It's not the case of lack of failing, the issue is that every time he's on the brink of getting caught, something happens that gets him out of the bag, or he pulls a stunt to do so. Like the latest stunt whereby Jack arrived onto the scene after he was cuffed. It just seems that he does a barrel roll through a torn bush several times a season and each time walks out of it unharmed with a new rose to add to his collection. It really is a case of "I'm the untouchable super-hero." Too often his pitfalls are made into success stories, which really bothers me as it seems that it's chaos that brings him upwards each time, and his smarts take a very prominent back-seat as the show goes on. Namely in recent episodes, he gets cuffed, his money is more or less found (all due to his negligence and greed), yet somehow he manages to come out of it with 11 million dollars, Hank and his colleague out of his way (ie. the two instigators of his impending demise), Jesse in slavery (also no longer a risk), and stumbles upon some random farm in the middle of nowhere which agree to sell him their only truck. You might say that "oh but he essentially lost his family", but I'd argue he lost it a long time ago, even Skyler said she was waiting for him to die. What he lost, was, nothing essentially. He had planned to give all his money to his family, so the 11 million bucks entered his pocket so that he's free to disappear with it, also with the primary DEA agents who had been after him. I just find that while they aim to bring him as high and realistically as possible, often-times he just gets out of deep water again and again, and quite often not due to his own character.
Though don't get me wrong, I love Breaking Bad, the writing is fantastic, my only critique is that they followed the formula of making a seemingly unstoppable character and built him up using a technique whereby he just gets out of every situation where he's caught by the low and danglies (by his hand or not) and somehow it benefits him in the end. As I say, I would have been slightly more okay with him getting out of tricky situations with a slight dent, but it was like every time he did get out of one of them he came off better. It seems like his pitfalls were his opportunities, and his smarts only caused him to get caught within those pitfalls. Either way, the latest episode is a slightly more realistic representation of what the show needed more of, which is a little more main character suspense and damage.
I could go on and on, but there was no sense of fear for me when it came to Walt, yet with some of my other favourite characters I was worried what would happen to them. Walt, being a primary character who's on the brink of death due to Cancer, and who's also on the edge due to his schematics with drugs, he should be the one who I would be worried about. And in fairness, I was, but really in the latest seasons my suspense was often eased in his scenes because I felt "oh, it's Walt, it's easy enough to predict that this scene which seemingly could go either way will end up in his favour." This led to a sense of predictability in the show, you never worried about Walt throughout the series, so you don't care when he's in trouble because you just know he'll be okay. Up until the end however, but the series should be about the journey, not whether he makes it out the other end on top or not. So yeah, while the series is almost flawless, and fantastically written, Walt's risks were never binary, because he always ends up on top without taking so much as a hit. So I feel that episodes like this one are perhaps a bit late in showing him take a few personal hits, I would have liked to see him break-even on more of his tight spots if he had to get out of them, rather than always achieve progress from what seems like impending failure each time.
