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
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