#if I have forgotten something important or gotten anything factually wrong in this post please lmk!!!

[woozapooza]

Obviously I already loved the scene where Skyler interrupts Ted’s audit and saves him by pretending to be a total airhead, but I just hit that episode (4x09, “Bug”) in my rewatch today and now I love that scene even more because of how it further establishes one of the biggest differences between Walt and Skyler. Skyler is capable of being just as devious as Walt, and she isn’t immune to letting her ego control her (as we see with the whole carwash thing), but she doesn’t have Walt’s obsessive need to admired. On the contrary, Skyler is willing to have people unfairly look down on her if she thinks it’s for a good cause. She doesn’t turn Walt in to the authorities because she can’t bear for her son to know the truth about his father, even though she knows that she’s making herself the villain in Walter Jr.’s eyes as a result; Walt, in contrast, complains about Skyler’s gambling cover story because “I don’t want Junior thinking less of me.” Then in 4x09, she makes herself look incompetent—in her actual area of expertise, no less!—because it will throw the IRS off Ted’s trail, and therefore off her trail. This comes just four episodes after “Shotgun,” in which Walt completely sabotaged himself because he just couldn’t bear to hear Hank give Gale credit for his (Walt’s) work. The only instance I can think of where Walt voluntarily made himself look bad (though to be fair, I could absolutely be forgetting something, in which case please let me know) is the phone call in “Ozymandias” where he makes Skyler out to be more of a passive victim than she really was, but in my opinion that’s barely comparable to the Skyler examples I gave, as it’s just an exaggeration rather than a complete falsity.

My point here isn’t that Walt was ever obligated to do something quite like what Skyler does in “Bug” (although now that I think about it, I would love to see him bimbofy himself). Nor is it that either of the examples I gave of Skyler willingly making herself look bad was definitively the right thing to do (they’re both complicated situations and evaluating the ethics of each isn’t the point of this post). Nor is it to say there’s something wrong with wanting to be appreciated. It’s just to say that I find it genuinely admirable how Skyler is often willing to see beyond her ego in a way Walt usually isn’t.

Also, I want to add that this realization reminded me that I thought about something very similar while watching BCS! I made a post a while back saying “BCS 3x09 is the most Jimmy has ever reminded me of Walt and BCS 3x10 is the least Jimmy has ever reminded me of Walt.” What I meant by that was that while Jimmy’s Sandpiper scheme in 3x09 was devious and cruel, the way he set things right in 3x10 made him appear both heartless and stupid, and even though he behaved awfully in the previous episode, I genuinely admire the sacrifice he made to make up for it. This is obviously very different from the Skyler examples I discussed above, but I think the contrast it creates with Walt is comparable. Walt sometimes feels regret, but I can’t see him ever deliberately disgracing himself to rectify things like Jimmy did.