Diary of a Breaking Bad virgin – Walt embraces cancer, crime & baldness

Let me just say this from the get-go: I was a big Malcolm in the Middle fan. Bryan Cranston routinely made me laugh out loud in his role of Hal, the idiotic, oddball dad of a pack of trouble-maker sons. So when I heard people wax poetic about Breaking Bad, and talk about how awesome Cranston was in this AMC show as a meth cooking high school teacher/cancer patient, visions of Hal getting his body shaved in the kitchen by his off-center wife Lois, roller skating to Funkytown, or donning crazy-looking aerodynamic gear in order to race-walk immediately would pop into my head.

So for me, seeing Bryan Cranston as anyone other than Malcolm’s lovable, goofy dad Hal was going to take some doing. However by the time I was done watching the first seven-episode season of Breaking Bad, I’d had the images of the comedic Hal blown out of my mind and replaced with a new, thoroughly and deeply different character: The terribly flawed, terribly compelling Walter White.

Maybe it was the lack of hair — which he completely shaved off after his cancer treatments had diminished his functioning follicular count — or his strengthening internal resolve rooted in his absolute certainty that he was going to die and therefore had nothing to lose, but watching the season one transformation of Cranston’s Walter White from a high school chemistry teacher to a crystal meth cooker was divided into two main time-frames for me.

First there was the wimpy hair phase, where Walt had to come to terms with his moral objections to breaking the law in order to earn money in the drug business — with all its violence and murder — in order to not render his growing family bankrupt if he died from lung cancer and left them with $90,000 in medical bills, never mind funeral expenses.

Then there was the later bald phase, where Walt toughened up, took no crap from anyone, and, in fact, seemed to delight in breaking all manner of rules — legal, moral and social … though by the season finale, he still wasn’t completely comfortable with the raw brutality of his new business, or with what consumption of his freakishly pure crystal meth did to his customers.

When viewers were first introduced to Walter White in the pilot episode, he was a complete doormat, a sad sack of a man who seemed to have lost … something, even before he initially received his dire lung cancer diagnosis, something he kept under wraps for a while. He was a teacher by day and a car wash employee in the after-school hours at a place where he was regularly humiliated and harassed by his boss and his customers, especially when he had to wash one of his affluent student’s cars while the kid snapped a cell phone image of the sponge-wielding Walt.

Fifty-year-old Walt was married to an attractive, loving wife Skyler, who was pregnant. They also had a son, Walter Jr., who seemed like a perfectly well-adjusted, good kid who was thriving despite having the obstacles of cerebral palsy to overcome. Sure, money was always tight in the White household, especially with a new baby on the way, but the thing that seemed to be eating away at Walt Sr.’s soul appeared deeper than job dissatisfaction, money woes, and an overall malaise.

But the more I saw of the brilliant Walt, who’d contributed to Nobel Prize-caliber work — especially in the “Gray Matter” episode where Walt and Skyler attended the birthday blow-out for Walt’s former grad school buddy who was wildly rich and successful — the more it became clear that Walt had lost his will to move forward in his life (for some unknown reason) long before he found out that he had cancer. (I’m dying to know how he wound up in the teaching profession.) Until the cancer diagnosis, it appeared as though Walt had been going through the motions, phoning it in … whatever cliche you want to invoke for giving up on one’s dream. “My entire life,” he told Skyler when he was contemplating not having cancer treatment that would financially devastate the family, “it just seems I never, you know, had a real say about any of it.”

Until now.

What I loved about this season was that Walter White didn’t become a bad ass crystal meth cooker just like that. A series of horrific events — like the absolutely grotesque second episode scene where the acid Walter’s partner Jesse Pinkman used to dissolve the body of a murderous drug dealer ate through the second-story bathtub and came crashing through the ceiling, followed by Walter having to come to the soul-crushing decision that he HAD to kill Krazy-8 lest he and his family be killed if he let Krazy-8 go free — helped propel Walt from being a quiet, law abiding guy who was pushed around by the world, into someone who’s ballsy enough to shake down a vicious drug dealer (with the help of some explosive fulminated mercury), and illicitly feel up his wife beneath a table during a meeting of “concerned parents” who were worried that a drug dealer had looted the high school chemistry lab, while the perpetrator was sitting amongst them.

The most powerful scene of the first season, at least to me, occurred in episode three, “…And the Bag’s in the River” where Walt put together the broken pieces of the ceramic yellow lunch plate and realized that he had to kill Krazy-8, even though he desperately didn’t want to, having already humanized him and even shared with him his lung cancer diagnosis, even before telling his own wife. The agony on Walt’s face when he saw that a long, jagged piece of plate was missing was tragic.

After the seventh and final episode of this too-brief freshman season, I was left with not only a whole bunch of questions, but the desire to feed my new addiction to Breaking Bad. Some of my questions:

Why and how did Jesse become a drug addict/crystal meth cooker? He came from a reasonably normal-looking, two-parent family who lived in a nice house in a safe neighborhood. It appears as though Jesse had promise, but obviously something went awry. I’m dying to know what that something is.

When Hank Schrader, Walt’s DEA agent brother-in-law, finds out what Walt’s doing (I’m convinced that it won’t be long before Hank gets wise to all this, unless he’s a completely obtuse DEA agent), what will his reaction be? And will Walt use the fact that Hank’s wife is a shoplifter as leverage?

Breaking Bad fans, what was your favorite season one moment?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jul 06, 2010 @ 17:00 EST5EDT