Breaking Bad

That's what he says, of course, at least to himself, but it's pretty clear by the end that it was a rationalization and that he does what he does out of bitterness and pride. There are several points in the series where he has the chance to get out and still see his family taken care of, but would have to swallow his pride to do so...and he refuses, every time. From refusing Gretchen and Elliot's hand out in the first season to asking Gus "...or else what?" after he's given a way to leave the drug business after having made tons of money already.

Every time he has to choose between his pride and his stated reasons for doing these things, he chooses his pride.

Well, it is a balance in terms of narrative. What he intended vs what he with an IQ like his could have reasonably expected to happen is a different topic entirely. I don’t think he ‘intended’ to have Jesse enslaved by the Nazis for such a long time, either, as he thought they’d do what he said and kill him. To my mind, he didn’t intend half of it, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to compare how things started to how they ended.

Fair point about H&M. I have discussed it with people out loud, but I would agree it doesn’t pop up that often. Also I’ve always felt they were generally well-aligned and reasonably happy, at least prior to his injury, so it’s just a less contentious topic.

Re: Hank. His evolution from fratty cliche to genuinely deep and interesting character is one of my favorite things about the show.

Exactly, and in Season 5 when he comes to see Skyler in the aforementioned dreary apartment, he finally admits it.

I did say this was Walt’s intention “When he started this whole venture”. I don’t think this was at all a “rationalization” at that time.

I don’t see why he should take a “hand out” from Gretchen & Elliot. He felt rightly or wrongly that he had been cheated by them. I don’t think I would take a handout from them in these circumstances. He got them in the end so to me that was satisfying.

Walt changed drastically & dramatically. He loved his Heisenberg rôle & was so proud of being “I am the one who knocks”, as he boasted to Skyler. Prideful, if you like, but it was the first time in over a decade since he had felt this way.

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Totally mine too. His arc became so very dark. Gomez his buddy was a very well-drawn rôle too.

Harder to say. But if it's not a rationalization at the exact moment he begins, it clearly is very soon into the venture.

Because that's what you do if your first priority is, in fact, to protect your family financially. You swallow your pride for their sake. The fact that he doesn't shows us why he's actually doing it.

It's very interesting seeing other characters realize things about Walt he hasn't even admitted to himself, like when the ever-perceptive Gus keeps him working with his whole "a man provides" speech.

This, I think, has a lot of do with people's differing reactions to the show: whether or not they think of him as being the hero and not merely the protagonist. The idea of a show's lead character being the latter but not the former is still a relatively new idea, and there was obviously a real frog-boiling aspect to the way a lot of viewers cheered for Walt even while the same person in reality would rightly be seen as a monster. It's always interesting hearing which moment in the show it was that they made the switch (and jarring to occasionally run into people for whom it never happened)!

Anyway, here's an article where showrunner Vince Gillian talks about the Gretchen and Elliot stuff. In short, he didn't think of them as the bad guys and didn't intend us to, and Walt leaves the company because of his rampant inferiority complex. Death of the Author and all that, but hopefully people find it interesting.

Good addendum, I briefly forgot about "Gomey." Hallmark of a great show when secondary or even tertiary characters are so well written.

Right. My favorite season was the last one & I absolutely loved Jesse Plemons as Todd. (Favorite scenes ever in the entire show are when they hijacked the train.) I also loved Todd’s uncle, et al. Dreadful characters (Lydia included also), but hugely entertaining.

Let’s not forget poor old Gale. Very well-written character.

What a strange expression. “Frog-boiling” is something I have never heard before.

I never thought of them as “bad guys” per se, but rather creepy. (Loved it when they think they’ll have laser guns pointed at themselves for the rest of their lives.)

Am not gonna go back & look for this, but didn’t Walt take a cash payment from them so he could pay his rent or some such? Some ludicrously small amount, but one he needed badly? I didn’t interpret this as him feeling inferior & I suspect it wasn’t too long before he realized his mistake.

Well, it's shorthand for "boiling a frog," which is how the idiom is usually phrased. It refers to the (possibly apocryphal) fact that a frog will sit in a pot of water as it's brought to a boil. It's used to refer to any situation that goes from acceptable to unacceptable, but by increments small enough that the overall change is not noted the way it would be if it happened all at once.

Gillian talks about that in the article: it's $5,000, a buyout for his part of the company (long before it was successful), driven by pique. Anyway, whether someone feels his insecurity was conveyed adequately or not, that's what he was going for.

Gillian says “I think it was kind of situation where he didn’t realize the girl he was about to marry was so very wealthy and came from such a prominent family, and it kind of blew his mind and made him feel inferior and he overreacted. He just kind of checked out. I think there is that whole other side to the story, and it can be gleaned. This isn’t really the CliffsNotes version so much. These facts can be gleaned if you watch some of these scenes really closely enough, and you watch them without too much of an overriding bias toward Walt and against Gretchen and Elliott."

Guess I’m not good at “gleaning” since I didn’t glean this at all. It doesn’t matter though. That’s the fun of seeing a great show like this: there’s so many ways to interpret scenes even if one interprets them entirely differently from the person who actually wrote them.

Absolutely, and I do think shows like this give you the leeway to interpret such relatively minor points in a way you see fit without it ruining the narrative flow.

Oh, to be clear, I wasn't saying all that back story stuff about Gretchen and Elliott was obvious, or meant to be clear to the average viewer (I either missed or forgot the stuff about her being wealthy already). But I think the bit about Walt's pique and his bitter reaction, and the part where his pride stops him from doing what's best for his family even early on, despite his stated goals, definitely is.

I do really like the idea that our perception of them can shift based on whether we adopt the "protagonist as hero" posture or not, though, or more likely have that shift over time.

The great German author Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, etc.) once wrote an essay in which he told us he was flabbergasted (gobsmacked in Brit speak) by the interpretations of his writing by his readers.

He told us that so many readers wrote to him with their own interpretations of many of his chapters. He realized that his readers were right: they saw meanings in his writings (especially The Magic Mountain) that he never knew were there. Far from disagreeing with his readers (after all, he was the writer), he usually agreed with them & relished their interpretations of his work.

Interesting to apply this to movies & tv.

Yeah, Death of the Author, they often call it. My reaction to that idea depends a lot on the specifics. Insofar as it means the work stands alone and the author's intent is not automatically the truth of the thing, I say fair enough. To some it seems to mean that there are no data points outside of the work, up to and including the creator's intent, which goes a bit too far for my taste (not that anyone here is saying that).

I never heard this phrase before.

Me neither.
And I'm an author.

It's a little scary. At least it's not literal.

It's not literal, is it??

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Oh, I think you may find it interesting. Primarily articulated by Roland Barthes. I wrote my dissertation on Death of the Author and meta fiction in what feels like very distant past.