What appealed to me at first about Breaking Bad, was that it seemed to be about how slim the line is between good and bad. That through circumstance, and increasingly poor decision making, anyone could fall from grace. It appeared to be a tragedy about a good man's fall. Placed in a world he didn't fully understand, Walter makes poor choices; at first to survive, and later to thrive, in that environment, having been almost complete taken over by his new life and surroundings. Fear and panic guide him, it seemed. Fear of losing everything he was trying to support, if the means by which he's trying support it are discovered. Panic in the moments when that fear seems to be realised. Could he turn around, or is the notion of his better self now only useful as a rationale for his increasingly evil actions?
What started out, for me, as a bold story of how good and evil are not useful terms because, given the wrong circumstances, anyone can flit between both. And, that understanding and empathy are always to be applied because nobody is evil and no one truly lost: context is everything. Has now shown itself to be about how people's true selves are not fully known, even unto themselves, until they are tested. That may be a simple truth: we don't know who we are without experience. Yet, here, it's used to explain why badness happens. In other words we are fated to be one thing and can expect no redemption. At first, Walter makes a seemingly naive choice to profit from a criminal undertaking, without fully grasping what he will lose in so doing. In later episodes, flash backs are increasingly used, to alter his motives and to reveal that: he was always this way, he always was arrogant and wanted to be a big shot. His apparent new self was, in fact, his true self.
This seems to have been the idea from the start. The creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, has this to say about what he wishes for people who do terrible things:
If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for Biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.
Can't not believe there's a hell. Can't not believe in the most evil idea man has ever imagined. That in secret, and forever, some power that won't reveal itself until you've been judged, will punish you with endless torture.
This seems a popular notion and synchronises itself nicely with much of the shows audience. They have uniformly hated Walter and wait eagerly to see his eventual downfall and for biblical justice to be served. Definitive justice as a revenge or balance for all previous wrongdoing.
The appeal here seems to be in enjoying the horror at his actions and in believing that they represent a simple truth: there are bad people and they do bad things. Rather than feeling sadness at his downfall and believing the show operates on the complex truth: that bad things can happen to anyone and for no good reason but all of us deserve to be understood.
As I say, I've stopped believing that the show represents anything. I feel it has blackness at its core. It's pandering to the capital punishment crowd and offering them a gore story about how an evil man reveals himself. They could be anywhere you know and we won't be safe until we shoot them between the legs with huge volts of electricity, for they are a cancer and must be cut out. Well, I don't believe that and I'm not entertained by that notion. I can't just watch the story of a bad man doing bad things. There's just no point.
