This Is The True Villain In Breaking Bad According To Fans
Throughout Breaking Bad, there are a lot of compelling nemeses for Walter White (Bryan Cranston) to contend with — arguably, including himself — and each of these foes has some distinctly disturbing qualities. Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz) is an unpredictable hot head who smashes his own foot soldier's face in just for talking out of turn. The Cousins, Leonel (Daniel Moncada) and Marco (Luis Moncada), are silent slaughterers who have zero reservations about slaying anyone in their way. And, of course, Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is so intelligent and calculated that his simple grimace is almost as terrifying as any act of violence on the entire series.
Fans can and have waged some serious debates about which of the many Breaking Bad villains is the worst of the worst — and the spin-off Better Call Saul has offered up a serious new contender for that title in Lalo (Tony Dalton) — but there's a case to be made that Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons) is the most loathsome of them all.
He embodies the banality of evil
Todd's malevolence is well-veiled at first because he presents himself as a simple guy with a lot of gumption about getting into the business. His true colors are revealed in the jaw-dropping final minutes of season 5's "Dead Freight," when he blithely puts a bullet into young Drew Sharp, who potentially witnesses the big train heist. Not only does he murder the child without a second's hesitation, but afterward he's more concerned with keeping himself in the good graces of Walt, Jesse (Aaron Paul), and Mike (Jonathan Banks) than reckoning with the innocent blood he has spilled.
Even when he does something truly vile — like gunning down Jesse's former girlfriend Andrea Cantillo (Emily Rios) and then holding her son Brock (Ian Posada) over Jesse's head as a threat — Todd maintains a gee-golly-aw-shucks-mister manner of innocence about it all. He also seems to think nothing of hanging around the gaggle of neo-Nazis in his uncle's crew.
As one Redditor noted while suggesting Todd is the biggest bad, "Something is deeply wrong with Todd and you can't even call it sociopathy. He's totally lacking in malice or sadism but also completely lacking in compassion or empathy... He's the type of guy to apologize before shooting you in the head."
The sequel sheds even more light on Todd's terror
The fact that Todd is a cold-blooded killer is well established in Breaking Bad, but fans get to see even more of his mellifluous brand of malice in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. After Todd has spent time torturing Jesse — and, of course, continuing to threaten to hurt Brock if Jesse attempts to escape — he takes Jesse on a road trip to his apartment to clean up the mess of a murder Todd has committed. He's even wistful about the memory of his housekeeper as he explains that he strangled her for finding (though not stealing) his money. While that might ordinarily be a crime of passion for most killers, for Todd it was just a thing that had to be done. No reason to skip out on a cup of soup or neglect to jam along to "Sharing the Night Together" over it.
The movie also shows us just how creepy the character is as well. Todd's fascination with Lydia Rodarte-Quayle (Laura Fraser) was clear enough in Breaking Bad, but in El Camino, we learn that he was positively obsessed with her, even creating a snow globe with the two of them sitting together just for decoration. If that weren't shudder-inducing enough, Todd also kept a souvenir from his murder of little Drew, as he took home the tarantula the boy had scooped up in the desert and kept it as his own pet. There are a lot of Breaking Bad universe villains who are bold, vicious, and intimidating as all get-out, but none are quite as devoid of humanity and downright strange as Todd Alquist.