The Antihero Trilogy, part 3
It’s impossible to watch Breaking Bad in 2021 and not think about Donald Trump. At its core, the show is the story of a white man who thinks the world owes him more than he’s received and will go to any length to close the gap between what he has and what he thinks he deserves. If the series wasn’t dark enough when we all first watched it ~10 years ago, let me tell you, it’s about hundred times darker now.
My original hot take about Breaking Bad was that, despite appearing to be about an extreme transformation, it’s actually about how people never change. Walt is an asshole from the very start. Jesse is a kind, lost soul who can’t escape Walt’s emotional riptide. The people surrounding them are slightly more morally complex: Saul Goodman, the con artist with a heart of gold; Skyler, the wife who takes out her frustrations over being “the wife” by running minor scams1; Hank, the decidedly not-PC DEA agent who is deeply committed to his family and community. Still, their characters are all sharply defined from the very first episodes. Different facets of their personalities are revealed as their lives become more and more dangerous, but no one ever meaningfully changes.
Especially not Walt. Breaking Bad isn’t about Walt becoming a monster, but rather about him removing the obstacles that previously constrained his monstrous nature and confined him to merely being a dick. I definitely wasn’t one of those “bad fans” who rooted for Walt the first time around, but I did remember him as mostly being in control of his actions and the chain reactions they set off. Some of his plots are rightly (in)famous, like the ricin switch that closes season four. Before this rewatch, I would have described Walt as a villain, but as an intelligent, systematic one. That was what made the show fun, right?
Wrong! Walt, like some other tempestuous, power-mad white men we can name, is actually terrible at being a criminal mastermind. He constantly misjudges people and misconstrues situations, and he always lets his emotions get the better of him. Walt, the supposedly brilliant scientist, is the least rational person in the whole show. His life is repeatedly saved by the logic and methodical thinking of the show’s other characters, which he disdains or never even notices. Instead, he projects his mistakes and flaws onto everyone around him and insists on escalating danger when everyone else is responsibly trying to turn down the heat. The only person Walt can effectively manipulate is Jesse, and that’s because Jesse is vulnerable and craves the approval of an authority figure, not because Walt is such a great manipulator. (Seen from that perspective, the ricin switch is the exception that proves the rule.)
Walt gets away with making so many mistakes for two intertwined reasons: 1) he flatly refuses to change course and so forces everyone else to accomodate him and the new reality he’s created, and 2) he’s a white man in America in 2008. Consider the constrast with his most compelling foil, Gus. Gus, a Black and (allegedly2) Latino man, built a drug empire by meticulously turning his entire life into a cover story and never taking an unnecessary risk. Walt literally burns all that work to the ground in less than year because he doesn’t like having a boss. He would rather tear down a functioning institution than accept any limits on his role within it. I mean, oof. I long for the days when I thought this was fiction.
(If you, like me and arguably also the show’s creators, are more interested in seeing the meticulous drug empire running as intended than watching it be destroyed, may I recommend Better Call Saul! It’s even better than Breaking Bad. But that’s an argument for a different newsletter.)
I won’t say I liked Breaking Bad the best out of our antihero trilogy. All three show are spectacular and well worth the watches and re-watches. But Breaking Bad was the one we finished the fastest. We never really binged either The Sopranos or Mad Men, but we could easily watch four episodes of Breaking Bad in a day and sometimes did. It’s so propulsive, especially when you watch it fast enough to appreciate the compressed timeline. (The series originally aired over five years, but only two years pass inside the show; the main action, pre-New Hampshire, all happens in 18 months.) Season arcs are immaculately constructed, but so are individual episodes. The cinematography is like nothing else on TV, before or since (Better Call Saul aside). The world is so immersive and detailed that you get the sense you could zoom in on any minor character and watch a compelling show about their life (as in, you guessed it, Better Call Saul. Watch Better Call Saul!).
When a piece of culture is as good as Breaking Bad, I’m usually against endless prequels and sequels. Breaking Bad has now had both, in the form of Better Call Saul and the Jesse-centered movie El Camino. Despite how good Better Call Saul especially has turned out to be, I believe on principle that masterpieces should stand on their own, and their creators should get to be free to have new ideas. I have to admit, though, in this case I get it. If I were creator Vince Gilligan, I wouldn’t want to leave the world of Breaking Bad either, not when the original show only scratched the surface of its seemingly infinite depths. And I especially wouldn’t want that world to remain synonymous with Walter White, the character who could least appreciate it and did everything he could to destroy it. Gilligan had to finish telling Walt’s story. Now, spell broken, he gets to tell everyone else’s.
Programming note: You might have noticed that lately, this weekly newsletter hasn’t exactly been weekly. I’ve doing a lot of work on my book, and I’ve also been much more strict about taking weekends off. When I was doing mostly news and feature articles, I could usually let rest come to me. Weekend work would be balanced out with light weekdays, or I would get a break when the piece was with my editor, or I could take a few days to relax after a story was published. None of those built-in downtimes exist with a book-writing schedule, which is almost entirely up to me. So I’ve had to get more serious about scheduling work, and also scheduling rest. I used to write this newsletter on weekend mornings, and now I have to find a different time for it. I’m confident I will get there, but not before I take a long holiday break from everything. So this is the last issue until sometime in January. Happy hibernation!
Surprisingly, Skyler is the most obvious precursor to the characters of prequel series Better Call Saul, more so than even Saul himself.
I will never accept that Gus is Chilean, not with that accent. Giancarlo Esposito is excellent in the role, but he’s very clearly a non-native Spanish speaker. My husband and I could not deal with this glaring logical fallacy any longer, so we used our rewatch to decide that Gus was a foreign operative sent to work undercover in the Pinochet regime. From where, we will never know. He acquired Chilean identity documents, either officially or unofficially, and then erased the rest of his past upon emigrating to Mexico in the 1980s. This is the only possibility that approaches making sense, and I will hear no arguments!