Breaking Bad

This weekend I started watching the streaming series Breaking Bad. Yes, I'm late to the party. This show originally aired between 2008-2013. It's on Netflix, which we just started a subscription to thanks to a discounted bundle offer with our Verizon mobile phone service.



Breaking Bad tells the (fictional) story of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in suburban Albuquerque, New Mexico, who suddenly is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Already struggling to make ends meet to support his family, White becomes curious about manufacturing illegal drugs, specifically methamphetamine, to afford treatment and to leave money for his family to survive after he dies.

Walter White specifically starts as sort of a sad sack of a middle-aged man. His wife doesn't really listen to him, their son has a handicap requiring special care, none of his students seem to care about learning and some of them are openly disrespectful. His wife, now pregnant, doesn't work, and he's had to take on a second job at a car wash to support his family. At the car wash he's hired to be the cashier, but the owner sends him outside to polish tires every time there's a no-show on the shift.

Show creator Vince Gilligan has quipped that the character arc he planned to show is the change in Walter White from "Mister Chips" to "Scarface". Lead actor Bryan Cranston certainly starts out portraying the sad-sack White fairly well. He's so mild he's cringe. But how well will he portray the transformation? With the show's shelf full of creative awards I presume it's done well. Now after years of waiting I'll get to watch it episode by episode.

Breaking Bad S1E1: Flash Forward

This weekend I started watching the streaming series Breaking Bad. I started, of course, with the first episode. I'll share a few thoughts on it here.

(Yes, I know I'm way behind on this show. It premiered in 2008. We've been meaning to get a Netflix subscription for years— Breaking Bad a few other shows we want to catch up on are on Netflix— but waited until now when we got a bargain because we didn't want to pay $$$ for too many simultaneous streaming services.)

The pilot episode of Breaking Bad opens with an unusual flash-forward. Walter White is driving an old RV hard over dirt roads in the New Mexico desert. Glassware and liquids in the back of the vehicle, the apparent materials of an illicit drug-making operation, crash and slosh around. Back there are also a few bodies. And another body is slumped over in the passenger seat up front.



White is in a state of panic and possibly injured as well. He crashes the RV and stumbles out the door. We hear police sirens. Out in the desert. White grabs a video camera and quickly records what sounds like a final message to his family, then grabs a gun and aims it in the direction of the approaching sirens. It seems like he is planning to commit suicide by cop. And scene!

This flash-forward opening left me wondering. See, one of the benefits of watching this show umpteen years later is that I know Walter White doesn't die in a shootout with cops in the desert in the first episode. He's the main character, and the show runs for five seasons. So I wondered, is this a flash-forward to an end-of-season cliffhanger? The end of the series? Both seemed unlikely but especially the latter, as a subtitle on the screen after the scene faded to black said "Three weeks earlier...." Could it be a dream or drug-induced paranoid hallucination that never really happened?

What really happened: ( Read more (S1E1 spoilers)... )

Breaking Bad S1E2: Walt's Transformation Continues

First of all, yes, this is now the 3rd blog about Breaking Bad I've posted today. But no, this little spurt doesn not indicate I'm bingeing the series. It's three journal entries: one for starting the series, and one each for the first two episodes. And that's all I've watched so far, two episodes.

I've remarked before that one upside of catching up on an older series is being able to watch episodes in rapid succession instead of having to wait a week between episodes and then 8 to 12+ months between seasons. But I don't actually binge. I mean, not in the binge sense of plopping down in front of the TV for an entire day or binge-watching multiple seasons of episodes in a single week. Like most of us learned to do growing up, you eat ice cream slowly instead of gobbling it because it draws out the pleasure. And it avoids the dreaded ice cream headache. There's no ice cream headache with TV watching, but it's good we had that extra helper as children to encourage developing better habits.

As for this blog, I'm going to try to limit myself to writing about mostly one thing per episode. Yes, sometimes in the past with other series I've done "Five Things" blogs about a single episode, even adding "Another Five Things" once or twice. But here, especially because I know going into this series there are 62 episodes, I'm going to pace my writing just like I'm pacing my watching.

My topic for this episode's blog is the transformation of Walter White as a character. In my first blog I noted that showrunner Vince Gilligan has said in interviews that this show is about an ordinary school teacher's transformation from Mr. Chips (Wikipedia link) to Scarface (ditto). The interesting question, then, is how fast this transformation occurs.

While Shakespearean dramatic structure calls for Act I (of five) to set the context and for the critical trigger event that sets the rest of the plot in motion to occur only in Act II, modern TV isn't so patient as to spend 20% of a series just setting things up. The trigger's basically got to happen in the first episode, whetting audience interest and signalling where the show is going to go. Thus White gets off to a start right away in the first episode.

After learning he has inoperable cancer White begins working in the illegal drug trade. His first drug deal goes bad, and he kills one or two people. (An argument could be made for self-defense.) All that happens in well under an hour.

The second episode shows that White's transformation is a much longer character arc than just one episode. The mild mannered high school teacher is not a drug-dealing, murdering bad-ass now. Not yet, anyway. He struggles with what he's doing. He feels trapped by what's happened and balks at taking further steps down the path.

White's character changes in small ways, too, as he processes his terminal sickness and his taste of the criminal world. He pushes back against people who, in the past would've pushed him around. He tells his boss at the carwash— his second job because teaching high school doesn't pay enough— to shove it when the boss tells him to scrub tires again. He hits a teen/young adult in a clothing store who's loudly and openly mocking his handicapped son. The young bully and his friends square up to fight back... and White dares them with a threat. "Go ahead, take your swing. But you only get one." White even snaps at his wife, telling her to "Get out of [his] ass," when she's prying about what's come over him.

FWIW I'm not sure if I see Walter's wife, Skyler, as a sympathetic character or not. She's portrayed in these early episodes as not particularly tuned in to what Walter wants or cares about. In a scene at the breakfast table Walt tells a story about something that happened at school. Skyler patiently waits until he's done talking then changes the subject completely. In another scene she dismisses out of hand his desire to see a museum exhibit over the weekend. Sheesh, it's his 50th birthday, maybe that's what he wanted to do! Instead she threw him a surprise birthday party with all her friends and relatives attending. And then, finally, there's the fact that while he's already busting his ass with a demeaning second job at a car wash, she's not working a job that pays. She's selling trinkets on eBay and talking about writing a book. I believe that if she were truly a partner she would put aside her own fantasies— much like she brushed aside Walt's interest in spending a day visiting a museum— to support financially her struggling family.