Photo: AMC
As I've already said elsewhere, when it comes to TV, my favourite character is almost always the one who's the most ruthless -- the one who'll make the tough but necessary calls for whatever enterprise he or she is involved in, unmoved by and maybe even unaware of the ways those decisions might harm others. Think about it: how much time is wasted, in your most beloved shows, by people dithering about what to do because they're scared of hurting people, even when the only course of action is obvious and clear and will provide the most interesting material for the show to work with? All these idiots wasting so much time Hamletting around when they could be Macbething people in the face! For this reason, Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) remains, in my opinion, the very best character on Breaking Bad -- the cold, unwavering pragmatist who never ever lost sight of his goals, right up to the moment one of his eyes got blown up. But perhaps because Breaking Bad is a show with so many ruthless characters -- rather than identify the most ruthless, you kind of have to plot them on a matrix -- I also always had a soft spot for...the soft spot: Gale Boetticher.
Groomed, by Gus Fring, for meth cookery right from the start (he attended college on a chemistry scholarship Gus had endowed), Gale (David Costabile) was a sweet, gentle soul, somehow maintaining his aura of innocence despite earning his living manufacturing illegal drugs. Gale was a libertarian (maybe the only one, real or fictional, who hasn't been insufferably annoying), and approached his vocation from the libertarian perspective: if addicts want to use a product, then at least one person producing it should make it reasonably safe. But with regard to all the overtly criminal stuff, Gale was happy enough to let Gus run point, and hole up in his well-appointed lab doing some applied science, with little sense of the end user and certainly no contact with him or her. For Gale, there seemed to be little difference between his interest in refining his meth recipe, and his determination to determine the most optimal method by which to brew coffee. (Maybe the illicit nature of the project also appealed to the adventurous part of Gale that liked to travel the world.)
Because Gale's spirit of scientific collaboration was so much greater than his professional vanity, it was he who recommended that Gus hire Walter (Bryan Cranston) and lock up Walter's meth recipe -- and though Walter and Gale have a cordial working relationship at first, of course it can't last -- not only because Aaron Paul is in the permanent cast and his Jesse needs to be working with Walter, but...that's a big part of it. Gus doesn't cotton to Jesse and starts making plans to take Walter out; Walter figures this out and enlists Jesse to kill Gale, his would-be replacement. And here's poor Gale in the middle, oblivious to the machinations surrounding him, and in emotional turmoil: Gus has told him that Walter is about to succumb to cancer, and Gus can't afford to leave the lab idle for more than a couple of days and needs a new head cook lined up and ready to take over immediately. Poor Gale has no idea that he's landed in the middle of a power struggle between the two men who mean the most to him in the world: the benefactor who gave him his start in the world, and the colleague he regards as a genius. He ends up dead, of course.
But I feel like the show's producers knew that they had struck gold with this character because even after he died, he wasn't entirely gone. As Hank (Dean Norris) investigates Gale's murder, we get more insights into his interests in life: his lab notes detail the process by which he cooked Walter's meth recipe, but it's also a scrapbook of what was most important to him, containing vegan recipes, a Ron Paul sticker, a Far Side cartoon. A flashback to his first day in the laundromat lab shows us a Gale heartbreakingly full of hope for the project and gratitude toward Gus. And when Hank turns up a commemorative video of Gale doing karaoke in Thailand...forget it.
Gale, you dear, trusting idiot. I know you would be horrified to know that your Leaves Of Grass inscription might lead directly to the downfall of one of your idols -- but at least you didn't live to see the gruesome death of the other. It's just as well: this world (of Albuquerque-based drug kingpins) was never meant for one as beautiful as you.