100 Favorite Shows: #42 — Breaking Bad
“Just because you shot Jesse James, don’t make you Jesse James.”
When Breaking Bad debuted in January of 2008, its first season was cut short by the writers’ strike of that year. What at first seemed to be a clip of the heels before the race could begin instead proved to be an unlikely boon, as the shortened season led to a number of course corrections, including the preservation of fan-favorite Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), the meth team’s second banana. Following this bumpy run out of the gate, Vince Gilligan’s drug crime drama set in Albuquerque managed to steadily build its audience along with its story over the course of five seasons before exploding in a massive conclusion to the series that was then attended to with massive viewership. (Season one’s finale garnered 1.50 million viewers. The series finale pulled in 10.28 million.) The neo-western starred Bryan Cranston as chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White and Anna Gunn as the conflicted, lost Skyler White, but Breaking Bad’s story quickly spun far outside their suburban home in New Mexico.
(Sometimes, I talk about how there’s spoilers for shows like Rugrats and Happy Days. However, if you seriously don’t want spoilers for Breaking Bad, then you should seriously consider cessation of your reading.)
A private domicile with a dead battery remains stagnant in a New Mexico desert for four days. An ashy pink teddy bear floats in a swimming pool. A fly triggers a lock down of the superlab, a meth-cooking facility. A man in a mint green button down stands in the sun, contemplating his irrevocable decision. This is the world of Breaking Bad. It’s a calculating, unruly, tragic world, but it doesn’t come from the stars or from an era long ago. Breaking Bad exists in the modern era. In many Americans’ own backyards. The dangers the characters on Breaking Bad are exposed to are the types that we’re just one medical bill from facing ourselves.
After all, the world of Breaking Bad is also the world in which Walter White operates. The entire, oft-repeated conceit of the show was to take Walter and transform him from Mr. Chips into Scarface. Considering the amount of people who’ve plastered Tony Montana on their dorm room walls since 1983, this came with the inherent risk of many perceiving Walter White as a hero. Granted, by the time Breaking Bad debuted, television viewers were accustomed to stories of the anti-hero. But even Tony Soprano failed to resonate across the culture as massively as Walter White has. His pork pie hat, glasses, and goatee have become minimalist iconography. His famous quote, “I am the one who knocks” has become the bad-ass battle cry of an entire generation of telephiles. When Walt cooked crystal blue meth (an element that led to many great musical choices on the show, like “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” “El Paso,” and “Baby Blue”), his expertise was captivating. His entrance into the brutal world of drugs and crime was what made many root for Walter.
One of Walt’s greatest assets throughout Breaking Bad was his ability to use the small-town suburban lifestyle he’d been devoted to for the majority of his life to his advantage. When his house is stalked by Gus Fring’s (Giancarlo Esposito) enforcers in “Face/Off,” he’s able to call a neighbor and ask her to check if he left the stove burner on. It’s a clever way of learning he’s on the whacking block, but it’s also a crafty plan that Walt has at his disposal. No one else in the meth underground has such an ability because they didn’t spend the healthy times of their lives ingratiating themselves to common society.
Almost every episode forced Walt to devise some sort of plan to wriggle his way out of imminent danger, both from the crime lords he faced off against and from the snooping DEA, partially led by his own brother-in-law, Hank (Dean Norris). The problem-solving tactics employed by Walt were often incredibly satisfying because of how devoted Gilligan and company were to the elements of process in the series. Each step of a White concoction was depicted in painstaking detail and it often wouldn’t reveal the true intentions of Walt until the pay-off finally came.
Take the final arc of the show for instance. Walt witnesses his old business partner, Elliott (Adam Godley), speaking about the uncovering of Walt’s “Heisenberg” persona on the news at the end of “Granite State.” In an incredible moment, a resigned Walt leaves his glass on the bar and ventures out of his isolation in New Hampshire for one last plot. We don’t understand the point of every ingredient to his plan (though it does involve the return of Badger (Matt Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) in a glorious bit of fan service, which Breaking Bad’s universe has always excelled at), but the eventual elimination of Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and the neo-Nazis is not some godly feat on the part of Walt. We saw every step of his plan, from the acquisition of a machine gun (which the writers were even unsure of) to the financial acquisition trickery on the part of laser pointers. Logically, if we had chemistry knowledge and emotional intuition on Walt’s level, we could pull off the plot, too. This awareness made the final scheme just as satisfying as every arc that came before.
Walt’s plans were not always flawless, however. Even those who rooted for Walt’s villainy had to recognize his shortcomings in the syndicates within which he found himself intertwined. Despite his meth-amatical genius, Walt’s entry into the criminal enterprise is still shaky. He may know how to cook the blue, but he doesn’t fully understand all the nuanced, ingrained rules of the seedy Albuquerque underground and it often deposits him into trouble when others see his inexperience as threatening. When Walt and Jesse’s lives are on the clock after Gus grows wary of their partnership, they begin flailing and thrashing for any method of saving their own skin. The experienced Fring was critical and cautious (save for one crucial mistake) and it was almost embarrassing to watch the juxtaposition of Walt’s panicked desperation dissolve his mask of ruthless confidence.
Before Walt and Jesse entered the scene, there was structure, order, and routine. Their completely original take on existing as players on the larger drug scale was the equivalent of dropping a mosquito into a pinball machine. Unpredictable, loud, and moving in every possible direction at all times. For as much terror as this inexperience caused them, it resulted in plenty of headaches for the enforcers reluctantly aligned with them, especially Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), the hokey and crooked lawyer who made a name for himself as a “friend of the cartel.”
“All I can say is if I ever get anal polyps, I’ll know what to name them,” Saul states to Jesse upon entering the FBI holding cell where he was questioned for his knowledge of ricin as a potential source of Brock’s (Ian Posada) poisonous ailments. It’s the equivalent of Professor McGonagall asking why trouble always involves Harry, Hermione, and Ron at Hogwarts. Whenever the cartel behavior ends up embroiled in shit, Walt and Jesse are likely the ones to blame and Saul knows it. It’s not just Walt’s inflated sense of competence on the scene, either. It’s also the fact that Jesse knows his way around criminal enforcers as well as he knew his way around the beakers in Mr. White’s classroom.
For Saul, every entrance into a scene was met with the sleazy bluster that typically comes along with lawyers relegated to billboards. On the other hand, there was also Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a P.I. and hitman for Fring and Goodman, as well as anyone they entrap/assist. For ten of Saul’s words, Mike would speak one (or ten thousand, quite frankly). In every arc, Mike kept his head down, finished his work, and left no incriminating evidence behind. For a while, he made a good team alongside Saul’s shady sermons and Gus’ organized syndicate. When Walt and Jesse entered the fray, though, the world went haywire for Mike and his brand of “no half measures” was not able to surmount Walt’s “do the next best thing” philosophy. Ultimately, it drove him to a Walt-inflicted death (“Shut the fuck up and let me die in peace”), another sign that everyone was better off without Heisenberg — except for Walt.
The dispatching of Mike was not one of the many full measures Walt strove to put in motion as a result of Ehrmantraut’s own advice. (It was hardly a necessary act at all, but once again, Walt’s arrogance got the better of the people he worked with.) One of the only effective full measures Walt implemented (not counting the unfortunate point blank shooting of karaoke lover Gale Boetticher (David Costabile)) was bringing in Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), the leader of the once-juggernaut Salamancas and Juárez Cartel, to eliminate Gus before Gus could eliminate Walt.
It’s a full measure that only works because Gus’ team performs half-measures in investigating Hector’s intentions for “talking” to the DEA. (He only tells Hank to suck and fuck various body parts.) Gus’ team does their diligence in checking out Hector’s nursing home quarters and staking out his visit to the DEA building, but it’s not enough. A bomb underneath Hector’s wheelchair and a lack of eyes inside the DEA led to the typically-perfectionist Gus slipping up — and it cost him his life.
The climax of “Face/Off” pays no homage to Nicolas Cage or John Travolta. Instead, it depicts Gus Fring with half of his face completely blown from the explosion of Hector’s wheelchair and bell. Muscles and blood vessels dangle loosely, the bones of his jaw are crumbling. All Gus does his straighten his tie, collapse, and die. I mean, it’s obviously a stunning shot that no one (especially those poor nurses who only signed up to feed the elderly and will instead be haunted until their own placement in the home) who watched Breaking Bad would forget, but it’s also emblematic of the dual nature of Gus Fring.
He wasn’t quite a Harvey Dent figure. Instead, he was kind of like Walter White. Gus owned a Los Pollos Hermanos franchise and, on the surface, seemed to aim no higher. Just a mild-mannered, small town business owner hiding an immense drug empire in plain sight. Ultimately, though, he was obviously ingrained into the criminal lifestyle that Walt never fully grasped. Walt was the revolutionary suburban figure in meth and Gus was the traditionalist who upholded every standard, every code of honor. It’s why he goes to Hector personally to kill him for speaking to the DEA. They may be enemies, but they have history together. And when one has a past with a drug lord, the honor is kept by dealing with them in person, rather than sending an enforcer to get them.
It’s just that Gus never counted on Hector’s own indignity. Once the most feared man in the entire southwest region, Hector in “Face/Off” is reduced to ringing a bell for a nurse to come in and ask if he needs help going to the bathroom. Killing himself to kill Gus not only gives him revenge over Fring, but it also gives him his own personal agency back. Ever the clever one, it was Walt’s idea to use Hector’s pride as a mechanism for dismantling the back rooms of Hermanos. His plans always tracked logically (even in their suspense, which saw Walt hiding from the nursing home surveyor while another resident repeated, “Hello” to him from an adjoining window), but they still put the meth routines into chaotic upheaval, where anyone could seize the power.
It’s definitely an anal polyp for Saul to orchestrate a plot for Walt that would kill one of the leading pushers in New Mexico because even he knows that the thought of the crimes being “over” and “won” is fallacy. For us, there was still another Breaking Bad season left. For them, there was the understanding that each new season brought a new, escalated villain. If Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz) in season one was the easiest boss for Walt and Jesse to defeat, then god help them when season five brings along Nazi sociopaths, including Uncle Jack, Lydia (Laura Fraser), and Todd (Jesse Plemons). Not to mention, there was still a clay pot in Walt’s backyard to be dealt with. It didn’t contain ricin, but it did contain lily-of-the-valley, the plant used to endanger Brock.
Walt using the life of a child as a pawn to be rid of Gus Fring is obviously too far for Jesse Pinkman (he’s that other anal polyp) to abide, even if Jesse hadn’t bonded with Brock through his doomed relationship with Andrea (Emily Rios). Jesse pretended to be the sort of modern high school burnout who would evolve naturally from John Bender. With his enunciation-free speech and graphic t-shirts, Jesse was the kind of student who traditionalist teachers (like Walt) would despise and dismiss as “problem children,” but more empathetic teachers would see immense potential within. His ambition may have been lacking in high school, sure, but over time, Jesse proves that he can be just as quick on his feet as Walt, even if he’d never be able to plan ahead like Walt can.
For the most part, Jesse’s strength was in his morality. He reported the potential of ricin being in Brock’s system, regardless of the sort of trouble it could put him in. When Walt brought a bomb to a hospital, it was the first thing Jesse protested because he is all-too-aware of the commonplace risk of innocent people suffering and dying because of his choices. It even extends to Gus, when he learns that Brock wasn’t poisoned by Gus’ ricin at all. “Gus had to go, right?” he asks Walt, already knowing the answer, but searching for some palatable way to reframe the murder in his mind.
Most of Jesse’s associates see him as profoundly idiotic, as if he was from St. Olaf or Jacksonville. “He’s a wordsmith,” Saul zings when the FBI agents he clashes with remark that all Jesse has done is call them a “couple of dicks.” When Walt and Jesse finish cooking and Jesse pulls out a cigarette in their RV, Walt tells him to smoke outside, to which Jesse replies, “Duh. Like I’m an idiot,” perhaps intuitively understanding exactly how Walt views him. The entire drug arena sees Jesse as a lackey who could never be a leader. The kind of guy you make do the dirty work for you because his perceived idiocy makes him expendable.
In reality, Jesse never wanted to be a part of the drug syndicate. He was just consistently roped into various plots, during which he would commit such egregious acts that he had no choice but to stay for another loop around the crystal blue carousel. Jesse actually just wanted to be happy. He wanted it, first, with Badger and Skinny Pete. And then with Jane (Krysten Ritter). And then with Andrea and Brock. And by the time all of his associates ruined these possibilities of happiness, Jesse’s left with no one to sit passenger when he rides away from slavery and Walter White in his El Camino, screaming, crying, and thrashing the steering wheel.
To me, this always made Jesse the most tragic figure on Breaking Bad. Yes, he’s partially to blame for what happened to Jane and Andrea, but it can’t be ignored how hard he fought to untangle himself and protect them. Jesse was always trying to do the right thing, but was burdened by the low perceptions others possessed of him.
Walt never did respect Jesse Pinkman. Even by the end, it was clear that he only saw Jesse as the undisciplined, lazy, fake tough guy that he acted like in high school. Walt was unable to perceive Jesse as being capable of growing and developing into anything else and that’s why he was so quick to give him up to Uncle Jack in “Ozymandias” (one of the series’ best episodes and directed by Rian Johnson). It’s that code of honor among criminals again. Jesse hides from the “Ozymandias” desert shootout that results in the deaths of Hank and Gomie (Steven Michael Quezada). Walt is understandably crushed by the brutal killing of his family and with Hank gone, he can trust either Uncle Jack or Jesse. With the scraps of humanity remaining within Heisenberg, he feels that there is no loyalty to be had with Uncle Jack. Countering this, he blames Jesse for Hank’s death. By the end of this near-to-the-end installment, all Walt can trust is the unspoken system of rules that criminals are expected to honor. It’s what makes his decision to give Jesse up to Uncle Jack as doable as when he goes back to liberate him in “Felina.” If Walt can’t trust himself or anyone he knows, then the best he can trust is that what he’s doing is what any other eschewed criminal partner would.
The erosion of trust is a major theme throughout Breaking Bad, but it manifests in more than just the Mr. Chips to Scarface transformation. It also comes in the question of what faith we’re meant to have in our American institutions. When Jesse is abducted by Gus’ goons, it’s done outside the police station in complete daylight. Even if the cops had rounded the corner a few seconds earlier to see Jesse getting taken away, would they have worked to protect him or would they have turned away? How are we supposed to have faith in the American police? Or in the American news (a radio station spends more time teasing Aerosmith than in addressing the massive explosion that killed at least three people in the nursing home)? Or in the healthcare system that decimated Walter White when he was diagnosed with cancer?
Coming off a massive recession in the United States, Walter was forced to care for his son, Flynn (RJ Mitte), on the salary of a teacher (already underpaid in an underfunded infrastructure). On top of it, the out-of-pocket payments ballooned astronomically with Walt’s cancer diagnosis. He lived exactly the way he was indoctrinated to: nuclear family, suburban home, college degree, socially acceptable job. And still, his entire savings was wiped out by one medical diagnosis. In the United States, it’s a miracle more people don’t turn to cooking meth. It’s an option as bad as the alternatives: go bankrupt for the rest of your life or die. And it’s all to relatable to our current moment of economic crisis and healthcare gutting in the U.S., especially in “Ozymandias” when Walt trudges through the desert with his share of funds in tow. Around him, The Limeliters’ “Take My True Love by the Hand” plays.
“Times are getting hard boys
Money’s getting scarce
Times don’t get no better boys
Gonna leave this place.”
Knowing we’re all just one moment of hesitation from our primary care physicians away from facing down an insurmountable hurdle for the rest of our lives, leaving “this place” doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. After all, I don’t think I’d personally be able to cook meth with 99.1% purity. Most people can’t.
At first, these compounding circumstances presented Walt’s motivation for becoming Heisenberg as a means of providing for his family after he dies. By the end, Walt admits to Skyler that the reason he cooked meth is because he felt alive doing it. Like he wasn’t just wasting his life as a forgettable man who changed nothing in his work or in his personal life. Becoming Heisenberg gave him an identity that spoke to what we stay alive for. It wasn’t a random occurrence that Walt happened to break bad so severely throughout the series. Heisenberg was born out of Walt’s hungered DNA as much as it was from his circumstances in life. Over time, Better Call Saul would pick up the baton of “character study” over “action thriller” as the series’ most crucial identity piece, but Breaking Bad still mastered the investigation into Walter’s mindset as deftly as any television tragedy managed before. What was good for Walt was debilitating for the spheres of people in his life.
He didn’t just ruin Jesse’s life ambitions and he didn’t just indirectly kill Hank and Gale and Mike and Gus. His hubris and his meddling that teetered constantly before eventually tipping over into “too far” territory ultimately ruined the lives of everyone in the White-Lambert-Schrader clan. None of them will ever be able to feel their maximum happiness again because of Walt’s decisions. He took two fathers away from their families because he felt the need to play kingpin. Hank’s resignation to death (“He made up his mind ten minutes ago”) is not even the most tragic aspect of his and Walt’s parallel ambitions to reach the peak of their occupational power. It’s the fact that their collision course was telegraphed from the minute Walt took his pants off in the desert. Bowling over Marie’s (Betsy Brandt) wishes for extra caution and safety and rocks (minerals), Hank’s behavior is typically used for comic relief and a family dynamic of irony. When Marie’s fears prove themselves founded and Hank ends up buried in a ditch for his refusal to stop and listen to them, all irony has been cast out and we’re left with only tragedy and heartbreak — those are the real world effects of devoting yourself to one side of the drug industry or the other. Very rarely do you get to find a happy ending in that realm. Tony Montana certainly didn’t.
Balancing the family stories with those of drug pushing and investigating, Breaking Bad managed to remind us of the humanity at stake in every moment. The entire opening stretch of “Ozymandias” deals with the fallout of Uncle Jack, Walter, Jesse, and Hank crashing into one another. It’s an extended, breathless sequence and when it smash cuts back to Marie, our obsession with the crime side is immediately checked by the Breaking Bad team’s recall of the people who are about to be devastated for the rest of their lives when they learn of what happened in the desert.
Before “Ozymandias” returns to the chilling horror of Walt’s present, it takes the time to flashback to the idyllic beginning when Walt was cooking meth, getting away with it, and growing his family. It could never stay that bucolic for long, but it was a sharp reminder of how far we’d come throughout the show and how corrupted Walt had grown. He was genuinely warmed to think of the new baby being named Holly and he couldn’t wait to get out of the desert and go home to his family. By the time “Ozymandias” came around, he couldn’t wait to go home to tell his family to pack their things and go on the run with him. The early days — before everything got out of control — were set in the same desert as the days that brought about the end of Hank and Gomie and the end of their family. It was challenging to recognize Walter White in that flashback setting, especially since a few minutes later, we arrived at the end to his entire empire.
When he fails to convince his family to pack their things with him, he grows increasingly exasperated until finally accepting that his world has crashed down — permanently. Skyler tells Flynn the truth about Walt and about her complicit behavior in his sins. It’s hard not to see right through Walt when Jesse Pinkman comes over for dinner in “Buyout” and Skyler’s acute awareness continues to her devastating repetition of “Where is Hank?” There were many deal-breakers before Hank, but there was no way out after a member of the family paid the final price. As he loses the loyalty of Flynn and Skyler, who initiate a final confrontation against him at the climax of “Ozymandias,” Walt processes how there’s nothing left. By this point, there are no more logical calculations because those would have told us that Walt would never break bad in the first place. Characters are operating solely by instinct. Skyler’s instincts tell her that Hank is dead; Flynn’s instincts say to trust his mother — even after she lied to him — from Walter’s attack with a knife; Walt’s instincts tell him when he’s licked and can’t convince his family of his true intentions; Holly’s instincts even kick in when Walt kidnaps her and Skyler tearfully begs for Walt to give her back and the baby only cries and calls out for “Mama.”
In emotionally heightened situations, we have to rely on our instincts and this intense sequence of “Ozymandias” tells us exactly how the nuclear family operates in Breaking Bad. The narcissistic patriarch grows increasingly violent when his family dares to disobey his commands and, of course, the ever-passive matriarch wails against the anti-hero’s torched-track behavior.
In many shows with a criminal emphasis like Breaking Bad, the wife of the protagonist tends to be relegated to the role of a “nag.” She constantly “tut-tuts” her husband’s behavior and tearfully asks him to stop, but ultimately acts powerlessly and without any agency to curb his actions, even as they destroy their way of life. Carmela Soprano was a bit more active in her role on The Sopranos, but Skyler White fell in line with figures like Betty Draper. It was disheartening to see the way many fans reacted to Skyler (as if her persona was somehow equally terrible when compared to the horrific depths of Walt), but it was just as cathartic when these sentiments were eschewed by the show itself as the end of “Ozymandias” when Walt knowingly called her a “stupid bitch.” Not to parrot the vaguely misogynistic complaints from the Internet, but to exonerate her from the cops he intuited were listening in on his phone call, as he portrayed her to be a victim of Walt’s crimes, just as much as Hank was.
After all, Walt was Ozymandias, right? The figure of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem (which Cranston read back in 2013 on AMC) was as much a symbol of tragic downfall as any anti-hero from the peak TV era, but it spoke to Breaking Bad most pertinently.
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The allegory is obvious and doesn’t require a degree in English to figure out. Walt clawed his way to the top of the syndicate and made inordinate amounts of cash along the way. But what was left around him? Who was there to bask in the riches? His throne raised at the cost of the environment around him and it resulted in a more pathetic reaction to the loss of all love in his life. At least when he was diagnosed with cancer, he had the support of friends and family. (Even if his fierce Heisenberg persona was hidden from them, to the point where Hank almost struggled to be friendly around Walt, considering the on-paper clash of their personalities.) When his meth crown was stolen by a group of white supremacists, there was no one around to provide sympathy. Many of them were buried under the ground he had been so keen to dominate.
Throughout our lives, we’re consumed by money if we’re not careful. We live for it, die for it, chase it, argue over it, kill for it. And it’s all just a concept we invented! Humanity invented its own downfall. We invented the technology and pioneered the medical science to sustain human life in an unprecedented capacity and then we immediately put a tax on it. If you don’t have the money, you can’t get the treatment, unless you feel like going into debt for the rest of time. To solve this debt, you can either perpetuate the myth of the “hard-working American” or you can build a meth empire from the desert ground up. It’s the American way.
As hard as it is to reconcile what a dystopia the country resembles, there’s still some beauty in it. Walter White destroyed everything good in his life for the chance of feeling alive for a few brief moments, but he at least managed to do it against the gorgeous vistas and landscapes of New Mexico. Gilligan and company were careful and attentive to detail on Breaking Bad to ensure that their narcotics action thriller series smartly showed the characters’ intentions, rather than explain them. But they were also more than happy to indulge in the iconic cinematography that came from shooting in the plains of New Mexico. For every half-blown Gus Fring skull, there was a wide shot of plateaus and buttes. For every smirk on Huell’s (Lavell Crawford) face as he laid down on a cubed stack of cash, there were cacti stretching towards the pristine blue sky. It helped remind me that for all the horror one man could inflict because of how the system worked against him (not that that’s any excuse for murder), the world was overflowing with beauty, whether its residents stopped jockeying for power to appreciate it or not.
I came to Breaking Bad a bit too late to ride the experience with everyone else. I only managed to see the second half of the fifth season in real-time and spent the months leading to it playing catch-up. Aside from constant rewatches of The Office, Breaking Bad was my first real binge and exposure to a world of prestige television that everyone seemed to be freaking out about. I have to admit, it was thrilling to witness it a little bit at all. It’s been off the air so long that I sometimes forget it was, at one point, not a completed story with questions that remained. It’d be like waiting for Act V of Macbeth to be released (what is going to happen with that dagger?) and waiting with the rest of the world to see how the tragedy came to an end. But that’s just it — it’s a tragedy. We already know how it’s going to end. Tragedies aren’t the stories that end in weddings. They end in death, regret, blood, and misery. And in 2013, the great tragedy of the modern era ended in a newly abandoned meth lab. A meth lab no one would inherit from Heisenberg, mighty and despaired.
