That’s kind of the point I was trying to make earlier. I think this episode was about how “nothing is black and white”, “no good or evil” or “just strategy” are really just convenient lies we tell ourselves. If it walks like a duck and kills people in cold blood like a duck… it’s an evil fucking duck.
Sure, if you accept that the very basic act of killing somebody is a move an actor in the system can reasonably make, then you can view it as “just strategy”. But isn’t it also a little mind blowing, the act of killing? I would say a good portion of our population would never even dream of ending somebody elses life, yet when we view violence in a tv series, everybody is suddenly a chessmaster arguing about trading pieces. Yes, it’s just a tv show and I’m not saying we’re all A-OK with killing just because we argue for somebody who does it in fiction but I think there is an underlying mechanism at work here. Where we do end up accepting evil consequences and mount evil decisions on top of one another because, relatively speaking, they are reasonable.
I think there really is good and evil and that it matters whether we buy into one side or the other - even if it’s just for strategy, for a short time or if we try to end up on the other side afterwards.
And I think Breaking Bad is about that. About showing us how pitiful our fascination with this downward spiral of evil is and how we, ourselves, are all one step into our own graves with the little conscessions to evil we are willing to grant ourselves and others. How the sum of all our combined, tiny little evil ways are what pushes the big evils in our world forward.
