TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Andy Greenwald, while recapping last week’s episode of Breaking Bad:

Breaking Bad, by contrast, explodes the fallacy that any good can come from evil; by setting us up to wish otherwise, it makes the viewer complicit in the criminality.

Dead-on. Breaking Bad dares viewers to sympathize with and make excuses for Walter’s actions, while making it clearer and clearer with each passing episode that whatever supposed justification Walter had at the beginning was a rationalization for him to do something wrong.

It’s no accident that, in the beginning of the show, it was very easy to sympathize with what he was doing. He’s a brilliant guy working as an un-appreciated chemistry teacher and at a car wash just to make ends meet, and then he gets cancer. It’s easy to sympathize with his decision; he’s a guy in a not so great position that’s going to do something wrong to pay for his treatment and leave his family with enough money to survive.

But from the very beginning, Walter could have chosen not to. He could have asked others for help; he could have taken his friend Elliot’s offer to pay for his treatment; and, as time went on, he could have exited the business at a number of points. But at each juncture, he chose to cook methamphetamine. While the show certainly shows a transition in Walt, it also argues very persuasively that there never was a point where Walt changed from a good family man into an evil drug lord. Heisenberg was inside of him all along, and every one of those decisions was wrong. And, in a sense, our initial sympathy for Walt and his decisions enabled what he’d done.