Free Yourself from the Prison of your Ego: Learn from Walter White’s Mistakes in BREAKING BAD, Season 3, Episode 4 – “Greenlight”

For complete summary of this episode, go to http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Light

 The major events in the episode as they relate to Walter’s character arc and their relationship to my groundbreaking self-help book, “Overcome Any Personal Obstacle, Including Alcoholism, By Understanding Your Ego” — http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/leewriter — are as follows.

1. With Saul and Mike secretly listening, Skyler tells Walter that whether he stays or leaves the White house, they’re not married anymore.
2. Walter, livid over her affair with boss Ted, tries to confront Ted at the office, but is thrown out the front doors by three warehouse men.
3. Walter, having deduced his lawyer planted “bugs” at the house, makes Mike remove them. Mike comments, “You know, Walter, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have someone watching your back.”
4. The school principal, due to his erratic behavior, places Walt on indefinite leave.
5. As Walt goes to his car after the news of his leave, Jesse shows his the blue meth Jesse made on his own, which Walter finds fault with, complains, “That is my product” and that his guy doesn’t work with junkies, only pros.
6. Gustavo, “Walt’s guy”, decides that after he hears Mike tell him Jesse and Walt aren’t getting along that Gus will go against his usual philosophy of not dealing with junkies and do the deal with Jesse anyway.
7. Jesse gets paid from the drug deal but receives only half the money.
8. Walter, at a traffic light, sees Victor (one of Gus’ henchmen) throw a bag of money into his car.

The ego-centric Walter’s envy, pride and anger, three out of the seven Deadly Sins, are on prominent display in “Greenlight”. In my book, I trace the root cause of all the deadly sins to an overly strong ego. Conversely, to achieve the Seven Virtues (opposite of the Seven Deadly Sins), one needs to adopt a more enlightened world view in which we are all part of the One Life, which means we’re all intimately connected on a fundamental, profound level. 

First off, it’s Walter’s pride and envy that boil to the surface when he nitpicks at the quality of the blue crystal Jesse made without any help from Walt. Even he’s decided, for the moment, to not cook meth, he doesn’t want Jesse to get any credit or financial rewards from cooking the blue crystal. He resents his partner’s potentially being able to profit from making meth without him.

And then it’s Walt’s anger that forces him to storm into Skyler’s workplace and go after her boss and lover, Ted. Walter doesn’t acknowledge that it was his criminal lifestyle that’s caused the emotional chasm between his wife and himself, thus making the affair possible in the first place. Instead of looking inward and learning from Skyler’s affair, he looks outward and strikes out at an easy target. The ego-based person treats its own (i.e. – the self) with kid gloves while is merciless with other people who become surrogate victims that hid the true source of the problem.

Mike’s comment to Walter as the former removes the bugs from the latter’s house, “…it doesn’t hurt to have someone watching your back,” hints at the danger of the ego-centric, “everyone is an island” philosophy. Pride assures the person they can handle things themselves but that’s not always true. If Mike hadn’t seen The Cousins enter the White house while Walter was in the shower, and then made a phone call that resulted in the assassins deciding to meet with Gus to discuss the planned assassination to avenge Tuco’s death, Walter would have been dead.