Walter White

Breaking Bad's meth chef Walter White's drug of choice was much more addictive than his signature blue crystal. He got his first whiff of it when he met the psychopath Tuco Salamanca in the drug lord's barrio headquarters to get paid for the meth Tuco had stolen and to avenge Jesse. The fulminated mercury that nearly levelled Tuco's building was a "crystallization" of Walt's delusion that his brain would win the day over the world's brawn. He would finally get he recognition he deserved. After he and Jesse escaped from Tuco's clutches and he launched the infamous fugue state canard, he was hooked. Every close call, every fabrication, every probing heart-to-heart with the conniving Gustavo Fring and, of course, Heisenberg's eventual destruction of the great man all fed his delusion that he was unstoppable, invincible, imperial. In the final season, Walt's narcissism was in full bloom and he grew more and more incautious, testing the limits of his luck with the railroad heist, or, perhaps, tempting fate with the giant magnet scheme. But why? Walt's greatest frustration was that he was all power and no glory. He could not tell the world how great he was. They would never know how he had outwitted the devil himself, built an empire that spanned the globe, cheated death time after time. "I'm the one who knocks," he told Skyler, showing a bit of the bristling arrogance that lay just below the surface and daring not to reveal more. He ached to be known and celebrated for the mastermind that he was. Early in Walt's descent into the pits, he showed his infant daughter stacks of money -- hundreds of thousands of dollars -- he had crammed between the insulation in the walls of his home. "See what your daddy has done for you," he cooed. Pitiful, heartbreaking and chilling. When Walt (Bryan Cranston) came back from New Hampshire to set things aright, he'd taken on the bearing of the fiends he'd been supplying -- gaunt, wasted, depleted. Poetic justice? Perhaps. Say my name? You goddamn right.