Breaking Bad is one of the greatest TV dramas of all time - it's in my top three, personally - with nary a dud episode in its five-season, six-year run. It's the story of a man with terminal cancer and undying pride taking his life back and going out on his own terms, losing every shred of goodness, decency, and morality along the way. More so than any other great TV show, it focuses almost exclusively on one man: Walter White. Yeah, Jesse is a great deuteragonist, and sure, characters like Skyler and Hank and the various antagonists of the series are all plenty deep and defined in their own right, but this is Walt's story first and foremost.
You all already know this because you've all already seen Breaking Bad, I'm sure. I only bothered bringing it up because my biggest takeaway from my second romp through the first half of the fifth season was that this stretch of eight episodes belonged to another character as much as they belonged to Walt; that character was Mike, the badass grizzled hitman whose relationship with Walt meanders for three seasons or so between partner and hunter. In many ways, Mike is a foil for Walt, a cool and collected professional contrasting heavily with Walt's fiery egotism. Walt claims he's in the meth game purely for his family's sake; with Mike, that actually appears to be the case. Both men serve as mentors and father figures for Jesse, but where Walt lies to the kid and manipulates him, Mike's concern for Jesse's well being and future is honest and genuine. And where Mike remains loyal to his guys on the inside, paying them off and making them whole with a substantial chunk of his own drug money, Walt has no issue with orchestrating the murder of each of those same gentlemen in a calculated and coordinated strike, all out of a fear that one or two of them would snitch.
It's this season - or half-season - to me that really turned the tide against the Walt supporters in the "battle" between those rooting for him and those waiting for his demise. Sure, up until now, Walt's done some terrible things, but nearly all of them were excusable to a certain degree. Cooking meth? Look, someone's gotta provide for the family somehow. Letting Jane choke on her vomit and die? Eh, she'd have done that anyway. Getting Jesse to murder Gale in cold blood? Hey, it was very literally done to save his own life, and likely Jesse's as well. Poisoning Brock in order to manipulate Jesse into helping him kill Gus? Yeesh... but... Gus was a drug lord ready to kill Walt and his whole family, and while poisoning a kid to manipulate your own apprentice into working with you again is a very shitty thing to do, so were most of the things Gus did in the first place.
But here, with his hunter and adversary out of the picture, fortunate to still have his life, Walt wastes no time jumping back into cooking meth against the wishes of both Mike and Jesse, his last two remaining partners. It's here, in this fifth season, that Walt begins to act reprehensible with no real motivations beyond pride, wrath, and the legacy of Heisenberg. He also cons his wife's sister into taking his side in their marriage issues by playing off Skyler's anger over all of his lies as guilt she's hanging onto from a one-time affair. Contrast this behavior to the actions of Mike, the consummate professional who just wants to walk away from the game. His hand is essentially forced by his own loyalty to his guys - he wants to pay to keep them quiet instead of just killing them all, which is, you know, relatively admirable - and it's with the utmost reluctance that he agrees to work with Walt at all. And in the end, when it all comes crashing down on Mike and he knows he has to run away forever and never see his granddaughter again, Walt can't even let him ride off into the sunset; instead, he shoots him in the arm over a petty argument about whether or not Mike "owes" him any sort of thanks. And just before Mike dies, Walt comes to the realization - out loud, for Mike to hear before he fades away - that another source can give him all the info on Mike's inside guys, and that it won't be hard to locate and kill them at all.
Mike gives him a stern but quick "shut the fuck up and let me die in peace," and then does exactly that, his final moments consumed with regret; he's dying, his men are all going to die, and really, what was it all for? Walt's pride, and nothing else. So ends the life and story of Walt's best foil in the show's entire run, a trained and talented killer, a seasoned veteran of the meth distribution process, who could make things work alongside sleazy lawyers and Mexican drug lords alike. In the end, even Mike was no match for Walt's self-centeredness.
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