**********SPOILER ALERT**********
Walter White, it's time to be reborn. But can you do it while being dead inside? You broke BAD, and now you are BROKEN. But you are still alive, your family is still alive, your surrogate son still loves you even though he hates you. You are about to take the next step in evolution. Is it bad? Is it good? I have no clue. But I know it’s probably something we have never seen before; and as frightened as I am, I look forward to it; and because of that, maybe I can get some sleep now.
by Sam Hanchett
I don't know how anyone can sleep after watching the last episode of BREAKING BAD. These characters, the anxiety and frustration they have had to deal with is something most of us will never know. But the effects were so profound for us viewers nonetheless. The thought of facing one's demise through a death sentence brought on by natural causes makes people want to hope in the face of that, want to be remembered, well at least, you would think. Not Walter White. From the beginning of this show the dilemma he has faced is one of extreme insecurity in what he has not accomplished in his fifty years on this earth. How can one be so ambitious when young but end up just a simple family man, a simple high school chemistry teacher who struggles to pay the bills that he needs a second part time job at a car wash? It is not a horrible situation to be in necessarily when looking out on the world and having some perspective. But our perspective is always molded through how we grew up and where we find ourselves in the present and what we dreamed that present would be. We can pretend to be someone else, pretend to be in a worse situation, be thankful for what we have, but in truth we know it’s still not good enough.
Walter takes a blue-collar approach when facing death, at first. Because this money will give my family comfort when I am gone; that’s all I care about. But then he doesn’t die right away and the rush of being really good at something takes over. The rush of not caring about certain moral consequences is not an issue because he finds solace in finally knowing that he is truly going for it, not thinking what can go wrong, not thinking about failing, which are the things that can hold a human hostage when trying to accomplish something special and risky. Anything in this world worth having usually involves some degree of risk. But how do we strike a logical risk/balance quotient without going to the extreme? In the first season he was faced with imminent death, imminent cancer. He gathered his intellectual chips and ran with it. He weighed the pros and cons and made a decision. HE MADE A DECISION! An extremely hard one; one that flows opposite, and cuts the flecks of our societal values. QUESTIONS, questions, questions. What value does your decision have on your immediate life? What value does your decision have on the people around you? What value does your decision have on people you have never met, who imbibe an illegal product that will destroy their lives? The product that YOU made--to get your family money, the money you could never make legally because you got cut out of certain advances when you were younger. Certain advances that were yours rightfully, but you just didn't play the game right. So then you settled into the family life, got complacent maybe, but when DEATH stared you in the face, you got up! Your energy surpassed legality. You weren't religious. You weighed life, and what you could get out of it with your talents in the shortest amount of time...because you were dying. You went to the extreme. You broke BAD, because this universe doesn't care right? In your mind, afterlife is not an issue. The only thing you know is earth, and the care for those loved ones still living on it. THE MAN PROVIDES for his family; and sometimes a man will do what he must for his family, FUCK the rest of society. But society will cause repercussions, especially when doing something illegal; so many complications. You straddle death daily to provide, but by actually doing something that makes a ton of money, and realizing that you matter, really matter in "a business that could be listed on NASDAQ”. Walter White, your tremendous skills are now noticed. You became the MAN, you became tough, you became a killer, and because the universe might not judge, you provided superficial sanctity for your loved ones but also put them in grave danger. What price do we have to pay for a life fulfilled through our talents, traversing the glossy ambiguity of this existence? Is living a truly fulfilled life facing danger all the time? None of us want to be him, but a part of us wants to experience that extreme stress. Because we don't experience some sort of similar anxiety we feel like we are not doing enough. We don't want to make high-grade blue crystal in a lab but we yearn to do something that is just as clean, just as succinct, but prosperous for humanity or makes us feel completely satisfied about our existence on Earth. This is prosperous for Walt's bottom line. It gives him the ultimate success of pride and money, but the stresses of death and gangsters run amok and so on, haunt him. Look at season 3. Walt was the employee of the month every month for Gus, but Jesse became the moral beacon. A morality that caused Walt to kill evil drug dealers to save his (Jesse's) life, but also to save future children from ever being brought up in that drug culture. He wants to make crystal meth to financially secure his family but what happens when he comes face to face with men who sell his product but also employ children to deal and murder for them. The “goodness” in him, had to act, had to save Jesse, had to rid the earth of this scum even though he ultimately knew it could cost him his life. Walt, Jesse, Gus, don't matter in the scheme of all human existence. They just have their life, they have their intimate thoughts, they are selfish, but want to be unselfish, while being selfish. They want to have morality while creating something that rips people's lives to shreds. Their experience is fictional and completely extreme, but in a small way encapsulates our own thought process. We are good. We are evil. What's stopping us from being both? If earthly law can’t get us, what will?
Relationships will get us. Secrets can only go so far. Tell tale hearts will rise in the non-sociopath who tries to do big and small picture good by doing so many evil things. Bad, good, these two qualities can bring a person to destruction or ultimate success. Walt wants to make crystal meth to financially secure his family but what happens when everything starts to frantically fall apart? Do you lie when it is the right time to lie? What will you do for the people you love? What extent will you go to for them? And if you go there and it invigorates you, yet you know whatever you're doing is wrong, is it wrong if you can get some semblance of god (or maybe a god complex) from it? The last five minutes of "CRAWLSPACE" threw my whole body into a contorted mess of shivers. Walter White had worked so hard to provide an out for him, his family, how he would be remembered, and through facing death for over a year's time he realized that he might have sealed the death of his brother-in-law, his 16 year old son his wife, and his infant daughter. He started this story ready to die, ready to do whatever it took to make his family exist successfully without him. He's worked incredibly hard, he's murdered for the overall good (even let someone die to save Jesse, again, in the long run, in a way), he's looked death in the face, but because of all of that his family might vanish from this earth. Was it worth it? And what is "worth" even mean to him anymore? Decisions, decisions, decisions, what do they mean? There are levels for sure. But by the end of the episode Walter realizes what people realize who are good and bad and try to be good and try to be bad when they want to, when they have to, when they need to...There are results that you can't see. The more you interact with humans the less you can get away with(?) Everything comes crumbling down on him when he goes to look for his "salvation" money underneath his house. He finds that he does not have the cash to pay for his family's speedy getaway, and then Skyler suddenly appears to tell him why. He is at rock bottom, he has been fired by Gus, but not killed, yet. He starts to cry, and you feel for his worn meekness. He's so confused! He's facing death and his family is facing death, and he has this thought, this thought, "I started this fucked up shit to rescue my family, and now it has all gone a rye, and now because I did this they might all die, and I don't know why my wife gave her ex-lover a lot of money, and this is all hitting me at once and my face hurts so much because of all the times I've been punched and so on, and I AM in the crawlspace of my own basement, of the house I never wanted to live in (I WAS TOO GOOD ENOUGH TO LIVE IN) scrambling for money to save us all, in the dirt, in the grime. Where is the money!!!??? There is not enough. I am in dirt. I am in grime. I have realized that life is severely unpredictable and that makes me incredibly sad, lying in filth, underneath my house, I am aware that I am guilty. I am wrought with unholy values. I've hit my coffin bottom...But then something happens...his whimpering effortlessly turns into the most sinister laughter I have ever heard in my life. Slowly but surely the dreadful cackling pours out of him and keeps going and going and going... It permeates our psyche, it rattles our journey with this character, echoing the worst JOKER nightmares that we have ever had. He has finally found a true, wondrous, and horrifying release in himself. Finally!
Walter White, it's time to be reborn. But can you do it while being dead inside? You broke BAD, and now you are BROKEN. But you are still alive, your family is still alive, your surrogate son still loves you even though he hates you. You are about to take the next step in evolution. Is it bad? Is it good? I have no clue. But I know it’s probably something we have never seen before; and as frightened as I am, I look forward to it; and because of that, maybe I can get some sleep now.
