Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Wanna Cook’s Episode Guide
1.01 Pilot/Breaking Bad
Original air date: January 20, 2008
Written and directed by: Vince Gilligan
“I prefer to see [chemistry] as the study of change . . . that’s all of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle. It’s solution — dissolution, just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay, then — transformation! It is fascinating, really.” — Walter White
We meet Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Walt’s family. Walt is poleaxed by some tragic news. With nothing to lose, Walt decides to try to make one big score, and damn the consequences. For that, however, he needs the help of Jesse Pinkman, a former student of Walt’s turned loser meth cook and drug dealer.
From the moment you see those khakis float down out of a perfectly blue desert sky, you know that you’re watching a show like nothing else on television. The hard beauty and stillness of the American Southwest is shattered by a wildly careening RV driven by a pasty white guy with a developing paunch wearing only a gas mask and tighty-whities.
What the hell?
Like all pilots, this one is primarily exposition, but unlike most, the exposition is beautifully handled as the simple background of Walter’s life. The use of a long flashback as the body of the episode works well, in no small part due to Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance in the opening, which gives us a Walter White so obviously, desperately out of his element that we immediately wonder how this guy wound up pantsless in the desert and apparently determined to commit suicide-by-cop. After the opening credits, the audience is taken on an intimate tour of Walt’s life. Again, Cranston sells it perfectly. The viewer is presented with a middle-aged man facing the back half of his life from the perspective of an early brilliance and promise that has somehow imploded into a barely-making-ends-meet existence as a high school chemistry teacher. He has to work a lousy second job to support his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son and still can’t afford to buy a hot water heater.
Executive producer and series creator Vince Gilligan, along with the cast and crew (Gilligan & Co.), take the audience through this day in the life of Walt, and it’s just one little humiliation after another. The only time Walt’s eyes sparkle in the first half of the episode is when he is giving his introductory lecture to his chemistry class. Here Walt transcends his lower-middle-class life in an almost poetic outpouring of passion for this incredible science. Of course, even that brief joy is crushed by the arrogant insolence of the archetypal high school jackass who stays just far enough inside the line that Walt can’t do a damn thing about him. So this is Walt and his life, as sad sack as you can get, with no real prospects of improvement, a brother-in-law who thinks he’s a wuss, and a wife who doesn’t even pay attention during birthday sex.
Until everything changes.
The sociologist and criminologist Lonnie Athens would likely classify Walt’s cancer diagnosis as the beginning of a “dramatic self change,” brought on by something so traumatic that a person’s self — the very thoughts, ideas, and ways of understanding and interacting with the world — is shattered, or “fragmented,” and in order to survive, the person must begin to replace that old self, those old ideas, with an entirely new worldview. (Athens and his theories are discussed much more fully in the previous essay, but since we warned you not to read that if you don’t want to risk spoilage, the basic — and spoiler-free — parts are mentioned here.) Breaking Bad gives us this fragmentation beautifully. Note how from the viewer’s perspective Walt is upside down as he is moved into the MRI machine, a motif smoothly repeated in the next scene with Walt’s reflection in the top of the doctor’s desk. Most discombobulating of all, however, is the consultation with the doctor. At first totally voiceless behind the tinnitus-like ambient soundtrack and faceless except for his chin and lips, the doctor and the news he is imparting are made unreal, out of place, and alien. As for Walt, in an exquisite touch of emotional realism, all he can focus on is the mustard stain on the doctor’s lab coat. How many of us, confronted with such tragic news, have likewise found our attention focused, randomly, illogically, on some similar mundanity of life?
It is from this shattered self that Walt begins to operate and things that would have been completely out of the question for pre-cancer Walt are now actual possibilities — things like finding a big score before he dies by making and selling pure crystal meth. Remember that Walt is a truly brilliant chemist, and knows full well what crystal meth is and what it does to people who use it. He may not know exactly what he’s getting into, but he knows what he is doing.
Enter Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, best known previously for his role on Big Love), a skinny white-boy gangster wannabe, who under the name “Cap’n Cook” makes a living cooking and selling meth. He’s also an ex-student of Walt’s, and after being recognized by his former teacher during a drug bust, Walt has all the leverage he needs to coerce Jesse into helping him. Why does he need him? Because, as Walt says, “you know the business, and I know the chemistry.” Symbolizing just how far beyond his old life Walt is moving, he and Jesse park their battered RV/meth lab in the desert outside of Albuquerque, far from the city and any signs of human life. All that is there is a rough dirt road and a “cow house” in the distance. The desert is a place without memory, a place outside of things, where secrets can be kept, and meth can be cooked. This is where Walt lives now.
It is in this desert space that Walt becomes a killer, albeit in self defense. Ironically, the one thing that Walt views as holding the keys to the secret of life — chemistry — becomes the means to end lives. Walt, a father, teacher, and an integral part of an extended family — in other words, an agent of life and growth — has now become a meth cook, using chemical weapons to kill his enemies. Walter White has become an agent of death.
The transformation is just beginning, but already Skyler (Anna Gunn, previously known for her roles on The Practice and Deadwood) is having some trouble recognizing her husband: “Walt? Is that you?”
LAB NOTES
Highlight: Jesse to Walt: “Man, some straight like you — giant stick up his ass all of a sudden at age what? Sixty? He’s just going to break bad?”
Did You Notice:
This episode has the first (but not the last!) appearance of Walt’s excuse that he’s doing everything for his family.
There’s an award on the wall in Walt’s house commemorating his contributions to work that was awarded the Nobel Prize back in 1985. The man’s not a slouch when it comes to chemistry, so what’s happened since then?
At Walt’s surprise birthday party, Walt is very awkward when he handles Hank’s gun.
Speaking of Hank (Dean Norris, whose other roles were in the TV series Medium, and the movies Total Recall, and Little Miss Sunshine), he waits until the school bus has left the neighborhood before ordering his team into the meth lab, showing what a good and careful cop he is.
Maybe it’s just us, but J.P. Wynne High School (where Walt teaches chemistry) seems to have the most well-equipped high school chemistry lab in the country.
As Walt receives his diagnosis, the doctor’s voice and all other sounds are drowned out by a kind of numbing ringing, signifying a kind of psychic overload that prevents Walt from being fully engaged with the external world. This effect will be used again several times throughout the series.
Walt literally launders his money to dry it out, foreshadowing what’s to come.
Shooting Up:
Thanks to John Toll, who served as cinematographer for the first season of Breaking Bad, the show has one of the most distinctive opening shots ever. Just watch those empty khaki pants flutter across a clear sky. Breaking Bad loves certain camera angles and this section is where we’ll point out some of the shots that make the show stand out.
Look at that taped non-confession Walt makes for his family when he thinks the cops are coming for him. We’re used to watching recordings of characters — shows are filmed (or taped), but here, we’re watching him recording himself on tape. Who’s the real Walt?
Title: Many pilot episodes share the name with the title of the show and Breaking Bad’s pilot is no exception. Vince Gilligan, who grew up in Farmville, Virginia, has stated that “breaking bad” is a Southernism for going off the straight and narrow. When you bend a stick until it breaks, the stick usually breaks cleanly. But sometimes, sticks (and men) break bad. You can wind up in the hospital with a splinter in your eye, or you can wind up in Walter White’s world. Either way, it’s no kind of good.
Interesting Facts: Show creator Vince Gilligan’s early educational experience was at J. P. Wynne Campus School in Farmville, Virginia. He recycled the name for the high school in Breaking Bad.
SPECIAL INGREDIENTS
What Is Crystal Meth, Anyway?
While there is some evidence that methamphetamine can be found naturally in several species of acacia plants, commercial meth making involves chemistry, not agriculture. The history of the drug dates back to 1893 when Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi first synthesized the substance from ephedrine. The name “methamphetamine” was derived from elements of the chemical structure of this new compound: methyl alpha-methylphenylethylamine. In the United States, meth is a Schedule II controlled substance, which the Drug Enforcement Administration defines as a substance that may have some accepted medical use, but also has a high likelihood of being abused and causing dependence. Other Schedule II substances include opium and cocaine.
Crystal meth is a very pure, extremely potent form of methamphetamine that is usually smoked like crack cocaine, but can also be crushed and snorted, injected, or even inserted into the anus or urethra where it dissolves into the bloodstream. Among other ailments, prolonged meth use can result in rapid decay and loss of teeth (known as “meth mouth”); drug-related psychosis that can persist for weeks, months, or even years after use is discontinued; and, oh yeah, death. Crystal meth is highly addictive and is such a horrifically vicious drug that in 2008 The Economist reported that in Pierce County, Washington, where 589 meth labs were found in 2001, some police and residents were relieved to see an uptick in crack use as an indicator that the meth trade was declining!
Make no mistake: what Walt and Jesse are doing is a Bad Thing.
Unfortunately, you don’t need a trained chemist like Walter White to whip up a batch of meth. In fact, there are many recipes for home-cooking meth and one of the most popular uses a method that sounds downright patriotic: in the “Red, White, and Blue” method, the red is red phosphorus, white is the ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, and blue is iodine, used to make hydroiodic acid. The cook obtains these ingredients from items such as lye, anhydrous (“without water”) ammonia, iodine, hydrochloric acid, matches (Emilio is scraping match heads when viewers first meet him), ephedrine (which is found in sinus medications such as Sudafed), drain cleaner, ether, lighter fluid, and brake fluid. Ick.
Another downside of meth manufacturing is the stew of toxic fumes that are created as by-products. As seen in the pilot episode, a careless cook can be exposed to highly toxic phosphine gas by overheating the red phosphorus used in the cooking process. Other toxins can include mercury and hydrogen gas — also known as the stuff that blew up the Hindenburg. Now you know why Walt made Emilio toss out his cigarette.
Mustard Gas versus Phosphine Gas
Hank: Meth labs are nasty on a good day. You mix that shit wrong and you’ve got, uh, mustard gas.
Walt: Phosphine gas.
Both of these gases are best avoided, to be sure, but there is a significant difference. According to the Centers for Disease Control, mustard gas (or, more accurately, “sulfur mustard”) is a chemical warfare agent that was first used by the German Empire in September 1917 against the forces of Imperial Russia at Riga during World War I. Mustard gas is a “vesicant” or blistering agent, which means it caused blistering both externally and internally on the skin, eyes, throat, esophagus, and lungs, with the blisters sometimes forming several hours after exposure to the gas. Mustard gas was not always lethal, depending on the dose or whether or not any gas had been inhaled. Victims often suffered agonizing pain from burns, blindness, and bleeding, both external and internal, and many who survived were disabled for the rest of their lives. Unlike chlorine, phosgene, or even tear gas, gas masks did not protect the wearer from mustard gas, which could cause disabling chemical burns on any part of a soldier’s exposed skin. Furthermore, mustard gas sank low and lingered for weeks, making occupation of trenches extremely dangerous for friend and foe alike. Mustard gas has no recognized medical use and its use in combat is now a violation of the United Nations’ Chemical Weapons Convention.
Phosphine gas is far more deadly. According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, phosphine gas is an unintended and potentially lethal (just ask Emilio!) by-product of meth manufacturing using the hydroiodic acid/red phosphorus method. Phosphine gas has no effect on the skin, and causes only mild to moderate irritation to the eyes, but produces rapid and horrific effects if inhaled. Low-level, short-term exposure can cause coughing and severe lung irritation. Neurological effects include dizziness, convulsions, and coma. The results of long-term or high-level exposure to phosphine gas (as in a poorly ventilated RV, for example) include pulmonary edema; convulsions; damage to the kidney, liver, and heart; and death. Phosphine gas was also used during World War I, but unlike mustard gas, quick and proper use of gas masks proved an effective countermeasure. In non-gaseous form, phosphine is used in the manufacture of semi-conductors and compound conductors. Pellets containing phosphine that react with atmospheric water or a rodent’s stomach acids are used for pest control, and phosphine gas is also used as an aerosol insecticide because it leaves no residue on the products it is applied to.
[Sidebar] BREAKFAST
Meth isn’t the only thing that gets cooked on Breaking Bad. Meals are a big part of the show, indicating how things are going at any given time: is the White family sitting down to a home-cooked meal or is it a dinner of takeout? And, while it is a well-known fact that teenage boys can wolf down copious quantities of food, Junior (aka “Flynn”) eats more breakfasts than should be allowed by law. In fact, Breaking Bad memes and drinking games have sprung up around Junior’s breakfasts, so keep an eye out for how many times you see him at the breakfast table.
Walt’s home life has an important marker associated with breakfast — the birthday bacon. For his 50th birthday at the start of season 1, breakfast is a celebration with Skyler spelling out “50” in veggie bacon on his plate. There will be two future instances of bacon spelling out something for Walter; watch how much his circumstances have changed each time.
