Breaking Down Breaking Bad

A Show About Change

In the first episode, when he's teaching his class, Walt asks what chemistry is. A student says it's the study of chemicals. Walt responds with "No, it's actually the study of matter. But I like to think of it as the study of CHANGE." And right there I think we have another premise, or at least a major theme. It isn't really worded right to be a premise.

I've seen Vince Gilligan say several times that the characters in the show aren't stable, they're undergoing a process of change. It seems to be true for all the main cast—Walt, Jesse, Skyler, Hank, Marie (maybe not Marie)—and possibly Walt jr. And I guess all Walt's enemies change to corpses.

Another line Gilligan says all over the place is that the hero changes from being Mister Chips to Scarface. I don't really know who Mister Chips is, though I've heard the name. I finally saw a brief clip on a video about a ten-year reunion for the show, and Mister Chips is a very kind and helpful English college professor in an old black-and white movie.

These two things taken together—that chemistry is the study of change and that all the main characters undergo changes throughout the show, is support for the idea that the characters are meant to be seen as chemicals or elements that interact with each other in various ways.

Walt's Real Change, and His Real Legacy

I once said somewhere on this thread that I thought Walt ended up providing for his family in the end. Wow, was I wrong!! He tried several different ways to get his money to them, and all of them failed. And when he finally talked to his wife and his son, they both rejected his blood money with contempt. So despite everything he went through, ostensibly to provide for his family, his major change was into a self-centered psychopathic monster. They might not have respected him much in the beginning, and maybe they walked all over him, but he was goofy old dad, and in a way they loved him. But because of what he changed into they ended up fearing and despising him. But I guess he did get to live out his repressed fantasy of being powerful and feared, and of being extremely good at something. Like world-class good. And his name being known around the world for it.

Here's that ten-year reunion video. I really enjoyed it, and it seems like a good way to close this thread out:



Though I can't be sure I'm really done with it. Usually I find a second round of ideas start coming in after I've made a full first pass on something, and those ideas are better than the original ones. I start seeing it at a higher level of understanding, and being able to connect up the ideas I found the first time through much better. Time will tell if that happens.

Actually I've already made a bunch of second-pass type connections, and maybe even third-pass. Not sure if any more will be forthcoming or not.

Booo-Yah!!!

Here it is—#17:



Somewhere back on page 1 I think, I wondered if there was a connection with Reservoir Dogs.

Walt's real REAL legacy

Correcting what I said 3 posts back.

I said his family rejected his blood money with extreme contempt, and that's true, But I forgot he then gave it all to Elliott and Gretchen and told them to give it to Walt. Jr on his 18th birthday with instructions to share it with the family. And to never reveal where they got it. Assuming they went ahead and did it, then he absolutely did meet his goal of providing for his family for the rest of their lives. Though it would have been nice to see a coda where Walt Jr recieves the gift, to remind us of that little factoid. And to make it clear that they accepted it since they didn't know it was from Walt.

That makes it more of a bittersweet ending and a major triumph. It was pretty much of a downer the way I understood it, just pure tragedy.

Poor Jesse



I'm almost done reading the book Breaking Down Breaking Bad (They stole the title from me!)

I was aware poor Jesse really got dragged through the shit (quite literally at one point, when he fell through the roof of a port-a-potty and emerged dyed blue), but I didn't quite understand what was happening to his character. Apparently I'm not very good at understanding the emotional arcs of characters, or I just didn't look deep enough into the depths of the show. To be fair though, those depths go really deeeep! We're made from the beginning to empathize with Walt, and Vince Gilligan said he understood that was absolutely key—he really needed viewers to see themselves in him or empathize with him or the show wouldn't work. So he spent a good deal of time early on showing us who he is and making us feel what it's like to be him. But there was an undercurrent of resentment and darkness in him already that was very subtle, or that I (and I think a lot of people) missed or were willing to ignore. So we believed he really was "Mister chips becoming Scarface." Which he really wasn't.

In reality, from well before the show begins, Walt was a nasty piece of work. He was filled with bitterness and resentment, but that was not focused on directly, it was shown subtly. And when he discovers he's dying of cancer and begins his heroic arc into what seems to be a badass, strong version of himself at first, we feel great for him (with him). And so maybe we do ignore those subtle little hints that he's deeply troubled from the very beginning. This is part of the Vince Gilligan magic. It's there, but somehow you didn't notice it or let it go by and forgot about it.

So you (by which I mean I) missed the fact that Jesse served mainly as Walt's kicking pet. Yes, Walt became his mentor, but Walt was a horrible twisted man with a darkness inside him that was growing through much of his life, he just was afraid to let it show before. He kept it locked down inside and it grew darker and more twisted. And to him Jesse was just a dumb kid who had failed his Chemistry class a few years ago, and who could usher him into the meth business. The fact that Jesse saw him (after a while) as a mentor/father figure (which is something he badly needed), and that Walt really didn't have much of a relationship with his own son, made us see it in a positive light. I feel so manipulated!! There's a great deal of subtlety and levels of meaning in this show folks!! More than I was aware of, even after my second viewing (the one I just completed recently). I didn't pick up on most of this until reading about it in a few books.

So—Walt is Jesse's father figure, but in the way Darth Vader was Luke's father. Because Heisenberg was already locked away deep inside Walt from the beginning, in latent form, and had yet to be released and grow into his really badass self. But the twisted, dark evil was already in him, and like what I said long ago in here on my analyses of the Minotaur myth, all of his progeny come out twisted and dark. All his thoughts, all his projects, his achievements, all are tainted with the evil that issues forth from inside this deceptively ordinary looking man. It's sort of like having Hitler for a daddy. The main reason Walt liked working with Jesse is because, and he even explicitly stated it this way once, Jesse does what Walt wants him to.

He uses him. No matter how happy they seem at times, or how good their relationship looks on the surface, this is always lurking just underneath. And it taints Walt's relationship to everybody, despite his constant claims that he did everything in order to provide for his family. That was his cover story, and it wasn't really true. He admitted that too near the end. He told Skyler "I did it because I wanted to. I liked the power." Probably the most honest thing he ever said. Though I think for a long time he really believed his own cover story. Heisenberg was well hidden in there, even from himself. But his evil manipulative nature comes through all the time, and poisons everything he does. The genius of the show is that, unless you're much more perceptive than I was, you don't notice it, or maybe you sort of do at times but can't quite add it all up until you've seen the show a few times (or read about it, from people who have). But to be fair, I wasn't paying close attention to Jesse's arc. I was just enjoying the awesome. I generally don't start going into analysis mode until I've seen something a few times.

Cont.

As we see Jesse grow from a hood rat boy to a man under Walt's tutelage, he also gets pushed again and again to do terrible things that go against his own nature. And unlike Walt, Jesse has a good nature. Vince Gilligan said once (probably many times) that Walt is a criminal who never should have been a good man, and Jesse was a good man who never should have been a criminal, but when we first meet them they're both in the wrong roles. But that isn't revealed until near the end of the show's run, and the writers didn't even know it until then. Things grew season by season, and their personalities came into focus more and more.

Anyway, wow, how did I end up writing all that? I came in here to talk about Jesse and how Walt messed him up monumentally. But I needed to set the stage first by explaining how Walt constantly deluded himself about how dark and twisted he's always been inside. That's necessary to understand first.

He forced him to murder Gale Boetteker in cold blood—a nice, friendly nerdy guy that's totally likable. Of course in a way it was Gus who forced that, but Walt is the one who called Jesse and told him he needs to go and murder him right now! Immediately, or both Walt and Jesse will be dead within the hour. And honestly, if you think it through, Jesse would never have gotten into any of this mess if Walt didn't drag him into it. So many times Jesse had an opportunity to straighten up his life and live much better, and he tried, and he found happiness a couple of times. A beautiful and amazing girlfriend (Krysten Ritter), and later a onther one, this time with two little boys. In other words twice he was very close to having a real family, and that's the major theme of the show. Family = happiness and the good life, and Jesse was always denied it because of his involvement with Walt, despite coming so tantalizingly close to it twice!! The show is so complex and things are so intertwined, you really have to think it through in long lines like this to figure things out. It takes many paragraphs at least to think your way through all the twists and turns involved.

The first girl—Jane (Krysten Ritter)—died by choking on her own vomit in bed right beside Jesse while they were both on heroin. Walt was there, in fact he inadvertently jostled her while trying to shake Jesse awake, and it caused her to roll onto her back. She had explained to Jesse earlier, as she gave him his first shot of heroin, that when you pass out you want to make sure you're on your side and not your back, or you can throw up and choke to death. So they were spooning, both on their sides. She started throwing up as Walt watched (Jesse was still passed out), and Walt started to move to help her, then he froze, his face went all Heisenberg (amazing how he can just change it like that), and he stood and watched her die. Then you could see waves of horror and self-incrimination pass across his incredibly expressive face at what he had just done, what he's become. Heisenberg is almost in full control now, and Walter is horrified, but Walter has no control anymore. From here on out it's Heisenberg who pulls all the strings.

Then later, when Jesse finds another beautiful young woman, this one with two boys (Jesse loves children), the older boy gets killed because of involvement with the drug trade, the second one gets poisoned (by Walt), and the woman is killed right in front of Jesse as punishment by the Neo Nazis he's now a prisoner of. Because he tried to escape the cage they keep him in when they're not forcing him to cook meth for them. By this time his face is all scarred up as you see in the picture above, because the Nazis cut him up while breaking him to his new life as their slave. Maybe all this gets across some sense of how badly his life has been utterly destroyed, because of his involvement with Walt. It isn't clear at the end if Jesse is fully sane anymore. He's the only associate of Walt, besides Walt's immediate family, who lives in the end.

So Walter White, this man we became so invested in at the beginning, completely ruined the lives of basically everyone close to him. But mostly he ruined Jesse's. The secondary character, the magical child to Walt's stern and abusive straight man. From a writing perspective, this is all genius level stuff. From a humanist standpoint, it's disgusting and horrifying. And I'm beginning to see the deeper levels that make the show so perfect. I knew there was more going on down there!

Special bonus video: