Desperation will do many things to a man (or a woman) and, in the moment, despair’s consequences are unfathomable. Do you risk your life, the life of others, your family?
Not that Walt White is entirely unaware of this. Last year he had to kill a man (who later turned out to be an undercover drug operative) in a gripping scene where he choked the man to death, with a steel bicycle lock no less. But that was last season, with Gnarls Barkley’s “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” playing over the closing credits.
This past Sunday marked the first episode of season two of AMC’s Breaking Bad, which is the second best drama on television right behind the same station’s early '60s-drenched Mad Men.
What Walt White (the remotely brilliant Bryan Cranston) begins to learn this season is that the consequences of his actions may jeopardize not only his life, but the life of his wife and son and unborn daughter. Episode one of Breaking Bad’s second season made it clear, early in the hour, that not only may the best of intentions have horrific consequences, those very consequences may take only days or hours to begin to manifest themselves. In short, you make a deal with the devil and you gotta deal with the devil, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
For those of you who have not seen Breaking Bad, I’d suggest you buy the full season one on DVD as quickly as possible, the sooner to plunge into the now playing season two.
Here’s the series, in summation: Walter White, a former brilliant college and post-graduate chemistry thinker and teacher has, over the years, missed one too many opportunities to capitalize on his great intellect. The friends with whom he worked and studied as a student have since gone on to win awards and amass status and honor and money — plenty of money. His best friend in college and with whom he collaborated in a series of major scientific discoveries lives the highest of possible lives (White, while a student, was in love once with the woman who is now married to this same best friend/colleague).
And what is Walt’s fate? He’s a high school chemistry teacher whose students are as interested in chemistry as they are, say, geopolitical politics — which is to say, not at all.
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