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[quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Skyler White is not the love of his life. Gretchen Schwartz was. Skyler was the next runner up. Walter is PASSIONATE about science. Skyler doesn't share that passion, Hank doesn't share that passion, Walt's students didn't share that passion, and even Walter Junior doesn't share that passion. Gretchen Schwartz did. Walter's flashback to an evening where he and Gretchen map out the chemical composition of the human body was one of the most romantic scenes in the show. Compare this to the rather pathetic story of Walt's courting Skyler via crossword puzzles. At some point Walter broke up with Gretchen and it was UGLY. Walter was so pained by the breakup that he wanted no contact with her at all. When she got together with his business partner at Grey Matter, Elliot Schwartz, he quit the company to keep her away. Look at the episode in Season 1 where he and Skyler go to Elliott's birthday party. Skyler is intimidated by her poverty verses all of Walter's wealthy old colleagues, but Walter isn't intimidated. The other scientists remember his achivements and have nothing but praise for him. While other people are buying incredibly expensive gifts for Elliot, Walter becomes the star of the show by showing them all up with his cheap box of ramen noodles. When Skyler pleads her case to Elliot, he offers Walter a job, and later just to pay for Walt's chemo, without any hesitation, or any hint that the two of them had any bad blood in the past. It's Gretchen, who Walt avoids the entire party, who finally calls up Walt and asks if his refusal to accept their help has something to do with her. I like to think that Gretchen and Elliot did not actually steal Walt's research, but that that's a story Walt convinced himself of to keep Gretchen away. At the time of the Pilot, Walt has built a life for himself away from Gretchen, but it's turned out to be a pretty shitty life. He's adrift in a world of friends and relatives he has nothing in common with. He's so miserable and numb he can barely perform when his wife gives him a birthday handjob. Then he gets the cancer diagnosis and you all know how incredibly freeing that all was for him and blah blah blah, but I think he wanted to die long before the diagnosis to escape his miserable alternate life with Skyler and that was the REAL reason he refused Chemo at first. This is why he didn't Skyler about the cancer diagnosis for months, and why he still hasn't leveled with her about his current predicament. She's not his soulmate and it didn't even occur to him that she needed to know, just that he fulfilled his husbandly duty to provide for her and their children. He doesn't want to hurt her, but she's not someone he's even remotely close with and he doesn't realize how much his web of lies has hurt Skyler until the very end of Season 2. Don't say I don't give credit where it's due, one of the more effective scenes in Season 4 is when Walter gives what seems like a sincere apology to Skyler for all the suffering his escapades have put her through, only for it to turn out to just be a sarcastic idea for a line to trot out in front of Hank. Then Jessie and the Meth business give an option C in his life. It's pretty obvious that Jessie is the son Walter Junior never was because while he may know fuck-all, his worship of Mr. White for his chemistry expertise taps into Walter's passion for science that no one in his life outside of Gretchen's circle ever has. The money is almost a secondary concern for Walt, it's the respect and power his MacGuyver chemistry tricks give him over these dangerous underworld thugs, especially when crazy Tuco hands Walt a wad of money after Walt blows up his office. Gretchen is miles away from that world, and Walter can feed his passion. Witness the birth of his and Skyler's daughter, or collect millions of dollars as reward for his chemistry wizardry? No contest. Providing for his family is just the excuse he gives to the world and himself for what he's doing. That's my impression, anyway.[/quote] I mostly agree with your analysis, but I think that chemistry is Walt's soulmate, not Gretchen or Skylar. I think Gretchen was a better fit for him and he's still hung up on her because she understands chemistry and his relationship with it better than any other woman before or since. It also is the reason for his connection with Jesse. Remember, it was originally a straightforward business agreement between them until chemistry (dissolving the bodies, the non-psuedo meth recipe) got involved. Well, and the shared trauma of barely surviving Crazy-8. Look at that magnificent restaurant scene with Walt and Gretchen in S02E06. Walt has never, NEVER shown that kind of fire or depth of emotion with Skylar. Between that and the awkward phone call near the end of S01E05, when he originally turns down the offer of help, I think it was pretty clear that Walt was still emotionally engaged with Gretchen in a way that he couldn't be with Skylar. Likewise, he's never opened up to Skylar the way he opened up to Jesse at the end of "Fly." You're absolutely right in that Skylar is a responsibility, not a passion. I think it's important to remember that Walt left Gretchen. He walked out on her, not the other way around. I think Walter is so self-destructive, self-deluding and self-absorbed that he can't help but fly every relationship he forms directly into the ground eventually. Even minor ones, like the principal of the high school he used to work at. He blew up the foundation that would have made him a millionaire and ended up with a boring, banal life where he's teaching kids who don't give a fuck about anything he says and washing cars for a living. He's miserable because he makes himself miserable, because he can't help himself, because he doesn't know any other way to live. How many people do you know like that: they can get their lives together just long enough to knock it all down again. Just like Walter: deliberately closing his eyes and letting go of the wheel because of a brief moment of clarity where he realizes that whether he steers or not, he's going to wreck and wreck badly. When Walt got the cancer diagnosis, it liberated him, all right. It liberated him to go right back to making the same mistakes he had been making his entire life. This is why I love Breaking Bad so much. Instead of having some sort of Touched by an Angel epiphany and "turning his life around," Breaking Bad depicts someone doubling down on every flaw, every shortcoming, and every failing. The one difference between this and The Shield (the prototype for Breaking Bad in more ways than one) that really stands out to me is that Vic Mackey really loved his family. For all of the reprehensible, horrible, unforgivable shit he did, he genuinely loved his family. He just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that you can't protect those you love from the consequences of the choices you make. Walt, on the other hand...Walt only loves himself. He's incapable of empathizing with the pain he causes others. In his mind, everything is framed in terms of Walt. The result is that not only is he completely tone-deaf when it comes to reading people and situations, he doesn't realize it. He can't.[/quote]