The Shocking Amount Of Lives That Walter White Ended In Breaking Bad
Spoilers for Breaking Bad ahead!
Often hailed as one of the greatest and most iconic characters in television history –- thanks in no small part to Bryan Cranston's transcendent performance –- Breaking Bad's Walter White is a ... complicated man. Yeah. That's one way of putting it.
It all starts when the high school chemistry teacher is diagnosed with Stage III lung cancer on his 50th birthday, leading him to partner up with former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to produce meth and hence ensure his family's financial security before death finally claims him. Claim him it does, in the series finale ... but not before he claims the lives of so, so many others. The drug trade is a perilous path, so Walt was always going to encounter death in one way or another. But to cause so many deaths himself?
For the morbidly curious out there, wondering just how much blood Walt's hands are soaked with, wonder no further. The following number accounts for all the people Walt murdered himself, were murdered because of Walt, or died because of Walt. That number is...
Walt is the danger
... 200.
Let that sink in for a second. Maybe more than a second. Walter White, once an underpaid educator and loving family man, finishes the series with the deaths of 200 people on his hands.
You'd think the show might build up for a while before Walt murders anyone, but the series pilot doesn't play coy. Near episode's end, Emilio Koyama (John Koyama), Jesse's former partner in the meth business, and Krazy-8 (Maximino Arciniega) have Walt at gunpoint in his rolling meth lab, forcing him to show them how to make Blue Sky. Instead, he tricks them with a burst of red phosphorus in a hot pan. The resulting phosphine gas is too much, and Emilio succumbs, Walt barring the door to ensure neither man escapes. Krazy-8 survives, but for not much longer thanks to the killer combo of Walt and a bike chain.
That's only in the first few episodes, and things careen downhill from there. Walt runs people over. He shoots others. Poison isn't above his repertoire. Some are basically strangers. Others are people he knows, or comes to know, like Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks). It's bad, is what it is. That may seem too simple a word, but it's in the show's title.
Walt blows people up, causes plane crashes ...
In terms of those murdered because of Walt, how about we start with Gustavo Fring's (Giancarlo Esposito) former employees? Gunned down by Jack Welker's (Michael Bowen) gang on Walt's orders. And Fring himself? Blown up by a bomb Walt built and supplied to Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), along with Salamanca himself and Fring's henchman Tyrus Kitt (Ray Campbell). Then there's Andrea Cantillo (Emily Rios), a love interest of Jesse's, that Welker enforcer Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons) kills once Walt divulges her location. There's also Alquist himself, shot by Jesse, after Walt kills all of his fellow gang members. And there's Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), also shot by Jesse, but on Walt's orders, to reduce the meth business competition.
Then there are the deaths — not murders — Walt caused. Salamanca's aforementioned death counts, since he used Walt's bomb of his own volition. Walt watched as Jesse's first love interest on the show, Jane Margolis (Krysten Ritter), overdosed, which many fans would agree is when they stopped rooting for the man. Her death led to the death of 167 airline passengers when Donald (John de Lancie), her father, failed in his duty as an air traffic controller because he was so steeped in grief.
And finally, there's Walt's own death. After saving Jesse from the mounted machine gun he set up to take out Welker's gang and shooting Welker himself in the head, Walt stands calmly as Jesse points a gun at him. He's perfectly okay with Jesse shooting him ... but Jesse is done doing him favors, noting Walt's already bleeding out from the machine gun assault. That wound is what kills him. Nothing more, nothing less.
And so it is that the last of the 200 deaths is his own. A fitting end for a man who wrought his own destruction and accepted the consequences... right?