Breaking Bad attempts to portray, step by step, a good family man's gradual descent into evil and his sleazy partner's gradual salvation. Nearly every review claims it succeeds brilliantly. Every viewer I know agrees.
They're all wrong.
Don't get me wrong. Breaking Bad rocks, but it still misses the mark it set for itself.
(If you haven't seen the first 4.5 seasons, stop reading and go watch the show. The rest of this piece abounds with spoilers.)
The best argument for Walter White's slow moral decline juxtaposes Season 1, when Walt refused to kill a man in self defense, with Season 4, when Walt happily endangered an innocent child to regain Jesse's allegiance. What a vivid change!
Except, of course, that the argument ignores Walt's trade.
Walt — even the "good Walt" of Season 1 — cooks meth. Meth kills people and ruins lives. Walt's super-pure meth doubtless kills even more people, including innocent children. And Walt is smart enough to realize this from day 1.
He is, in other words, a cheerful child murderer by the first episode.
If the show's creators had really wanted to illustrate a slow decline, they needed to choose a lesser criminal enterprise: marijuana, gambling, anything where Walt's day-to-day conduct, rather than his trade itself, would be the only thing that could make him truly evil.
As things stand, with Walt making meth, the only difference between early-Walt and late-Walt is that late-Walt is honest with himself and treats the people he knows with the same malice as the strangers he murders.
The same, of course, applies to Jesse in reverse. Jesse's bold stand for the kids that Gus exploited was just nonsense. How can you castigate Gus for using some kids as pushers when you kill far more kids with the meth you make?
I simply cannot understand how the show's creators think they are writing a show about moral transformation or how others believe they are watching one.
The only possible moral arc I see is in Walt's motivations. He began the series by murdering people to provide for her family. By Season 5, he murdered innocent people to aggrandize himself. I suppose that's somewhat worse, but, when you're murdering innocent people by the score, motives matter little.
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