So this is the first television series featured on this blog. I'm excited!
If you're a fan of Walt, then you know that Breaking Bad's 5th and final season is premiering in almost a month (July 15). To steel myself, I've been watching the entire show all over again, since I zoomed through it last year in order to watch the must anticipated Season 4. And oh man, how refreshing and wonderful it is to watch all our old friends again! Specifically, how nuanced and complex and stunning this show it the second time around. The following comment gets thrown around a lot in my neck of the woods in Brooklyn when Breaking Bad gets mentioned: "I've heard it's considered the best show of all time." Now I could be a good little blogger and do my research and find reviews in which critics spout out various points to buttress this position, but really, who gives a shit. Is Breaking Bad the best show of all time? What does that mean anyway? Let's find out!
Let's begin with a run through of Season 1 and 2's narrative SPOILERS SPOILERS. Walter White is a genius chemist who lives a boring and under appreciated life as a father and high school teacher in Albuquerque. He has never been allotted the credit or recognition he deserves through a series of set backs and failures. He works at a car wash where he is undermined by an asshole boss, his son has cerebral palsy, and his wife is newly knocked up. Poor Walt, stuck in a suburban deadlock, is diagnosed with lung cancer. Life sucks and then you die. Like all of us, Walt is merely a pawn in a cruel and unfair world of which we have no control. So what does he do? He aims to take control of his life, to assume power, by manufacturing meth. At first he chooses to do this for the practical purpose of leaving his family money after his death. As the series progresses, he finds his innermost self strengthened and rejuvenated as he must encounter and outmaneuver psychotic drug dealers and shrewd authorities, not to mention his own DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank. Not to mention that he must keep his illicit second job a secret from his family, a venture that causes him to build lies upon lies. However, it's a venture that likewise gives him the autonomy he craves.
Why the alias Heisenberg? Much like the famous uncertainty principle, Walt's path gives him a semblance of control in a world that gives us no control. A cancerous death sentence and an unsatisfactory life are the central tenants of his powerlessness, and so what was initially intended as a practical means of sustainability becomes a catalyst to live the existence he always wanted. However, the more control he has--as a drug manufacturer dominating the market-- the more he must 1) be handed wild cards of violence and danger and 2) alter his morality and loyalty to stay afloat.
On the surface it seems that Breaking Bad is a morality tale of one man gradually entering the dark side. And the show certainly is that. The major turn comes in Season 2 when Walt actively decides not to save Jane, Jessie's girlfriend, from choking on her own vomit after she blackmailed him and threatened to destroy his life. But on a deeper level, the show is also the story of an unpredictable world, one that begins to feel more autonomous than any of the characters!
By the end of Season 2, glimpses of a teddy bear floating in Walt's pool and wreckage and dead bodies on his driveway reveal themselves as a catastrophic airplane crash. The entire episode reveals itself as a chain reaction of events and ironies resulting in mass deaths. This is not only symbolic for the amorality of Walt's profession-- making meth and inadvertently destroying lives through drugs-- it's also representative of the manner with which life seems to coordinate our various encounters and decisions to result in something random, unexpected, and seemingly destined. Jane died because Walt went into Jessie's apartment and accidentally let her rest of her back. By letting Jane die, Walt disrupted her father's job as an airline comptroller who, in his grief, allowed the wreckage of two airlines. Walt would never had gone back to Pinkman's apartment if he hadn't encountered her father at a bar, where the father influenced Walt to try and save his loved ones no matter what, in this case Pinkman. But Jane wouldn't have been a junkie if Jessie hadn't reintroduced her (tempted her) to smoke meth. BUT Jessie wouldn't have been smoking so much meth if his friend and dealer hadn't been shot for selling in an unfamiliar gang territory. BUT that wouldn't had happened if Walt hadn't insisted on branching out beyond their own zones of meth-dealing. And so on.
At the end of Season 2, Walt is in remission and his wife has discovered his secrecy, so she leaves him. Walt is determined to save Pinkman from his guilt and drug addiction because Pinkman is now as close a member of his familial circuit as anyone else. Walt is trying to preserve his loyalty and honor because it's the only thing that prevents him from being an aimless agent acting on his own accord with no purpose.
My favorite episode of Season 3 is the "Fly" episode, because Walt reveals that the night he let Jane die, when he heard Skyler singing to their newborn on the baby monitor, was the night he should have given up. In watching Season 2, this episode takes on a new meaning. This particular introspection from our protagonist and narrative irony is spectacularly magnificent, elevating Breaking Bad not only to one of the best series, but one of the best literary works of our time.
I can not attest that it's the best TV series of all time because I have yet to see every series, but I can certainly attest to its superiority in the vein of narrative achievements. Especially because it stands alone as a 21st century saga of one man versus the world.
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