We Had A Good Thing You Stupid Son of a Bitch

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About

We Had A Good Thing You Stupid Son of a Bitch is a catchphrase taken from a scene in Breaking Bad where Mike Ehrmantraut (played by Jonathan Banks) yells at Walter White (Bryan Cranston) about how his pride and ego caused their successful criminal careers under Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) to implode. The scene comes from season five episode seven (released in August 2012) and first became the subject of memes in 2019, particularly image macros that use the quote as a phrasal template by changing various aspects of it to alter the context. The format was popularized on sites including 4chan, Twitter and Instagram in the early 2020s.

Origin

On August 26th, 2012, season five episode seven of Breaking Bad aired. During the episode, Mike Ehrmantraut decides to flee New Mexico, suspecting he's going to be killed. Walter White wants a list of names of people Mike was paying off to keep their criminal careers a secret so he can have them killed. Before he can leave, Walter demands the names and Mike angrily rants at him about how his pride and ego caused their perfect criminal setup to implode (shown below).

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had Fring. We had a lab. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, cooked and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now.

The earliest known use of the quote as a meme was posted by Twitter^[1] user @Nadim_UTD on July 15th, 2015, writing, "We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had LvG, we had Schmidfield, we had everything we needed." On July 3rd, 2017, an anonymous user of 4chan's^[2] /pol/ board posted an edit of the quote about immigration in Europe. On December 7th, 2019, Facebook^[3] user Kakarot posted an image macro using the partial quote about the movie Dragon Ball Z: Bio-Broly, garnering over 1,000 reactions in four years (shown below).

Spread

On July 16th, 2022, an anonymous user of 4chan's /tv/^[4] board posted an altered version of the quote in a thread with over 300 replies that became a copypasta on the board^[5] (shown below).

We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch! We had child murdering Fring! We had a meth lab built on top of an innocent lawyer! We had everything we needed and it all ran like clockwork! You could have shut your mouth, taught Gale how to cook, and died for Gus like a good employee! It was perfect! But no! You just had to blow it up! You and wanting to live! You just had to save yourself and Jesse. If you gotten yourself killed, known your place, we'd all be fine right now!

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the quote became increasingly popularized as a phrasal template on 4chan,^[6]^[7] inspiring versions referencing things like TV shows, memes like Sneed's Feed and Seed and real-world events (examples shown below).

On August 3rd, 2021, a Redditor posted a version of the meme to /r/freefolk^[8] that gained over 11,000 upvotes in two years. On August 29th, 2022, an anonymous user of 4chan's^[9] /tv/ board posted a version of the quote referencing Star Wars, which was reposted by Instagram^[10] user ownthegasmask.k on August 30th, garnering over 3,400 likes in 10 months (shown below, left). On December 1st, Redditor u/Gentleman_owl posted an edit of the quote to /r/Kanye,^[11] garnering over 12,000 upvotes in six months (shown below, right).

On June 24th, 2023, Twitter^[12] user @MarxInCrisis posted an image of Yevgeny Prigozhin along with an edit of the quote, garnering over 22,900 likes in six days (shown below).