Part 1 Saying goodbye to the bad guy: Heisenberg the modern day Tony Montana

As we approach the end of the final season of Breaking Bad it really makes me think about the history of how I felt when I rooted for the bad guy to win, but realized that for the story to end we needed him to not have a happy ending. I spend all week trying to search out which show or movie first made me feel this way. I found that my first experience was Scarface. This film by far really had the recipe where our main character having a tough down and out life now faced with a hunger to have the things he felt he deserves. Walter White worked that way because of his streak of bad luck, crappy jobs, and stale marriage all of which culminated and basically broke him when he was diagnosed with cancer.

The big difference between the two is that we never saw what broke Tony because it would have made it a lengthy movie. But the TV shows lets us have a peek into what turned Walter into the villain we see today. So why are we cheering for the bad guy? If we step back he has poisoned children, set bombs in nursing home, and ordered brutal hits. Blood is on his hands and yet most of us watched season after season hoping he would not get caught and his luck to not run out.

I just watched episode 13 as Walter made the incredible hard decision to order a hit on Jesse and the episode ended as a melee of bullets barrage Hank and his partner and Jesse’s future looks bleak. Jesse is to Walter as Tony was to Manny. His partner, his friend, the one person that he was with from the beginning when they were nothing. This relationship tests why I think we cheer for the bad guy. We have already been okay with the murder, drugs and the constant lawbreaking but what makes us want them to never get caught is that small sliver of a connection to love. The same connection we saw in Michael Corleone towards Fredo as he made the tough decision to kill him in the Godfather. As we saw in Tony when he felt betrayed and killed Manny. Now we look at Walter and his connection to Jesse is so strong that as his world is crumbling and everyone around him is in his ear pleading to “take care” of Jesse he fights it till the very end. But what makes Breaking Bad different from Scarface or The Godfather is my prediction that not only does Walter need to die at the end but it won’t be by the hand of some neo-nazi criminal or a Czech hit squad but by the very own human connection he has outside of his family.

I know for many of us Jesse is a mess, and yeah I agree Jesse was broken when Walt first approached him about meth. But Walt slowly took him under his wing, rebuilt Jesse in an image of how he envisioned a relationship with his own son. He acted like an overprotective dad on steroids as he did anything and everything to keep Jesse out of harm’s way. But not for one moment realized that this person he was rebuilding had a foundation of a broken boy. He never wanted to murder or hurt anyone and sought the comfort of a stable relationship because he desperately wanted to be normal. Walt gave him everything he never wanted when he offered Jesse so much money he wouldn't know what to do with it. This chemistry (pun intended) is the reason why Jesse is the only possible deserving person to end Heisenberg’s reign of terror.

We saw this show as Walter White breaking bad and turning into Heisenberg. But never realized that Jesse was breaking good as he was fighting and doing anything to just get out of this evil environment he was in. The final point when Jesse can finally have a normal life will be when he ends Walters.