Sandbox

I’m starting to get pretty sick of the things people have been saying about Walter White lately.

If you haven’t heard, they’ve been calling him unlikeable. Insensitive. Egomaniacal. In short, it seems like a lot of them are pretty disillusioned with his transition from an underachieving family man pushover to a murderous, scheming, meth-cooking kingpin. I, on the other hand, happen to feel differently. And, as Breaking Bad rounds out its fourth season, I happen to disagree with the terms of the conversation, as well.

I guess that’s because I just don’t really buy the accusation that Walt abandons his morals and family—rather, he casts them off. And that, frankly, is a lot less unlikeable than it is laudable: awakened in his middle age from a lifetime of dormancy, he finally wises up to the oppressive atmosphere of his quotidian life and takes steps to ameliorate it.

In that way, Breaking Bad is a lot less about a family man gone missing than it is about a born-again individual: as the seasons wear on, Walt leaves behind things that weigh him down. He liberates himself from an undeserving family (seriously, Walt could only be construed as unlikeable if his whiny, demanding clan—or any other aspect of his pre-neoplastic life, for that matter—was in any way the opposite). He quits his job, which has always been beneath him, and opts instead to pursue the success he feels he deserves. And he rejects domestic life, spending his time eating junk food and stripping down with men in a mobile home, far from civilization and cellular reception, where he can break the law and be left alone.

Walter White, to me, is not unlikeable; he’s just a selfless citizen turned around and gone rabidly individualist. Surely that can’t be what everyone’s objecting to.