How will Breaking Bad end?
Aug. 27th, 2011 12:45 pm"He's just a brilliant chemist with plenty of nerve and a few clever tricks up his sleeve. Beyond that, he's a mess, and from certain angles rather pathetic. Although he carries himself with a lot more confidence than he did before the cancer struck and unleashed his inner antihero, at times you look at Walt and see not Heisenberg, the dapper wraith, but Walter White, the guy who evangelized about carbon and winced whenever Hank reminded him of what a wimp he was.
Walt is at once overconfident and hopelessly neurotic. He remembers what it was like to be a white-collar enunch and beta-male punching bag and is terrified that he'll have to return to that place again. So he lets his pride eclipse his rationality and derail his self-preservation instinct. He's got that Willy Loman/Shelly "The Machine" Levine sense of desperation, that secret fear that everyone things him weak and useless, and that each time he opens his mouth he confirms the world's low estimate of his manliness. Sometimes these fears come through even when Walt's coming on like a demonically terrifying alpha male, a Wonder Bread avenger. You can see it in the eyes of drug dealers and crime bosses. They flinch when he's up in their faces, but there's always a bit of bewilderment in their eyes, because no man who looks and sounds like Walt is supposed to be talking to them that way. The experience doesn't compute. Walt's secret weapon isn't that he's scary. It's that he's so weird that he puts truly scary men on the defensive."
But I hope that Seitz is wrong about the way the series will end...