It’s been over a decade since Breaking Bad first aired, and even after such a span of time, it remains one of the greatest works of fiction, let alone TV shows, ever conceived. On one hand, the incredible tale of a loser high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who transforms into a feared drug kingpin has a low barrier of entry to appreciate; you don’t need to be intimately familiar with the world of illegal drugs, police procedures or hell, chemistry, to be absorbed in the plot and its characters. On the other, the show is filled with God-tier levels of nuance, symbolism, and every other storytelling trick in the book to such a degree that repeat viewings always reveal new insights previously glossed over. This is a show in which every scene and every line of dialogue is driven by a singular purpose, all leading to one destination, and thinking about moments that stick out in Breaking Bad isn’t easy because, frankly, all the moments stick out.
With that said, after re-watching the entire series about four times and being able to thoroughly digest each and every minute of the show, I’ve managed to come up with what I think is a more informed list of Breaking Bad’s ten greatest moments. Generally speaking, this list (arranged in chronological order, by the way) eschews some of the more obvious ones that people remember, like “I am the one who knocks” and “Say my name”, and instead prioritizes moments that grew on me the more I watched them, so let’s take a look.
“Think of something scientific!” – S2E9
In the first of several seemingly hopeless situations that Walt and Jesse managed to escape from, the duo find themselves stuck in the desert inside a dead RV with no water or cellphone reception, thanks to Jesse’s negligence. Walt, already resigned to a fate of death by cancer, soon becomes content with the inevitable, viewing his predicament as punishment for the lies he’s pushed on his family. Jesse, on the other hand, is desperate to live and motivates Walt into action with one of the most hilarious and distinctly Breaking Bad-esque monologues ever:
“Okay, you need to cut out all your loser crybaby crap right now and think of something scientific!”
“Something…something scientific?! Right…”
“What? Come on, man. You’re smart, alright? You made poison out of beans, yo. Alright, look, we got, we got an entire lab here, alright? How about you take some of these chemicals and mix up some rocket fuel? And we can just send up a signal flare! Or you make some kind of robot to get us help…or a homing device…or build a new battery or…or wait, no. What if we just take some stuff off the RV and build it into something completely different? You know, like a, like a dune buggy. And that way, we can just dune buggy or…”
It’s a familiar scene if you’ve watched enough movies; the proverbial “Aha!” moment triggered by a throwaway line that leads to salvation. It just works so extraordinarily well in Breaking Bad because of the contrast between Walt and Jesse, the most unlikely duo imaginable who go from cooking meth while irritating each other along the way, to having to work together in a life or death situation. As the show progresses, Walt and Jesse’s exploits take a significantly darker turn, so this sticks out as one of the show’s comedic highlights in which there are no serious consequences from their success.
“You led him right to us.” – S3E6
It’s a scene so high-stakes that the show’s own writers nearly wrote themselves into a corner when they conceived it. With Hank in search of the meth lab RV containing Walt’s fingerprints, Walt desperately tries to scrap the vehicle before his brother-in-law can get to it, only for Jesse to show up to stop him. “This is mine just as much as yours!” Jesse shouts. Walt prepares to fire back with his own retort, but the anger instantly drains from his face when he has the horrifying realization that Hank has followed Jesse to their location. What follows is the closest Hank comes in the entire series to solving the Heisenberg mystery until he reads Leaves of Grass in the toilet in Season 5. The only thing separating Walt and Jesse from total ruin is the bullet-riddled RV door, which Walt and Hank get into a tug of war over.
Throughout the show, Walt, for all his diabolical shenanigans, has always been careful about not involving his family in his business. But here he’s forced to dip his toe into the forbidden zone by getting his lawyer, Saul, to give Hank a phone call that tricks him into thinking his wife has been in a car accident. The scheme works, but, like many things Walt does, triggers a chain reaction of events that nearly costs Hank his job and his life.
What makes this scene great is that it displays Walt’s ability to survive the unsurvivable not through physical prowess or MacGyver-style ingenuity, but by manipulating everyone he knows. In this scene alone, he goads Jesse into yelling things like “This is my own private domicile and I will not be harassed” at Hank in an effort to dissuade him from breaking into the RV. He then leverages Saul to make the fake phone call, which leverages Hank’s love for Marie to send him packing. In Season 3, he taps into this skill as a desperate measure, but later in the series, he utilizes it proactively with darker consequences.
“This is a ridiculous idea.” – S3E12
Season 3 is my personal favorite season of Breaking Bad because, as the middle point of the series, it fuses together the comedic and conflicted natures of Seasons 1 & 2 with the darker and demented elements of Seasons 4 & 5. This often overlooked scene in the episode “Half Measures”, in which Jesse tries to persuade Walt to help him assassinate two of Gus’s henchmen, is the final stop in Breaking Bad before shit gets real crazy.
Things get off on a poor note when Jesse tosses a bag of blue meth on the table in the middle of a bar filled with customers. An appalled Walt quickly covers it as he asks “What the hell are you doing?” Jesse then pitches his idea of using ricin (cooked by Walt) to poison two of Gus’s henchmen, who were responsible for previously killing his friend Combo using a child gunman. From Jesse’s point of view, killing the two henchmen is the right thing to do, consequences be damned, because of their use of children to handle drugs and murder competitors. From Walt’s point of view, even if the henchmen deserve to die, there is no practical benefit to killing them; “This achieves nothing. It accomplishes…NOTHING.”
Earlier in the season, Jesse admits to Walt that he’s accepted being a member of the criminal underworld (“I’m the bad guy” as he says). Because of this, he’s got no qualms about using criminal means in pursuit of his idea of justice. Walt, on the other hand, is still stuck in the belief that he’s not “the bad guy” and that he’s doing this for his family. Throughout Season 3, he engages in one half measure after another to resolve problems while maintaining that he’s just a family man who also happens to cook meth. He outright denies any role in causing the mid-air plain collision in Season 2. He tries to salvage his marriage even after admitting to Skyler he makes meth. He sabotages the perfectly competent Gale in order to stop Jesse from ruining Hank’s career, instead of having Jesse killed.
The dialogue in this scene is a masterful example of the chemistry between these two characters. Walt’s exasperation at Jesse’s harebrained plan is hilarious, with the meth maestro trying to torpedo the idea the only way he knows how: using cold hard logic. It doesn’t work on Jesse, who is prone to letting his emotions guide his most extreme decision making. Eventually, Walt drops the most critical line: “You are not a murderer. I’m not, and you’re not. It’s as simple as that.” It’s a strange thing to say, considering by that point Walt has been directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of quite a few people, but it drives home the point that he’s desperate to keep things from spiraling out of control with self-delusion and half measures. To that end, he follows up with his final ridiculous half measure of the season: trying to have Jesse arrested so he can calm down in prison. It’s a move that triggers the next grave development in Walt and Jesse’s descent into the meth underworld.
“Run.” – S3E12
After three seasons of trying so desperately to maintain a delusion of normalcy with half measures, Walt finally owns the choices he’s made and takes a full measure to protect Jesse: he murders Gus’s two henchmen before Jesse and them have a chance to murder each other. It’s a spectacularly violent scene and emblematic of the kind of show Breaking Bad is: a show in which established tropes of the drug underworld are usurped by the arrival of an outside, unstable factor: Walter White.
Walt doesn’t talk or act like any of the criminal characters in Breaking Bad, and his responses to the problems that crop up in that world don’t follow any particular mold. Like a violent chemical reaction, the introduction of Walt to a criminal culture that feeds on a familiar cycle of turf wars, backroom deals and brushes with the law produces unexpected results, creating a story unlike anything seen before. This scene is an embodiment of that. It starts out with a familiar setup of drug criminals squaring off in the middle of a seedy street, pistols in hand. Then out of nowhere comes Walt, slamming his goofy Pontiac Aztek into two of them before finishing a survivor off with the man’s own pistol.
Realizing that Jesse is about to be killed in his attempt to enact justice for Tomas Cantillo, Walt arrives at the point Jesse was at during their discussion at the bar. He accepts that there’s no use maintaining delusions as to who he really is, and that the extreme act of murdering the two henchmen, consequences be damned, is an acceptable action in order to save the young man who has essentially become his surrogate son.
“You might wanna hold off.” – S3E12
This for me is Walt’s most badass moment. Having willfully murdered two of Gus’s men in the preceding episode, the restraints are off and Walt is now prepared to do anything it takes to protect himself. Unfortunately for him, the time for such desperate measures comes a lot sooner than expected, as Gus decides to have Walt executed right after his protégé Gale becomes familiar with Walt’s blue meth formula.
What Gus and his chief gunman Mike don’t realize is that Walt has seen this coming, and has tracked down Gale’s address with Jesse’s help. Upon being led by Mike and Victor to the entrance of the meth lab, where he will be executed, Walt begs for his life in the most pleading, feeble manner you’ve ever seen from a man his age. “If I could talk to Gus, I can convince him ok?? Just please, pleeeaase! Please let me talk to him!!” he cries, prompting Mike to tell him to shut up. “I can’t do it,” the grizzled fixer says, unimpressed by Walt’s pathetic mewling, “I’m sorry.”
Walt suddenly has an idea…another one of his “Aha!” moments that, once again, involves leveraging someone he knows. He tells Mike he’ll give up Jesse Pinkman for a chance to speak to Gus. Mike relents and allows Walt to call Pinkman, but instead of luring the young man out of hiding, Walt instructs him to “Do it!” Mike realizes that Walt has just instructed Jesse to murder Gale, which would prevent Gus from killing Walt or Jesse, lest his drug empire collapses. “Your boss is gonna need me.” Walt sneers, his now calm voice and demeanor having transformed from a man desperate to live to the devil himself. The normally stoic Mike can’t believe what’s just happened in front of him; the chemist he always thought was a reckless, selfish man is in fact a coldly calculating mastermind.
Unlike the battle-hardened criminals he consorts with, Walt has no fighting abilities and no cadre of bodyguards on retainer. But he has something that none of them have: an extraordinary tenacity to outthink and out-strategize everyone who crosses him by leveraging friends, family, associates, and even enemies. Many of his opponents simply think he’s a desperate, selfish asshole they can simply eliminate, and every single time they wind up proven wrong, often with fatal consequences.
THE REBEL XENO 