he was already burnt out and ground down by life working two jobs and still not providing for his family sufficiently as the water heater has been broken for a long time already in the pilot and that's just the beginning of it there's a great video by Tim's video essays about in part how Walter's harmful Behavior comes from his turbulent relationship to the role of a provider and the video is called yes breaking bad is about toxic masculinity I strongly recommend it some people or should I say some men get all worked up about the phrase toxic masculinity and Tim's video breaks down the blatant logic of it when masculinity motivates and promotes good things it's healthy masculinity and when masculinity motivates and promotes bad things it's harmful or toxic masculinity or at least that's how I would put it and Breaking Bad well let's just say the show gives us one or maybe two subtle hints that characters just might be slightly impacted by their concepts of masculinity you might have missed it because it was so subtle but if you think back really really far you may remember one or two examples that's why they hire men I'm no [ __ ] come on let's be men about this huh okay because you're gonna man up you're gonna push out just throw some [ __ ] balls nice job wearing the pants I suggest you stop whining like a little [ __ ] now really pull not like a girl pull this you want to talk like men I'm just not the man I thought I was I am the man that I am son so yeah a very subtle theme of the show is how the characters twisted around concepts of masculinity to manipulate themselves and each other into harmful activities or to assert status and power a lot of referring to the role of a man and a lot of referring to various genitals as forms of masculine encouragement but I don't mean to imply that people referring to genitals is toxic masculinity in fact sometimes people can refer to genitals and it's actually a healthy understanding of masculinity like the example of when Walt Jr gets upset with his dad for not wanting to do cancer treatment he uses language exactly like what we just saw in those more toxic examples but it's a non-toxic context you're a [ __ ] you're like ready to give up Walt Jr is expressing his feelings the best way he knows how and intuitively knows his dad might respond to masculinity shaming but here it's shaming Walter for lack of courage and responsibility not shaming for like not wanting to work with a massive drug dealer bit of a difference no let me ask a possibly silly question speaking of differences what's the difference between being a man and being the man people mean when they say to be a man when I'm just hanging out being a man am I being the way that people are telling other people to be when they say be a man obviously we have lots of different concepts of what it means to be a man and lots of different reasons to call on the manliness of another person but one thing I think we can agree on is that a common meaning of the phrase be a man is block out your feelings block out your fear block out your pain block out your guilt block out your worry block out your sadness isn't it funny how when people say be a man they usually don't mean show empathy for your loved ones and connect with them on an intimate level the reason be a man doesn't mean that is not that there's any genuine conflict between intimacy and masculinity of course common concepts of masculinity have the general form they do for historically dependent reasons I think it's safe to say in my mind it sort of goes like this the dominance of men over other men and other people is a common feature of societies and the relations of production how we make everything that we do in our societies men dominate other men and that's an integral aspect of how our societies have been structured and sort of perpetuated themselves through the domination of men over other men women and other people also feelings and intimacy are in genuine conflict with the relations of economic production with blocking out feelings being more conducive of to all sorts of forms of economic exploitation and production more intimacy and more emotional awareness is not necessarily good for the economy so this is my way of sort of explaining why masculinity takes on this emotionally repressive aspect in so many societies within patriarchal and capitalist hegemony masculinity is going to be leveraged for the further generating of profits for owners of the means of production as we see for example with Gus telling Walter to be a man and keep working for him if men didn't dominate the global economy in so many societies and if feelings didn't get in the way of maximizing profit I'm not sure that masculinity would have the same toxic aspects of unhealthy emotional repression when we spent so long talking about Walter's ways of forcing himself and others to move on from feelings we were talking about equality that is itself a hugely significant aspect of the toxic waves that masculinity can be dude Walters I am the danger speech is toxic not just because he's priding himself on his violence but for that first reason I originally pointed out which is that he's completely disconnected from Skyler's emotional state masculinity is not toxic just when it motivates someone to murder rather than swallow their pride masculinity is also toxic when it motivates someone to damage their relationships by avoiding empathy and respect for other people's emotions but as we saw Flynn use masculinity to try to motivate his dad to treat his cancer of course there are so many positive ways to be masculine Breaking Bad gives us clear examples of this like when Hank says Step Up be a man and admit what you feel that's it there is no other option it's better for all of us if we emphasize the importance of the positive attributes like accountability that can be related to such generally applying Concepts as masculinity though is it truly an essential thing about masculinity that it involves admitting what we've done I don't know I think masculine is a shifting social construct that can mean many different things but I think it's great for Hank to use the shared value of masculinity to try to motivate Walter to do something accountable this is a slight tangent but I have this thought sometimes about like what if our concepts of things are incoherent from a totality perspective but we never see it from that perspective so we go around wanting this and wanting that for example but our desires are inherently overall contradictory or I could be looking for a romantic partner for instance with like a certain set of 30 different traits that are extremely unlikely to be together in the same person or we could see being a man as being made up of like thousands of different tiny things for example but certain combinations of these traits make it very hard to attain any significant number of the other ones maybe most or all ideals we have of things are necessarily impossible to actually achieve or experience and that's what it means to have an ideal well I'm not sure how much control we have exactly in choosing how to form what our ideals are but to whatever extent we have control like for instance in how we choose to understand something like masculinity we're either going to understand each quality of the ideal as being something we want to shoot for and then shoot for it or do the opposite so it's good to examine our ideals and work to make them less incoherent and more internally consistent such that if an ideal is important to us we don't work against it while working towards it for me personally the concept of masculinity in and of itself is not very important just to me personally and I'm perfectly comfortable being masculine in certain ways and not being masculine in others because I only care about the elements of masculinity that I would otherwise care about and strive for anyway for other reasons like admitting to doing things wrong is such an Obviously good idea that it seems absurd to chalk it up to masculinity but Hank's not like consciously doing that he's just using the most readily available language to communicate to Walter the seriousness of Walter's only path forward with any Integrity on this note about honesty I think many Breaking Bad viewers seem to really downplay the seriousness of Walter lying to his family it's as if some viewers think Honesty is something to engage in when it's convenient rather than something we owe our loved ones imagine if Walter sat down with Skyler in the pilot before visiting Jesse at his home and Walter was like Hey Skyler I'm thinking about making drugs so we can pay for my treatment and stuff and she'd be like no I'm not okay with that and then imagine he said sounds good well I'm gonna do it or in an alternate universe where he treated her as an equal in their relationship he'd say oh my gosh okay well then I definitely won't do it but even if he said well I'm gonna do it anyway he'd be giving Skyler the information she needs to live her life and make decisions more freely with respect to her relationship to him by lying he manipulates her and treats her as an object for him to control rather than as a subject to make her own decision I think we see Walters emotionally repressive approach to masculinity when Gretchen confronts him about lying to his family and He makes himself into a brick wall if you were going to name the gender most known for apologizing too much would it be men no not in the society I'm in at least men are in fact known for under apologizing and Walter really latches on to this unhealthy aspect of masculinity seeming to actually not even understand the concept of apologizing I don't Nation I owe you apology and I have apologized he then gives himself credit for apologizing three times and it's such a great moment because it shows him being shamelessly upfront about his careless approach to accountability he has the gall to claim explanations are separate from apologies the only sense in which explanations are separate from apologies is that explanations are not in themselves sufficient for apologies but they are absolutely necessary apologies require explanations plus amends the amends often including material improvements that will reduce future chances of harm an apology that's just an explanation borders on a rationalization but an apology without an explanation is just the emptiest flimsiest thing imaginable and he expects to get away with it Gretchen lays out the absurdity of Walter expecting her to just let him involve her in his lies she passionately communicates to him the unfairness of his perspective and he says yeah pretty much the size of it this is such a fascinating moment because Gretchen says what happened to you this isn't you and Walter says what would you know about me Gretchen and he goes on and on with clearly an enormous amount of unprocessed emotion about this engagement he broke off many years ago but it also can't be ignored that Walter is taking that line from Skyler who as we talked about said that same thing to him which was in the very previous episode to him saying it to Gretchen when Schuyler said it she was communicating how distant he'd been and communicating that it would be absurd not to expect her to act out somewhat and when Walter says it to Gretchen he's implying that she's wrong to see his defensive shutdown self in this moment as changed or different from his past self or that's what he would mean if he was actually responding to what she meant when she said what happened because this isn't you she meant it's not him to be so shut down which is certainly interesting to me as someone very curious about how Walter ever used to be different but Walter says what would you know about me and then what would your presumption about me be exactly go begging for your for your charity and like no dude she was instead talking about the presumption that you would speak to her like a human being and be honest actually I get that he had a lot of feelings to unpack but he has nothing to say to back up the idea that Gretchen did anything morally worse than date his friend after he left which is more just slightly rude rather than wrong still Walter is accusing her of not taking responsibility while himself taking zero responsibility and being so disconnected from Gretchen during his quote unquote apology that he treats her like she's forcing her money on him when really she just wants to know why he's lying to his whole family she cares about him and doesn't feel she can reach him so so sorry for you Walt I don't care if that sounds and looks like pity to you that's empathy folks it's a fine line but she has Tears In Her Eyes that's not condescending pity she's learned that her ex remembers the relationship shockingly different from how she does and he's living with probably largely unjustified resentment at the same time living a lie and deceiving his closest and only loved ones about fundamental aspects of his life Walter is basically in a hell of his own creation and she genuinely feels bad for him she's not trying to hurt or manipulate him but Walter cannot perceive it in this way [ __ ] you it's only badass to say [ __ ] you to your Rich ex when you're not apologizing for involving them in a month-long lie to your family he has no legitimate accusations of Gretchen's conduct just vague references to viewing her as if she thinks she's a rich girl and built her Empire on his work and so like what was she supposed to do not date Elliot why yeah sure maybe it's a little Annoying to Walter but he was completely out of their lives are we really gonna be like Elliot you broke the bro code when we have almost zero information about their relationship and the context of Gretchen and Elliot getting together we're supposed to see Walter as the wronged party here no of course not I think the show leaves it perfectly open-ended and someone has to be very uncritical of Walter to in any way admire his approach to this conversation with Gretchen I want to take a second and say that in my opinion the masculine thing for Walter to do even at this point months into drug manufacturing would be to give as non-incriminating an explanation to Gretchen as possible say he changed his mind and needs their help and even take a job at Elliot's and aggression's Company as offered don't you see how that's the masculine thing to do he would provide not because of their charity but because of his willingness to be a man and manage his emotions effectively avoid acting impulsively or disproportionately and not just come from a place of Pride and resentment like it doesn't even feel right to me to even say Pride because it's such a shorthand here Pride does not at all need to have a negative connotation it can just be a positive sense of self so when we talk about Walter's Pride what we're really talking about is his inflated ego his attachment to a sense of self that was barely achievable already as a potentially underemployed teacher working in the American public school system and raising two kids that sense of self he craved became even less achievable when he realized as that horrible cough he was ignoring was inoperable cancer and he was about to fail permanently as a provider but as Tim pointed out in his great video it wasn't about Walter providing it was about Walter providing and as I'm saying a healthy ego could find a way to make sense of Walter actually being the one providing by being the one to suck it up and work at gray matter so his family can be in its best form rather than scared a traumatized and in danger for me it doesn't feel like a stretch at all to see why this would be the masculine decision in a healthier sense of masculinity do people really think there would be something not masculine about Walter if he were to accept a job at gray matter and get a lot of help with his medical bills from the you know his ex and the guy who married his ex how much of Walter's resentment is related to unresolved feelings about Gretchen and how much of his resentment is from the Lost stake in their huge company I think Walter is much more upset about the business Empire fire he could have built and the fortune he could have had in the finale when he enters Gretchen and Elliot's home his immediate focus is the high quality of their material Life by the way has it ever implied that Walter even reached out or came up with some proposal on receiving dividends of his work like what were they supposed to do what did he ask them to do did he ever try like are we meant to think he tried hard and they made it impossible for him or that he didn't try much at all it would make sense that he would have such an inflated ego he wouldn't even try he would just be resentful if he's mad he didn't stay at gray matter though there's really only one person to be mad at obviously he never learns this lesson and we see him say this in the finale this is where you get to make it right yes Walt exactly accountability is when you're forced at a parent gunpoint to do an illegal favor for someone I would argue that what he's doing here is uh not a fair ask and a fair ask would have been to take their help legally in those early months even at the time of this conversation with Gretchen about how he owes her an apology not an explanation another interesting Walter moment where he has a similar approach to apologizing is after that Flynn liquor slash blow up at Hank incident at the barbecue when Flynn gets home from school the next day and Walter manly as ever shows him the fixed water heater Walter finally talks about his behavior from the day before notably framing it using words like embarrassed and foolish instead of emphasizing the harm he did and when Flynn says Walter seemed angry with Hank Walter downplays it enormously and says everything's fine I called him this morning and made my apologies the way he says that is so great made my apologies like it's a box he had to check off also it's my opinion that he's lying and didn't call Hank he does apologize to Flynn and it's a pretty good one but were then hit with Flynn's tragic response and for that I'm very sorry but I kept up right Walter perceives that his son's been so deeply impacted by his behavior that he's only concerned with whether he kept up with the men Walter certainly looks like he feels guilty but he clearly never learned how to productively act on feelings of guilt because he walks away sadly instead of taking it as an opportunity to write his wrongs to any extent and maybe parent his son for a bit he doesn't even try at all to correct his son's unhealthy perspective that he himself is largely responsible for Hank obviously also has complicated ways of approaching his relationship to masculinity might leave your balls in your wife's partially when in this episode his partner Stephen Gomez gets the job in El Paso that Hank had and turned down Hank does his best to manage his feelings about it I made a decision I'm not going through anything what a cool shot this could be an album cover this is the same episode when Gus gives Walter the unbiased life advice that a man provides and we see Hank starts screaming at Marie when she calmly offers support you hear me we hear you buddy when he initially gets the El Paso promotion five or six months earlier it was after killing tuko and experiencing traumatic distress he dissociates and or has a panic attack in the elevator immediately after getting the promotion and it's representative of just how contained his feelings are as he moves right along out of the elevator he calls in sick to work the next day to avoid the stress and to achieve a flow state with his home brewing in the garage he is incapable of opening up about his feelings to Marie and it also seems significant to me that he uses sexualization explicitly to shut down any emotional conversation get that sweet ass out of here so I can concentrate she silently and begrudgingly leaves and I found it really interesting how sexualization is so clearly connected to repressing emotions for Hank notably he injures himself by breaking a glass bottle moments after Marie leaves and it seems unintentional but he pauses either to just take a moment and feel pain or to soak in how bad his mental state seems to have gotten how Hank relates to elevators symbolizes how he relates to his emotions and when over a season later he first admits to his job how he assaulted Jesse he gets in the elevator with Marie and cries intensely later in the episode he finishes His official confession and finally has a positive expression as he enters the elevator he's balanced and level-headed going through one of the worst professional experiences of his life and he's rewarded for this by The Show by immediately getting critically injured I think we may be okay also he took accountability and now he's holding flowers is there any masculinity left just kidding I would obviously argue that this is a positive interpretation of masculinity for him to own up to what he did his ability to take accountability definitely his accountability ability I don't his his accountability his ability accountability his accountability ability definitely surpasses Walters and that's why I agree with Walter in the next episode when he ends the green light speech by saying and I'm not half the man your husband is Hank was very clearly a better man because he was a better person and he was a cop so that says a lot that face when you're in a toxic masculinity contest and your opponent is a cop all in all Breaking Bad shows us approaches to masculinity in various forms and the impacts of unhealthy types and as much as Walter is the villain of his own story his relationship to masculine characteristics is the ideological villain in that he pursues an incoherent unexamined ideal with contradictory aspects he becomes a worse provider and a worse protector because of his Twisted efforts to try to go about fulfilling these roles someone has to protect who protects family anyway speaking of green lights uh Breaking Bad is a great show for people whose favorite color is green I know people must have pointed all this out to death by now so I won't go over all of it but I mean he goes unconscious in the pilot after seeing a woman in a green dress there's the green box cutter Gail puts down in the flashback at the start of season four and that Gus uses to kill Victor in front of our protagonists after Walter kills Gus and he and Jesse burn down the lab we see him in a green shirt of course even the credits of the show have the theme of highlighting letters of people's names to represent chemical elements and the highlighting is significantly green then there's that time Jesse lights up some green herb in Saul's waiting room and when he goes in Saul's in a green shirt my advice is come on already and the flashback when Walter and Skyler are finding a home together and Skyler is 23 years old and Pregnant the 35 year old Walter in a leather jacket has a green shirt on but the most important green moment comes in the hazard pay episode after Walter is inspired by Green materials to go forward with the vamanos pest plan they do their cook and Walter is unsatisfied with the fact that they had to pay drivers to transport the drugs 275 thousand dollars worth of risk then Mike hits him with since you're putting on the green eye shade and this is when to my knowledge the connection is made most explicitly in Breaking Bad between green and greed I understand there's significant lore about the color palette of Breaking Bad and I think other people have covered that probably a ton the blueness of the meth the whiteness of the Walter green is just the one that jumped out most obviously to me as the green dress is so noticeable in the first episode and then on the ride along Hankins Steve have this specific conversation about whether the house is green or not Green Sage Sage but he worked their [ __ ] Pottery Barn Jesus I mean I was just like hello okay Green's a thing I thought it sort of represented strangeness or newness like the woman's green dress representing sort of exotic novelty that he wanted in his life but money is definitely a big part of that of course and the thing is like with greed it's not necessarily about the money for its exchange value it's also just about the control like when they're doing the big train heist in season five Walter pushes Jesse and Todd until the very last moment risking their lives and limbs is he compelled to risk their well-being for every last drop of methylamine because he needs it as a resource or because he's super worried of them getting caught if the Tank's not filled up the exact right amount and blah blah blah no I think he wants to see if he can he wants to prove to himself he can put cold calculating self-interest above everything else no matter what I think it's more about his identity as a renegade rather than the exact resource he's interested in itself but it's not just Walter who's greedy the system he lives in is greedy in the fourth episode their new doctor is not in their health care insurance plan and they are told they have to pay a five thousand dollar deposit just to start that's more than 10 of his salary I think the show makes a serious indictment of the U.S Health Care system and I say this as someone who is literally a health care professional I bill insurance companies myself as a provider it's how I earn my living more so than YouTube AdSense and patreon dollars and I could go on for days about the issues with private insurance companies from a provider's perspective but it's also a nightmare from the client's perspective things being out of network having extremely high premiums or deductibles all these kinds of issues keep in mind also that Skyler is pregnant when the show starts which can be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars too even with insurance Walter makes forty three thousand seven hundred dollars per year which is not a lot and was not a lot in 2008 before during or after the global recession and this is not an excuse it's just part of the contact text of seeing Walter be like corner of the market and raise the price yeah like I wonder where he learned that and internalized that obviously a few episodes later he's quoted as having to pay 170 to 200 000 for the operation on his remaining cancer it seems absolutely absurd and you almost can't help making a mental connection like Walter's being preyed on by a global systemic type of greed that impacts all of us and then because he's who he is he expresses it how he does of course his money couldn't buy him relationships after everything he did unfortunately Skyler cares more about him killing Hank which he indirectly did and months later when Walter calls Flynn and tells him about the money he's trying to get to him Flynn similarly hung up on the whole Walter killing Hank thing and even no well you did to Mom you [ __ ] and Flynn's ability to care more about human beings than money also saves Lewis from getting involved which is fantastic this brings us to an extremely important point that I'm sure many people are very upset with me for waiting this long to address we need to talk about Lewis Lewis is clearly the main character of Breaking Bad but no one seems to want to talk about it or admit it listen tell Louis to drive carefully Lewis has a doctor's appointment Lewis helped me set up a PayPal account and everything Lewis dropped him off he was here when I got home hey Louis according to the internet we first see Lewis in season one's gray matter episode outside the convenience store and I don't care about them recasting him but no one calls him Lewis in this scene as far as I can tell so he wasn't really Lewis for me the first time through and the internet really shows its limitations as a tool in general when it comes to Lewis like this webpage which talks about Lewis like he only matters when he's physically present folks come on Lewis works in mysterious ways we first hear of Lewis when Walt Jr gets a call from him Lewis Marie always clever is immediately suspicious seriously is it this Louis person Lou this is Walt Jr's friend and like all friends we have as kids Lewis is a window into the world outside the family I'm sure Lewis had his own stuff going on but he's completely separate and detached from the dysfunction Walters perpetually perpetuating Lewis is a refuge for Walt Jr representing his ability to be a person outside of the family so much so that when Walter finds out his son doesn't go by Walter Jr anymore he finds out from Lewis Flynn and me gotta get going Flynn Flynn he's your Lewis is the bearer of Flynn's non-walterfied identity this is the big Lewis episode where we get a whole lot of Lewis but even three episodes earlier Walter already feels threatened by Lewis when he goes back home to hypothetically defend his family from tuko he asked Skylar where Walt Jr is and she says having dinner at Louis's house and just hearing this sends Walter into a Fugue state it was Lewis all along if you need to get somewhere Lewis is there um Lewis is taking me to the train station when the going gets tough Lewis keeps a cool head what's Louis gonna do worry wow Lewis is so cool I said season two episode four is the big Lewis episode because he shows up at their home unintentionally informs Walter Flynn goes by Flynn and since it's after the Fugue State Lewis also serves a specific function of contaminating Walter's Twisted family risk assessment you think he he told Lewis about me about the blackout and we learned Lewis has been teaching Flynn how to drive in U.S culture the process of learning how to drive is a very masculine slash dad coded activity so Flynn learning driving from Lewis obviously bothers Walter good good okay just a bit later in this Lewis episode we learn Lewis took Walt to school of course this was something Walter did so Lewis has usurped that role too in the next episode Flynn is out with Lewis I will mention that Walter calls Flynn Walt Jr here as he does a lot and all I really feel like saying about this is that I definitely am not trying to be a jerk about people who are named Junior or people who name their kids Junior but I do find it kind of strange that it's almost always a father-son thing I've never seen a mother name their daughter Junior and there are some women that have historically been named Junior but it's just a very rare thing because of the history of patriarchy imagine in the Ozymandias flashback when and Skyler tells Walter she likes to name Holly for their baby imagine if she instead suggested Skyler Jr anyway Flynn obviously rejected the name Walter Jr ultimately because he presumably didn't want to have the same name as his family's worst enemy but who knows how much more Flynn would have needlessly suffered if he didn't have a good friend like Lewis to watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force with hi Lewis Walter has one of the most perfectly revealing moments ever right here with Skyler in the kitchen when he explains why he invited Lewis over by saying Louis really pitched in Breaking Bad has a lot of moments like this that are laugh out loud funny but in a very serious way Walter obviously doesn't see the irony and we can expect Skyler to laugh after what he's put her through but it's unavoidable that he just said we've been kind of absent and that's really just Next Level disconnected from reality is it even shamelessness if he's hardly capable of sustaining a feeling of Shame it's just complete disconnectedness this scene is amazing and Skyler's line is legendary really just a perfect moment and of course it's all thanks to Lewis Lewis comes up a lot more even when just serving as a helpful Alibi I told her I was spending the night at Lewis's here Lewis is being used to bring Father and Son closer together Lewis is a multi-purpose concept and then towards the end of the whole show in a climax of Lewis significance Lewis is a critical element in Old Mr Lambert's hair brain scheme to shove 100K in a mailbox it's Lewis's family still at 48.48 newcome good thing Flynn is a baller and tells Walter off thereby protecting Lewis for eternity and solidifying breaking bad's status as a legendary show I guess we've covered a lot and I just want to say that this is going to be my only video about breaking bad unless something dramatic changes with me neurologically because I have other video projects in mind but I am happy to continue thinking and talking about this series probably in live streams on YouTube and twitch as well as the verbal Journal podcast for channel supporters and in the Discord and you know wherever else I feel like it but I'm not going to do a whole series of videos on this show because I just want to move on to other subjects for writing and I think it'll be interesting to see where the channel goes from here but yeah now it's time for me to give my opinion on Better Call Saul versus Breaking Bad I don't think you can make objective statements about the quality of art I really don't and I got into Better Call Saul because I deeply love Bob odenkirk's comedy which is a completely different basis than me watching Breaking Bad because I have a video series about its spin-off I don't know if I ever would have watched Breaking Bad If I Didn't Have This Better Call Saul video series and I'm definitely glad that I watched it I think it's a really incredible show most people I talk to have certain characters they don't like I've heard people who really can't stand Jessie people who can't stand Hank obviously huge chunks of the male fan base had deep-rooted issues with their feelings about Skyler personally I found all the characters fun and interest thing but I struggled with Walter not in all his scenes but in a lot of them I found it hard to care about him Walter tried so much less to mitigate the negative consequences of his actions and he earned really really really small amounts of empathy from me basically zero it was just hard for me how he consistently does significant harm and barely struggles with his awareness of it I'm not describing flaws of the show I'm describing aspects of the show he's a villain that's how the show is as far as I can understand Walter is the bad guy he's the villain and it's all about him trying to understand that I can't be the bad guy I love how him saying this is completely out of left field in his conversation with Saul and Saul's like where did that come from but we know it's a fascinating show because it follows the villain from an extremely intimate perspective making him the protagonist and it doesn't absurd and mocking glamorization of his life as he struggles to push away consciousness us of his villainous status they're so similar in so many ways but in some ways I think the similarities can deceptively hide the differences Jimmy's downfall is just so many orders of magnitude slower than Walters I cared so much more about him because of this and I felt emotions about him being locked up for life that I didn't feel at all when Walter died It Felt Like Walter could have died at so many other points that I just stopped caring whether he was about to die or not and while I could definitely root for him in specific scenes like when it was cool to watch him magnetize the police evidence or steal from a train I could almost never root for him for a full episode or several I still think Walter is a very special character and probably as unique and special as Jimmy I just didn't attach to him and a lot of the time I really wanted him to get off of the screen seriously I also overall don't really care much for seeing dead bodies or intense Gore I can handle it as long as it's not horrifyingly disturbing like Jane's death but handling Gore is not the same as appreciating it I've just never had much of an appreciation for media that shocks me I don't go for it but I respect it as a craft and in my uninformed opinion Breaking Bad seems to be top tier in this side of things it really does push Gore boundaries within an artistic and dramatic story and it's it's really incredible I still struggled though to enjoy the gore I mean it was cool to see the tortuga guy blow up and stuff but Victor's death I you know I mean like I didn't want them to take it out or anything but it's like the type of thing like I can't I'm not gonna re-watch that I can't it's just horrifying I'm not criticizing the show for these things it's really all how it should have been I think it's just hard for me to get excited about something that shocks me with scary images it's just part of how I work so yeah we all have our preferences and long story short I prefer Better Call Saul that's my right and my lawyer Saul Goodman has informed me that I do in fact have rights which is really good to know as we come to a close here I want to thank simply snaps for providing her insight as a script consultant helping me make this video everything it could be as well as making sure I made some version of sense how did you know how to put this all together I had excellent health but any issues in this video are definitely my fault still of course if you'd like to hear snaps and I talk for a couple hours about the two shows and all our lingering ideas and thoughts there's a recording of our chat live now for channel supporters through the YouTube members page as well as on patreon feel free to check that out as well as another bonus video of me going through a bunch of interesting questions and comments people left on a community post recently where I asked about what people really were wondering about my experience watching Breaking Bad as a viewer of Better Call Saul there were just so many good questions that I figured I'd go through it separately and long story short there is a lot of extra stuff to enjoy if you have disposable income and want to support my work I'm very glad I watched and wrote about this show and I want to thank you for listening this long to my thoughts about it we'll do a live stream in the next week or two and if you missed that you can check it out with the other live streams on the side Channel okay wait I'm already in full outro mode and it isn't even the outro yet so that was the intro to the outro and this is the outro I've been told to keep this a little bit shorter than the previous eight videos I've been told the outros are getting a little bit long management has been riding me very hard about this apparently I'm about to lose my job which I don't understand because I I run the whole operation so I don't I don't really get how that's supposed to work but okay I'll keep it kind of short I just get so enthusiastic because this is the part where I can thank people for giving me actual money their hard-earned money or inherited money I don't really care how you get it um I'm gonna thank them right now and you can join them if you have disposable income you want to give me money this might sound like a silly thing to say but it's always been a dream of mine for people to give me money for art specifically like it's you know growing up you're like what am I going to do with my life and I really like art and blah blah that's what I was like and then it's like well you know I read about all these old artists you know Picasso Dali and the less problematic ones and you're like oh gosh like people just paid them a lot of money to make art it's like I'm not like them I'm not you know but maybe people still do that so apparently patreon and YouTube memberships kind of can serve the same function as like an old-timey Patron type of thing so it really does mean a lot I mean people literally just paying for the work I do and it's a lot of work so thank you so much I'm going to start by thanking my wonderful supporters on patreon the people who are so nice enough to just actually give me money for this so they are user Elise Joe Miles Lauren thulu source Rex Gunther modest maoist Isaiah aryaman Scott M doing last initials Luca well I guess I'm only doing last initials if I notice that there's two people with the same first name it's not a perfect system Scott s Isaac Jack SB Ashley Bennett Pete Kyle Molly Jameson Brent Mr Moxie dependency injector I never noticed that one wow Connor John Madeline benedict with a k John oh this is John L that was John S before Mr Fahrenheit Sophie Sophie neither one have a last initial sorry that's on you Sophie's Nicholas Nathaniel Ryan and Christian thank you so much supporters on patreon now let's go over to the YouTube members where you can join too if you want to be a part of the YouTube members okay over at the YouTube members page we have Jaden Daisy Girl simply snaps who as I've mentioned actually was the script consultant with me on this video gave lots of insights helped me with the script and so yeah it also helps support the channel on on the YouTube members page so thank you simply snaps thank you Isaiah 39 weird gift Sparks pit inhabitant Wolfgang and Robert thank you so much feel free to join these cool people support the channel if you have money no worries if not I have a day job I like it I enjoy it so no worries it's all good now lots of extra stuff for the channel supporters more than ever okay [ __ ] I forgot to do the joke where I was starting by reading the Walt Whitman book and I've already recorded everything else [ __ ] oh it was gonna be so funny though well it would have worked yeah it would have worked um anyways I like Walt Whitman you know I was gonna find a poem in here I mean there's there's a lot of really good ones the dalliance of the Eagles I remember reading that in school I really liked that one it's beautiful they don't have Leaves of Grass in here though I guess that's sort of its own book yeah I read that a while ago it is very long so I get that it needs its own book um Walt Whitman is really an amazing Poe I I really have enjoyed his poetry a lot I hope he comes out with some new stuff um was the Walt Whitman book in frame the whole time too okay I guess I didn't ruin the joke then if it was in for okay we gotta keep this short or else I'm gonna get fired um extra stuff uh I've mentioned this already my conversation was simply snaps we talked for like two hours talked about all kinds of interesting ideas you might find it really interesting that's available for uh patreon supporters YouTube members um there's also behind the scenes footage video it's like almost an hour I haven't finished cutting it yet but uh I'll try to get it down to like half an hour it doesn't actually have to be long at all but it shows like my whole process and it's really interesting and there's also like me joking around and having a good time while I'm editing and stuff like that so there's all kinds of different insights there if you if you feel like checking it out uh behind the scenes footage video for channel supporters um honestly if you're a video essay maker or you want to be I think it's actually kind of helpful I don't know it's just my method but I'm can help there's also a uh a video where I'm responding to all the community uh post responses about like asking people asking me my thoughts about the show about all these things I never got a chance to mention in the video because it was just such a short video I just couldn't squeeze things in so that's a whole extra thing I don't know how long that is I'm gonna record that later today it's currently Wednesday videos coming out Friday okay and there's been a small mini essay that's like very short and it's extra thoughts about masculinity that I like couldn't fit in the video I was just writing a bunch about masculinity for a few days when I was doing that section and it's kind of weird I don't really recommend it but it's a little interesting some extra thoughts about masculinity where I answer the question am I more or less masculine than Dwayne The Rock Johnson support the channel and read that essay to find out more and yeah that's pretty much it check out the other videos on this channel I put a lot of work into them I enjoy this this is a very fun Pastime I've never had so many people look at things I make and listen to things I say before so I'm really enjoying this and I hope you are too I do live streams I'm going to stream in about a week on YouTube and we will all have a great time please come hang out if you feel like it it'll be on the side Channel if you don't uh if you aren't there live you'll be able to watch it if you want to it honestly should be pretty fun to watch even not live uh because I have a lot of things prepared to talk about I do have a twitch but I don't really like using twitch and I'm probably gonna try to stream more on YouTube in the future because now you know I just have a bit of an audience and it would be nice to engage with you all more maybe just hang out and play chess talk about the videos stuff like that and future projects and channel stuff I should have prepared more to say here there's all kinds of things in the works it's going to be a journey so thanks for checking out this YouTube channel and checking out this video and I'm pretty much done here so I'm gonna move on to other things with this channel I'm gonna move on to other you know non Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad related things and I hope you're ready for that because there's a lot of stuff going on in the world you know and we don't want to get too hyper focused on one area to exercise our sort of thoughts and feelings we want to exercise our thoughts and feelings in as many different domains uh as we can I'm not uh you know motivated to make videos about everything but I am motivated to make videos about a lot of other things and to share my thoughts and to write about a lot of different things and so I hope you uh hang out and stay tuned it's gonna be him [Music]

Channel: What's Therapy?

Views: 4,389,568

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Id: y9NOjyR0FSk

Length: 163min 40sec (9820 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023