Breaking Bad 101

by Alan Sepinwall

  We’re also starting to learn that Skyler doesn’t give up, particularly when it comes to protecting her family. So when the play with Elliott doesn’t work, she resorts to more direct confrontation with Walt, staging an intervention with Marie, Hank, and Walter Jr. Cable dramas of this type tend to treat interventions as excuses for comedy, and though this one starts there—with gags about the cheese plate and the talking pillow and Hank’s awkward poker and sports metaphors—it moves into sincere, emotional territory when Walter Jr. again lays into his father. This shames Walt into tears, but not enough to change his mind about risking the devastating side effects of chemo for little or no chance of success. It’s Walt again being selfish and selfless at the same time, insisting that he doesn’t want them to remember him as a man too sick to do anything. Walt changes his mind the next day, but our first glimpse of his treatment shows radiation techs wrapping him up in plastic like he’s already a dead man, underlining why Walt was so unwilling to try it in the first place.

  Where Walt seems reluctant to take the way out—of both cancer and the drug game—offered by his wife and his ex-partners, Jesse spends most of “Gray Matter” realizing he doesn’t have many other options professionally, and that he’s now been infected by Walt’s meth-cooking perfectionism. His friend Badger1 works as the stand-in for the Cap’n Cook–era Jesse, eager to smoke whatever he’s made, but Jesse now takes after Walt and can’t stand the thought of anyone sampling an inferior product. It’s mostly played for laughs, particularly when the two brawl in the desert, but the insidious influence Mr. White has had on his former student’s life is already clear. This used to be fun and games for Jesse. Now he’s been party to the murder (and disposal) of two people, wrecked his own house, and discovered that he can’t even enjoy the act of making the stuff that he used to enjoy if it doesn’t measure up to Walt’s chemical standards.

  A Matter Left Gray

  Though Walt’s departure from Gray Matter is perhaps the single most important part of his origin story prior to the events of the series, Breaking Bad never entirely revealed what happened. The writing staff had it all mapped out, though, and let their knowledge inform Walt’s awkward conversations with Gretchen and Elliott. Here’s how Peter Gould explains it:

  “This one, we did discuss a lot. There were any number of versions, but the way I remember it best, Gretchen and Elliott and Walt were a trio, all science graduate students. They had an idea for a company, a breakthrough. And in a trio, there’s always an odd man out. The odd man out in this trio was Elliott. Gretchen and Walt were really into each other. Gretchen was infatuated with Walt, and vice versa. As this was going on, Gretchen and Walt traveled to meet her family. She does not carry on airs—there’s no sense of this when you meet her in this period—but she’s actually from serious money. We always talked about her family having one of those grand old estates in Rhode Island. Walt goes and visits and feels completely overwhelmed by this circumstance. He becomes very aware of the fact that he’s from working-class or lower origins, and suddenly he feels less than. And right in the middle of this weekend—which is a big step in any relationship: You meet your girlfriend’s family—Walt just leaves. One morning, Gretchen goes up, and he’s cleared out. He just left. And he comes up with a reason, but essentially, he and Gretchen break up over this, because Walt can’t really say what’s bothering him.

  “But still, Walt, Gretchen, and Elliott are working together, and now that Gretchen is available, Elliott makes his interest known. And the triangle moves in the other direction. It’s serious, and Walt feels left out. And also, their little business is not doing well at all. They come to a crossroads where they all have to chip in a little bit more, and Walt just says, ‘I’m out. You guys can just buy me out.’ And they buy him out for a very small amount, because the company isn’t doing well. It’s not just a business situation. It’s about feeling jealous, like he missed his chance with Gretchen, and feeling less than, and about pride. He walks away from this and says, ‘Good luck.’

  “And then this struggling operation, which seems like a hopeless dead end, explodes and becomes a tremendous success. And there were probably times Gretchen and Elliott reached out to Walt and said, ‘We feel bad about this. Would you like to come back in and work with us/for us?’ and he, of course, said ‘no,’ because he couldn’t endure the daily embarrassment of being reminded that they did so well without him.”

  But Walt has also been absorbed into Jesse’s life, too, and decides he’d rather keep cooking than take Gretchen and Elliott’s money in order to pay for his treatment. He wants help from no one, not even a family member like Hank, who here gets Walter Jr. out of trouble with the local cops in a way suggesting he’s more than just a cool uncle—a relationship Walt resents nearly as much as he does the success of his ex-partners. Cooking keeps him feeling independent, and alive, despite the awful things he’s already done, just as the partnership gives Jesse a chance to achieve the perfection he couldn’t in his cook with Badger. No matter how unpleasant Walt might have found accepting charity from the colleagues who have so obviously eclipsed him, he rejected a solution to his problems that was free of violence, criminality, and all the other risks that he is about to unleash onto himself and his family. He and Jesse already need each other, and very bad things are going to happen because neither man can walk away—even when one of them has a gift-wrapped opportunity to do so.

  1 Following the entrance of Combo and Skinny Pete in the previous episode, Jesse’s inner circle of friends is complete with the introduction of Badger, played by Matt Jones. Because Aaron Paul is relatively small of stature, the pairing of him with Jones makes for an amusing contrast and great physical comedy throughout the show.

  SEASON 1 / EPISODE 6

  “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”

  Written by George Mastras

  Directed by Bronwen Hughes

  Enter Heisenberg

  “This … is not meth.”—Walt

  Enter Tuco. Enter Heisenberg.

  After the previous four hours took a step back from Walt’s life of crime to better establish the characters, their environment, and the clumsy dynamics of the Walt/Jesse partnership,1 “Crazy Handful of Nothin’” dives deep back into the world of drugs and violence. Just as Walt’s newly shaved head makes him look more badass (or at least his son thinks so), this episode takes the show to a new and frightening level. This is where the legend of Heisenberg begins.

  Of course, most legendary figures require an opponent, and Walt gets his first one in local meth kingpin Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz).2 Tuco seems to be everything Walt’s not: physically imposing, erratic, prone to violence, and a user of his own product.3 Jesse’s attempt to sell him some of their pure crystal ends disastrously, with Jesse in the hospital and Tuco keeping the drugs (which he literally used to beat Jesse—a bit of symbolism Jesse might have been wise to pay attention to) without paying for them.

  Between Jesse’s injuries and the arrest of Hugo—the friendly school custodian who, not long after he helps Walt get through a vomiting spell in the boys’ bathroom, is falsely arrested by Hank and Gomez when they trace the mask Walt left in the desert back to his high school—people (beside those who use the product) are being seriously hurt by Walt’s attempts to play drug dealer. (Hank doesn’t think of Walt as a suspect for the same reason Walt is able to so easily bluff him at poker: Hank can’t imagine his brother-in-law being capable of deception even in a simple card game, let alone involved in the kind of business Hank investigates every day.) Yet, rather than take a step back from this madness before it causes any more collateral damage, Walt instead decides to go all-in. He marches directly into Tuco’s lair for a wild stunt—gaining entry by pretending that an explosive bag of fulminated mercury is meth, blowing out the windows of Tuco’s office, and then threatening to blow everyone in it to kingdom come if Tuco won’t cut him a deal—that could have easily caused many more deaths, including his own.

  In order to
deal to Tuco without giving away his true identity, Walt adopts the pseudonym Heisenberg—the name of the German physicist who coined the famous uncertainty principle, which states that the velocity and position of a particle can’t be measured exactly at the same time. With Heisenberg’s first act—which is more explosive in every way than the incident with Ken Wins’s car battery in “Cancer Man” (S1E4)—Walt not only fully embraces a violent life, but also establishes himself as a wild card whose behavior can never be properly predicted by his enemies. Even with the shaved head, he still looks and carries himself like a middle-aged man who would never be capable of being a genuine threat to someone like Tuco—yet he outwits and outguns an entire roomful of the kingpin’s lackeys.

  It’s thrilling to watch, but also profoundly unsettling, because it’s clear from the look on Walt’s face, after the fact, how much he enjoyed what he did. People are being hurt, but Heisenberg is being feared, and Walter White is getting the respect he so desperately craves.

  1 Jesse finally finds out about the cancer—and realizes it’s what’s been motivating their partnership. It provides them with another reason to bond, since Jesse’s aunt died of cancer after undergoing treatment similar to Walt’s.

  2 There‘s more than a little Spaghetti Western in the DNA of Breaking Bad, which is why Tuco was named after Eli Wallach’s wily gunslinger from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  3 Tuco is recently out of prison (which is where he met Skinny Pete), but the reason for his incarceration won’t be explained until Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad’s prequel spin-off.

  SEASON 1 / EPISODE 7

  “A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal”

  Written by Peter Gould

  Directed by Tim Hunter

  The Agreement

  “Where did that come from, and why was it so damn good?” —Skyler

  “Because it was illegal.” —Walt

  On November 5, 2007, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, as its members fought for their proper share of the profits in a rapidly changing business. This meant that all movie and TV scriptwriting had to stop until the strike resolved itself, which led many TV series in 2007 and 2008 to have severely truncated seasons.

  One of those strike victims was this first season of Breaking Bad, which was just beginning to build real narrative momentum with the introduction of Tuco when production had to shut down for lack of scripts. On the one hand, this makes “A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal” a poor season finale, since it was never intended to be anything but another brick in the middle of the larger wall Vince Gilligan and company were trying to build that first year. On the other hand, the strike coming when it did1 prevented Gilligan from taking the story in directions that even he later admitted could have destroyed the series.

  Watched today, out of the context of the original air schedule, “A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal” simply feels like a solid—if slightly unsatisfying on its own, since it mainly exists to set up stories still to come—episode of a series that’s slowly but surely coming to understand its own strengths and weaknesses, just as much as Walt is as he becomes more and more comfortable in the skin (and now, the porkpie hat) of Heisenberg.

  When making decisions about the cosmetic details of his new trade, Walt is still a rank amateur—a suburban dad2 fumbling in the dark while trying to hide everything from his family.3 He foolishly insists on meeting Tuco at an isolated junkyard—“This is like a non-criminal’s idea of a drug meet,” Jesse complains—rather than a more public (and physically safer) location. When he needs to buy ski masks for the robbery he and Jesse plan to commit, he chooses silly-looking ones with pom-poms on the top. Even the porkpie hat seems designed to call attention to itself,4 especially since Tuco has already seen Walt’s bald dome. But though he doesn’t yet know how to look or carry himself like a criminal mastermind, Walt and Jesse are still able to pull off amazing criminal feats. The theft of the methylamine barrel is largely bumbling and panic-inducing, and yet Walt’s chemical genius carries the day;5 he’s able to make thermite from the aluminum powder found inside an off-brand Etch A Sketch and use that to burn through the warehouse lock. It’s not as flashy a stunt as the exploding mercury in Tuco’s office, but it gets the job done, and it gives the pair enough raw material to stay in production for a long time—or, at least, as long as Walt’s health will last.

  As effective as they are at cooking the stuff (and acquiring the supplies necessary to do so), Walt and Jesse are still woefully unprepared to deal with the intense violence that comes from an alliance with Tuco—a man who ends the abbreviated season by beating one of his soldiers half to death for the crime of presuming to speak for him. As cliffhangers go, it’s not a stunner, but it’s brutal enough to signal just how bad a spot our protagonists have found themselves in, and to make the viewer eager to see when and how they’ll get out of it. For the small handful of people watching the show live back in 2008, there would be a long wait. For the many who caught up on the show years later via binge-watching, they’d get to enjoy the next step in the story—and the big creative leap that came with it—immediately.

  Saving Steve Gomez

  So how would season one have ended if not for the strike? Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould recall the writers playing with two different possibilities before production shut down—both exciting at the time, and both potentially ruinous had they actually been filmed.

  In one, the Whites’ house would be invaded by criminals who knew Walt and who would take Walter Jr. and Skyler hostage to demand Walt’s drug money. A terrified Skyler would insist that they had the wrong house, right as Walt produced a bag full of cash he had hidden in a vent; the season would end on the horrified look of realization on her face.

  “It would have been a great scene, and I don’t know where the hell we would have gone after that,” says Gould.

  The other would have involved Tuco shooting Steve Gomez, who would recognize Hank’s brother-in-law as he bled out, forcing a terrified Walt to run off into the night, covered in Gomez’s blood.

  “It would have been an arguably more exciting season one,” Gilligan says, “but it would have left us with so many fewer avenues, and ultimately, we might have had one or two fewer seasons. Or we would’ve had one or two seasons where we had gone past the apex and were starting to slide into familiarity.”

  1 The timing of the strike turned out to be useful in another way: Had it begun even a week or two earlier, only six episodes might have been completed, which by Emmy rules would have forced Breaking Bad to compete in the miniseries categories, since seven is the minimum episode total required to qualify as an ongoing show. That seventh episode allowed Bryan Cranston to win his first Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.

  2 Skyler’s baby shower finally gives their unborn daughter a name (Holly) and sprinkles in some comedy along the way. But it’s most memorable for a lovely piece of acting by Bryan Cranston, where Walt’s discomfort at being around all these people melts away for a moment as he records a message to the daughter he assumes will grow up without him. Speaking honestly and warmly, he tells her, “Holly, I am very proud of you, and I think about you all the time. Wherever you go, whatever you do in life, always know that you have a family who loves you very much.”

  3 Marie shoplifting the shoes in “… And the Bag’s in the River” (S1E3) turns out to not to be an isolated incident: Skyler’s attempt to return the gaudy tiara Marie gave her at the shower gets her into trouble when it turns out Marie stole it. Less notable than Skyler learning her sister is a kleptomaniac is Skyler demonstrating a skillful ability to lie to authority figures, as she fakes labor pains to get released from the store manager. This kind of quick thinking might just prove handy if she ever gets involved in her husband’s business.

  4 And would, in time, make it very easy to dress as Heisenberg on Halloween.

  5 Jesse’s exhortation of “Yeah, Mr. White! YEAH, SCIENCE!” is a marvelous bit of comic delivery by Aaron Paul, and among the most
quotable lines of the entire series.

  SEASON 2 / EPISODE 1

  “Seven Thirty-Seven”

  Written by J. Roberts

  Directed by Bryan Cranston

  The Devil in the Details

  “How would you do it?”—Walt

  “What do you mean, how would I do it?” —Jesse

  “Specifically. Step by step.” —Walt

  Though one day shy of a year passed between the airings of “A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal” (S1E7) and “Seven Thirty-Seven,” the season two premiere pulls off a neat trick: It picks up chronologically exactly where the previous episode left off,1 while at the same time demonstrating a more advanced command of tone, structure, and pacing. It’s the same Breaking Bad as before, only better.

  This noticeable improvement doesn’t mean that the series is now disregarding the in-between moments that characterized so much of its first season. One of the premiere’s two strongest scenes lives in the minutiae, when Jesse shows Walt the revolver he bought to take out Tuco before their erratic new associate can do them any harm. Walt responds by asking about all the details of an assassination plan that never occurred to his partner. Not only has Jesse not considered how many bullets he’ll need to take out Tuco or any of his goons hanging about, he doesn’t even know how to load the pistol. The devil is in the details—for Walt, and for Breaking Bad.

  Upon realizing that Jesse’s paranoia is justified, and that Tuco has somehow figured out his real identity and home address, Walt comes up with a plan more suited to both his skill set and the kind of show on which he’s the main character: He will convert castor beans into ricin, poisoning Tuco in a manner that will give them distance and deniability when it takes effect. But even this is a plan with a lot of variables, and one that—like the partners’ initial plan to sell their meth to Krazy-8—falls apart immediately when Tuco abducts them both in the middle of the night.