SEASON 1 / EPISODE 1
“Pilot”
Written and directed by Vince Gilligan
Growth, Then Decay, Then Transformation
“I am awake.”—Walter White
Walter White enters the story of Breaking Bad at full speed, tearing down a New Mexico desert highway in his new mobile meth lab, a ventilator mask on his face, no pants on his hairy legs, a trio of unconscious (or worse) men rolling around in the RV. Though we know nothing about him at this point, nor how he came to be in this predicament, when Walt (Bryan Cranston1) removes the mask to record a video message to his family, it’s clear from his words, his tone, and the pained look on his face that he never imagined his life would one day lead him to this moment.
But, given his new vocation, maybe he should have guessed.
After that gorgeous,2 surreal, in media res prologue—which opens with the image of Walt’s missing pants floating through the sky, so filled with air they look like they have an invisible man inside of them, and closes with Walt standing in the middle of the highway in his shirt and jockey shorts, a gun pointed in the direction of the sirens that are fast approaching—the pilot jumps back to show us the depressing existence that led Walt here. Though his house on 308 Negra Arroyo Lane contains mementos of past scientific triumphs (including work on a Nobel Prize–winning proton study) he has somehow wound up teaching high school chemistry—a task he seems even more bored with than his students, and one that pays him so little that he has to work a second job at a local car wash.3 His pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn4) chooses to celebrate his birthday with a plate of veggie bacon, a surprise party he doesn’t want, and a distracted hand job that she performs while monitoring an eBay bid.5 His wardrobe,6 his ugly green Pontiac Aztek, and everything else about his life are as drab and unremarkable as they can be.
In a lecture about why he loves chemistry, Walt suggests that he views the field as “the study of change,” using a Bunsen burner and different chemical sprays to change the flame’s color, and promises that his classroom will witness “growth, then decay, then transformation!” It’s a loud, flashy demonstration that fails to break through to a single student, but the speech serves as Vince Gilligan’s mission statement for Breaking Bad. We are going to watch Walter White be changed—first by the discovery that he has inoperable lung cancer, and then by his terrible decision to cook crystal meth with former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul7) as a way to provide for Skyler, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte8), and the baby after he’s gone—in ways far more colorful and varied than the burner’s flame.
One of the many smart choices Gilligan makes as both writer and director is to constantly remind us that Walt is a man of science whose whole life has been devoted to chemistry. There are chemicals everywhere he goes, from the samples in his classroom to the cleaning products at the car wash to the ingredients he and an incredulous Jesse will use to cook glass-grade meth. We don’t know if overexposure led to the cancer, or if it was just the luck of the genetic draw, but when Walt coughs himself into a collapse while wheeling a chemical barrel around, it unfortunately seems like more than a coincidence. When Walt’s at the hospital getting scanned, Gilligan shoots it from an angle suggesting science fiction as much as science—aliens may as well be performing some kind of cruel experiment on Walt to see what will happen to him under extreme stress. And what activity does Walt undertake to calm his nerves and distract himself from the awful turn his life has taken? He sits by his swimming pool, lighting one match after another, admiring the chemical reaction that turns an anonymous wooden stick into a bright red flame, little realizing that he is now the match, ready to ignite.
And ignite he does, following a ridealong with Hank Schrader (Dean Norris9), the DEA agent husband of Skyler’s sister Marie (Betsy Brandt10), and Hank’s partner Steve Gomez (Steven Michael Quezada11) that reunites him with Jesse, who has used Mr. White’s science lessons to help establish an identity as a low-level meth manufacturer named Cap’n Cook, and who provides Walt an entrée into the local drug economy. But it’s a disaster almost instantly. This isn’t the cute, sitcommy story of a suburbanite bumbling his way through a life of crime; this is an hour of television that climaxes with Jesse’s ex-partner Emilio (John Koyama) and Emilio’s cousin Krazy-8 (Maximino Arciniega) trying to murder Walt and Jesse, and Walt using his gift for improvisational chemistry to turn the tables, possibly fatally, on them. It’s not at all what Walter White expected when he got into this, and it may not be what much of the audience expected when they heard about the show and saw that Bryan Cranston—best known as the hapless sitcom dad from Malcolm in the Middle12—was starring in it.
Through all of this, Cranston has to convey a lifetime of disappointment and pent-up fury so the audience will empathize with his plight, but also understand why he might be arrogant enough to think he can just slide into a life of crime without hurting anyone or getting hurt in turn. There is an angry, dangerous man lurking beneath all those earth tones, and though the anger emerges here in quasi-admirable ways—standing up to the bullies who are mocking Walter Jr.’s disability, or even cooking the meth to ostensibly look after his family—that level of rage doesn’t appear from nowhere. It lives inside you, stoked by inescapable thoughts of every mistake, every slight, every piece of rotten luck that has brought you so low that you would consider this a viable, necessary path to take with what remains of your life. In his video confession in the opening scene, Walt promises his wife and son, “I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only had you in my heart.” But did he? Would even the most devoted family man, possessed with our protagonist’s unique scientific genius, really go down this road if there wasn’t something darker already there?
In the premiere’s closing moments—after Walt has saved his own life and Jesse’s, apparently by killing Emilio and Krazy-8 (and after he has literally laundered the bloody money he took from his victims, because he’s just that new at this)—he stuns Skyler with an aggressive sexual maneuver of the sort the eBay hand job scene made clear didn’t happen anymore.
“Walt?” Skyler asks. “Is that you?”
This will be the central question of Breaking Bad. The man in bed with Skyler is someone unfamiliar to her, and the man in the RV would be a total goddamn stranger. But is this some brand-new monster created by the cancer diagnosis, or is this who Walt really was all along?
SEASON 1 / EPISODE 2
“Cat’s in the Bag …”
Written by Vince Gilligan
Directed by Adam Bernstein
In-Between
“Hey, man: we flipped a coin! WE FLIPPED A COIN!” —Jesse Pinkman
As dazzling as the pilot was as an introduction to the world of Breaking Bad, “Cat’s in the Bag …” is in many ways far more representative of the series. The pilot burned through plot ideas—Walt has cancer! Walt and Jesse will cook meth! Krazy-8 and Emilio are going to kill them!—faster than Walt drove the RV in the opening scene, and suggested that the show would continue at that breathless pace.
But what will come to define the series is what Vince Gilligan refers to as “t...