Breaking Bad: an appreciation

So, I’ll get back to writing about my reading list—which keeps growing—very soon, but just this moment, my imagination has been captured by a TV series about meth dealers.

No, really.

Some of you know this already—one of you turned me onto the show, after all—but I’m speaking of Breaking Bad, the cable series on AMC starring Golden Globe winner Bryan Cranston (formerly best known as the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) and created/produced/often written by Vince Gilligan, who used to be one of the main writers on The X-Files. I never expected to become a fan of a show with such a dark premise, but the acting is terrific and the writing… the writing is completely brilliant.

As the series begins Walt, played with total erupting-out-of-the-middle-aged-doldrums conviction by Cranston, feels like his life has been a failure. Once a promising but congenitally passive scientist, the on-the-cusp-of-50 Walt has watched his former partner take his best idea and build a successful company around it while Walt has languished for 20 years as a barely-scraping-by high school chemistry teacher. He loves his wife Skyler—pregnant with an unexpected second child—and his son, Walt Jr., who is a typical 15-year-old in every respect except that he has cerebral palsy, but the rest of his life is one unending humiliation.

Money is already tight when Walt learns in the first episode that he has stage four lung cancer (ironic because he does not smoke), with a year, maybe two to live. The next day he goes on a ride-along with his DEA agent brother-in-law and sees one of his former students (the luckless, mostly well-meaning loser Jesse) escaping from the meth lab the agents are in the process of busting. He also sees the rolls and rolls of cash the agents recover at the house, and an idea forms… Walt may be doomed, but he can leave his wife and kids well off rather than destitute—be their hero financially if in no other way—if he can team up with Jesse to cook and sell meth.

Needless to say, complications ensue, not the least of which is that Walt is both an excellent meth chef, and smarter than almost everyone he has to deal with in that world. He doesn’t like what he’s doing, but he does like how it makes him feel—powerful and finally, for once, in control of his life.

What prompted me to write about the show this morning, though, was the brilliant episode I just watched last night, episode ten of season two, titled “Over.” At this point I’m going to put up a big

*********************** SPOILER ALERT ***********************

so that no one reads any further if they want to check out the series for themselves. (Seasons one and two are on DVD now, and season three should be coming out before long. Season four is scheduled to start in June.)

In the previous episode, Walt becomes convinced by the hacking cough he’s developed and the blurry shape he sees on his preliminary medical scan results (that the technician won’t talk with him about) that the end is near. So he calls Jesse and they go on a marathon four-day meth-cooking binge that’s full of comic complications, with Walt’s MacGyver-ish science abilities ultimately rescuing them.

The kicker, though, comes at the end, when Walt and his family sit down together in the doctor’s office and hear the scan results—Walt is in remission, the tumors have shrunk 80 percent and the cough and the blur on the scan were side-effects of the chemo and radiation treatments that have saved his life. He’s not dying, his family is delighted… and he slips off into the bathroom alone and pounds his knuckles bloody against the towel dispenser.

That’s the setup for “Over,” in which Walt tries to figure out what this means. At first, he calls Jesse for a meet and says, sell what we’ve got, we’ll split the money, and then we can both walk away. A big clue that this is far from over, though, comes when Walt continues to shave his head, even though he finished chemo weeks ago. Then his wife throws a celebration for him, at which Walt spends his time sulking, drinking and generally behaving poorly. When asked to say something to the assembled group of friends he will say only this: “When they told me I had cancer, I thought, ‘Why me?’ And then when they told me I was in remission, I thought the same thing.”

The next day he apologizes, telling his wife “That wasn’t me, that was, I don’t know, someone else.” And then begins furiously working on a home repair project, ultimately ending up on his back in the crawl space literally shoring up the subfloor of his family home (and you’d better believe that symbolism was intentional). But you can see he’s deeply frustrated, to the point of obsession. Now that he’s no longer dying, everyone in his life wants everything to go back to the way it was… but other than his wife and son, Walt hated everything about his life the way it was. He felt defeated and powerless and constantly a victim.

In the episode’s final scene, he goes to the local big-box hardware store to get some mold-resistant primer to apply to his house repairs, walks down the aisle with a can in each hand, and comes across a shopping cart filled with what he immediately recognizes as a large buy of the ingredients needed to cook meth. The cart’s sketchy-looking owner returns and Walt glares at him before launching into a whispered rant in which he tells him everything he’s doing wrong—wrong ingredients, wrong approach (buy different components at different stores, and never in quantity), etc.—until the guy wordlessly flees the store.

Walt then gets in line to buy his primer, but something has already clicked over in his mind and he leaves the cans on the floor, leaves the checkout line and marches out into the parking lot, where he finds the sketchy customer explaining what happened to his muscle-bound, biker-ish minder. Walt marches right up to the two of them and does an old-West staredown with Muscles, the sort of tough guy he would instinctively have run from three months before.

After a long face-off, Walt finally hisses out five words: “Stay out of my territory.” The other two back off slowly, get in their van and leave Walt standing alone in the parking lot. He won’t go back to his old life; he can’t. He’s become a different person… and for better or for worse, he likes it.