Photo: AMC

Photo: AMC

When we first met Walter White on AMC’s Breaking Bad, he was a meek high-school chemistry teacher who, on his off hours, got yelled at by his car-wash boss. One cancer diagnosis and four seasons later, he has a thriving meth business, millions of dollars to be laundered, enemies on both sides of the law, and an ever-increasing body count. It’s quite a transformation, but this kind of swerve toward villainy didn’t happen in one episode. On the occasion of the season-four premiere (Sunday, July 17 at 10 p.m.), we decided to systematically break down Walt’s progression to the dark side, looking at the major events of the series and estimating where they pushed him (or pulled him back) on a scale of Badness, which goes from 1 (boy scout) to 10 (pure evil).