This relentless, Shakespearean focus on one man’s decisions and flaws has also allowed the show to pull off a tonal and genre shift that rarely happens in television. As mentioned above, this show began as a quiet, methodical domestic drama that examined minor processes in minute detail, an externalization of the chemical reactions that produce the drugs at the show’s core and Walter White’s own internal journey. Since season three, however, the show has increasingly left that aside for larger, more grandiose adventures, taking greater and greater leaps into the abyss and becoming more and more fanciful. (Try describing that super-magnet plotline to someone who doesn’t watch the show, and they may wonder exactly why it’s won so much acclaim.) Walter’s descent has required larger, more baroque emotional and physical stakes, and Vince Gilligan and his writers have only been too happy to provide them. We don’t need to see the methodical processes anymore, because we largely already know them. What we need to see are the sorts of cosmic stakes introduced and constantly heightened, and Breaking Bad is happy to oblige. This has the added benefit of allowing the show to make leaps of logic and have them feel absolutely organic to what’s going on, without pushing too hard.
Shakespeare understood that a clockwork plot could be a thing of beauty, that the moment at the end when the tragedy arises so inevitably that the audience begs for it to never come. But it would only be so if it had characters crowded around the story center who seemed as if they might have lives outside of the story but didn’t, not really. The non-Walter characters on Breaking Bad serve similar functions, many starting out as barely sketched-in archetypes—hectoring wife, straight-edge lawman, burned-out stoner—and quickly becoming incredibly potent figures the more they try to escape the gravity of the main story. In Shakespeare’s best tragedies, the characters all seem dimly aware they’re trapped in a Shakespearean tragedy and don’t know how to get out. That’s true on Breaking Bad, too, whether it’s the goofy side characters like Badger and Skinny Pete or the show’s most important non-Walter character, Jesse (who is, in some ways, the show’s protagonist now).
It seems unlikely that Gilligan and his writers sat down every season and questioned how they could adhere to Shakespearean five-act structure, outside of the general and pronounced influence Shakespeare has had on drama in general. But over the course of the show’s run, it has inadvertently turned into what might be the great Shakespearean tale of TV history. There’s a reason so many TV writers cite Greek drama when talking about their work. Greek drama is driven more by a general sense of oppression at the hands of the gods and the inevitability of life’s futility than anything else, and oppression and futility are endlessly renewable resources when it comes to TV. Breaking Bad made the far more difficult choice of depicting one man’s rise and fall, and in so doing, it borrowed heavily from classical tragedy to make its case and tell its story. Its greatest trick is that it is a clockwork story, but it’s made the clock-maker its main character. And once all of those people struggling to break free of the gears and levers that hold them in place realize the man that trapped them there is standing right beside them, the canker rotting away at the center of everything, the universe will surely shatter.
. got inside jesses head and made him think he cant go on without opening up to her about gale.
and if this one finishes strong it will have had a VERY strong season 3 ,4 5, and 5 (
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spoilers
