Then he is diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer and given about six months to live, longer perhaps if he undergoes chemotherapy (a cruel joke) and radiation. Acquiescing to his wife Skyler’s wishes, he decides to go through with the treatment — but his insurance won’t cover it.
With no money in the bank, and a family he must take care of, Walt White takes a leave of absence from his teaching job, connects randomly with a former loser student who is a low level crystal meth dealer. Turns out this kid Jesse Pinkman (played with just the right level of near-hysteria by Aaron Paul) and White form an unlikely partnership: Walt, because of his chemistry background and Pinkman, because of his street contacts for a crystal meth lab and distribution enterprise. One thing Walt can do is make one hell of a batch of crystal.
It is an unlikely alliance, but it somehow manages, no matter how often it threatens to come unglued, to remain intact — at least through the first episode of season two. White and Pinkman argue and fight like two brothers, but in the end remain “in this thing together.”
During its first season I thought Breaking Bad was filled with an enormous amount of silence and stillness. Like Walt, the camera and the characters are existential in their hidden or suppressed expressions. There are times when you want Walt to scream — in anger, in pain — and he resolutely remains quiet, beaten, defeated, silent. Underneath, though, there is a raging anger, and the high points of the series are when it explodes, sexually with his wife and in a deadly way with the seamier underside of the meth business. (The concept that death focuses the mind is brought home vividly, but even more so that it changes a mild-mannered man who, briefly, is as ravenous and treacherous as a hardened and sexually unburdened creature, who is stripped of all the patina of civilized man.)
His wife Skyler (the extraordinary Anna Gund; see, Deadwood) wants Walt to express his rage at his lot in life: no academic repute, a job far beneath him, and a deadly disease. She plays her character as though she both wants and doesn’t want him to speak up: it’s like she knows what consequences his words may have, and it scares her. She is, after all, going through an unplanned pregnancy at 40. Their son, by the way, has cerebral palsy.
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