Walter White wasn’t meant to wear white hats, but Heisenberg was still someone. “Breaking Bad” fans rooted for — to a point.
Even Vince Gilligan can be reshaped by distance and time. “Breaking Bad”Executive producer and creator, who appears to have had a total change of heart about his complicated antihero. In a Q&A with The New Yorker, Gilligan bites hard on the hand of the protagonist that fed him for five Emmy-heavy seasons. As time goes by, his view of Walter White gets more negative.
“The further away I get from ‘Breaking Bad,’ the less sympathy I have for Walter,”Gilligan stated, moments after musingA much more sunny ending to his spinoff series “Better Call Saul.”
“[Walt] got thrown a lifeline early on,”Gilligan said. “And, if he had been a better human being, he would’ve swallowed his pride and taken the opportunity to treat his cancer with the money his former friends offered him.”
While Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill “finds a little bit of his soul”In a final redemptive episode of The Last Episode, the cast survives (and also wins). “Saul,” Bryan Cranston’s Walter White went down in a hail of gunfire by his own design, a moment that “Breaking Bad”Fans saw fans as self-actualizing and heroic at best.
“He goes out on his own terms, but he leaves a trail of destruction behind him,”Gilligan said. “I focus on that more than I used to.”
Whatever had us rooting for White at the height of his Heisenberg powers was hiding a trove of character flaws, Gilligan said, that just haven’t aged well.
“After a certain number of years, the spell wears off,”He stated. “Like, wait a minute, why was this guy so great? He was really sanctimonious, and he was really full of himself. He had an ego the size of California. And he always saw himself as a victim. He was constantly griping about how the world shortchanged him, how his brilliance was never given its due. When you take all of that into consideration, you wind up saying, ‘WhywasI rooting for this guy?’”
Though Walter White is a long-dead fictional character from a TV show that ended in 2013, Gilligan might be mindful of his creation’s own words: “You cross me, and there will be consequences.”