Breaking Bad

posted at 1:54 pm on June 1, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Last night brought the season finale of one of my favorite television shows, “Breaking Bad” on AMC. It’s a brilliant combination of clever writing and terrific acting, especially lead actor Bryan Cranston. His performance drives the show – he’s so good that you can see the rest of the cast stepping up their game and improving their own performances with each passing episode. Alternately tragic and darkly hilarious, “Breaking Bad” has something serious to say about the way people are all connected to each other, causing every action we take to ripple through the lives of everyone around us.

I’ll try to keep this spoiler-free, in case you haven’t watched the show yet. The basic premise is that one day, a mild-mannered high-school chemistry teacher named Walter White discovers that he has terminal lung cancer, despite being a lifelong non-smoker. Walt quickly realizes that his cancer treatments are not only likely to be futile, but will hopelessly bankrupt his family. Driven over the edge by this final, cosmic injustice – in what we will learn is a lifetime of injustices and missed opportunities – he hatches a radical plan for paying his bills and putting together enough money to care for his family after he’s gone. After a chance meeting with Jesse Pinkman, a former chemistry student, who dropped out of school and became a low-level crystal meth dealer, Walt uses his brilliant chemistry skills to create the purest form of methamphetamine ever seen, and partners up with Jessee to go into the meth business.

The ensuing tragedy, which unfolds like a slow-motion train wreck, results from Walter’s foolish belief that his activities will be a “victimless crime,” peddling a high-quality illicit product to willing customers who have already ruined their lives, and would only buy lesser quality drugs from other suppliers if Walt didn’t step in to claim his slice of the underground pie. Much of the dramatic tension in the show comes from our hero’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep his family from learning about his double life, as he continues to teach chemistry in school and present himself as a respectable member of the community. The stress of maintaining this deception, and the consequences of Walt’s immersion into the violent drug underworld, cause incredible damage to his family, in ways he would never have predicted at the beginning of the series. As a man of science, he believes he can mix a carefully calibrated amount of criminality into his life, balancing the light and dark elements of his soul like chemicals in a formula… and as the series unfolds, he receives a series of very painful lessons that human beings are not factors in a equation, and moral cancer spreads even faster than the biological kind.

The recurring theme of “Breaking Bad” is the way people’s lives are linked together, in a ballet of action and reaction that even the most highly trained scientist cannot predict. Even the people Walter thinks he knows best, such as his wife and son, continue to react in ways that surprise him. His own evolving relationship with his “junkie imbecile” partner Jessee unfolds in ways he could never have anticipated, even though he thinks he knows every square inch of his own soul. Seemingly minor decisions turn out to have shattering consequences. Walter finds himself making one moral compromise after the other, until his degeneration becomes a headlong slide into darkness… even as he remains an essentially decent man, acting from the noble desire to take care of his family. (The key to understanding much of what Walter does is that his family has grown by two members over the course of the series.) At the end of this season, he finds himself compelled to do something truly monstrous, and a great many people suffer the astonishing consequences.

Some criticism of the show suggests its roller-coaster plotline relies on some unlikely coincidences, but that’s exactly the point: life is filled with unlikely coincidences, which destroy every plan designed to treat the human experience as an equation to be resolved, or manage evil as merely a dangerous ingredient in a complex formula. In retrospect, the path from Walter’s first night cooking meth, to a business meeting with the manager of a fast-food chicken restaurant, to a quick late-night beer with a man he didn’t realize he was connected to, is a straight line… ending in the horrifying reason behind a burned, eyeless teddy bear floating in Walter’s swimming pool. At every step along the way, it looked like an inscrutable maze of unguessable outcomes. The humility to accept those outcomes are unguessable is a necessary ingredient to living a virtuous life, and doing the right thing when cutting corners, or claiming what the world “owes” us, seems so very reasonable.

Bryan Cranston’s amazing, understated performance brings the audience along with Walter every step of the way. Sometime during the next season, he’s going to learn who that guy in the bar was, and the knowledge may be too much to bear. Like all the best stories, “Breaking Bad” builds drama, and black comedy, from an essential truth: every person we meet is one link in a chain of lives, and another chain of lives radiates from us. There is nothing more absurd, or tragic, than the notion of a “victimless crime.” It’s the kind of idea that can lead a good man to become a monster.

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