Rumor has it that Breaking Bad is returning to televisions in the form of Breaking Bad 2. Is it really happening? No. But could it happen? No, as well.
But what if it did happen? It won’t, and it shouldn’t, and it still won’t, but what if it did? The writers, already famous for their play-it-by-ear approach to long-form storytelling, sure would have a pickle of a time writing their way out of the show’s iconic finale. Not to spoil it for you, but the show’s main character, Walter White, accidentally machine guns himself in the tummy button, simultaneously driving home a story about the unpredictable consequences of violent actions and ruining a perfectly good zip-up jacket.
Obviously, any Breaking Bad return – which isn’t happening, and won’t happen – would need to rewrite Heisenberg’s story with a little more uncertainty. Here are a few ways that they could make it happen, even though, and we can’t stress this enough, they won’t.
Blue Cross Blue Shield
There are folksy rhyming rules about inebriation that we’ve all accepted as fact. “Ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws.” “If your skin feels real crawly, you bought some bad molly.” “Glarph blargh murrrnurrrgh when you bought indica on accident.”
And maybe, just maybe, there’s a new one waiting to be born: “Ain’t no death when it’s Jesse’s meth.”
In the closing moments of Breaking Bad, we see Walter, beginning to fade from a bullet to the bread basket. He looks around the lab and sees that his lessons were taken to heart – that Jesse, once the apprentice, has become a master at cooking meth.
But what if it’s even better than that? What if Jesse has transcended his mentor’s teachings, creating an even more incredible product, capable of not just stimulating the human mind, but preserving it – reanimating it, even? Exposed to Jesse’s concoction, Walter is brought back to life, now utterly dependent on the drug he once disdained in order to preserve his unnatural vitality. Would it be an enormous departure from the tone of the show up to this point? Yes. So would bringing back Breaking Bad at all, which again, they’re not doing.
The Waltering Dead
It’s the lazy answer, but it’s also dripping with inter-network synergy: In a wild twist, it turns out that the story of the last episode of Breaking Bad takes place on the same day as the first story from The Walking Dead. Just before he dies, Walter is bitten by a S.W.A.T. officer who’s been infected with the virus. Walt is reanimated, a hyper-intelligent walker retaining a rudimentary understanding of chemistry. He becomes the most dangerous undead creature on the planet, converting his fellow walkers into living bombs through the use of basic explosives and strategizing devastating attacks on the survivors of a world whose society made him a monster years ago.
Trite? Stupid? Maybe. Definitely. See if that stops AMC from at least thinking about it, though, especially once they realize that they could bring an undead Don Draper into the mix while they’re at it. It’d be like an AMC MCU. An AMCU. You can almost hear the studio execs salivating.
Sent back as Walter the Even More White
Following his death in the final seconds of Breaking Bad, Walter White is taken by the darkness. He wanders far on roads he will not tell.
But it turns out that his work is not done, and he’s returned to Earth to complete his tasks, more powerful than ever before, as Walter the Even More White. On the back of his Pontiac Aztec Shadowfax, he rides into battle with the D.E.A. shining a light of righteousness above his head as a beacon to all those who would fight for what’s good in this world.
Something something “I am the one who speaks ‘friend’ and enters.”
OCP FTW
So the thing about the RoboCop movies is that they never really dove into the whole “equal and opposite” deal that normally makes for a solid nemesis. Sure, there was Cain in RoboCop 2, but he was a failed upgrade designed to replace the main character. What we needed was a criminal equivalent to the future of law enforcement – someone part man, part machine, all scofflaw.
And that’s where Heisenberg comes in. Picked up by OCP at the end of the events of Breaking Bad and converted into a bulletproof super criminal as a way of drumming up demand for more RoboCops, Walter White is at last given a chance to bring his story full-circle. Where once he was a man terrified of death, he is now borderline indestructible. He can work tirelessly, always improving on his previous methods thanks to the advanced computing power allotted to him by his state-of-the-art neural interface. He becomes RoboCook, the future of lawlessness. He and RoboCop carry a freshly revived pair of franchises on their armored shoulders for the next 20 years.
