[Continuing with Breaking Bad week, today brings my thoughts on some of the core characters. Also, if you don’t watch the show the following will make almost no sense to you.]
For as long as Breaking Bad has been on the air, the two most prominent characters (Walter White and Jesse Pinkman) have been acting out a pattern: Jesse screws up, Walt bails them out. Jesse cries a lot, Walt is significantly more pragmatic and cold. Jesse feels really bad about things they do (yet continues to screw up in an identical fashion), Walter does only to a point and then moves past it pretty quickly.
Because of this pattern, people mistakenly believe Jesse to be the moral center of the show. They believe that because he feels badly, and cries, and screams, and is sometimes literally tortured by guilt that that somehow makes him a good person. They also believe that because Jesse is a drug addict, that maybe it somehow massages away any responsibility he should have for his repeated screw-ups.
Well, I would say Jesse’s biggest fans are also huge enablers. They don’t see the character for the utterly selfish and unaccountable person that he really is.
“But Walt blackmailed Jesse into helping him in the pilot. Everything that happens from there on out is Walt’s fault.”
Walt knew Jesse was already cooking meth/dealing meth/using meth. This is the reason we didn’t see Jesse put up much of a fight when Walt made his offer. Walt wanted to take someone already in that world and make them a millionaire. And he made Jesse rich many times over (in season 2, season 3, season 5), it’s just due to Jesse’s own stupidity and weakness that he kept losing that money.
“But Jesse saw Walter as a surrogate father.”
Walter never offered to be that to Jesse. He wanted to partner with him, not parent him. He bailed Jesse out many times over because of irrational sentimentality towards him (the same irrational sentimentality BB’s creative team and some fans have towards Pinkman), and it still was never good enough for Jesse. The bad things Walter has done to Jesse (like poisoning Brock to manipulate Jesse into helping him take down a common enemy…why did he have to manipulate him at all? Because Jesse is an idiot who temporarily thought Gus was his friend) don’t outweigh the bad things Jesse has done to himself, and anyone he comes into contact with.
“But Walter let Jane die!”
Jane was a troubled drug addict, and Jesse got her to start using again by exposing her to things she (initially) begged him not to. This brought out Jane’s darkest side and allowed her to blackmail Walter. Walter didn’t have a responsibility towards Jane, and felt like they would both be dead from an overdose if one of them didn’t die before the other. I’ve always felt like the over-reaction to Walt’s indecisive action was really just one more way to let Jesse avoid any blame.
“But Jesse is a poor, tortured soul drowning in guilt.”
Jesse may think he feels guilt, but his actions don’t change. He felt “guilt” over Jane’s death to an almost suicidal degree, but he was the one that got her to start using again…Then only a few episodes later, he’s at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting trying to knock Andrea (his next girlfriend) off the wagon. The only reason he’s there is to sell her meth when he’s already making a fortune cooking it for Gus. He doesn’t even need to be on the street level trying to ruin the lives of people in recovery, he just wants to be.
Then he accidentally gets Andrea’s brother Tomas killed, and feels “guilt” over this but it doesn’t stop him from seeing Andrea and her son Brock, even though the relationship started in a toxic place and he’s still working for the same people that killed Tomas. Shouldn’t he realize that he’s putting Brock in danger? Not this character, he doesn’t realize anything before it’s too late, then he feels bad about it…
BUT if he really felt bad about it [spoilers for most recent episode] then why did he stupidly refuse to keep cooking for the neo-nazis that have threatened the life of Andrea if he stops? It’s like he’s begging them to kill her, then he cries/screams when they do as if it’s a huge shock and he can’t believe his behavior had consequences.
“But Jesse loves kids!”
Jesse unknowingly got Tomas killed, then indirectly got Brock’s mother killed, most likely ruining Brock’s life in the process. This is the only kid we’ve seen Jesse have a true connection with, and it all started because he was trying to sell the boy’s mother meth and knock her out of recovery. If this is how he love kids, maybe the kids would be better off if he hated them.
“But Jesse is really a good person!”
Jesse is really a slow-motion suicide who didn’t have a bright future at the start of the show, and will end it in the same way. He puts everyone around him in danger through sheer stupidity and self-destructive weakness. And he is a near-sociopathetically responsibility-deprived fool who thinks only of himself, and seems to think nothing he does has consequences because of the way he always pawns accountability off on “Mr. White.” It just sucks that the viewers (and some of the writing staff) have let him get away with it too.
This character no longer has anything to live for, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s alive at the end of this week’s series finale. The creative team seems to have misguided sentimentality for this character, and may not be able to kill him.