Vince Gilligan famously set out to take Walter White “from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” and he did just that. Yet much of what made “Breaking Bad” great had less to do with gradual transformation and more to do with who Walter White was all along. As brought to life by Bryan Cranston, Walter’s insatiable need for more—more money, more freedom, more time, more power, more control, and especially, more recognition—was “Breaking Bad’s” great superpower, a nuclear reactor churning out more and more energy, especially when it seemed likely to blow. Think of “Dead Freight,” the show’s masterful train heist episode, and the brilliant and divisive “The Fly,” a Rian Johnson-directed bottle episode which trapped Walt and Jesse (the invaluable Aaron Paul) in their lab. Two very different episodes, the same narrative force: Walt needs more.
“Breaking Bad” may have hooked us with its infernal, unshakeable plotting, but those wild yarns always emerged directly from Walter White’s wants and the acts of those who would oppose him. In never straying from that link, Gilligan—one of TV’s greatest scribes and a very fine director in his own right—gave us a series with as firm a foundation as any before or since.
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