A man with a gas mask wearing only tighty-whities barrels down a desert dirt road in an RV. Two people in the mobile living room area are passed out and may be dead. The driver crashes. He grabs a video camera from the glove compartment and makes a plea of love to his wife and son as sirens close in. The man is Walter White, and at this point in the beginning of Breaking Bad, we have no idea what’s going on, and why he’s awaiting the police’s arrival with a gun.
It’s hard to think of a better, more intense introduction than the opening moments of Breaking Bad‘s first episode. Surprisingly, this new AMC cable drama keeps the intensity through the whole first two episodes–and it shows no signs of slowing.
After the above chase scene, we see Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston (the father from Malcolm in the Middle), three weeks prior to his 50th birthday. He is timid, quiet and lives in a calm New Mexico suburb with his wife and disabled son.
He teaches high school chemistry, but has to work a second job at a car wash, where he washes his students’ cars to make ends meet. After both jobs, he comes home to a surprise birthday party. Walter seems like he is perpetually that picked-on kid in high school, and his DEA-employed brother offers Walter a chance to come along on a ride for a meth bust. It’s something to break the monotony of his dull life. He refuses.
The next day Walter’s monotony is broken. He finds out he has lung cancer and bad health insurance. Instead of telling anyone, he decides to take his brother-in-law up on his offer, so he can learn about the business of meth. On the meth raid, Walter sees a former, troublemaking student escape. Walter seeks him out, and they decide to go into business together. Walter adds one more job to his life: meth dealer. It’s a pretty big leap.
From here Walter leaves his spineless, mundane life behind. He tells his car wash boss off, and he beats up a bully who makes fun of his son. On the surface it seems improbable, like something against the science Walter teaches, that he begins the life of a drug peddler. In a lecture to his students about chemistry, Walter says: “Elements combine and change into compounds, that’s all of life. Solution and dissolution … Growth and then decay and then transformation.”
In short, he says, chemistry is the study of change. Walter’s long life of singular boredom has become a fine example of chemistry at work, an ionic bond that happens when two oppositely charged elements attract.
Breaking Bad bears similarity to another show, Showtime’s Weeds. Both shows have a suburban parent who decides their only course of action is to sell drugs. But the equivalence end there.
Even though Walter starts to sell a far more destructive drug, the events bringing him to that decision are far nobler. He is struggling to provide for his small family when he finds out he will die in two years.
In Weeds, the mother deals marijuana not to provide her family the bare necessities but to uphold the lavish, entitled lifestyle she and her family lived before her husband died. Also, Weeds is a dramatic comedy that tends to be overtly humorous, and at times touching.
Breaking Bad is still funny at times, but its humor comes from a darker place. And it is less a study of family than an intense dramatic thriller.
Dissolution has many definitions. In chemistry it is “the act or process of resolving or dissolving into parts or elements.” This bears strong meaning in Breaking Bad. Not only does Breaking Bad strongly display a consistent theme of dissolution, but it also offers dissolution as the solution to boring TV.