Copper: I am so much happier with the second episode! I have a weakness for shady real estate shenanigans, and everything that happened at the contessa's completely surprised me. That was a helluva plan.

By the end of the first ep of Copper I was impressed by how much I'd remembered, because it was damned boring and I was hugely distracted.

Now, watching the second ep, I see I should have been less smug, because nothing seems to apply anymore. Totally confused.

Big Bad--whoah. God, Walter, seriously.

If you were going to put your finger on a point in his arc where it was clear that he isn't just a good man caught up in a difficult position, where would you say? I'd have expected, if I were predicting, that it would hinge on his attitude to potential customers, and the idea of people ruining their lives with his drugs.

Did we have that moment, and I didn't remember it? Its absence is very telling, if my memory is not just failing me.

Clearly, at this end of everything he's an emotionally abusive (on a number of fronts) megalomaniac. This is the part where you start throwing around diagnoses of narcissistic personality disorder or sociopath with IANAP TV accuracy, but he's clearly way over the line.

It was pretty gradual, but around when Walt refused to take money from his old partners (the internet tells me that was the 5th episode) I started to feel like he was never forced into anything by circumstances and if he hadn't gotten cancer he would have found some other reason to let his inner bad guy take over eventually. That's the big lie he tells himself constantly, that he had no choice, he had to do it, each step of the way.

Which I think is a much more interesting story than the apparent anti-hero who, really, it's okay to root for because he's dying.

I think from the very beginning his attitude towards users was that they were going to buying meth from someone so he wasn't really responsible for their damage, but he might as well get the profit. Which is the kind of thing everyone thinks about something, right?

I kinda feel like that's the beauty of it, that there isn't a distinctive point. That it was always blurry, the line, and that while it's clear we're over it at this point, that probably neither we as viewers, nor he as a character ever saw it, really. I kinda like that we got dragged along for the ride, that we were asked to start out liking him, and if we can't now, that we don't know when it happened.

Which feels true to life, for me. That sometimes you just don't know it until way after you've crossed it.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

But there were also lines that he knew and we knew he was crossing, all along and he just kept crossing them. I mean, killing Jane certainly seemed like a moral Rubicon.

Can he go back now? Be redeemed? I guess it's possible but it would be enormously difficult and, well, first he'd have to want to.

Would Jesse's GF dying be the earliest clear manipulative/abusive thing he did to him?

I think he might not have gotten into crime without the cancer, but I think he'd have morphed into a lighter, more law-abiding massive asshole in the face of some smaller drama--maybe if his wife had cheated on him for some other reason than the chain that put her where she reached (although I am pretty sure we'd see a more sympathetic version of her without Walt's crime revelation--she wasn't perfect, but she wouldn't be this), he'd have been scary and dangerous in his reaction--and possibly worse, he'd be paying attention to her, instead of basically neglecting her like he has been this whole time--I don't think you want that unbalance pointed in your direction.

Wait--he didn't kill Jane, did he? I mean, he's not legally liable for her death, right? Without good samaritan laws in place, he's just (just) a monster.

To me, the line was crossed when his cancer was cured but he didn't stop. S3 was the weakest in my opinion and I forget some of the details of that time. But he could have left after Holly was born and chose not to.

Jane was aspirating and he left her. Totally not legally responsible. (morally is a different story)

But I think that he let her die. He didn't kill her.