Breaking Down Breaking Bad

Walking Wounded

Several characters are wounded or more properly disabled, starting with Walt Jr. He has Cerebral Palsy and must walk with a pair of canes that strap onto his wrists.



Then there's old Hector Salamanca, former Mexican Cartel boss and Tucos'uncle. He's permanently in a wheelchair, paralyzed, and can only move his head and one finger, that he uses to ring a bell attached to the arm of the chair.



Hank gets severely wounded, almost killed, in a shootout with Tuco's cousins who came originally to kill Walt, but Gus denied them permission to do that, and sicced them on hank instead. Hank spent some time in hospital beds and a wheelchair, then graduated to a pair of canes. He healed very gradually over a couple of seasons.



Aside from Walt Jr, who is disabled because the actor playing him is, the rest are collateral damage, wounded by their involvement in the drug trade. I think it's a very visceral and physical way to demonstrate the severe danger of the trade. People die or get severely wounded all the time.

In fact, both Walt and Jesse frequently are wounded in various ways, though I don't think they lost the ability to walk, at least not for long. They both often sport facial wounds and bandages of various types, as well as stitches.





Adam Savage asked Vince Gilligan (show creator) about this in the interview way up at the top, and he replied with something to the effect that they both look really good with facial wounds and bandages etc, like Bruce Willis does. He says some actors just look really cool like that.

Calls to mind some Frank Miller comics:



Just ran across this one—Ted Beneke, recovering in the hospital after a run-in with a couple of Saul Goodman's goons (one of whom is Bill Burr with hair. Apparenlty he Broke Bald some time after the show):



He didn't even know he was connected in any way with the drug trade. Poor bastard.

Ultimate Facial Woundage

The hands-down winner of this competition is Gus Fring, who got his face

Spoiler: Read it if you dare, read it if you care

halfway blown off.



Interestingly, it does closely resemble Two-Face from The Dark Knight. It was only briefly though as he was dying. Even in this moment, his final act was to fastidiously straighten his tie. He was a very dapper man, always concerned about his appearance.

If the meth-heads look like zombies, Gus became the Zombie King. Hector Salamanca, the former cartel boss in the wheelchair with the bell, willingly blew himself up to take Gus out. Was it Gus who originally put him in the wheelchair? Probably, but I don't remember. If so, poetic justice.

Meth = Death?

There seems to be a lot of symbolism linking the two. Meth-heads as zombies, just about everybody involved in the business keeps getting wounded or killed. Even children hired (as killers in some cases) by Gus. And of course it ulitmately leads Walt to his grave, but he was headed that way already due to inoperable lung cancer. Jesse only escaped the same fate because he managed to step away from drugs before it was too late, and still he had several really scary run-ins with near-death and woundage.

Gus, the undisputed kingpin (aside from maybe Heisenberg? Though Gus ruled the roost much longer) did a pretty decent impression of the Grim Reaper in that last entry.

Welcome to the Dark Side

There's a visual motif used to show the theme of people having a light side and a dark side. They pushed this harder in Breaking Bad than I think I've ever seen it pushed, especially in some of the scenes in the Whites' house.



Who has their house this dark at dinnertime? And yet at times the rooms are brightly lit, as you would expect. I think if you go through and check, these scenes with extreme contrast between dark and light happen when Heisenberg is coming to dinner. It's like inviting Satan to your picnic. It's a visual way of depicting the extreme contrast between who Walt is right now and who his unsuspecting family think he is.

High-contrast lighting is also frequently used to make certain people's faces half dark and half light.



Those would be people who are meant to have a light side and a dark side. And sometimes, when the dark side is in control, you see them entirely from, quite literally, the dark side. Meaning the camera operator positioned the camera on the side that isn't getting any direct light.



This is a very deliberate choice, and it's hard to light for. They don't do things like this in a sitcom or a regular TV show, only a big production where they have plenty of time to concentrate on details like this. It's used to create a strong visual impression.

Maybe this is why the lead character's name is White?

Certain characters in the show get this treatment frequently.



This shot is complex. Walt is half light/half dark, while we're seeing only the dark side of Gus and Jesse.

I believe this is why when Gus Fring got his face blown off, it was divided neatly down the middle. Only one half of it got decimated. This is to show that he's half dark and half light. Same as Walt, Jesse, Mike Ehrmantrout, and probably Saul Goodman—the characters who really delved into the dark side of drug production and sales, as well as duplicity and murder. I'd need to check, but I'll bet Skyler got this treatment when she was helping Ted Beneke cook his books, and when she went into business with Walt to buy the car wash for laundering their dirty money.

Also note Walt and Saul have two names. Walt also goes by Heisenberg, and I forget what Saul's real name is. As Heisenberg Walt wears a black hat and black sunglasses. Saul Goodman is just a made-up name, to convey "It's all good, man." It's his TV Lawyer persona he uses to bring in business on the shady side of the law. There's also an intimation that Gustavo Fring isn't his real name, but we never find out if that's true or what that real name is. Hank investigated into Gus' past and couldn't find anybody with that name who ever lived in the country he claimed to come from. Oh, and Jesse also went by the street name Cap'n Cook, and had that on his license plate. Duplicitousness, symbolized in various ways. Captain Cook also connects up with Captain Hook, who was badly wounded. That's probably a coincidence, but when you use symbolism this well it starts to take on a life of its own. The name might also connect up with Captain Crunch. There's something very cartoonish about Jesse when we first meet him.

Influences and Connections

I just discovered Vince Gilligan had many of the directors for the show watch the famous opening sequence from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.



One of my favorite pieces of cinema. The sound effects create a slow symphony, and the actors take their time, interacting with their environments as if they have all the time in the world. Small things that in another movie would be edited out instead get focused on in great detail. I suspect the fly that landed on Jack Elam's face was unscripted, just an accident, and he reacted by turning it into a bit. And then I guess they got ahold of the little plastic fly and finished the scene. I could be wrong, maybe it really was scripted, but I don't know how you get a fly to cooperate. I wonder if this could be what the episode called Fly was referencing? Quite likely, but I also believe it references Cronenberg's Fly as well.

But now I think I see where the long, slow deliberate scenes of Breaking Bad originated. Things unfolding with such unhurried precision, one beat after another after another, perfectly paced, with no cutting away for a long time.

I also decided to look into connections with other movies. I found a couple of articles on the subject, but so far mostly going the wrong way—connections from later shows back to BB. Apparently there are a lot of connections with AMC's Walking Dead, and there's even a weird fan theory that the zombie apocalypse was caused somehow by Walt's Blue Sky meth, and that Gus Fring was the first zombie. The same effects guys did both.

• How Breaking Bad And The Walking Dead Are Connected

Unsurprisingly I also found connections with The X Files, Gilligan's earlier show. Many of the actors and directors worked on both.

• ‘The X-Files’ Connects To ‘Breaking Bad’ In The Most Interesting Ways

THIS is more what I was looking for:

• The 7 Movies That Influenced Breaking Bad

This is where I learned about Gilligan's liking for Once Upon a Time in the West. For some reason I suspected there might be a Blood Simple influence, but I couldn't say what made me think that.

What's in a name?

The title of this thread is so good somebody used it for a book long before I came up with it. I didn't realize that until yesterday when I decided to look into more books on the series. I bought it for the Kindle, it's excellent. Also got Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion. Meant to get that one on the kindle too, but accidentally ordered a paperback. Oops.

All research for my deep dive into the writing aspects of the series.

Crime pays, but it can also cost you everything

More than it's a Western, Breaking Bad is a crime show. I'm not nearly as familiar with crime movies as I am with their close cousin the film noir (which technically is a subset of crime movies). Several of the movies that influenced BB are, unsurprisingly, crime movies. And apparently it's from one of them that they took the ideas for those strange shots up through glass floors and from the inside of a dryer where money is literally being laundered etc. I assumed that was a very modern touch to make the show feel really edgy and fresh (and it does), but no, it came from a crime movie from probably the 50s (or even the 40s).

Heat was one of the 7 big influences. It was a heist move where they really let things play out as long as they needed to in order to make it feel more realistic than all previous crime movies. Generally, according to standard movie protocol, many things are cut out and just assumed to have happened. But in Heat they wanted a much more gritty and realistic feel, so they showed you a lot of the more mundane moments you normally wouldn't see. Breaking Bad definitely took inspiration from that!


It's About Time

In the pilot episode (called Pilot), Walt is forced to kill two thugs who try to murder him and Jesse and steal their meth and their lab equipment. For the next entire two episodes Walt and Jesse must deal with the unexpected fallout of this incident. They panic many times over, and have to rapidly come up with plans for how to dispose of dead bodies. But one of the thugs turns out not quite to be dead (another one for the Walking Dead post). After a painfully prolonged period of imprisonment in Jesse's basement, the guy is healing up nicely, and Walt realizes he needs to decide whether to kill him (in cold blood this time, not in a desperate self-defense move), or to let him go and trust that he won't come back and kill them both or turn them in to the DEA.

They have long conversations there in the basement while Walt agonizes over this choice, until he realizes the guy has taken a shard of a broken plate shaped vaguely like a knife, that he undoubtedly plans to use to stab him with. And that's that, the decision is made. This time Walt has to choke the life out of the guy, after having long soul-bearing talks that revealed the humanity in him, and even singing a silly commercial jingle together! This is one of the most decisive moments in his breaking bad (turning to the dark side of crime and murder). And nothing is skipped over. Every agonizing moment unscrolls almost in real time. Vince Gilligan said he knew the only way an audience would feel any sympathy for Walt was to really show them moment by moment why he made the decisions he did, the ones he had to, once he had set things in motion by deciding to become a meth cook.

And from this point on we witness Walt's metamorphosis into Heisenberg, and then Heisenberg's gradual transformation into a ruthless murderer and criminal kingpin.

But more importantly, we witnessed a show having the courage to slow things waaaay down at times, to let actions and their inevitable consequences play out with nerve-wracking deliberateness and inevitability, like no movie or show has ever done before. Part of that is because it was a long-form cable show, so rather than the hour and a half most movies run for, it ran something like 62 hours. More like a series of novels really. They had the time to do whatever they wanted, and they used it brilliantly.

Complexity of themes—Masculinity

Hank Shrader is the ultimate guy's guy in the show—Walt's brother-in-law and a DEA agent. This sets things up for intense conflict—Walt makes and deals a highly illegal drug and lives in the criminal underworld, and his worst enemy is right in his family. Not only that, but at the beginning of the show Walt is the ultimate emasculated man, defeated on every front by life though he came from a very promising beginning. He definitely doesn't wear the pants in his own family, and his brother-in-law is a strutting rooster of masculine stereotypes. At Walt's own birthday party Hank humiliates him by demonstrating how much more masculine he is in several ways, and Walt just accepts it though you can tell it burns him deep inside. And to really add to the insult, Walt's own son—his namesake Walt jr—is fascinated by Hank and his gun. Then Hank steals all the attention (at Walt's birthday party) when a segment comes on the news showing him leading a bust on a meth house where the camera lingers on huge rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Walt hesitantly asks "How much money was that Hank?" and Hank replies that it was a massive fortune, and that it's very common to find huge sums of money like that when raiding meth labs.

See, this stuff is so skillfully interwoven I can't really separate out just one theme, several of them are tied together usually. Hanks takes all the fame and fortune at Walt's own party (those being two things Walt, in his secret inner Heisenberg form, craves most of all). Going forward, this is the man Walt will have to contend with and clash with repeatedly, his only saving grace being that Hank can't see Walt as masculine or powerful, so he continually overlooks that his brother-in-law might actually be the very drug kingpin he's searching for.

But to get back to what I was setting up to say—each time Hank does something really brave or heroic (which he does repeatedly), he suffers for it. After getting involved in a shootout with Tuco in Mexico and killing him, Hank suffers from panic attacks that he has to hide from his fellow DEA agents and his wife and extended family. So we know his exaggerated masculinity is at least partly a put-on. He's shorter than Walt, it may well be some kind of little-man syndrome.

Later, when Hank gets sent to Mexico to work on the cartel problem down there, he sees a severed head (of a man he was talking to not long before) on top of a turtle that's walking around in the desert—an informant in their witness protection program that the cartel got to anyway (as they tend to do). We've already been told that severed heads are common along the border, as symbols of the strength and savagery of the cartels. But this is different. The character is played by Danny Trejo, and is named Tortuga, which means tortoise. He has a motto—"I'm slow, but I always win." Well this time he didn't, and Hank is horrified on seeing his head being carried around on the back of the tortoise. It wanders near their group and suddenly explodes. Hank survives only because he was revolted, nauseated by the sight (not such a tough guy in front of all these Mexican agents, who see this stuff all the time), and he went next to his car, I think to throw up. It saved his life when all the rest died or lost limbs. The only thing that saved Hank was his lack of real manliness.

In Breaking Bad masculinity is a double-edged sword—cowardice kills, but so does courage. There is nothing that guarantees safety or security, this is simply a life that comes with endless dangers.

And as Walt eases into being Heisenberg and his masculinity and courage grow exponentially (toward ruthlessness and savagery) he finds himself in increasing danger, and the only thing that saves him is often his own resourcefulness and deceptiveness, or sometimes great ideas that Jesse comes up with (the guy seen as a fumbling idiot at the beginning, absolute contrast to Walt's intelligence and cleverness with chemicals).

It's really hard to separate these themes out, they interweave so much they become inextricable. I'm not going to be able to clearly delineate each theme, at best I can do jumbled posts like this one where several of them intertwine, but of course the real goal here is for me to increase my understanding of these themes and how they're used. Theme is one of the key elements of story, and it's used brilliantly in this show.

Real Housewives of Breaking Bad—dark sides of the main female characters

Everybody has their dark side on this show, and that includes the females. For the first episode or two I thought Walt's wife Skyler was a bit one-dimensional, little more than a put-upon housewife working hard to keep the family together and getting stretched thin by the effort. But pretty early on we begin to see her dark side. She has a knack for deception and manipulation—when she was taken into the 'security room' in a jewelry store, accused of shoplifting (that her sister Marie, Hank's wife, actually committed), she gets out of it by pretending she's going into labor (she was well into her pregnancy at the time, very obviously).

And when the two sisters get together to talk it out, Marie repeatedly denies committing the crime, but Skyler insists that she's always been like this and Skyler knows her too well to buy into this old innocence routine. And basically (if I remember right) Skyler bullies her into confessing.

So Marie, married to a law enforcement agent, likes to steal from stores, including some very valuable things, and then lie about it. Hank knows about it and just treats it as a very minor thing to be kept in the family and not talked about openly. A little minor corruption in the family of a law enforcement agent.

Skyler begins to escate her dark side as the pressure mounts because her husband is clearly lying to her about a number of things and she starts to suspect he's having an affair. In later seasons she decides to help out her boss, who's been cooking his books (this makes him similar to her husband, who "cooks" meth). She becomes his assistant and does the book-cooking for him, and has to work some real power plays in order to keep from going down with the ship when his stupidity and selfishness gets him audited by the IRS. This actually parallels Walt quite closely, as I said already he bought an expensive sports car for his son to try to win him over (largely to win the son's loyalty against his wife), and she had to strongly caution him that it will bring the attention of the IRS and cause his downfall and the destruction of the family. So Beneke is in some way a caricature of Walt, and Skyler gets involved with him. Showing, I suppose, that she has a weakness for criminal men who need some help. Codependency/enabling much?

Then in season 5 Walt and Skyler really start sparring with each other. It's power play city as he blackmails her to try to force her to stay with him despite her terror over what he's becoming (the real danger to the family he thinks he's protecting). She really steps up to the blackmailing plate by threatening to have very public 'episodes' (of mental instability caused by the stress of living with him). I forget exactly what that was going to accomplish (humiliate him maybe?), but his retort is a threat to have her committed to an asylum and then the kids will live with Walt. So she steps right up into his face, looks him coldly in the eye, and threatens to choke herself and blacken her eyes and claim he did it. Holy shit!! Skyler stepping into the big leagues.

Meanwhile Marie starts ramping up her shoplifting exploits, visiting open houses in really nice swanky neighborhoods and stealing expensive things.

Walt's Two Worlds Colliding (as well as his two personae)

It isn't just that Walt has 2 people in him—Walter White and Heisenberg—he also inhabits two different worlds. The world of drugs/crime, and the world of his family. He desperately wants to keep those worlds apart, but they keep bleeding into each other, or occasionally colliding violently. I think this is why he's so concerned about what he calls 'contamination'. He wants both worlds to remain pure. And ideally his two personae would be totally separate as well. Walter would only exist when he's with his family, and Heisenberg only when he needs to be a badass drug lord. But elements of each world and each persona have a nasty habit of contaminating the other one.

I suppose this counts as another double dialectic, like the one I found in All That Jazz, but it works differently. Or is it a quadruple dialectic (a quadrilectic?)? Two worlds and two personae, and in each case, as one advances its opposite recedes. The more he becomes Heisenberg, the less Walt he has in him. And the more he lives in his drug/murder world, the less quality family time he has. Until eventually all of them are hopelessly fouled. It goes beyond contamination, the two worlds and the two personae just all mash together and get hopelessly smeared into each other. Like the old commercial—"You got your Heisenberg in my family!" "You got your Walter White in my drug cartel!" And they're definitely not two great tastes that taste great together.

In the comments under a video I watched the other day somebody said after seeing the show several times and trying to figure out why it's so good, the word that floated up is mature. I agree, it is very mature, but that's not the whole story. There are plenty of mature movies and stories that bore me to tears, and this isn't one of them. Somehow it handles things in a very mature way, and yet there's intense action, violence, and power aplenty. It somehow works as both mature drama and powerful addictive entertainment.

Juxtaposition

The reason they're able to wring so much high-impact drama out of the show, at such intensity levels, is because of the close juxtaposition of the tender feelings and vulnerability of family, with a newborn baby and a crippled son, against the ruthless brutal world of murder and drugs.

Walt has a persona for each, but as I said, they keep showing up at the wrong times and places. Though sometimes when he goes all Heisenberg in the house or with the family he needs to, like when his disabled son was trying on pants at a store and some bully kids were making fun of him. That's one of the first times we saw Walt be a badass, and it felt amazing!! His wife and son both thought so too. It was definitely the first time his family had seen him like that. That's that Jeff Goldblum from The Fly thing—at first it's liberating and empowering, but it gradually turns darker, morphs into toxic masculinity and then full monster-mania.

And also at key moments in the middle of a drug deal or some kind of out-in-the-desert meetup where he needs to be a full-on badass, suddenly his face goes all happy-Walt and he turns all soft and gentle. Usually when family is somehow invoked or involved, like when the Nazis were about to shoot Hank. Really it would serve Walt's purposes (Heisenberg's anyway) for Hank to be dead. Otherwise Walt ends up either dead or in prison. But he turns fully into Walter White, decent loving family man, and begs them not to kill him, because he's family. The way he said it made it absolutely clear Walt has weird delusions about family, or rather about his place in his family. He has a good family, but he's become a monster, and sorry, but unless it's at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, a monster has no place in a decent family. Maybe if he'd move into some meth-head's house, he'd fit right in there. They wouldn't care, they probably wouldn't notice. But that's not a family, it's an empty house with only nihilism and addiction and the living dead in it.


By season 6 (or season 5, part deux?) he's so delusional that he's in full rampaging Godzilla mode and still shouts "We're a FAMILY!! We love each other!" Dude! Where have you been for the last few seasons? Did you not get the memo? They've all seen your dark side too many times now, and they realized they don't know who the hell you are. They're afraid of you. They hate you. That's not a family anymore, at least not the kind you desperately want it to be/believe it is. But the writers once again pulled a magic bunny rabbit out of their hat. On the phone call to Skyler while the police are listening in and tracking his location, he screams insanely at her, finally going fully off the deep end and becoming a real abusive asshole. She's horrified and cries. Excellent performances all around of course. But later it's revealed that it was largely an act on his part, because he knew the police were listening, and he set it up so he looked like the complete asshole and she looked like an innocent victim. She wasn't. She had teamed up with him for a season or so and helped him launder his money. He did it to keep her out of jail.

Geez! Every time! They do something amazing and you're stunned and can't believe how excellent it is, and how unexpected. And then you realize it was a trick. Really what they were doing under your nose is far more devious and amazing than you even realized.

This happens almost routinely on this show.

I'd like to add sophisticated to the earlier mature. It's both, but again, it's also able to get intense and dark and insane and violent and gritty and exciting as hell at the drop of Heisenberg's hat.

And it's also funny as hell.

Sophistication

Here's an example of it. The neo Nazis have Jesse trapped in a pit and they tortured him. We know that for two reasons. One, they made it clear they were going to. They didn't actually say it, I forget what was said. Something like "We can get it out of him when we get him back home." When this was said, Jesse whimpered in terror, knowing what was coming, and Walt gloated in evil glee. At the time it served his purpose for Jesse to be not only killed but tortured as well.

And the second reason we know is that, next time we see Jesse, he's lying on the floor of the pit chained hand and foot, looking like he's been there a long time. He's got some cuts all over his face that weren't there before, they're not bandaged but it looks like they should be. The roof of the pit is cage bars, and above it sky—he's out in the middle of the desert somewhere. Here comes one of his jailers and opens the hatch with a clang, and Jesse whimpers and cowers like a beaten animal. I think he whispers "No no no no no." He doesn't say "Not again!" or "Don't torture me again!" or anything. No theatrics, not hysteria, and most importantly we never see a torture scene or even the typical scene where they have a tray of wicked utensils and start to reach for one and the screen goes black. It's never the cliche you'd see in a dozen other shows. It's always handled in a more sophisticated way. Understated, until it's time for fierce brutality, and then it's over the top, but not in a stupid way. Somehow the brutality is sophisticated too. I need to study this much more. I'm getting deeper and deeper into what makes it work.

And next I'm going to have to watch El Camino and Better Call Saul.

Not Just Juxtaposition

I want to modify what I said a few posts back about juxtaposition. As I understand it, the word simply means to hold two things up side by side so their differences can be seen. That in itself doesn't create any drama. Going back to my previous example yes, the two very different worlds of Family and Violent Crime are juxtaposed, but in order for it to become dramatized, you must smash them together at some point. Let the one start to destroy the other right in front of your eyes.

There's always been the threat that Walt's violence, or the violence of the crime world he lives in, will come crashing in to his peaceful family life, right into the very house where we see him living. But it isn't dramatized until we see it actually happen. Mere threat isn't dramatic. The threat must become a reality, or at least begin to. Something like this:



Even from the very first moment (and this is the beginning of the episode, though a little is cut off at the very start) we see a car moving down a peaceful suburban street, but there's violence in the way it's being driven, and in the music. Already the two worlds are being smashed into each other, the one contaminated by the other that doesn't belong. Then we see the way it 'pulls into the driveway'. Nothing normal about that! Rage and desperation have so infected Jesse at this point that he destroys the boundary between driveway and yard. The violence has moved from the street into a familiar yard. Then the door is destroyed. We actually see pieces of it break off and fly into the living room. How rude, he didn't even knock first, as you're supposed to! That's how we've always seen everyone else enter this nice house before. And then of course he proceeds to just ruin the carpet and furniture. Those stains and that smell will never come out! And the worst thing about it is, it's Jesse—Walt's sort-of proxy son, who has largely been a decent person and has been dragged through all kinds of hell himself, but has never exploded into a violent rage. Certainly not in someone's house! He's been the target of violence and cruelty, but has never been its agent (unless I'm forgetting something). So this hits hard, on several levels at once. While you're still trying to process one aspect of it they hit you simultaneously with several more.

Which brings up another thing that's handled brilliantly—


Cliches and Stereotypes

Every now and then something happens that looks like it's going to be a standard cliche or stereotyped situation. But they never go there. Just when you think you know exactly what's about to happen, it gets inverted or transformed into something completely unexpected and becomes a revelation rather than a tired old trope.

Walt's Skills and Chemistry as a Theme

Why Jesse had to kill Gale Boettecher, his one big act of violence previously.

One of the biggest elements of the show is Walt's incredible skill and brilliance as a chemist. His meth is something like 96% pure, and if I remember right, the best most cooks can manage is more like 65%. This skill is what allowed just about everything else to go down the way it did. It's why his meth was the best anyone had ever seen, why his reputation skyrocketed so fast. Only Jesse could come close, after assisting Walt several times and learning his methods. There's more to that though, it's metaphorical for the 'chemistry' between them as characters. Each had something the other needed desperately, and when they got together and started making meth they both improved because of it. Walt became a mentor and father figure to Jesse, and Jesse a proxy son to Walt (Walt's own son and namesake doesn't like him very much, and prefers Uncle Hank).

But on the surface level of the show this insane skill gives them all kinds of power and opportunities. Because only they can make the infamous Blue Sky meth (so named for its unusual blue color) they can get meetings with some of the big kingpins in the area like Tuco and later Gustavo Fring, and can make deals with them to become their main suppliers. And frequently it's the only reason their lives are spared after Walt does something insane out of his rage and fragile ego. If you want the Blue Sky to continue to flow, you must be nice to Walt and Jesse, that unlikely duo, and you also must protect them against your competitors and the DEA.

When Gayle Boetecher comes into the picture it's as a new rival to Walt and Jesse. He's a well-trained and highly talented chemist, almost on a level with Walt, but apparently Walt knows a few secret tricks that he just can't figure out. Jesse knows them as well, so his meth is better than Gayle's. Gus Fring, the kingpin who built the underground superlab specifically for Walt and Jesse to cook in, hires Gayle and has them train him in their method. They never taught him the secret tricks, but his meth comes up to very nearly as pure as Jesse's. After a while Gus decides Walt is too much of a loose cannon, too unstable and potentially disastrous to work with, and that Gayle's skills are good enough, and he's going to kill Walt and Jesse and let Gayle make his product.

This is why Jesse had to kill Gayle. It wasn't done in a fit of rage or anger or anything, he's not unstable like Walt is. It was a calculated move done in self defense for both of them. Now that Gayle is gone, Gus needs Walt and Jesse. There's no one else who can do anywhere neas as good of a job.

All of this is absolutely built around the idea of Walt's insane skill levels, and the fact that through their (chemical) bond Jesse picked up a nearly equivalent level of skill. That later makes them rivals, because Gus could always kill Walt and force Jesse to keep making meth. But Walt and Jesse swear
a pact to never work alone—each refuses to work unless the other is working with him. This gets them through a lot of jams.

But it's such a brilliant move to use the meth-cooking skill this way, and to distribute various skill levels to certain characters and use them as game pieces in a way. And the writers explored many different possibilities it offered, and squeezed out the maximum drama from each.

I'm not sure if I even got my point across. I think I kind of lost it in writing all that. But it ties in with the chemical bonding theme of the characters—the way they can have positive, negative, or unstable bonds with each other. And it's also made to tie in with the Family theme, by having Walt and Jesse's bond be that of proxy father and son to each other. I'm not sure I'm expressing this well enough. Maybe it's not even something that can be clearly expressed, or maybe I just lack the writing skill to do it justice, I don't know. Or maybe I don't understand it clearly enough at this point (likely). But I can see some angles to it that I don't know how to express. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of this understanding in my own writing.

Comedy Duo?

When I was thinking about the chemistry between Walt and Jesse it suddenly occurred to me—they're like the classic comedy team—the straight man and the magical child. Walt is often mean and garrulous, sometimes downright abusive, and Jesse, especially at the beginning, is a buffoon with idiotic ideas. Very much like a child, and somewhat magical I suppose. This is the setup for the classical comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, and even The Three Stooges. I know, there were three, it was a somewhat more complex setup. Basically Moe was the straight man when nobody else was around, who harangued and slapped around the other guys, but as soon as one of the authoritarian straight men (or women) showed up then all three became magical children. I'd say The Marx Brothers had the same setup, where Groucho did double duty.

Breaking Bad isn't really a comedy, but it does include a pretty liberal dose of black comedy, and Jesse is one of the comic relief characters, at least in the beginning. He grows out of it into a much more mature character and his friends take his place, and so does Saul the lawyer, though Saul is also very good at what he does, highly knowledgeable about crime and related subjects, and extremely smart. I suppose really Saul is more of a serious character who has a funny persona as almost a disguise, or maybe a useful way to defuse situations and make people feel at ease. His humor is mostly in things he says, but nothing he says is ever stupid or childish. It's more of a self-aware humor, very deliberate. I've seen clips from his previous shows, and in both of them he essentially plays exactly the same guy.

Ok, so, my question at that point was—if Breaking Bad isn't really a comedy, is it right to say the main characters are a comedy duo? Or would it be more accurate to say they function somewhat like a comedy duo?

Then it hit me. The same can be said about Riggs and Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon movies, though those are more definitely comedies. Yeah, the older more staid Murtaugh is definitely the straight man, and Riggs is the scrappy, sometimes goofy magical child. Maybe that dynamic isn't always there—the movie also has to function as a serious detective drama too. I'd say the most comedic scene in the first movie is when they meet in the police station, when Riggs stupidly pulls his gun out, somebody shouts "Gun!" and Murtaugh tackles him. Riggs is literally like an innocent and idiotic child, only for that scene. But I'm off topic.

Anyway, I suppose there's the same kind of dynamic in buddy cop movies, and BB can be said to be the dark counterpart of one of those. Rather than cops they're criminals (anti-heroes?). So yeah, I'd say it isn't as pure as it would be in a real comedy, but the straight man/magical child dynamic is definitely there.