It looks like Gus Fring’s half-immolated head. It’s what makes him such a brilliant escapologist, but it’s also a nightmare to deal with, and Mike realises how dangerous Walt is just to be in vicinity of, let alone work for.īut right now, Walt is “winning”, and Skylar is slowly – finally – coming to terms with the horror of what that concept actually looks like. These are traits he recognized in Gus, and even recognizes in Jesse, but Walt is clearly an entirely different prospect – wholly unpredictable, due to his emotion-led approach to his criminal undertakings, with apparently very few moral boundaries.
CAST OF BREAKING BAD SEASON 1 PROFESSIONAL
Mike is a career criminal, a professional with a no-nonsense approach, a strict set of principles and impressive moral fortitude (in the field of drug violence, at least). Walt’s obviously not an idiot, but he’s definitely a kind of rubber to Mike’s glue. Turns out being a high-level drug enforcer is just like any other job – you’re constantly forced to work with people you don’t like. When they run into each other in the desert (nearly literally) he’s ready to cap him and head for the hills, but almost instantly he’s forced to ally with Walt and Jesse again when hearing about the laptop, because otherwise it’s their asses. Walt cleans this up easily in around 20 minutes of screen time – with more than a little help from stealth MVP Jesse, of course, whose impressive demonstration of practical ingenuity (“Yo what about magnets?”) shows that the unusual, extra-curricular science lessons Mr White has been giving him this past year must have subconsciously been paying off at least a little bit.Įven Mike eventually seems grudgingly respectful of Walt’s casually brilliant problem-solving, although he is clearly not happy at the arrival of his new boss.
The laptop is sealed inside a heavily guarded police headquarters you say? Chump change. Maybe even poisoning a kid wasn’t enough for you to stop seeing his behaviour as ultimately justified. For others, maybe it was when he let Jane die, or had Gale killed. Some people gave up on Walt when he killed the guy with the bike lock. But then again moment when you personally lose sympathy with Walt is pretty subjective, as there have been so many potential tipping points by now. Many would argue that ironically this was the moment that Walt ‘lost’, giving up his last morsel of moral fibre in order to preserve his own sorry skin. That’s something he achieved while managing to keep Jesse, his somewhat unlikely but nevertheless greatest ally, completely onside, despite employing an outrageously complex gambit to surreptitiously poison his girlfriend’s son in the process. At its core, Breaking Bad is about good and evil and all of the shades of gray in between, a weird, tragic and often darkly comic character study of a good person who has nowhere to turn but the dark side.Įvery episode of Breaking Bad was reviewed by Billie Doux.He is firmly ensconced at the top of the methamphetamine empire of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a position he established by covering a nursing home with half of the face and body of Gus Fring, his greatest opponent. With no money and no legal way to get it, he reaches a breaking point in his life and turns to the manufacture of meth. Breaking Bad (2008-2013) is about Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a brilliant high school chemistry teacher with a pregnant wife, a disabled son, and incurable cancer.