When the second season debuted a year after the first ended, something had changed—as much with me as with Breaking Bad. The storytelling was more confident, but I was also more familiar with the pace and tone of it, and I had come to realize that the slowest moments were often the most important ones. Before the series began, I feared it would be a disappointment for AMC on the heels of the instantly brilliant Mad Men—but by the time the Cousins started crawling toward that shrine in Mexico at the start of season three, the story of Walter White had become every bit as audacious, riveting, and seemingly destined for the TV Hall of Fame as the adventures of Don Draper. By the end, it was a show that I wouldn’t have missed writing about for anything—not even damaged insides, drugs, or stern warnings from the on-call nurse.
This book collects most of my writing about the series (including a second take on “Ozymandias” that I wrote a few months later, once I was healthier and more alert) from my days at the Ledger and then at HitFix.com (now archived at Uproxx.com). My thoughts on every episode are occasionally accompanied by memories from Gilligan, Cranston, and other members of the cast and creative team. In some cases, my recaps are similar to what was published online the night the episode aired, but have been polished with the benefit of hindsight and a much looser deadline. Other reviews have been heavily rewritten, and several episodes—that entire first season, the series finale, and a few others—prompted me to start over from scratch, either because my feelings now were different from the ones I had in the moment, or because I knew that an episode deserved better than I was able to give it at the time.
Because the essays in their original form were written one episode at a time, and were meant to be digested that way, this book follows that approach. If you’re experiencing the show for the first time, it’s safe to read along as you watch without fear of spoilers for what comes later (give or take the things Damon Lindelof mentioned in his foreword). And if you know Breaking Bad by heart, the reviews have been largely divested of whatever breathless speculation I was making at the time about what might come next, particularly in the (many) instances where I guessed wrong.
Consider this your supplemental textbook to the chemistry lesson that Gilligan, Cranston, and company are offering. Some essays are meant to enhance the emotional experience of what you just saw, others to analyze the deeper thematic meaning of an episode or praise a particularly brilliant piece of acting or directing. And a few are a chance to talk about the rare occasions when I feel the creative team misstepped. Along the way, we can analyze the transformation of Walter White—or argue about whether he really changed at all, or simply let circumstance unleash the man he always was inside—the unexpected rise of Jesse Pinkman, the complicated sympathy Skyler White elicits, and maybe even Walter White Jr.’s love of breakfast food.
Without further ado, let’s have a chant of “YEAH, SCIENCE!” and start the class.
1 There were no blogs or comment sections online in the early ’90s, and while message boards (or, as they were called back then, “bulletin boards”) existed, most of them were restricted to your internet service provider, so that CompuServe users could only talk to other CompuServe users, Prodigy with Prodigy, etc. The significant democratized space at the time was Usenet, whose newsgroups had already been around for more than a decade, and allowed users across the globe to communicate with people who shared their interest in particle physics, advanced baseball statistics, or TV dramas.
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 1
“Pilot”
Written and directed by Vince Gilligan
Growth, Then Decay, Then Transformation
“I am awake.”—Walter White
Walter White enters the story of Breaking Bad at full speed, tearing down a New Mexico desert highway in his new mobile meth lab, a ventilator mask on his face, no pants on his hairy legs, a trio of unconscious (or worse) men rolling around in the RV. Though we know nothing about him at this point, nor how he came to be in this predicament, when Walt (Bryan Cranston1) removes the mask to record a video message to his family, it’s clear from his words, his tone, and the pained look on his face that he never imagined his life would one day lead him to this moment.
But, given his new vocation, maybe he should have guessed.
After that gorgeous,2 surreal, in media res prologue—which opens with the image of Walt’s missing pants floating through the sky, so filled with air they look like they have an invisible man inside of them, and closes with Walt standing in the middle of the highway in his shirt and jockey shorts, a gun pointed in the direction of the sirens that are fast approaching—the pilot jumps back to show us the depressing existence that led Walt here. Though his house on 308 Negra Arroyo Lane contains mementos of past scientific triumphs (including work on a Nobel Prize–winning proton study) he has somehow wound up teaching high school chemistry—a task he seems even more bored with than his students, and one that pays him so little that he has to work a second job at a local car wash.3 His pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn4) chooses to celebrate his birthday with a plate of veggie bacon, a surprise party he doesn’t want, and a distracted hand job that she performs while monitoring an eBay bid.5 His wardrobe,6 his ugly green Pontiac Aztek, and everything else about his life are as drab and unremarkable as they can be.
In a lecture about why he loves chemistry, Walt suggests that he views the field as “the study of change,” using a Bunsen burner and different chemical sprays to change the flame’s color, and promises that his classroom will witness “growth, then decay, then transformation!” It’s a loud, flashy demonstration that fails to break through to a single student, but the speech serves as Vince Gilligan’s mission statement for Breaking Bad. We are going to watch Walter White be changed—first by the discovery that he has inoperable lung cancer, and then by his terrible decision to cook crystal meth with former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul7) as a way to provide for Skyler, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte8), and the baby after he’s gone—in ways far more colorful and varied than the burner’s flame.
One of the many smart choices Gilligan makes as both writer and director is to constantly remind us that Walt is a man of science whose whole life has been devoted to chemistry. There are chemicals everywhere he goes, from the samples in his classroom to the cleaning products at the car wash to the ingredients he and an incredulous Jesse will use to cook glass-grade meth. We don’t know if overexposure led to the cancer, or if it was just the luck of the genetic draw, but when Walt coughs himself into a collapse while wheeling a chemical barrel around, it unfortunately seems like more than a coincidence. When Walt’s at the hospital getting scanned, Gilligan shoots it from an angle suggesting science fiction as much as science—aliens may as well be performing some kind of cruel experiment on Walt to see what will happen to him under extreme stress. And what activity does Walt undertake to calm his nerves and distract himself from the awful turn his life has taken? He sits by his swimming pool, lighting one match after another, admiring the chemical reaction that turns an anonymous wooden stick into a bright red flame, little realizing that he is now the match, ready to ignite.
And ignite he does, following a ridealong with Hank Schrader (Dean Norris9), the DEA agent husband of Skyler’s sister Marie (Betsy Brandt10), and Hank’s partner Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada11) that reunites him with Jesse, who has used Mr. White’s science lessons to help establish an identity as a low-level meth manufacturer named Cap’n Cook, and who provides Walt an entrée into the local drug economy. But it’s a disaster almost instantly. This isn’t the cute, sitcommy story of a suburbanite bumbling his way through a life of crime; this is an hour of television that climaxes with Jesse’s ex-partner Emilio (John Koyama) and Emilio’s cousin Krazy-8 (Maximino Arciniega) trying to murder Walt and Jesse, and Walt using his gift for improvisational chemistry to turn the tables, possibly fatally, on them. It’s not at all what Walter White expected when he got into this, and it may not be what much of the audience expected when they heard about the s
how and saw that Bryan Cranston—best known as the hapless sitcom dad from Malcolm in the Middle12—was starring in it.
Through all of this, Cranston has to convey a lifetime of disappointment and pent-up fury so the audience will empathize with his plight, but also understand why he might be arrogant enough to think he can just slide into a life of crime without hurting anyone or getting hurt in turn. There is an angry, dangerous man lurking beneath all those earth tones, and though the anger emerges here in quasi-admirable ways—standing up to the bullies who are mocking Walter Jr.’s disability, or even cooking the meth to ostensibly look after his family—that level of rage doesn’t appear from nowhere. It lives inside you, stoked by inescapable thoughts of every mistake, every slight, every piece of rotten luck that has brought you so low that you would consider this a viable, necessary path to take with what remains of your life. In his video confession in the opening scene, Walt promises his wife and son, “I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.” But did he? Would even the most devoted family man, possessed with our protagonist’s unique scientific genius, really go down this road if there wasn’t something darker already there?
In the premiere’s closing moments—after Walt has saved his own life and Jesse’s, apparently by killing Emilio and Krazy-8 (and after he has literally laundered the bloody money he took from his victims, because he’s just that new at this)—he stuns Skyler with an aggressive sexual maneuver of the sort the eBay hand job scene made clear didn’t happen anymore.
“Walt?” Skyler asks. “Is that you?”
This will be the central question of Breaking Bad. The man in bed with Skyler is someone unfamiliar to her, and the man in the RV would be a total goddamn stranger. But is this some brand-new monster created by the cancer diagnosis, or is this who Walt really was all along?
1 Cranston’s career began in the early ’80s with episodic guest work and a regular role on the daytime soap opera Loving. Prior to Breaking Bad, he was most famous for sitcoms, both as panicked dad Hal on Malcolm in the Middle (a role for which he received three Emmy nominations) and as kinky, regifting, converted Jewish dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld. But it was a dark guest turn as a racist carjacker on an X-Files episode called “Drive” that put him on the radar of that episode’s writer: Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.
2 With only a couple of X-Files episodes to his credit as a director, Vince Gilligan recruited Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll to work with him on the pilot, and the two set a stunning visual template for all that would follow. The shot of Walt’s pants flying through the air is a work of art in itself, but the compositions throughout are as beautiful as they are useful in moving the story along and establishing the show’s many themes.
3 Bogdan, Walt’s boss at the car wash, is played by Marius Stan, a successful scientist in his own right. He was working at Los Alamos National Laboratory at the time the Breaking Bad pilot was being cast, and when his son and daughter both wanted to audition, he came along merely to chaperone. Instead, the show’s casting directors were fascinated by his look (which inspired Walt’s “Fuck you—and your eyebrows!” kiss-off line) and hired him to play Bogdan; the kids got non-speaking parts. That’s showbiz.
4 Like Cranston, Gunn did a lot of TV guest star work in the ’90s (including her own Seinfeld appearance, as a girlfriend of Jerry’s whom George, while missing his eyeglasses, mistakenly thinks he sees kissing Jerry’s cousin). Her most prominent role prior to Breaking Bad was as Martha Bullock, the reserved wife of Deadwood sheriff Seth Bullock.
5 The original version of the pilot ran fifty-eight minutes without commercials, and AMC aired it in an extra-long timeslot to fit it all. Later airings eventually cut out about ten minutes, including the Skyler/Walt hand job scene, and that shorter version was the only one available on Netflix for a long time. So viewers were introduced to the realities of the White marriage very differently depending on when and how they watched.
6 It’s also a mark of how shabby a life Walt has that he refers to his ugly, cheap-looking shirt and pants as “my good clothes.” Cranston helped contribute to the depressingly bland look of his character, whom he felt was always trying to disappear from his own life—working with the show’s wardrobe, hair, and makeup people to erase as much color from Walt’s life as possible, right down to removing the natural red highlights in Cranston’s hair. Cranston had Walt dress in neutral clothing, and the actor grew a thin mustache that he wanted “to be impotent. I wanted the mustache to have people subconsciously go, ‘What’s the point of that mustache? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you bother if that’s all you can grow?’”
7 Paul, like Cranston, guest starred in a latter-day X-Files episode (written by Gilligan’s old friend—and future Breaking Bad writer—Thomas Schnauz). And like Anna Gunn, he did a stint on a mid-’00s HBO drama, with a recurring role on Big Love as the love interest of Sarah Henrickson.
8 Breaking Bad was the first significant acting role for RJ Mitte (unless you count his appearance as “School Jock” on Hannah Montana). Mitte has cerebral palsy, but his is less severe than Walter Jr.’s, and he had to adjust to walking with crutches for the run of the series. Fortunately, since most of the character’s big scenes take place around the Whites’ dining room table—particularly when breakfast is being served—it was never too much of a physical strain for the actor.
9 After Cranston, Norris was the most recognizable actor in the original cast, even if most viewers probably recognized him as “that cop from that thing!” He has one of those faces that seems to scream “law enforcement” (at least to casting directors), and prior to Breaking Bad had carried a badge in movies with Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon 2), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 2), and Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey (The Negotiator), among many others. (He also played a U.S. Marshal in an early X-Files.)
10 Brandt had been acting professionally for a decade prior to Breaking Bad, but the role of Marie was her big break after mostly doing episodic guest roles in shows like ER and The Practice.
11 The bulk of the series’ major roles—both the cast regulars and the guest stars—were played by Los Angeles–based actors like Gunn and Norris. To cut down on travel expenses, though, certain parts were filled with local actors from Albuquerque, none of whom wound up with a more prominent job than Steven Michael Quezada as Gomez. There’s never a Gomez-centric episode, or even subplot, but as Hank’s partner, he’s on-screen more often than all but a handful of the show’s more famous guests.
12 Walt working in his underwear evokes Cranston’s time on Malcolm, but Gilligan admits he nearly “wimped out” on putting his leading man in them again, asking Cranston if he might be more comfortable filming the opening scene in sweatpants. To Cranston’s credit, he replied, “No, I’m not comfortable, but that’s the whole point. What’s important to the story?” And what was important was saggy jockey shorts. “God bless him,” Gilligan says.
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 2
“Cat’s in the Bag …”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Adam Bernstein
In-Between
“Hey, man: we flipped a coin! WE FLIPPED A COIN!” —Jesse Pinkman
As dazzling as the pilot was as an introduction to the world of Breaking Bad, “Cat’s in the Bag …” is in many ways far more representative of the series. The pilot burned through plot ideas—Walt has cancer! Walt and Jesse will cook meth! Krazy-8 and Emilio are going to kill them!—faster than Walt drove the RV in the opening scene, and suggested that the show would continue at that breathless pace.
But what will come to define the series is what Vince Gilligan refers to as “those in-between moments” that your typical crime story won’t tell: the slow and awkward progress of Walt’s assimilation into the criminal world, and what happens after bodies have been dropped. In most previous versions of the story,1 disposing of Emilio and Krazy-8 (the latter of whom turns out to be less dead than
he first appeared) would be the subject of a montage, or a quick scene, or even just an offhand comment about what a pain in the ass it was to get rid of their bodies.
“Cat’s in the Bag …,” though, slows the show’s pace to a crawl. It makes clear that Walt and Jesse are not master criminals, and that even if Walt knows (a lot) about chemistry and Jesse knows (a little) about the local drug trade, neither of them is in any way prepared to address the many complications that have already arisen from their new venture. They are going to make mistakes, and maybe take three steps back for every one forward, and we are going to watch this slow and agonizing process in what will damn near feel like real time.
This time out, we are witness to two big mistakes, each somewhat understandable on its own, but disastrous for the current ugly state of things. The first is that Krazy-8 is very much not dead, and will have to be dealt with. The second is that, when attempting to follow Walt’s instructions for dissolving Emilio’s body in acid to prevent it being traced back to them, Jesse skips a few steps, which results in the acid eating through the bathtub in his house … and the floor below it, creating a much bigger and more disgusting mess to clean up than the one they originally had.
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