He Can’t Keep Getting Away With It

He can’t keep getting away with it (also used as he can’t keep getting away with that/this) is a meme that features the character Jesse Pinkman from TV series Breaking Bad.

A still image of Jesse taken from the scene, where he desperately utters the sentence, is used online as a reaction image. People usually use it when somebody does something bad again and again, showing no remorse or will to stop doing it.

The meme is sometimes used in an animated GIF form as well.

via GIPHY

The fifth season of the popular American TV drama series Breaking Bad was premiering in the U.S. in 2013.

The scene that features the source of the meme takes place during episode 6, when detective Hank tries to stop Jesse who is about to torch Walter White’s house. Jesse shatters under the pressure and confesses to Hank what evil and cunning things Walter has done to him and to others.

At the end of the scene, he repeatedly utters in desperation that “he can’t keep getting away with it”.

A clip of the scene was cut out of the episode and was uploaded to YouTube, the same day when the episode aired for the first time. It reached a relatively broad audience at the time, but it had not been used as a meme yet.

One of the first instances of using Jesse’s performance as a meme happened on Twitter in 2014, when the fan page BreakingBadQT brought the quote in relation to the then prominent Justin Bieber’s DUI scandal.

However, the meme only got very popular in around 2019, when Reddit users started to utilize it as an image macro template and then as a reaction image, spreading it to mainstream meme sites like Instagram or Me.Me.

• Screenrant.com – He Can’t Keep Getting Away With It: 10 Tragic Breaking Bad Moments That Fans Turned Into Memes
• Reddit – r/breakingbad