breaking bad: jesse and mike couldn't be jesse and mike

I've been thinking about Breaking Bad again lately, and specifically about the things in the show that don't make sense.

There are plenty of them. And, for the most part, I don't care.

The blue meth, for example. There's no particular reason extraordinarily pure methamphetamine should suddenly turn blue. I'm sure a chemist could make a very long list of other things Breaking Bad gets wrong. That's fine. I'm not watching it as a chemistry documentary.

I also never particularly liked Gus Fring's death. The image of Gus walking out of Hector Salamanca's room, straightening his tie, and then turning to reveal that half his face has been blown off always struck me as a little too cartoonish for a show that usually took itself seriously. But it's a few seconds. Someone thought it would look cool. Whatever.

And then there's Wayfarer 515.

I've never really bought the idea that one grieving air traffic controller could return to work, make a mistake, and cause two commercial airliners to collide over Albuquerque. Is the air traffic control system really so fragile that everything comes down to one guy having a bad day? There aren't redundant systems? Other controllers? Computers? Pilots looking at radar? Some enormous red light somewhere saying DON'T LET THE TWO AIRPLANES HIT EACH OTHER?

But again: whatever.

None of these things fundamentally changes the show.

There are two things that do bother me, though, because they're not really plot contrivances. They're characters. And they're two of the best characters in the Breaking Bad universe.

Mike Ehrmantraut doesn't make sense.

This actually bothers me more after Better Call Saul, because Better Call Saul tells us where Mike came from. He wasn't some former Green Beret, CIA operative or international assassin. He was a Philadelphia beat cop. A corrupt one, at least to a degree, and an alcoholic. He was a man beaten down by life and consumed by guilt over the death of his son.

Then he gets to Albuquerque and somehow becomes Batman.

Mike knows everything.

He understands surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons, tracking, criminal organizations, security systems and police procedure. He can follow people without being seen and detect when he's being followed. He can infiltrate buildings, plan elaborate operations, outthink professional criminals and calmly improvise when everything goes wrong. He seems to know exactly how drug cartels work. He can be a sniper, a private investigator, a bodyguard, a fixer, a security consultant, an interrogator and a one-man tactical team.

Where did he learn all this?

Some of it makes sense. He was a cop, so of course he knows police procedure. He may have picked up some useful skills along the way. And Mike is obviously intelligent.

But the Mike we eventually get isn't merely an intelligent former cop with street smarts. He's an extraordinarily accomplished specialist in approximately everything.

I love the character. Jonathan Banks is magnificent. But I don't buy the résumé.

And then there's Jesse Pinkman.

Jesse's transformation may be even harder to believe.

When we meet Jesse, he's a screwup. He's an addict. He barely made it through high school. Walt remembers him as a lousy chemistry student. Jesse is already cooking meth, but apparently not particularly good meth. His big contribution to chemistry is adding chili powder.

Then he spends some time working with Walter White.

And somehow, by the end, Jesse has become one of the greatest meth cooks in the world.

This is especially important because the show repeatedly establishes that Walt's product isn't just good. It's extraordinary. His purity is so far beyond what everyone else is producing that it becomes his calling card. Gale Boetticher is an actual trained chemist with an advanced education, and even he is in awe of Walt's work.

Yet Jesse eventually becomes capable of reproducing it well enough that Gus is willing to send him to Mexico to teach cartel chemists how to do it.

That's quite a career trajectory for the guy who couldn't pass Mr. White's chemistry class.

And it's not only chemistry. Jesse becomes substantially smarter as the series goes along. Not more mature—smarter. He starts seeing things other people don't see. He comes up with plans. He understands people. At several points he figures things out before characters who are supposedly much more sophisticated than he is.

Again, I love Jesse. Aaron Paul took what could easily have been a one-note character and made him one of the emotional centers of the series.

I just don't entirely believe the person Jesse becomes was hiding inside the person we met.

Interestingly, I don't have the same problem with Walter White.

Walt makes sense.

From the beginning, we're told that Walt is brilliant. Not just smart. Brilliant. He helped found Gray Matter Technologies, and the company went on to become enormously valuable after he left. Whatever exactly happened between Walt, Gretchen and Elliott, it's obvious that Walt has spent years watching other people enjoy the success and fortune he believes should have been his.

So when the mild-mannered high-school teacher turns out to have an enormous reservoir of pride, resentment and rage buried underneath, I buy it.

Heisenberg didn't suddenly appear when Walt got cancer.

Heisenberg was already there.

Cancer just gave him permission to come out.

That's why Walt's transformation, outrageous as it becomes, works for me in a way that Mike's and Jesse's don't. The seeds are there from the beginning. Walt always had the intelligence. He always had the ego. He always had the resentment. The series is largely about watching circumstances strip away everything that had kept those qualities under control.

With Mike and Jesse, I sometimes feel as though the writers fell in love with the characters—and with Jonathan Banks and Aaron Paul—and kept making them more capable because they were so much fun to watch.

Mike became cooler, so he had to become more formidable.

Jesse became more important, so he had to become more competent.

Eventually Mike became the guy who could do anything, and Jesse became the guy who could cook Walter White's meth.

Neither ruins Breaking Bad for me. Not remotely. It's still one of the greatest television shows I've ever watched.

I can accept blue meth. I can accept Gus Fring adjusting his tie with half a face. Maybe. I can even accept that Jane's grieving father can accidentally knock two airplanes out of the sky.

Those are things the plot asks me to believe for a few minutes.

Mike and Jesse are different.

The show asks me to believe them for years.

And I'm still not sure I do.

Did you like this feature?

Strengthen my Jesse argument against obvious objections

Sharpen my plot-versus-character thesis earlier

Trim my opening examples before Mike

cinema history class: weapons (2025)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3 (Ethan's  choice): Weapons (2025)
Directed by Zach Cregger

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I had seen it once before -- at home, with Ethan when he was trying to decide whether to bring it or something else.

Plot Synopsis:
When 17 children from the same elementary-school class mysteriously vanish from their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m., their teacher and the father of one of the missing children separately try to uncover what happened, gradually discovering a disturbing supernatural explanation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
This was Ethan’s pick, and he made the somewhat risky choice of going with a recent release. There’s always a danger in doing that: with an older movie, you at least have some sense of whether it has stood the test of time. With something brand new, you’re going in with some doubt -- am I blinded by the newness of it?

In this case, the gamble paid off with some really enthusiastic praise for the movie and for Ethan's choice to bring it.

Weapons begins as a mystery. Seventeen children from the same class get out of bed at exactly 2:17 in the morning, leave their homes, and disappear. From there, the movie initially seems to be asking a fairly straightforward question: what happened to them?

But somewhere along the way, almost without announcing that it is doing so, the movie transforms. What begins as a mystery gradually turns into something much closer to a zombie movie. I liked that progression. The movie doesn’t suddenly throw out everything it has been doing and become something else; it feels as though the horror was lurking underneath the mystery all along and was simply waiting to emerge.

One thing I was less enthusiastic about was the way the story was told. We follow the events from one character’s perspective, then the movie jumps backward and begins again from another character’s point of view. Then it does it again. And again. Until I caught on to what the movie was doing, I found it confusing. Apparently I was in the minority on this one, because several of the others in the room really liked that structure. Once I understood the device, I appreciated it more, but I’m still not sure I would have chosen to tell the story that way.

Fortunately, even with all of that doubling back, the movie never dragged. That’s actually rather impressive. Replaying overlapping portions of a story from different viewpoints could easily become tedious, but Weapons keeps moving.

And once everything starts coming apart, the camera work does a terrific job conveying the chaos. The later sequences feel frantic without becoming visually incomprehensible. You know enough about what is happening to follow it, while still feeling the panic and disorder of the characters themselves.

There was also something about the movie that reminded me of Village of the Damned. The circumstances are obviously very different, but there is a similar unsettling quality to taking something as ordinarily harmless as a group of children and turning it into the center of something deeply wrong.

Most of all, I admired the decision not to force a happy ending onto the story. It was a bold move to end on such a depressing note, but by that point it was also the ending the movie had earned. A conventional everybody-is-okay-now conclusion would have felt false after everything that had happened, and how the explanation was unfolding. The ending is bleak, but it makes sense, and I think the movie is better because the filmmakers were willing to follow their story where it logically led.

Joe certainly thought so.

He gave Weapons a 10—but this time he made a point of distinguishing it from many of his other 10s. Some of those, he explained, are essentially genre-specific 10s: a 10 because the movie accomplishes exactly what that particular kind of movie is trying to accomplish. This one, according to Joe, was a genuine, real-world 10.

He has explained the distinction many times before, “some tens are tennier than others.”

Apparently this was one of the tennier tens.

malbone street and the true genius of vince gilligan

Great storytellers borrow from history. Great storytellers borrow so well that you don't even realize they're doing it. Which raises an interesting question: did Vince Gilligan draw inspiration for one of the most memorable tragedies in the Breaking Bad universe from New York City's worst transit disaster?

Hear me out.

On November 1, 1918, the deadliest subway disaster in New York City history occurred beneath what was then Malbone Street in Brooklyn. The official explanation is familiar enough: a strike left the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company desperately short of qualified personnel, so they put dispatcher Edward Luciano—a man with virtually no experience as a motorman—in charge of a rush-hour train. The train entered a sharp curve at roughly five times the speed limit. The result was catastrophic. More than ninety people died. Historians point to a perfect storm of bad decisions: inadequate training, poor management, an improperly assembled train, wooden cars, and an unforgiving curve.

But there is one detail that has always stood out to me.

Just days before the wreck, Luciano's three-year-old daughter had died during the Spanish influenza pandemic. He himself had recently been ill. Whether his grief affected his performance is impossible to know, and historians are careful not to overstate the point. It was one factor among many -- not the cause of the accident, but possibly a cause

Fast-forward ninety years.

In Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad canon, Jane Margolis dies of a heroin overdose. Her father, Donald Margolis, an air traffic controller, returns to work while still overwhelmed by grief. Distracted, he makes a catastrophic error that results in the midair collision of Wayfarer 515 and another aircraft over Albuquerque. It's one of the defining tragedies of the Breaking Bad universe.

Now ask yourself...

A transportation operator.

Grieving the recent death of a daughter.

Returns to work before emotionally recovering.

Makes a tragic mistake.

The mistake kills large numbers of innocent people.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

But what if Vince Gilligan was quietly borrowing a page from one of New York's greatest transportation disasters?

Gilligan is famous for planting obscure historical references and constructing elaborate chains of cause and effect. The Wayfarer crash wasn't just random tragedy—it illustrated how one seemingly private event could ripple outward until strangers paid the price.

That's also, in a way, the enduring lesson of Malbone Street. The wreck wasn't caused by one person's grief any more than it was caused by one curve in the track. It was a cascade of failures: corporate decisions, inadequate training, unsafe equipment, labor unrest, bad luck, and perhaps one exhausted young man who never should have been handed the controls in the first place.

So no, I'm not actually suggesting Vince Gilligan sat down with Brian Cudahy's The Malbone Street Wreck while outlining Season 2.

I'm just saying...

Has anyone ever seen Edward Luciano and Donald Margolis in the same century?

cinema history class: class of 1984 (1982)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2 (my  choice): Class of 1984 (1982)
Directed by Mark Lester

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I've seen it several times.

Plot Synopsis:
An idealistic music teacher takes a job at a crime-ridden high school and clashes with a violent student gang. As the gang's campaign of intimidation escalates, the conflict becomes increasingly personal, leading to a brutal final showdown.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Since this was my entry for Bring Your Own Movie Month, I was especially interested in seeing how the movie held up after not having watched it in quite a while. The answer, I think, is...not quite as well as I'd remembered.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did. It's still an entertaining movie. But it also left me wondering why I instinctively separate "good movie" from "entertaining movie." If the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain, shouldn't succeeding at that be enough? I don't have a good answer, but somehow I still came away thinking that Class of 1984 is a fun watch without necessarily being a good film.

Keith observed that the acting was all over the map, and I think that's right. There are moments that really work. Timothy Van Patten's bathroom scene, where Peter Stegman brutally beats himself up to frame Mr. Norris, is remarkably convincing. Roddy McDowall is mesmerizing as the increasingly unhinged biology teacher, although he was such a gifted actor that I suspect he could have turned in that performance on autopilot. On the other hand, Merrie Lynn Ross never quite convinced me in her role, and some of the emotional scenes just didn't land.

It's also fun to see Michael J. Fox—still billed as "Michael Fox"—in one of his earliest film roles. He doesn't have much to do, but he's immediately likable, and it's easy to see why bigger opportunities soon followed.

Some sequences haven't aged particularly well. The gang fight beneath the highway, with everyone swinging chains and clubs while somehow forgetting that guns and knives exist, felt more than a little contrived.

The ending is especially odd. I did appreciate the final ironic title card explaining that Mr. Norris was never prosecuted because there were no witnesses—a neat callback to one of the movie's central frustrations, namely that the authorities were powerless because nobody would testify against the student gang. It's presented as a triumphant ending, but it's hard to ignore that Mrs. Norris has suffered an unimaginably traumatic ordeal and will almost certainly be dealing with those scars for the rest of her life. The movie seems eager to declare victory while quietly stepping around that reality.

All in all, I'm glad I picked it. It sparked a lively discussion, even if it didn't quite live up to my memories.

And, in a rare fit of real-world restraint, Joe gave it an 8.2.

what if -- tom lehrer version

History is full of little "what if" moments.

What if the Hindenburg hadn't caught fire? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if someone at Coca Cola headquarters had tasted New Coke and said, "Maybe let's not"?

Today I'd like to consider another.

What if Tom Lehrer had simply stayed a mathematician?

At first glance, it seems like the world wouldn't be all that different. Before he turned to musical comedy (or would "musical commentary" be more accurate?) Lehrer was a legitimate mathematician. He never earned a PhD (because of his foray into music), but he taught at Harvard, MIT, and UC Santa Cruz. He could have had an entirely respectable academic career writing papers that only six other people would ever read.

Perhaps he'd have solved the Four Color Theorem decades early. Maybe Fermat's Last Theorem would have been known as Lehrer's Last Theorem, depriving Andrew Wiles of his greatest achievement and forcing him to become an accountant. Entire graduate seminars would now begin with the phrase, "As Lehrer showed in 1958..."

But mathematics never happens in isolation, and neither does music.

Without songs like The Elements, chemistry students would have had to memorize the periodic table the old-fashioned way: by crying.

Without New Math, the "new math" movement might actually have succeeded. Millions of parents would have nodded knowingly as their third-graders explained why 7 + 5 equals 12 only in a culturally oppressive base-ten framework. There would be no backlash. By 1983, the IRS would require tax returns in base eight.

The ripple effects continue.

Without Lehrer proving that intelligent people could also be funny, generations of mathematically inclined undergraduates would conclude that humor was simply not an available elective. College campuses would become eerily silent except for the occasional muttering of eigenvalues.

This leaves a vacuum in satirical music.

Someone has to fill it.

Allan Sherman becomes far more influential than anyone intended. By the early 1970s, every political scandal is explained through novelty songs set to public-domain melodies. Congress establishes a standing Committee on Musical Parody.

The Beatles never notice Lehrer, and without his example of sophisticated topical satire, they decide there's really no point in getting terribly serious. "Revolution" is replaced with a cheerful tune encouraging everyone to remember their library books. John Lennon never writes "Imagine" (admittedly, a positive, since that is probably the most overrated piece of crap in musical history). Instead he records "Perhaps," a song about maintaining reasonable expectations.

Bob Dylan, finding himself without intellectual competition, decides he's done enough for folk music and enrolls at MIT to finish the topology degree he never knew he wanted.

Meanwhile, mathematics is advancing at an alarming pace.

Professor Lehrer solves the Poincaré Conjecture during a faculty meeting because the discussion about parking permits is moving too slowly. He casually jots down a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis on the back of a departmental memo, but the memo is accidentally recycled, forcing humanity to rediscover it seventy years later.

The Clay Mathematics Institute quietly disbands due to lack of unsolved problems.

With every famous theorem conquered, mathematicians turn their attention to more practical questions.

Can a sock truly disappear in the dryer?

Is there an optimal strategy for choosing the fastest supermarket checkout line?

Exactly how many cats is too many cats?

These, too, fall within a decade.

By the 1990s, with mathematics effectively completed, every former math department is converted into an escape room.

Artificial intelligence develops much earlier because the necessary mathematics already exists. However, lacking Tom Lehrer's satirical warning that brilliant people are perfectly capable of making terrible decisions, nobody sees any reason to be cautious.

The first AI immediately announces that the mathematically optimal form of music is a continuous 11-hour recording of an oboe tuning to A-flat.

The public accepts this without complaint because, remember, the Beatles never became philosophical.

Eventually historians identify the exact point where our timeline diverged.

Not the invention of the computer.

Not the moon landing.

Not the Internet.

Just one graduate student deciding, "You know...I think I'll write a funny song."

Sometimes civilization really does hinge on a rhyme scheme.