Breaking Bad: Better Late than Never

I am the danger! I am the one who knocks!

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now. For years I heard that I just had to watch Breaking Bad, that it was brilliant and groundbreaking. It's not that I didn't believe these people, it's simply that I didn't get into it from the start and often assumed I'd never get a chance to catch up. Last New Year's Eve I finally sat down and began the Saga of Walter White as he transforms from a nebbish chemistry teacher into the ruthless crystal meth kingpin, Heisenberg over the course of six incredible seasons. From the opening seconds of the pilot in which  an RV driven by a man wearing only his underwear and a gas mask careens wildly over a desert road, I was instantly hooked. My addiction to the show only increased as I followed Walt on his bloody rise to the top of the crystal meth empire. By the time the curtain fell on this bloody saga of crime and corruption in the American Southwest, I was finally convinced of what so many fans already knew: Breaking Bad is the most perfect show in television history.

From the outset creator Vince Gilligan's goal was to take an all around nice guy like Mr. Chips and gradually and plausibly turn him into Scarface. Over the course of the two years in which the events of the show take place, Breaking Bad accomplished this metamorphosis with frightening success. Walter White begins the series as a milquetoast man living a life of quiet desperation despite the love and support of his beautiful wife Skylar and teenage son Walt Jr. who suffers from Cerebral Palsy. Despite being a chemistry genius, Walt walked away from a life of exorbitant wealth and success and settled for teaching chemistry to a bunch of bored high school students. When we first meet him, he's about to turn fifty and has, by all indications, given up the ghost and resigned himself to a life full of regret. All this changes when on his fiftieth birthday he's diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. This is the final blow, the wake up call that snaps him out of the coma which has become his life and causes him to suddenly "break bad." Fearing he won't be able to leave anything behind for his family and learning how much money can be made in the meth business from his DEA brother in law, Hank, he decides to put his chemistry brilliance to good use cooking the purest meth the world has seen.


Walt and Jesse taking a beer break in between cooking.

It's at this point where we meet Jesse Pinkman, a former burnout student whom Walt discovers is in the meth business under the name Captain Cook. When Jesse's partner is arrested by Hank, Walt tracks Jesse down and suggests they partner up, saying "you know the business, and I know the chemistry." Hoping to avoid being turned in, Jesse reluctantly goes along with his former teacher and it's not long before they acquire an RV and drive out into the desert to cook. Over the course of the show, Walt and Jesse's relationship veers wildly from periods of friendship to deep hatred, backstabbing and violence as Walt becomes more ruthless, manipulating and lying to Jesse in order to keep him on his side. Despite this however, neither one can bring themselves to kill the other; through it all Walt has a fatherly love for Jesse even as his actions continue to shatter Jesse's life. By the end of the series, their roles are reversed; Jesse is shown to be the one with the conscience and heart, unwilling to go along with Walt's deadly schemes while Walt does whatever it takes to keep the meth train running.
At its core, Walt's transformation into a ruthless criminal represents the essential failing of the American dream, the desperate belief that we in this country can have it all. Despite his incredible potential, Walt walked away from his dream life and instead played it safe, settling for a normal, middle of the road existence. Although he has a beautiful wife, a great son and a nice house in a quiet neighborhood, he's filled with the resentment of feeling that it's all beneath him, especially when he's reduced to teaching elemental chemistry for a meager wage. With Walter Jr's medical needs and an unplanned baby on the way, Walt is forced to take a second job doing demeaning work at a car wash. Walt's underlying resentment and anger at his situation lies dormant for years, building pressure until the final blow of his diagnosis. Bryan Cranston, known prior to Breaking Bad for his wacky comedic chops, is consistently brilliant in subtly emphasizing Walt's sense of failure as his real incentive for breaking bad at fifty. The more Walt attempts to provide for his family the more he hurts them by lying and being distant. When Skylar finds out what he does, she threatens to leave him and tear the family apart, which ultimately pushes him deeper into the business.

The show does a wonderful job of showing all the repercussions, both short and long term, of Walt's actions. Every decision he makes in the meth business has serious, life shattering consequences for everyone around him, especially Skylar and Jesse. Not one character is untouched by the collateral damage that Walt leaves in his wake and that's another great theme of the show: the idea that every action has ripple effects which spread outward exponentially. As Walt's soul corrodes and he slips further and further into his Heisenberg persona, all those around him are affected. Take his decision to let Jesse's girlfriend Jane overdose. Walt goes to Jesse's place to try and save him from meeting that same fate, but when Jane starts choking on her own vomit, Walt's initial instinct is to turn her on her side. Just as he's about to do so, he hesitates and we get the sense that there's another part of him, Heisenberg, convinced that it's best to let Jane die to give Jesse a much needed wake up call. More important to Heisenberg however, is the fact that Jane threatened to reveal who he really is, so it's easy to see that Walt acted in his own interest. Cranston does an incredible job of silently conveying this as the point where the old Walt truly dies and Heisenberg takes over. Walt had killed before but it was always in defense of his life.  Little does he know that letting Jane die will cause her bereaved father, an air traffic controller, to space out on the job, leading to a mid-air collision of two 737's right over Walt's neighborhood. Walt's indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. As Walt transforms into a power hungry, egotistical drug kingpin, his actions gradually shatter the lives of the very people he originally intended to help.

By season 5, having successfully killed all the other threats to his position in the drug world, Walt has become the very kind of person he was terrified of in season one. When it comes to cooking his famous blue meth and raking in the dough, nothing will stand in his way. As he says in Season 5 when Jesse tries to convince him that they should take their money and leave the meth business for good, "I'm in the empire business." It's here where Walt's true motive for what he's done comes to light; despite his continued claims that he did it for the family, the truth is he did it to satisfy his own ego and get even for the life he believed was owed him. Therein lies the essential fallacy in the belief that one can have it all. To have it all, one must usually do terrible things. Throughout its run, Breaking Bad so artfully and powerfully conveyed many deep and complex human themes, giving us a main character that we initially sympathize with and gradually come to hate even as we still often find ourselves rooting for him. The characters in Breaking Bad force us to face a mirror and recognize the same impulses and frustrations within ourselves. We can see ourselves in each character at one point or another as they struggle to grapple with the shocking ramifications of Walt's actions. More than any other show, Breaking Bad shows the potential darkness that lies in the human heart and the corrosive effect of unchecked power and ego that can turn any person into the very danger that we fear.