Season 2
In the second season, we are introduced to an insane, psychopathic, distributor named Tuco. Tuco is a character who loves to kill — probably gives him some sort of sexual endorphin filled rush which is why he has no qualms about doing it over and over. His relationships are all transactional — he beats one of his “lieutenants” (I’m making up ranks and things) because he made an innocuous statement which Tuco misinterpreted or purposely got enraged over, and then, a few minutes later, comes back and throws the body on the ground and screams at him (the corpse) that was too much of a bitch to take a beating. The other lieutenant dies in a freak accident, but this just makes Tuco laugh. For the series, the body count is now 4.
It also, incidentally, makes Hank, Walter’s brother in law, laugh. These two are supposedly on the opposite sides: one bad and one good. Hank poses for a picture with the headless body, thumbs up like Trump with his weird ass thumb, and kind of the way those horrible soldiers in Iraq posed with the Iraqi hostages with their thumbs up and grins. [And we wonder why people in the south gathered around a lynched black body hanging from a tree to have their picture taken. They were the same, they just weren’t part of the “thumbs up” culture.]
The series did a little bit of regression here, I think. Walter becomes a little bit more scared than he was in the first season — he seems to be a little bit too shocked at some of Tuco’s behavior, given that he’s already killed 2 drug dealers himself. But this regression was probably necessary because by now they knew the show was a hit and they probably had a showrunner involved who was planning how to tell the multiple stories over 5 seasons, etc. You can’t start at the end, so they stepped back a little and made both Jesse and Walter a tiny bit more frightened and naive.
Jesse has a fight with Walter in one of these episodes, and starts to choke him, but he backs down. He does not kill. Later, in the episode where they’ve been kidnapped by Tuco who is going to take them down to Mexico to escape the DEA, Jesse shoots Tuco in the stomach during a scuffle. But it isn’t Jesse who kills him. In fact, Tuco doesn’t seem to be very much bothered by the stomach wound and has a shootout with Hank who has come to this remote location to look for Jesse — having found a few clues that tie Jesse to Walter. Hank is the one that shoots Tuco in the head, calm and steely, and kills him. Body count: 5. This is helpful for Walter and Jesse, as they get away from someone who was undoubtedly going to kill Jesse for being useless and kidnap Walter to Mexico. But in furtherance of the plot, it creates a gap in the distribution market. Tuco was the distributor in the Albuquerque area — the one who brought the drugs up from a Mexican cartel near Juarez and had a network of dealers and second level dealers to sell it to all the meth heads in Albuquerque. Without a distributor, Walt and Jesse can’t make 2 pounds of meth every week and sell it for $36,000 a pound, or whatever they’re getting.
The interaction with Tuco, however, leaves them shaken to the core. In spite of the fact that earlier in the series, when Tuco stole all their money as well as their drugs, Jesse, who was told by Walter to go get their money, got beat up — I may be remembering this wrong — and ended up in the hospital. Walter, who is going by the name Heisenberg, goes to the same gang hideout with what is, supposedly, a bag of crystal rocks. (They call it glass because it isn’t cloudy). Walter demands his money but Tuco attempts to throw him out. At that moment, Tuco decides to smash the “crystal” but it turns out to be an extremely potent explosive. The entire place it destroyed — Walt hit the ground knowing what would happen — and walks away with his money and his drugs. So being that shaken when Tuco was on a machine gun rampage with his brother in law doesn’t really make that much sense. But we’re talking trivial details.
The plan Walter comes up with to explain his “absence” without revealing that he had been kidnapped, is to get naked and stand in the middle of a gas station candy and soda store. For this he has to go an extensive series of counseling and during one of his sessions he “confesses” to the therapist that he made it up, because he was sick of people fussing over him and he was sick of the medicine and he was sick of the nausea. So he left, and then used the naked episode to try to convince people he had a fugue episode. This isn’t actually true, but it’s a believable truth to a therapist. At this point, Walter has lied so often: to his wife, to himself, to his son, to Hank, to Jesse, the school where he teaches, that you almost get a sense of the good lying and the bad lying. Like when he makes up reasons for his wife, they are utterly unbelievable and everyone can see right through the lie. With the lie to the therapist, there’s a bit of truth in there, and so the lie is delivered more successively by the actor and it is, almost, believable. If we didn’t know the rest of the story, we’d probably accept it as true.
We have to remember that almost all of us listen to things that people say and believe what they say. It’s practically impossible to do otherwise. I’ve known some (maybe one person, actually) people who never accept what people say at face value. But for most people, if someone comes in and says, “Oh look what I bought at Sax this morning,” we believe an almost uncountable number of things that person just stated. We believe that person went to Sax, in the morning, bought something there, had an uneventful rest of the day, and is now showing it you. They could have stolen it from Sax. They could have stolen it from another store. They might have been arrested, been caught in an accident. Someone could have given it to them. Maybe it’s an old purchase and it wasn’t today at all. Maybe they’re trying to distract you from something completely unrelated to a purchase. But we believe, for the most part, the things people say because that is our nature. It would be next to impossible not to believe that people are generally not trying to fool you or lie to you. They might be exaggerating, engaging in some hyperbole, telling a tall tale, talking about the fish that got away — but we kind of enjoy that sort of lie.
Since this analysis was really meant to look at how the series deals with “Good and bad” — Walter’s descent into badness or maybe even evil — Walter is the obvious character, but Hank’s character, in my opinion, essentially starts out bad and, maybe as he goes on, becomes a little bit more good. He is a horrible racist even though he has a Mexican partner who puts up with being called a Beaner. He’s a pretty terrible husband. And what’s most awful, in my opinion, about Hank is what a lazy thinker he is. In the rest of the season, we’ll come to see that he’s actually a pretty clever agent. There is a person who the gang (at this point in the season it’s Walter, Jesse and a new character, Saul, the lawyer) hires to pretend to be Heisenberg and takes money in order to go to jail. Hank, alone, doesn’t buy it. That’s because he has good instincts and probably the same instincts as criminals have. He is blind to his brother in law, right now. But, culturally, he is so irritatingly middle class, middle America. He’s part of the very large group of people who think Hillary Clinton was talking about them when she referred to half of Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables.
[Incidentally, that phrase probably cost her the election. It doesn’t seem possible that something so small could change the outcome, but I think it did. For one thing, every supporter of Trump thought they were in that basket. She clearly said, “half” his supporters, but that’s not what they heard and she should have known that nobody would make the distinction between one half and the other. Secondly, it was a beautifully written phrase: memorable, sharp and accurate. It has lasted, probably, beyond any other phrase of that season. Make America Great Again has become a movement, but I wouldn’t call it beautiful, sharp or accurate. You could probably substitute “Great” for “White” and get at the real meaning. Deplorables was effective because it was true, while Maga is just a disguised and invented nostalgia. Anyway…]
Hank’s wife is a shoplifter who cannot admit she has a problem, but she also is extremely judgmental and a racist, so she is full of “bad” while pretending to be middle class and hypocritically judging all the other bad people: Mexicans, drug dealers and so on.
Jesse is my favorite character and it could be because Aaron Paul is such a lovable actor, not because the character is someone you would want to fall in love with. If there’s any of the bobble heads I’d all in love with it’s probably Badger. But I think Jesse’s role in the entire series is probably as “pretend bad.” He is possibly, one of the only good people on the show, and I’m including the CP son who became a kind of disability spokeperson and hottie when the show was running.
The second season also ups the danger and “bad” level with the introduction of an insane set of twins who are coming up through Mexico and, like Tuco, are psychotic. They kill without thinking about it but their main purpose won’t come until the 3rd season, if I’m remembering right.
Also in this season, Jesse found a girl living next door to him whose name is Jane and is a “recovering” drug user (heroin) — she likes to lace her heroin with a little crystal she says. After meeting Jesse, she falls off the wagon very quickly and becomes re-addicted to heroin, with all the messiness and crap that goes with it. Her father is Q, from Star Trek — I’ve forgotten the actors name. He is, perhaps, very close to the end of his patience with her. All drug addicts of this nature end up exhausting their parents ability to keep caring. In any event, Walter, who has made an acquaintance with someone who can sell their enormous quantity of blue crystal meth, has to break into Jesse’s apartment to steal it. Jesse reveals where it is in a heorin and meth drug haze that he won’t remember, and Walter gets the stash. Then Walter watched Jane start to vomit and choke on her own puke. He rushes over to help her — turn her on her side — but then stops and lets her die. None of this would have happened had Walter not shaken Jesse to try to wake him up and find out where the crystal was. In doing this, he knocked Jane over onto her back and she had earlier mentioned to Jesse that they had to sleep on their side in case they puked while they were sleeping in their high.
Body count: 6.
Other bodies that I don’t need to enumerate because they don’t relate to Walter turning to evil: Cujo (I’ll fix the name later) — a small time dealer that gets shot on the street by a little kid in a bike — 7. An informant named Tortuga (Spanish for tortoise) who gets his head chopped off by a cartel and attached to a land tortoise in the desert: body count 8. A bunch of people on an illegal migrant bus that the crazy twins are riding on: 9 (though I counted 10, I’ll go by the dialogue of the series): body count 17. The driver of that bus. body count 18. And then Jane’s father, having a nervous breakdown while trying to run an air traffic control screen, has two planes either purposely or accidentally collide in mid-air, right over Walter’s house and neighborhood, 167 passengers. I’m doing body counts based on associations as well as direct killing by Walt.
Body count: 185 — just about all of these people would be alive if Walter White didn’t decide to cook meth to make some money to pay for his cancer treatment and to leave his family some $$$ when he found out he was terminally ill.
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