Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Who cares? Who cares, who cares, who cares? I’m not saying who cares about the show — I’m saying this is becoming the point of the show. What makes Breaking Bad one of the most moral shows in the history of television is that actions have consequences, whether those actions arise from pain or greed or fear or panic. You pay for your actions, not the operation of your heart. The psychoanalytical journey we could all choose to take — and that most of us have taken — with Walt is a bloodless exercise. It is a luxury afforded to people who can see selfishness and wickedness and violence in the abstract, the way you can when it’s on television. What these final episodes are doing is showing no mercy, because evil shows no mercy. That’s not “Evil Shows No Mercy” in a tattoo-it-on-your-arm kind of way; that’s reality. That’s the reality of the fact that the reason to be a moral person is, in part, that brutal acts of violence do not take place inside a cage where the only ones hurt are the ones who deserve it — rats, or finks, or phonies, or fools. When you embrace doing whatever you want in order to get what you want, you cannot isolate the consequences. This is not a show that will ever be revealed to take place inside a snow globe; it’s a show where everything spills everywhere. – Linda Holmes on Breaking Bad
