Anatomy of Walter White

Prologue

Walter, Oh Walter, as a character how you have beguiled me! I can never ever replace such sagacity in a silver-screen thespian, so as to say, such a cryptic methodology to outwit the laws and take turn of thy future thyself at the same time appearing to lead a normal life. Nothing comes to your road so self-excavated, so intensely maneuvered, to not allow you to traverse across in reaching the destiny that you want to, desperately, step upon and that you have proved to the last inch via Breaking Bad. I find no sense of human lure in your integrity but a poise to cherish what you are and pursuing what you can do so very well. It is, hence, not greed, it is passion and it is making your soul enriched with all the richness of the world: the money, no matter even if you can’t use that overtly. Be assured, while I scope you through my own lens, you do not lag a step behind Hannibal Lecter in every other way possible.   

Let there be one more director and scriptwriter to devise even so grasping story for you Mr. White such as this so that, we as viewers, would have to again live in a world expecting twists and crooks of every episode that is to come.   

Factual Summary

Genre: TV Series

Title: Breaking Bad, 2008-2013

IMDB Rating: 9.5 / 10

Creator: Vince Gilligan 

Review centered upon protagonist Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) 

Reviewer: Adhikary Rabindra / 2016 November 

Dissecting Walter White’s Character as Mr. White and Hiesenberg

From the start to the finish, Walter White has been central among the characters depicted in the series “Breaking Bad”. It takes little—if any—time to get the insinuation that the series must be portraying the stories based somewhere around complicated scientific deductions or chemical formulae when one sees the banner popping out with Mendeleev’s Periodic Table mottled in acoustic aura of mystic music. 

This must have been a perfect motion picture as a tool that Vince Gilligan has devised to show Jekyll and Hyde character of Walter White, an ordinary high school teacher, who later faces the specter of average income family at least one member of which suffers from a fatal disease (stage III lung cancer when diagnosed)—such that the family has to pay the unaffordable merely to expect alleged longevity, coerce-fully—only to become extraordinary, not to mention the psychological turmoil of everyone involved. 

As the plot unravels, it is fairly interesting to see how a boring family old-man—that Walter White, of course—turns to a underworld meth chef, a new normal to his cruel and darker side of behavior intermittently alternating to a kind family guy; indeed a caring husband and responsible father to a boy and a baby girl in the course. The weighted yet intriguing relationship of Mr. White, as is addressed by cooking clans of his, with different individuals, which again varying according to the place, context and the surround, adds more spices to the viewers how one’s dual personality complicates the social situations. 

The first time when Mr. White enters into Tuco’s rendezvous is when he pronounces his netherworld name “Hiesenberg”, being an aspirant chemist and all, coined after Heisenberg’s principle, perhaps. The name is then first heard, and echoed, loud and clear inside the meth industries reverberating in the sinusoidal manner to the cartel world, zeroing to customers and blazing to DEA—soon as Heisenberg bombards the Tuco’s place with his mystique chemicals masquerading blue methamphetamine crystals, and threatens to reimburse the money of previous ‘debacle’ trade on top of Jesse Pinkman’s—his coworker— injuries, and succeeds. Thus is how Heisenberg establishes his imagery, rather Kafkaesque nightmare for a man like him, unbelievable to whoever have known him, not only near but far and beyond as well. 

The Jekyll Walter White might be a perfect husband, father and a family friend whereas Hyde Walter White is equally brutal, emotionless individual, who is, at places, called animal even by his meth-cook colleague Jesse Pinkman with whom Mr White shares almost all his business interests. His notoriety could not have reached any farther than poisoning an innocent child with his insidious chemical weapon called ricin to having explicit role in the suicide of trusty business partner Mike Ehrmantraut. Whether his unaffordability to cancer treatment or lung cancer alone knowing that he is surely going to die has caused him to turn into Mr. Tough-Guy-wanted-by-police seems baffling. Or, maybe, he is born that way, only that character precipitates soon after lung carcinoma transcends to his life. 

He is near perfect in excellently pulling up the rationale for every wrongdoing he commits, sometimes even is busted out for over-reaction—of verbally fabricating unusually intricate details of what happened, how and where. He is best at what he does, as he keeps claiming that—96% and blue color should validate his claim, however; in whole of America, and that’s where he reasons that meth-cooking is justifiable at his end rather than to work out a lousy sub-standard product by some lethargic naïve cook, a wastage of precursors, lesser selling price and then lesser benefits at the same time depriving the customers of pure crystal inhalation experience. 

The later portion includes more of Heisenberg than Walter White, when he gradually and irreversibly implicates himself to a murderer—or so a serial killer even. He is now not only a mere cook, he is the king of Meth Empire after he bombs Gustavo Fring to death or at least that is what he thinks. He keeps on destroying everyone and everyone else in his journey to become millionaire and to escape law enforcement, DEA so to tell, not to mention the destroyed lives of ultimate users of ‘blue thing’ he manufactures. 

Day by day he becomes grave criminal in the name of ‘providing’ for his family, more and more he is pushed further away from uxorial intimacy and family love. Even if he seems to lose trust from Skyler, his wife, he keeps running for money only to save it for her and their children after he will be gone owing to the carcinoma. This has rather happy ending when independently scrutinizing all the felonies that Mr. White has committed. To me, he should have succumbed to more cruel death than is shown, and only in that way the viewers would find more justice in viewing all the way bottom from the start. I am saying that only to respect his persona while he sometimes evokes abhorrence. It is his power to offer you that feeling of distaste.    

As a whole the serial is a family drama with interesting mix of crime and violence affecting social virtues of a man and his family garnished with bright colors of joy, love, care, sacrifice and darker shades of victimization, realization and compunction. It also brings about the unpleasant aspect of illegal money, its cohesive and indispensable chain of bummers to the society. 

©Adhikary Rabindra 2016