Not The Worst

Here's a list at Salon by Matt Zoller Seitz of Breaking Bad's top ten moments.  One of his picks is Walt and Gretchen in "Peekaboo":

...they get together in a restaurant, and Walt tells her the truth. But his explanation/apology is laced with anger and contempt for Gretchen and Elliott, whom he accuses of profiting off his research, cutting him out of millions in potential profits, and eventually driving him into the pathetic state he once was in before he started cooking meth.

This is one of the most painful scenes in the entire run of the show, because it links Walt to a long tradition of American fictional characters who have been ground up and spit out by the system and resent the world and hate themselves as a result. Walt is Willy Loman from “Death of a Salesman” or Shelly “The Machine” Levine [sic] in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” except one day he decided to stop playing by the rules and make his own fortune. But he still can’t let go of the past. Everything he’s doing is driven by animosity over what other people did to him years ago.

I think Seitz is missing the point.  Willy Loman was never much but bought into a dream that he could never live up to, and made him focus on the wrong things.  Levene is a salesman who's simply past his prime and is getting desperate now that he knows he has nowhere to go but down. They were arguably ground up and spit out by the system.

Not Walt.  He did it to himself.  It would seem (his past is never made entirely clear) that he did cutting edge research that helped others make millions, but his anger and resentment at personal slights, or perceived personal slights, made him leave.  The "dream" was his if he wanted--he had the talent, anyway.  Just not the temperament.

By the way, I disagree with much of the list.  Tomorrow I'll post my own.  Here's a moment that would have been great: