This essay is a follow-up to my earlier piece on vindicating Skyler White. By “vindicate” Skyler White I by no means intend to “exonerate” her - Skyler is certainly blameworthy for her participation in the Heisenberg empire. But to follow up on the Fight Club connection I suggested in the earlier piece, I think Skyler is a more interesting and nuanced character upon re-watch. Crucially, Skyler’s reluctant acceptance of Walt’s deeds signals the point of no return. Skyler is not the moral compass of the show (that honor goes to Hank Schrader), she’s the canary in the moral coal mine. By that I mean we can use Skyler to gauge just how far Walt has descended.
Skyler, like Walt, tries to justify her actions under the goal of preserving Walt Jr’s innocence, that so long as he does not think of his father as morally corrupt, even if he thinks she is a bitch, then what Walt does is permissible. In Plato’s Apology Socrates defended himself against the charge that he was “corrupting” the youth by arguing that no one voluntarily does evil, because to do evil is to harm others which entails harming oneself - if the people close to us are bad, then they will inevitably hurt us as well. Since harming ourselves is not in our best interest, and we cannot act against our own self-interest, no person knowingly does wrong. In other words, the road to breaking bad is paved with good intentions. Following this Socratic thread, throughout the series Walt is not only guilty of lying to his loved ones, he is guilty of lying to himself. Walt tells himself that he can keep his “Heisenberg” alter-ego separate from his family, that he can have his meth empire and eat birthday bacon too (err or something like that).
The tenth episode of season three is called “Fly” and it is considered the most divisive episode in the series: the episode with the lowest IMDB rating in the series and one that inspired many a think piece and Reddit post. Even those that defended the episode tended to focus on how it helped flesh out Walt and Jesse’s relationship (fwiw like the introduction of Mike Ehrmantraut, the episode was a product of non-narrative constraints). However, I think it is important to contextualize Fly within the season and series more broadly. Fly is the episode that directly follows Skyler confessing to Marie that Walt is addicted to gambling, which signals her “acceptance” of Walt’s career and her attempt, like Walt, to use this evil for “good.” Skyler’s “breaking bad” reveals how Walter’s moral corruption (Heisenberg) is like his terminal cancer: something that grows for the sake of growth, a malignant tumor that cannot be contained - hence the problem of “contamination” that anchors Fly.
The fly symbolizes Walt’s moral decay, and his all-encompassing attempt to extinguish the fly under the guise of contamination mirrors his willingness to kill anyone that threatens to “expose” his secret life. There is a scene near the end of the series when Skyler and Walt meet Hank and Marie at a restaurant in an attempt to forestall the inevitable - and Walt claims that it wouldn’t be “right” to crush Walt Jr with the knowledge that his father is a drug kingpin given that Walt’s cancer has returned, which means he will die sooner rather than later. Hank balks at Walt’s use of the word “right” because what is “right” to Walt Jr would be not manufacturing meth altogether. That if Walt Sr had done what was actually right there would be no need to hide anything from Walt Jr in the first place.
As Hegel once said, happiness is being at home in the recognition of the other. And Sartre expanded this to argue that who we are is not “up to us” but instead a product of how others’ recognize us. Ideally, we want others to recognize us in the ways we recognize ourselves. Bu humans are essentially free - we cannot “force” another person to view us in a certain way. So, the best we can do is manipulate others in order to control how they see us: to have our social self-consciousness birthday bacon breakfast and to eat it too. Walt, and by the end Skyler too, continually attempt to control how others’ view them - and this helps explain why Walt care so much about how Jesse views him, as Jesse is the only link between Heisenberg and “Mr. White”; Jesse is the only way Heisenberg could be recognized as the “same” person as Mr. White. Skyler does not know Heisenberg, only in glimpses and in that devastating final phone call with the police listening in; Walt’s hail Mary in using language in an attempt to control the narrative - to control how others recognize him. By the end, as Gretchen says on the news program that inspires Walt’s return to ABQ, Walter White is dead, only Heisenberg remains. When Walt finally admits to Skyler that he did it for himself, he is admitting this to himself as well - and Socrates might argue that it is no coincidence Walt goes on to sacrifice his life to “save” Jesse - if evil is ignorance, then the person that causes harm to those they love has two options: to lie to themselves or sacrifice themselves. In the end, Walt finally makes the right choice.
i dont know if i believe in evil. there are imbalances