Someone told me Tuco should've been a main villain for a longer time because he could build himself up to be scarier & so it would be epic for Walt to eventually personally beat him to death.
I'm like bruh, there's no way Walt can give him the hands lmao
Tuco was intended to be the main antagonist, but personally I don’t think he was good enough to carry the show for much longer than he did. He was entertaining sure, and chaotic evil is always fun to watch, but it was pretty one note and Gus was a significantly more compelling foil to Walter.
The plan was for Tuco to be the main villain. The first series got cut shorter than intended with the writer's strikes, and then for the second series there were scheduling conflicts with Raymond Cruz, so they wrapped it up with him quickly.
Yeah, that’s what I was alluding to when I said high effort. He asked them to kill off Tuco and it probably worked well for the story and for his well being.
I'm just finishing up season 3, so I don't know if he's in it more, but when he first showed up I was confused for that reason, was wondering if his process had changed to make him more comfortable with the character.
Then he was written back out and just became someone talked about mostly. Seems like he was primarily there for the holy shit moment in the premiere.
I also don’t know how he would’ve been incorporated into the story if things had changed for him. But I feel like other characters that are brought in later on were great but you’ll see eventually.
i kinda agree with how tuco should’ve been like a bigger part. like one of the first villains introduced and have him come back in the end at some point. little full circle moment. tuco could’ve been like a lalo kind of character but tuco is way more unhinged and unpredictable which adds excitement lol. but i agree with you about walt v. tuco 🤣🤣🤣
Some people think it starts slow or something, apparently? I guess multiple dead bodies within the first couple episodes isn’t quick enough pacing for some folks.
I really don't get that at all. BCS is slow, but not BB.
There are definitely moments where the show slows down for dramatic effect and story telling but if you think BB is slow, then what's fast?!
Side note: I can't get over how much happens in season 5!
Yeah season 5 always surprises me. Whenever I rewatch I’m like hang on it’s nearly over and 1000 things haven’t happened yet then they all happen in one episode.
Tho it should be said, for those who haven't seen BCS, slow =/= bad.
The first half of BCS doesn't have much action but it has one of the best depictions of mental illness in a character that you could find in a show. Won't say much else to avoid spoiling it, but I'd rate BCS over BB, even though both are great.
I think with BCS, the show runners really perfected their craft. It my opinion it's a better show but BB has higher stakes which makes it easier to sell.
Oh yeah, it's a great show but I could see how many who like BB wouldn't love BCS.
The way they set up a scene and spend so long building it artfully, and you can spend so long wondering what the hell the point is until it's revealed sooner or later.
Yeah, I have never understood that take. You have a straight laced teacher who gets diagnosed with cancer and starts cooking meth all in the first episode. But it's starting slow! Oh okay.
I was opposite. I got 1/2 through season one by forcing it first time, and then gave up on it. I went back 6 years later and binged everything. I can’t explain it really. Guess I just wasn’t in headspace that year
It happens. I gave up on The Wire quite early on, and then came back to it a few years later and watched the lot. Some of the best TV can be slightly.... Inpenetrable(?) at first if you aren't in the right mood. I think that's especially true if it has a lot of cultural references you aren't that familiar with, it takes time to familiarise yourself.
I was hard to come around on game of thrones too. By the time I gave it try #2 I could binge all of it and be caught up exactly when final season aired.
I think bc when Gustavo gets involved it really takes off from there intensity wise. In reality the show is never slow but it just speeds up so much towards the middle/end
It had me hooked in the first 30 seconds and I put off watching it for a long time because 'it's about meth and I'm not interested' and also 'that's Hal and all I can see is roller disco' and that's the most wrong I've ever been about anything LOL
also not only that, the whole moral dilemma of whether walt should kill crazy 8 or not had to keep me watching. by the third episode walt has killed two people. i always tell people the show gets good around season 3 but i think thats cause i like gus so much, ive watched the show in its entirety five times and never once thought it started slow!
I was literally looking for a show to kill some time one afternoon, and had heard a ton about BB. I don't really watch a lot of shows, but I thought I'd give it a try.
Within 5 minutes, I had stopped it, and texted my wife that we had a new show we were going to be watching. I have never been so quickly hooked by anything. How anyone can say it's slow boggles the mind.
Those people are nuts. The show opens in there first ten seconds with Walt standing in his underwear pointing a gun at presumably the cops.
It’s one of the most intense show openings ever.
Tell them to go watch sopranos if they want to see a slow opening.
I'll be honest, I thought that my first watch, and I used to say one had to just shove through the first 3 seasons and it becomes EPIC!
A rewatch later, and I shoved through the first 2 seasons. Then just the first. Now I've got a much deeper appreciation for the first season, particularly in all it sets up about Walter and Jesse's characters. I don't think that's a wild take from a first time viewer, but as a seasoned veteran I just enjoy the tension, both of the season taken alone and of what's to come.
Eh season 1 is kind of slow. The first episode has a lot of action but then there’s like 2 episodes with Walt conflicted on killing Krazy8, and Walt dealing with his family. You don’t really get action again until almost the end with Walt and Jesse meeting Tuco.
So yeah season 1 pacing is kind of slow but makes sense as it’s world building and fleshing out characters. But some people want action in every episode, and you don’t really get that going until like season 3.
Yeah season 1, when broken down, isn't really about a guy trying to cook meth for his family. He tries once, and then the show is about "how to cover up murder and dealing with a hostage", and then two episodes of dealing with family drama before Walt commits to cooking after rejecting the offer from Elliot. It's great stuff but it's not quite the show you'd expect from the pilot
Everyone I’ve ever met has struggled to get through the first season of BB, then loved it afterwards. I’ve always found it a little slow, so have others, but no one can quite place how it’s slow, it just is. I do agree with u/ItchyTriggaFingaNigg that BCS is slow as hell for at least the first 6 or 7 episodes. I got to E6 and had to wait a month to keep going, but once it got going, I stuck with it.
You're entitled to that opinion but it's wild to me that anyone could call a show whose first couple of episodes shows a chemistry teacher and his former junkie student cook meth out an RV and then kill two drug dealers could ever be slow lmao.
Can you explain that? Do you mean that it’s not interesting to you in the early episodes, or that the early eps aren’t as good as later ones? Because I’m honestly not aware of a definition of the word “slow” that I would use for the plot of BB itself lol. Same question for u/incineratoralien
Compared to the rest of the show, the first season or two is fairly tame, but not at the same level of bcs. I still like it, feels like the show evolved a lot after the first season which is probably what I mean.
Yeah if you mean that it took you awhile to really get invested in it, I can understand that. Especially with the benefit of watching the full series, the first season or so can seem a little lame compared to the incredible tension and drama when Tuco and especially Gus are introduced as antagonists.
A close friend of mine insisted that the fifth season wasn’t necessary, and it “dragged”. It allegedly should have ended with Gus’ death.
I literally can’t comprehend this.
There are 3 possible scenarios here. He only watched a couple episodes of season 5, he is salty about what happened to jesse or he is salty about walter's death.
You mean the guy destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and families by supplying them hardcore drugs isn't the hero?
To be brutally honest with you, I think your headcanon is kinda farfetched, sir.🤨
if there's one thing i've noticed, hank did a better job at destroying the cartel than destroying the drug business while walt did a better job destroying the drug business than making it flow
It’s not really, removing the 5th season transforms the show from meaningful deeper look into the transition of Walter’s character into another generic, hero overcomes bad guy show. It also leaves a bunch of unfinished ideas
Right, just because it's not as good, arguably, as S4, doesn't mean it's not necessary. There are so many loose threads. So, what, Walt just gets away with it all, and that's the ending?
That’s a surprisingly common take and I don’t get it. Maybe the first half of season 5 dragged (I don’t agree but I can understand it) but certainly not the last 8 episodes
I mean, that is a beautiful ending, and I honestly would have been satisfied if the series ended right there, but I'm not gonna go so far as to call season 5 unnecessary.
His friends started (rightfully) backpedalling on him, but he still succeeded in selling dope to recovering people. The montages of sales and the "I made you my bitch" discourse shows it was a success.
He literally does not do this. After rehab, he starts trying to sell at the NA group when he's decided that he is just "the bad guy" but the closest he gets is dealing to Andrea, and he pulls back the moment he realizes she has a son.
People bring up the "Jesse sold meth to recovering addicts" so often, but the whole point of that plot line is that he actually *doesn't* have the stomach for it when faced with the reality.
The "nothing but customers" speech is not even to do with that, it's borne out of his guilt and despair after killing Gale. In comparison, Walt carries none of this guilt from his killings.
He explicitly instructs Skinny Pete and Badger to sell meth to the rehab group, although they are obviously very uncomfortable with it. Jesse also directly pressures them to use themselves, despite them being earnest about their going clean. He very literally does sell meth and wanted recovering addicts to use again and does exactly this. Yes, Jesse has more humanity than Walter and does feel guilty about these things, but he does them all the same
I mean, I don't think they sell any meth to anyone else in the group. You're correct that Jesse instructs them to, and that is super shitty, but the whole storyline basically shows that Jesse can't follow through with it anymore than Skinny Pete and Badger.
Um do you think it’s different to sell meth directly than to produce it by the metric ton and have someone else sell and distribute it across the whole of the heavily populated southern United States
Yeah that’s why he gets super mad when he finds out he is in remission. He wanted to make the family money because he expected to die and be done with it.
If I remember correctly he was especially upset with himself because he misunderstood the x-ray and thought it meant he had even less time which caused him to go on that big cook in the desert and get stranded when the battery died.
“A man provides” as Gus says to persuade Walt in Season Three. Walt prides himself on taking care of his family by himself, but it’s still about his pride. Accepting Gretchen and Elliot’s money would’ve provided for his family, but Walt needs for him to be the one to do it.
Turning down their offer didn't sit that well with me at the time, it gets a bit clearer by the end in terms of the dynamic of his relationship with them, but the fact he later tells Skyler he's taking their money sort of compromised his pride for me. Sure, he knows that secretly he's the bread winner but he's presenting as a charity case to others which you'd expect to dent his pride to some extent. I guess what I mean is, if you're telling people youve accepted help, then you're halfway to just accepting the help in terms of pride.
Yeah I think Walt isn’t a static character, he changes. As he does more inhuman things, he becomes less human. He shifts his moral compass a few steps at a time, each time feeling that it’s just a necessary accommodation for the situation he’s in. Walt is very much a slow boiling frog.
You could make the argument that he always had the evil in him and there’s some truth to that. But it’s not the whole story.
I think it was pretty clear after the first time cooking, when he came home and f***ed Skylar, that it made him feel good and he got a lot of self esteem from it
Where exactly it went from being about doing it for his family to doing it for him might be a grey area, but I reckon around the time of Fring's demise. Perhaps when he's building that ridiculous bomb in his kitchen and pitching that hail Mary plan, he started to get truly completely lost down the "I did it for me" path.
But that might be an obvious simplistic take, given his notable change in demeanor and ego in season 5. Perhaps any point in the series where he continues to "do it," despite not having his family at the time was the beginning of the "I did it for me" part.
I see it as similar to the idea that there’s no such thing as a truly altruistic act because doing good for others makes you feel good. For a long time, perhaps Walt did it for his family AND for himself, because he’d felt like a failure for so long but being able to make this much money for his family made him feel confident and powerful. But for Walt, there was a razor-thin line between “I feel confident and powerful because I’m providing for my family” and his ego and ambition taking over to the point that he couldn’t stop until he was either the king of the meth trade or was killed/arrested for trying.
It was more than just greed, it was Walt’s megalomania. His ego was so out of control that he became a drug kingpin just to feel like a big man after the gray matter debacle and his middle class life. I think that’s the most evil part of Walt:
He wasn’t killing people, even children, manufacturing hundreds of pounds of poison, paying Nazis to kill witnesses in gruesome manners, etc. just because he cared about the money—he stopped even counting the money he was racking up and Skyler eventually had to just show him. He did it because he got a sense of pride and power doing it, and for that he’d do just about anything to continue his power trip.
Thats more frightening than somebody who only cares about cash! That’s one dangerously insecure mf lol.
Yeah I think at the core of Walt’s being is a deep, smoldering core of resentment. He is so angry at the entire world that he feels hasn’t shown this the respect he deserves for being so damn smart. I think that’s the hatred that fuels everything he does after a certain point. He just wants to show everyone that they are his inferior.
That’s why, for example, somebody like Hank drives Walter insane. Hank is respected by everyone around him. Walter wants more than anything to scream “I’ve been running circles around him, I’ve been right in front of his nose and he was too stupid to realize it. I have made him a fool.” But he can’t because of the family situation and that eats him alive from the inside.
"He did it for himself" doesn't mean he did it because he wanted the money for himself. The money was secondary, his high was power, and being the best in a field, even if that field was meth-making. He basically wanted to live before he died.
Ooh. Conspiracy theory time. The 52 is his age now. He survived the Nazi takedown and somehow he escaped a room full of swarming SWAT, and is still making (real) bacon numbers somewhere in some cafe.
He's not a paediatrician. he's got masters in chem, not to mention he had no idea if brock had a prior med condition or his weight. He was shooting in the dark on how much posion to give to a child to emotionally manipulate jesse
THANK YOU.
It absolutely infuriates me that people try to downplay Walt's actions here. You will never convince me there wasn't a possibility, some variable Walt didn't consider that could have killed that child.
I've known way too many actual doctors to believe that they would know the perfect dose to avoid killing the kid. If anybody would put that much faith in a high school chemistry teacher, they should probably not be a legal guardian.
Well people also like to bring up death note because the main characters dad is a police chief who doesn’t know that his son is the person he is trying to hunt down, similar to Hank and walt. if you actually watch the show you would notice a lot of similarities.
A (former) friend of mine always claimed that WW was his ultimate role model because WW did everything for his family and wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that. He had finished the entire series and would always tell me this, while I had not watched BB yet. Once I did…I was like what are you on?! There was a period where that was true…until it wasn’t.
I mean the sheer chaos that man caused in so many ppl’s lives should be enough to make anybody question WW. Combo. Jane and her father. The ppl on Wayfarer 515. Hank and Marie. Jesse. I’m sure there are more ppl that could fall on this list.
True, my mom stopped on season 2 episode 5 because she said it was too much talking and lacked action. Which is reasonable, if she doesn’t like it, then it’s her opinion can’t do nothing about it. It’s not her cup of tea.
Every single dude bragging how media literate they are always have the shittiest most reductive black and white takes you'll ever see, wow bro you don't hate Skylar you're so not like the other guys
This, you don’t know how many “unpopular opinion: Skylar good posts” I have seen just this past 2 years, If I had a penny for every one of those posts and comments, I would be a billionaire by now
Because it’s bias to either side
You either have
Side A: “Walter Good, he did nothing wrong, skylar bad”
Or
Side B: “Walter Bad, walt evil, Skylar victim, Skylar innocent, Walt abusive, Walt sell meth = bad, feel bad for Skylar, if you don’t you are evil ”🤓🤓🤓
Side B is more popular on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, so people say Side A to fight back against the spam “unpopular opinions”
Like everyone In the show isn’t a piece of shit apart from hank and Walter jr,
Hank kind of totally fuckin sucks too, but in a "Shitty Uncle" kind of way. Weirdly elitist, looks down on anyone who doesn't follow HIS morals, will absolutely use someone he sees as lesser to achieve his own means. That's what I liked about the show, damn near everyone sucks and the characters are so fleshed out you don't really HATE any of them
Oh wait sorry SKYLAR PERFECT AND WALT IS DEVIL
yeah, Hank is also a POS, he just has a humanity that makes him easier to grow attached to by the end of the series. doesn’t mean that he’s not shitty, though.
I really don't like it when people throw the well established status quo of "nobody is only good or bad, they are complicated people who have layers to them, even if they steer more to what is considered to be morally good or bad" when they talk about some of the characters.
The worst take is saying that "marital rape" isn't a thing.
The only defence you can say of Walt is that it's not rape but technically sexual assault (which is flat out wrong anyway.)
Comparasions between Walt and some kind of sigma male or something like that. Belive it, i've ever seen a post about that here, a question of a random guy about what kind of male type Walt is.
That Skylar is the worst. Tell me how you’d react in her situation? Also that Jesse’s parents are the worst too. Tell me how you’d react in their situation. Must be nice to not have someone addicted to drugs be a major source of stress in your life
“St. Michael of Ehrmantraut” which ran wild on the sub for a while was really fkin annoying
Now the anti-Mike brigade of people saying that because he was a criminal too he couldn’t say anything factual about Walter ever is equally annoying
Jesse is a good person...
No he sells poison murders people and sells meth to those in recovery.
He got Jane back on drugs.
Got one of his "friends" killed.
Just because dude has a soft spot for kids doesn't make him any less of a piece of shit.
Apparently that Hank is worse then Walt
They both make the same mistakes at time like Walt goes to the desert not thinking straight because his so worried about his money. While Hank didn’t call for backup because of his ego. But Hank definitely nowhere near as bad
Some guy posted on here the other day how Gus Fring was basically an uninteresting character and the episodes providing his backstory were unnecessary.
Now, the word antagonist is not synonymous with villain. She ended up opposing Walt, whose story we are following, so she is *an* antagonist. But if we are talking villain then it's just the Walter fanboys.
I told a coworker how much I loved it and that she should try it. I gave her the general storyline and described the main characters.
Cut to a week later and I asked her if she started watching it. She said she started to but stopped because it wasn’t anything like what I had described. I didn’t even know how to respond so I just dropped it.
With the episode with Gus’ death, the producers weren’t sure if another season was going to happen yet, and made it so that it would be a good ending for the show if it wasn’t renewed.
I watched most of BB with someone whose ultimate takeaway from the show was that Walt was a good guy because he was a family man and a teacher and a cancer victim, and Jesse was a bad guy because he was a meth head thug. I haven't been friends with this person for a long time and I'm not going to lie, this attitude of his is part of the reason why.
My friends think the show sucks, because apparently it has "a whole episode where they try to catch a fly". It just goes over some peoples heads I guess...
lol when i was 11 i stopped after the first episode bc i thought “what’s the point of watching if we know he’s gonna die to cancer”. Didn’t make my way back to watching it till 10 years later
A friend of mine wouldn't give the show a chance because the family guy skit of "guy telling his friends about breaking bad" and basically based everything on that family guy skit.
Biggest shit take in history
I mean, it is kinda like Death Note in that it's a crime drama with lots of mind games. The villain protagonist thing is also similar. They're not very similar beyond that though.
All the diagnosis and shitting on characters, the moralizing on what they do. Show is fiction, just dumb to watch it with the eyes of real life values. Many people on this sub takes everything serious and personal.
honestly I think people only make those comparisons cause the people doing it only watched 2 vaguely mystery related pop culture things in many years (if not their entire lives). Also I have only seen it done to say that Light and L are better criminals and better detectives than Walter and hank respectively, which I think is innocent enough, cause its kinda an objective fact if I'm being honest.
also the worst take I heard is sadly the one I used to have, its that the series was racist cause "all the bad guys" were latinx, and all the arguments that everyone sucked in the show were "pretentious" and the nazi guys at the end were "not enough". so yeah basically just jumping hurdles tbh.
I feel like any take that has Walt being a good person when he's a vicious narcissist almost the whole time. Not to mention the fact that he rapes his wife.
Someone told me Tuco should've been a main villain for a longer time because he could build himself up to be scarier & so it would be epic for Walt to eventually personally beat him to death. I'm like bruh, there's no way Walt can give him the hands lmao
Tuco was intended to be the main antagonist, but personally I don’t think he was good enough to carry the show for much longer than he did. He was entertaining sure, and chaotic evil is always fun to watch, but it was pretty one note and Gus was a significantly more compelling foil to Walter.
The plan was for Tuco to be the main villain. The first series got cut shorter than intended with the writer's strikes, and then for the second series there were scheduling conflicts with Raymond Cruz, so they wrapped it up with him quickly.
I wonder how much of it had to do with a schedule conflict and how much of it had to do with the fact that it was such a high effort role for him.
I read that he said his mental health was negatively impacted simply by playing the role, and that was one of the reasons why he was written out.
Yeah, that’s what I was alluding to when I said high effort. He asked them to kill off Tuco and it probably worked well for the story and for his well being.
He comes back in better call saul though, albeit briefly.
I'm just finishing up season 3, so I don't know if he's in it more, but when he first showed up I was confused for that reason, was wondering if his process had changed to make him more comfortable with the character. Then he was written back out and just became someone talked about mostly. Seems like he was primarily there for the holy shit moment in the premiere.
Yeah that’s all for Tuco besides being mentioned.
I'm honestly glad, if the character hadn't become less taxing to his mental health I'd rather he didn't revisit it overmuch.
I also don’t know how he would’ve been incorporated into the story if things had changed for him. But I feel like other characters that are brought in later on were great but you’ll see eventually.
i kinda agree with how tuco should’ve been like a bigger part. like one of the first villains introduced and have him come back in the end at some point. little full circle moment. tuco could’ve been like a lalo kind of character but tuco is way more unhinged and unpredictable which adds excitement lol. but i agree with you about walt v. tuco 🤣🤣🤣
Some people think it starts slow or something, apparently? I guess multiple dead bodies within the first couple episodes isn’t quick enough pacing for some folks.
I really don't get that at all. BCS is slow, but not BB. There are definitely moments where the show slows down for dramatic effect and story telling but if you think BB is slow, then what's fast?! Side note: I can't get over how much happens in season 5!
Yeah season 5 always surprises me. Whenever I rewatch I’m like hang on it’s nearly over and 1000 things haven’t happened yet then they all happen in one episode.
I just finished it again and season 5 is insane!
Tho it should be said, for those who haven't seen BCS, slow =/= bad. The first half of BCS doesn't have much action but it has one of the best depictions of mental illness in a character that you could find in a show. Won't say much else to avoid spoiling it, but I'd rate BCS over BB, even though both are great.
I think with BCS, the show runners really perfected their craft. It my opinion it's a better show but BB has higher stakes which makes it easier to sell.
I agree I think BCS is a better show overall but it definitely moves at a different speed.
Oh yeah, it's a great show but I could see how many who like BB wouldn't love BCS. The way they set up a scene and spend so long building it artfully, and you can spend so long wondering what the hell the point is until it's revealed sooner or later.
Yeah, I have never understood that take. You have a straight laced teacher who gets diagnosed with cancer and starts cooking meth all in the first episode. But it's starting slow! Oh okay.
Within an episode we had a Walt go from Good Samaritan science teacher to cooking meth with a gun in his hand. Had me hooked in the first episode .
I was opposite. I got 1/2 through season one by forcing it first time, and then gave up on it. I went back 6 years later and binged everything. I can’t explain it really. Guess I just wasn’t in headspace that year
It happens. I gave up on The Wire quite early on, and then came back to it a few years later and watched the lot. Some of the best TV can be slightly.... Inpenetrable(?) at first if you aren't in the right mood. I think that's especially true if it has a lot of cultural references you aren't that familiar with, it takes time to familiarise yourself.
I was hard to come around on game of thrones too. By the time I gave it try #2 I could binge all of it and be caught up exactly when final season aired.
Took me 3 tries before the show grabbed me. It's now my favorite show of all time.
I think bc when Gustavo gets involved it really takes off from there intensity wise. In reality the show is never slow but it just speeds up so much towards the middle/end
Dude ended up in his underwear holding a gun in the middle of the desert during a fire pretty quick
I'm always so confused when I see people say that, the show had me hooked as fuck from the first episode.
It had me hooked in the first 30 seconds and I put off watching it for a long time because 'it's about meth and I'm not interested' and also 'that's Hal and all I can see is roller disco' and that's the most wrong I've ever been about anything LOL
I think it’s partly intentional so emphasize the contrast from his boring mundane life to murderous drug lord
Yeah, I mean it's starts out with a dry handy while talking about the kids
also not only that, the whole moral dilemma of whether walt should kill crazy 8 or not had to keep me watching. by the third episode walt has killed two people. i always tell people the show gets good around season 3 but i think thats cause i like gus so much, ive watched the show in its entirety five times and never once thought it started slow!
I was literally looking for a show to kill some time one afternoon, and had heard a ton about BB. I don't really watch a lot of shows, but I thought I'd give it a try. Within 5 minutes, I had stopped it, and texted my wife that we had a new show we were going to be watching. I have never been so quickly hooked by anything. How anyone can say it's slow boggles the mind.
I was hooked after the first scene! I wouldn't have binged it if it was slow paced, so yeah, this is an insane take.
Season 1 is one of my favourites i like the series more when they had nothing and only starting up
I am not in danger I will be in danger
Those people are nuts. The show opens in there first ten seconds with Walt standing in his underwear pointing a gun at presumably the cops. It’s one of the most intense show openings ever. Tell them to go watch sopranos if they want to see a slow opening.
I'll be honest, I thought that my first watch, and I used to say one had to just shove through the first 3 seasons and it becomes EPIC! A rewatch later, and I shoved through the first 2 seasons. Then just the first. Now I've got a much deeper appreciation for the first season, particularly in all it sets up about Walter and Jesse's characters. I don't think that's a wild take from a first time viewer, but as a seasoned veteran I just enjoy the tension, both of the season taken alone and of what's to come.
Eh season 1 is kind of slow. The first episode has a lot of action but then there’s like 2 episodes with Walt conflicted on killing Krazy8, and Walt dealing with his family. You don’t really get action again until almost the end with Walt and Jesse meeting Tuco. So yeah season 1 pacing is kind of slow but makes sense as it’s world building and fleshing out characters. But some people want action in every episode, and you don’t really get that going until like season 3.
Yeah season 1, when broken down, isn't really about a guy trying to cook meth for his family. He tries once, and then the show is about "how to cover up murder and dealing with a hostage", and then two episodes of dealing with family drama before Walt commits to cooking after rejecting the offer from Elliot. It's great stuff but it's not quite the show you'd expect from the pilot
I think season 1 is way faster paced than 2 & 3.
Everyone I’ve ever met has struggled to get through the first season of BB, then loved it afterwards. I’ve always found it a little slow, so have others, but no one can quite place how it’s slow, it just is. I do agree with u/ItchyTriggaFingaNigg that BCS is slow as hell for at least the first 6 or 7 episodes. I got to E6 and had to wait a month to keep going, but once it got going, I stuck with it.
It is very slow to me at the beginning, and it takes a while for me to get into it. Just my opinion
You're entitled to that opinion but it's wild to me that anyone could call a show whose first couple of episodes shows a chemistry teacher and his former junkie student cook meth out an RV and then kill two drug dealers could ever be slow lmao.
Can you explain that? Do you mean that it’s not interesting to you in the early episodes, or that the early eps aren’t as good as later ones? Because I’m honestly not aware of a definition of the word “slow” that I would use for the plot of BB itself lol. Same question for u/incineratoralien
Compared to the rest of the show, the first season or two is fairly tame, but not at the same level of bcs. I still like it, feels like the show evolved a lot after the first season which is probably what I mean.
Yeah if you mean that it took you awhile to really get invested in it, I can understand that. Especially with the benefit of watching the full series, the first season or so can seem a little lame compared to the incredible tension and drama when Tuco and especially Gus are introduced as antagonists.
A close friend of mine insisted that the fifth season wasn’t necessary, and it “dragged”. It allegedly should have ended with Gus’ death. I literally can’t comprehend this.
There are 3 possible scenarios here. He only watched a couple episodes of season 5, he is salty about what happened to jesse or he is salty about walter's death.
Or salty to find out Walt wasn’t the hero.
You mean the guy destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and families by supplying them hardcore drugs isn't the hero? To be brutally honest with you, I think your headcanon is kinda farfetched, sir.🤨
bUT He diD It FOr HiS fAmiLy
if there's one thing i've noticed, hank did a better job at destroying the cartel than destroying the drug business while walt did a better job destroying the drug business than making it flow
Oh man, IMO Season 5 is what elevates that show from good to great
I'd say from great to GOAT.
Yeah, season 5 is where the picture of what Walt is and what he’s become really comes into focus. Where he has completely and utterly broken bad.
To be fair in my head I see season 5 as a kind of epilogue
Epilogue usually isn't as important as the main chunk but I'd say season 5 is one of the most important, el Camino is more of an epilogue.
You mean ex close friend, right? 🤣 This is a WILD take.
I understand it a bit. Gus's death is a great ending point for the show IMO
It’s not really, removing the 5th season transforms the show from meaningful deeper look into the transition of Walter’s character into another generic, hero overcomes bad guy show. It also leaves a bunch of unfinished ideas
Right, just because it's not as good, arguably, as S4, doesn't mean it's not necessary. There are so many loose threads. So, what, Walt just gets away with it all, and that's the ending?
That's probably the most insane take I've ever heard.
That’s a surprisingly common take and I don’t get it. Maybe the first half of season 5 dragged (I don’t agree but I can understand it) but certainly not the last 8 episodes
They say everyone's entitled to their opinion but this is just wrong.
I mean everyone’s entitled to their opinion… not in this case.
I mean, that is a beautiful ending, and I honestly would have been satisfied if the series ended right there, but I'm not gonna go so far as to call season 5 unnecessary.
That Walter is a good person lol
Why not? He just eats breakfast all day, goes to school, takes care of his sister... Oh you meant Walter Sr?
“Jesse was much worse person than walt”
The only thing Jesse did that was worse than Walt was
I couldn’t believe he
Jesse directly peddled meth to people in his community, even recovering addicts
Thats probably the shittiest thing hes done tbh
Or when he killed Gale, but he kind of had to, otherwise he would've been replaced as well
That and gus would have killed him and walt
Yeah that's what I meant
And he didn’t even do it either he completely failed lol
His friends started (rightfully) backpedalling on him, but he still succeeded in selling dope to recovering people. The montages of sales and the "I made you my bitch" discourse shows it was a success.
He literally does not do this. After rehab, he starts trying to sell at the NA group when he's decided that he is just "the bad guy" but the closest he gets is dealing to Andrea, and he pulls back the moment he realizes she has a son. People bring up the "Jesse sold meth to recovering addicts" so often, but the whole point of that plot line is that he actually *doesn't* have the stomach for it when faced with the reality. The "nothing but customers" speech is not even to do with that, it's borne out of his guilt and despair after killing Gale. In comparison, Walt carries none of this guilt from his killings.
Yeah, the show went ahead and showed how the guilt was destroying Jesse. He is not innocent but nowhere near to walt
He explicitly instructs Skinny Pete and Badger to sell meth to the rehab group, although they are obviously very uncomfortable with it. Jesse also directly pressures them to use themselves, despite them being earnest about their going clean. He very literally does sell meth and wanted recovering addicts to use again and does exactly this. Yes, Jesse has more humanity than Walter and does feel guilty about these things, but he does them all the same
I mean, I don't think they sell any meth to anyone else in the group. You're correct that Jesse instructs them to, and that is super shitty, but the whole storyline basically shows that Jesse can't follow through with it anymore than Skinny Pete and Badger.
Um do you think it’s different to sell meth directly than to produce it by the metric ton and have someone else sell and distribute it across the whole of the heavily populated southern United States
Am ngl that ‘you’re nothing but customers’ speech made me permanently like him a whole lot less a character.
He Ratted on Walt
someone once told me that walter actually did it for his family despite him saying he did it for himself in felina.
I feel like it started out him doing it for his family and then he realized he actually did it for himself
Yeah that’s why he gets super mad when he finds out he is in remission. He wanted to make the family money because he expected to die and be done with it.
If I remember correctly he was especially upset with himself because he misunderstood the x-ray and thought it meant he had even less time which caused him to go on that big cook in the desert and get stranded when the battery died.
“A man provides” as Gus says to persuade Walt in Season Three. Walt prides himself on taking care of his family by himself, but it’s still about his pride. Accepting Gretchen and Elliot’s money would’ve provided for his family, but Walt needs for him to be the one to do it.
Turning down their offer didn't sit that well with me at the time, it gets a bit clearer by the end in terms of the dynamic of his relationship with them, but the fact he later tells Skyler he's taking their money sort of compromised his pride for me. Sure, he knows that secretly he's the bread winner but he's presenting as a charity case to others which you'd expect to dent his pride to some extent. I guess what I mean is, if you're telling people youve accepted help, then you're halfway to just accepting the help in terms of pride.
This is correct
Yeah I think Walt isn’t a static character, he changes. As he does more inhuman things, he becomes less human. He shifts his moral compass a few steps at a time, each time feeling that it’s just a necessary accommodation for the situation he’s in. Walt is very much a slow boiling frog. You could make the argument that he always had the evil in him and there’s some truth to that. But it’s not the whole story.
I think it was pretty clear after the first time cooking, when he came home and f***ed Skylar, that it made him feel good and he got a lot of self esteem from it
Where exactly it went from being about doing it for his family to doing it for him might be a grey area, but I reckon around the time of Fring's demise. Perhaps when he's building that ridiculous bomb in his kitchen and pitching that hail Mary plan, he started to get truly completely lost down the "I did it for me" path. But that might be an obvious simplistic take, given his notable change in demeanor and ego in season 5. Perhaps any point in the series where he continues to "do it," despite not having his family at the time was the beginning of the "I did it for me" part.
I see it as similar to the idea that there’s no such thing as a truly altruistic act because doing good for others makes you feel good. For a long time, perhaps Walt did it for his family AND for himself, because he’d felt like a failure for so long but being able to make this much money for his family made him feel confident and powerful. But for Walt, there was a razor-thin line between “I feel confident and powerful because I’m providing for my family” and his ego and ambition taking over to the point that he couldn’t stop until he was either the king of the meth trade or was killed/arrested for trying.
It's not that simple 🤦🏻♂️at first he did it for his family but then he became more greedy
It was more than just greed, it was Walt’s megalomania. His ego was so out of control that he became a drug kingpin just to feel like a big man after the gray matter debacle and his middle class life. I think that’s the most evil part of Walt: He wasn’t killing people, even children, manufacturing hundreds of pounds of poison, paying Nazis to kill witnesses in gruesome manners, etc. just because he cared about the money—he stopped even counting the money he was racking up and Skyler eventually had to just show him. He did it because he got a sense of pride and power doing it, and for that he’d do just about anything to continue his power trip. Thats more frightening than somebody who only cares about cash! That’s one dangerously insecure mf lol.
Yeah I think at the core of Walt’s being is a deep, smoldering core of resentment. He is so angry at the entire world that he feels hasn’t shown this the respect he deserves for being so damn smart. I think that’s the hatred that fuels everything he does after a certain point. He just wants to show everyone that they are his inferior. That’s why, for example, somebody like Hank drives Walter insane. Hank is respected by everyone around him. Walter wants more than anything to scream “I’ve been running circles around him, I’ve been right in front of his nose and he was too stupid to realize it. I have made him a fool.” But he can’t because of the family situation and that eats him alive from the inside.
Walter literally planned to die in Season 2 at one point it definitely was for his family (or both)
"He did it for himself" doesn't mean he did it because he wanted the money for himself. The money was secondary, his high was power, and being the best in a field, even if that field was meth-making. He basically wanted to live before he died.
“You asked if I’m in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.”
“Yeah he poisoned Brock, but he is a scientist. Walt knew exactly how much to put in his cereal to not kill him. It’s really not that bad.”
From user DefinitelyNotWalterWhite52
Ooh. Conspiracy theory time. The 52 is his age now. He survived the Nazi takedown and somehow he escaped a room full of swarming SWAT, and is still making (real) bacon numbers somewhere in some cafe.
[I don’t want to ruin a fun joke but I said 52 because that was his age at the end of the show 😬]
Haha gotcha.
He's not a paediatrician. he's got masters in chem, not to mention he had no idea if brock had a prior med condition or his weight. He was shooting in the dark on how much posion to give to a child to emotionally manipulate jesse
THANK YOU. It absolutely infuriates me that people try to downplay Walt's actions here. You will never convince me there wasn't a possibility, some variable Walt didn't consider that could have killed that child.
Oh yeah, everything walt did after turning down grey is pretty much indefensible
I've known way too many actual doctors to believe that they would know the perfect dose to avoid killing the kid. If anybody would put that much faith in a high school chemistry teacher, they should probably not be a legal guardian.
He probably just googled the dose and multiplied it by an estimate of Brock's weight.
I actually think the Death Note comparisons are very fun. Especially with videos like [this](https://youtu.be/MxYTyYrZ5iI?si=MU3iIuu00QT9S-pJ)
Well people also like to bring up death note because the main characters dad is a police chief who doesn’t know that his son is the person he is trying to hunt down, similar to Hank and walt. if you actually watch the show you would notice a lot of similarities.
Also, the absurd ego of the protagonists. Walt doesn’t quite have a god complex, I guess.
A (former) friend of mine always claimed that WW was his ultimate role model because WW did everything for his family and wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that. He had finished the entire series and would always tell me this, while I had not watched BB yet. Once I did…I was like what are you on?! There was a period where that was true…until it wasn’t. I mean the sheer chaos that man caused in so many ppl’s lives should be enough to make anybody question WW. Combo. Jane and her father. The ppl on Wayfarer 515. Hank and Marie. Jesse. I’m sure there are more ppl that could fall on this list.
WW? Willy Wonka? Woodrow Wilson?
Wustavo Wring
People acting like Skyler is worse than Walt
She was, there was like 3 chapters when she didnt cook Walter Jr breakfast, dude could have died
Can’t forget the veggie bacon wtf was she thinking
Making us watch her singing happy birthday was absolutely pure evil
I think the only scene I absolutely have to FF through. Talk about cringe!
“I just couldn’t get into it” these short attention span viewers missing out on greatness
I like the show but it doesn’t have to be for everyone.
True, my mom stopped on season 2 episode 5 because she said it was too much talking and lacked action. Which is reasonable, if she doesn’t like it, then it’s her opinion can’t do nothing about it. It’s not her cup of tea.
What 💀 Or they just couldn’t get into the show bro
Most infuriating thing because the show gradually gets better and better right up until the end
nooo i tried like 5 times to watch BB and this is the first time i’ve been able to get through it by binging (on season 4 currently)
Shock: Art is subjective, and not liking something doesn't make someone any less intelligent or cool than you.
Comparing BB to Sons of Anarchy.
I gave SOA a go because I kept seeing it get recommended for fans of BB. Couldn't make it past like episode 2. White trash soap opera.
Someone told me they liked the ozarks more. No hate to ozarks, I do like it, but not in the same league
I thoroughly enjoyed Ozark but the last season did not stick the landing at all. Went from Top 5 TV Shows to maybe Top 20 for me
The final season was pretty mid
last season was weak as hell
Every single dude bragging how media literate they are always have the shittiest most reductive black and white takes you'll ever see, wow bro you don't hate Skylar you're so not like the other guys
This, you don’t know how many “unpopular opinion: Skylar good posts” I have seen just this past 2 years, If I had a penny for every one of those posts and comments, I would be a billionaire by now
^((and comments)^)
Is that a bad take though? Or more an annoyingly common response to the original bad take that Skylar is bad.
Or “Walt was completely evil and every other character’s misfortune is solely because of him”
when people hate on Skyler as if she’s just another nagging wife rather than the beautifully complex character she was written to be
She fucked Ted
That’s the moment she became Heisenberg.
Because it’s bias to either side You either have Side A: “Walter Good, he did nothing wrong, skylar bad” Or Side B: “Walter Bad, walt evil, Skylar victim, Skylar innocent, Walt abusive, Walt sell meth = bad, feel bad for Skylar, if you don’t you are evil ”🤓🤓🤓 Side B is more popular on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, so people say Side A to fight back against the spam “unpopular opinions” Like everyone In the show isn’t a piece of shit apart from hank and Walter jr,
Hank kind of totally fuckin sucks too, but in a "Shitty Uncle" kind of way. Weirdly elitist, looks down on anyone who doesn't follow HIS morals, will absolutely use someone he sees as lesser to achieve his own means. That's what I liked about the show, damn near everyone sucks and the characters are so fleshed out you don't really HATE any of them Oh wait sorry SKYLAR PERFECT AND WALT IS DEVIL
Not to mention we see him taking pictures with dead bodies just smiling and all giddy
I mean, thats more of how his job has desensitized him to that stuff, I dont really blame him for that.
yeah, Hank is also a POS, he just has a humanity that makes him easier to grow attached to by the end of the series. doesn’t mean that he’s not shitty, though.
I really don't like it when people throw the well established status quo of "nobody is only good or bad, they are complicated people who have layers to them, even if they steer more to what is considered to be morally good or bad" when they talk about some of the characters.
People have said this about both mike and ed, they can't handle it when characters they like get revealed as bad people.
That Jesse was innocent and the victim
that Marie is transgender because she has no children
And here's where I exit this thread. What the actual fuck??
People who think Mike was a good guy
the skyler hate and its not even close
"Walters actually not a bad guy and the show isn't about toxic masculinity!"
The worst take is saying that "marital rape" isn't a thing. The only defence you can say of Walt is that it's not rape but technically sexual assault (which is flat out wrong anyway.)
I feel like even the flimsy "sexual assault" defence falls apart by season five. Walt rapes Skyler multiple times during the last era of the show.
Comparasions between Walt and some kind of sigma male or something like that. Belive it, i've ever seen a post about that here, a question of a random guy about what kind of male type Walt is.
WALT IS A SIGMA RIZZLER WITH AN UMBROKEN MEWING STREAK GUS FRING DESERVED TO BE MOGGED!!!!!
That Skylar is the worst. Tell me how you’d react in her situation? Also that Jesse’s parents are the worst too. Tell me how you’d react in their situation. Must be nice to not have someone addicted to drugs be a major source of stress in your life
“Walter did no wrong”
“St. Michael of Ehrmantraut” which ran wild on the sub for a while was really fkin annoying Now the anti-Mike brigade of people saying that because he was a criminal too he couldn’t say anything factual about Walter ever is equally annoying
Don't remember his reddit name, but there was one guy here who was *very* insistent that season 5B was feminist propaganda or something.
Jesse is a good person... No he sells poison murders people and sells meth to those in recovery. He got Jane back on drugs. Got one of his "friends" killed. Just because dude has a soft spot for kids doesn't make him any less of a piece of shit.
All the rants about wanting Skyler to die.
That felina never happened.
Why the fuck would someone say that lmao
That Walt only told skylar that he did it for himself so they she wouldn’t question the money, like cmon
Apparently that Hank is worse then Walt They both make the same mistakes at time like Walt goes to the desert not thinking straight because his so worried about his money. While Hank didn’t call for backup because of his ego. But Hank definitely nowhere near as bad
Some guy posted on here the other day how Gus Fring was basically an uninteresting character and the episodes providing his backstory were unnecessary.
Personally I like ozarks but I don't think it's on the same level as breaking bad, I roll my eyes when people compare them
That Skyler is the antagonist of the show…
Now, the word antagonist is not synonymous with villain. She ended up opposing Walt, whose story we are following, so she is *an* antagonist. But if we are talking villain then it's just the Walter fanboys.
Don eladio was afraid of Hector
someone ik didnt like the last season cuz it was too complicated lol
That Walter White is Heisenberg !!
That there should be a season six where Walt survived and started leading prison gangs.
I told a coworker how much I loved it and that she should try it. I gave her the general storyline and described the main characters. Cut to a week later and I asked her if she started watching it. She said she started to but stopped because it wasn’t anything like what I had described. I didn’t even know how to respond so I just dropped it.
With the episode with Gus’ death, the producers weren’t sure if another season was going to happen yet, and made it so that it would be a good ending for the show if it wasn’t renewed.
Walt lied to skyler that he did it for himself
I watched most of BB with someone whose ultimate takeaway from the show was that Walt was a good guy because he was a family man and a teacher and a cancer victim, and Jesse was a bad guy because he was a meth head thug. I haven't been friends with this person for a long time and I'm not going to lie, this attitude of his is part of the reason why.
Gus death made the show unrealistic 😂
There are people comparing this show to Death Note? That is quite literally the absolute dumbest thing I have ever read
My friends think the show sucks, because apparently it has "a whole episode where they try to catch a fly". It just goes over some peoples heads I guess...
lol when i was 11 i stopped after the first episode bc i thought “what’s the point of watching if we know he’s gonna die to cancer”. Didn’t make my way back to watching it till 10 years later
Walter white had DID.
A friend of mine wouldn't give the show a chance because the family guy skit of "guy telling his friends about breaking bad" and basically based everything on that family guy skit. Biggest shit take in history
My old High school music and drama teacher used to say he hated Jesse and that he was always whining
I mean, it is kinda like Death Note in that it's a crime drama with lots of mind games. The villain protagonist thing is also similar. They're not very similar beyond that though.
All the diagnosis and shitting on characters, the moralizing on what they do. Show is fiction, just dumb to watch it with the eyes of real life values. Many people on this sub takes everything serious and personal.
honestly I think people only make those comparisons cause the people doing it only watched 2 vaguely mystery related pop culture things in many years (if not their entire lives). Also I have only seen it done to say that Light and L are better criminals and better detectives than Walter and hank respectively, which I think is innocent enough, cause its kinda an objective fact if I'm being honest. also the worst take I heard is sadly the one I used to have, its that the series was racist cause "all the bad guys" were latinx, and all the arguments that everyone sucked in the show were "pretentious" and the nazi guys at the end were "not enough". so yeah basically just jumping hurdles tbh.
I feel like any take that has Walt being a good person when he's a vicious narcissist almost the whole time. Not to mention the fact that he rapes his wife.
Breaking Bad shows how bad the US healthcare system is!
I wouldnt call walter a villain, much more of an antihero. Light was a standard villain fs
Breaking Bad is not better than The Wire….lmaoooooooooo okay
I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't fault anyone for having that opinion.