Walter White starts Breaking Bad as a seemingly milquetoast science teacher who cowers in fear of stronger family members and tough life circumstances. As he begins to die of cancer, his moral decay commences quicker than his physical decline. Walter continues to falter in the face of adversity, but he uses his finite time to demolish others and warp his previous ethical code into an unrecognizable mess.
The incredible acting by Bryan Cranston and sharp writing by Vince Gilligan make Walter White easy to root for even during his darkest days, but that doesn’t mean it should go undiscussed just how vile Walter becomes throughout Breaking Bad. Walter’s worst moments make audiences question how they could still feel empathy for him!
1. Walter Poisons Brock
When Walter White loses Jesse’s allegiance at the end of the fourth season, he decides to leverage the power of his former student’s love for six-year-old Brock Cantillo to bring him back into the fold. Walter poisons Brock with lily of the valley but convinces Jesse that Gus committed the crime. Brock doesn’t die, but Walter taking that chance proves his all-consuming wickedness.
2. Walter Assaults Skyler
After coming home from a heart-racing encounter with the menacing drug lord Tuco Salamanca, Walter White forces himself on his wife, Skyler, before eventually giving up when she doesn’t reciprocate intimacy. The scene illustrates Walter’s thirst for power and his disdain for Skyler. He wants to tip the balance of the relationship, and his efforts are despicable.
3. Walt Lets Jane Perish on Her Own Vomit
Jesse falls deeply in love with Jane during the second season of the series. The couple aren’t exactly good for each other’s drug addictions, and Walter gets frustrated with Jesse’s time being taken by Jane. When Walter walks in on them passed out from a drug overdose, he watches Jane succumb to her own vomit instead of shifting her body and saving her life.
4. Walt Calls Neo-Nazis To Take Out Jesse
Walter White takes total control of the antagonist role in the final season of the series until he hires the only people worse than him: a family of neo-Nazis. After Jesse tries to burn Walt’s house down and won’t cooperate with Walt any longer, Heisenberg decides to call a group of white supremacists to eliminate his long-time partner.
5. Walt Bombs a Nursing Home
Walter’s ongoing war with Gus reaches a climax in the fourth season, and the only way Walt can win is through ingenious evil. Gus won’t meet with Walter face-to-face, so Walt manipulates Gus into visiting his arch-nemesis, Hector Salamanca. Walter rigged a bomb to the handicapped man’s wheelchair, and the situation blew up in Gus’s face exactly as planned. The fact that Walt didn’t care if anybody else died in the bombing demonstrates his lack of human morality by this point in the show.
6. Walter Asks Jesse To Save His Life by Taking Out Gale
Walter rarely helps Jesse in any way, but in the rare instance he commits a good deed for his former student, he turns around and uses it as leverage. In the third season finale, Mike and Gus decide to eliminate Walter, but Walt calls Jesse and has him shoot Gale, so both of them have the upper hand with Gus. Jesse can’t forgive himself for this act, and it haunts him for the rest of the series.
7. Walter Blackmails Jesse Into Cooking Meth With Him
Walter White doesn’t know anything about the drug trade when he first starts cooking meth. He blackmails Jesse into helping him by threatening to turn Jesse in to the police if he doesn’t go into business with him. This instance is the first of many in which Walter uses Jesse as a puppet in his egocentric schemes.
8. Walter Begins Cooking Meth To Make Money
So many TV shows and movies use drugs as a turning point or a plot emphasis that the effects of substance abuse go unchecked. Walter’s decision to make meth turns millions of Americans into drug addicts, especially considering how powerful and popular his signature blue product has become in the United States.
9. Walter Tells Jesse He Let Jane Die
Jesse goes most of the series ignorant of Walter’s decision to let Jane die. When Walt and Jesse’s relationship is at its lowest point in “Ozymandias,” Walter tells Jesse the truth with a wicked, monotone, shrill voice. The hurt in Jesse’s eyes tells the whole story.
10. Walter Blackmails Hank on Video
When Hank finally discovers the truth about Walter’s crimes, the latter makes a confession tape blaming the entire meth operation on his brother-in-law. With nobody to corroborate or deny the story, Hank and his wife, Marie, feel betrayed and struggle to figure out answers to Walt’s deceit.
11. Walter Takes Baby Holly From Skyler
After Walter and Skyler come to blows in the antepenultimate episode of the show, Walt takes the couple’s infant daughter and careens out of the neighborhood. He eventually returns Holly via the fire department, but yet another power play intimidates Skyler and adds to Walt’s criminality.
12. Walter Uses His Neighbor as a Shield From Gus
During the war between Gus and Walter at the end of season four, Walt asks his neighbor to go inside his house to check if the stove is running. Walt wants to make sure that Gus’s drug associates aren’t waiting in the wings inside his home, so it is better for an elderly woman next door to die than him. She ends up leaving the residence safely, but only because Gus’s crew exits when the woman goes inside.
13. Walter Misses the Birth of His Child To Do a Drug Deal
Skyler spends most of the first two seasons pregnant with Walter’s second child, Holly. When Walt gets into business with Gus, he only has one chance to prove his worth to his newest boss. Walt gets a call that Skyler is going into labor but decides to forgo witnessing his daughter’s birth to complete the drug deal. Walter White never proved to care much about his family, no matter how often he used them as an excuse for his atrocities.
14. Walter Crashes His Car To Hide His Identity, Hurting Hank in the Process
It takes Hank a long time to start putting the Heisenberg puzzle together, but once he figures out the blue meth is manufactured under the guise of a commercial laundry center, he asks Walt to drive him to the location so he can execute the drug bust. Desperate to conceal his identity and crimes, Walt crashes their vehicle right before they arrive at the scene of the crime and nearly kills Hank in the process.
15. Walter Gets Immigrants Deported While Working for Gus
Gus attempts to pit Walt against Jesse during season four by forcing Walt to cook meth on his own while Jesse runs errands with Mike. When Walter doesn’t want to clean up the cooking station because it takes too much time, he bribes the immigrant women working in the laundry upstairs to do the job for him. Gus then deports the innocent ladies back to their original country of birth.
16. Walter Puts a Hit on Ten Criminals in Prison
Walter makes sure to get rid of any loose strings that might muck up his standing as New Mexico’s largest drug lord in season five. He hires neo-Nazis to take out all of Mike’s prison associates who might tattle on him, and the swiftness of the deaths that take place symbolize Walt’s psychotic state.
17. Walter Shoots Mike
For many fans, Walter shooting Mike stands as the pinnacle of the former’s evil. Considering Mike’s standing as a bad person himself, the shooting isn’t as dire as some would make it out to be. Still, Walt’s rash response to Mike’s opposition demonstrated his out-of-control emotional state during the course of season five.
18. Walter Makes Light of the 737 Crash
Walter White indirectly causes a tragic airplane crash at the end of season two when the grief-stricken father of Jane plunges a plane over Albuquerque. Walt makes light of the situation during a school assembly by telling the student body that the incident was only the 53rd worst fatal tragedy of its kind and that everyone should just move forward and forget about the deaths.
19. Walter Tries To Kiss His Boss at Work
Skyler tries to gain a semblance of emotional control over Walt by sleeping with her boss during season three. As a response to the infidelity, Walt attempts to kiss the vice principal of the school where he works. This is the second time Walter Whitehas behaved in an inappropriate manner towards women, and it definitely constitutes harassment.
20. Walter Encourages Walter Jr. To Keep Drinking
During a party celebrating Walter’s cancer going into remission, he sits down to have a drink with Hank and his underage son. As a twisted way of forcing his parental power on Walter Jr., Walt encourages his high school-aged boy to drink copious amounts of tequila. When Hank steps forward to cut off alcohol consumption, Walt gets even more stubborn.
21. Walter Traps Saul in the Corner
Saul Goodman certainly wrote his own laundry list of misdeeds during his time on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but Bob Odenkirk’s lawyer maintains a shred of dignity most of the time. When Saul tries to get out of Walter’s clutches at the beginning of season five, Heisenberg menacingly informs him that “we’re done when I say we’re done.”
22. Walter Skips Go-Karting With Jesse
Jesse often tries to get closer to Walter White in a father-son type of way, but Walter always keeps his former student at arm’s length. When Jesse can’t get over depression and PTSD from killing Gale, he asks Walter to participate in go-karting with him. Walter says no, and while this isn’t immoral, it definitely stands as Walt being cold-hearted and unfriendly towards a young man looking for comfort.