When people have gone back to rewatch Breaking Bad from its beginning after having seen a few seasons, the most common observation is that from the very first episode the show clearly states its motives. From the first moment that we see Walt in the chemistry classroom, he’s talking about chemistry being the science of change, solution and dissolution, transformation. Vince Gilligan has described many times that his goal in this series was to see if he could turn Mr. Chips into Scarface—taking a harmless, non-threatening man and turning him into a merciless drug lord. It’s his own personal chemistry experiment, playing out before our eyes.
The crazy thing about it is that it seems to have worked. The transformation of Walter White into Heisenberg, or maybe more accurately, the bringing out of the Heisenbergian properties that were in Walter all along by his circumstances, has made for one of the most exciting and mesmerizing stories of our generation. It’s an experiment that capitalizes on the inherent qualities of the medium of television that I alluded to earlier. Because we tend to experience television in the present, that it unfolds before us seemingly in real time and week after week, year after year, has the potential to veer off in unexpected ways, taking a character and transforming him into someone else entirely is risky in terms of convention, but incredibly compelling material. The fact that it’s an unfinished story makes its potential energy part of the equation to hold our interest. This was Gilligan’s whole prerogative, and this linear intention has proved to be transformative for the medium itself.
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