Walter White is a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a 15-year-old disabled son and a baby on the way. His family has some financial issues, but they’re getting by. That is, until he gets diagnosed with inoperable stage III lung cancer. After learning of this, he keeps it from his family, fearing what their reactions would be.
After Walter sees his DEA brother-in-law, Hank, take down a meth lab and sees how much money you can make in that industry, he visits one of his old students, Jesse Pinkman, whom he saw escape the previous crime scene and makes a deal to cook crystal meth with him in an attempt to pay his hospital fees and leave something for his family when he’s gone.
From the first scene of this show, you could tell it was going to be a hit. The foreshadowing in the opening scenes of most episodes are extremely cinematic, and gives the show some really good introductions. In the first season, Walter doesn’t look fit for this industry. He is sympathetic to people who are trying to kill him; he can’t bring himself to kill somebody who will surely rat him out, he can’t intimidate someone for the life of him, and he is just overall inexperienced in the world of crime. Throughout the seasons, however, we see Walter start to change; committing horrible crimes like drug manufacturing, murder, money laundering, assault, kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and more. He gradually becomes insensitized to these acts of violence, and eventually becomes the dangerous drug lord ‘Heisenberg’ that he is known as in the end.
Throughout the whole show, Walter is considered very stubborn, not accepting help from others around him. He believes that he should be the “provider” of his family, and that accepting charity is a sign of weakness. This leads him to do things like deny loans or job opportunities that are based on pity, lie to his family about where the money for his cancer treatment came from, and continue cooking meth even though it is tearing his life apart. There were many points in this show where he could have given up producing meth and returned home with more than enough money for his family, but every time he goes back and cooks more, leading him to more issues. His yearning for the life of crime comes not from a desire to provide, but a desire to control and be in charge of his lifestyle.
Jesse is my all-time favorite character of this show; he starts as a 20-something-year-old drug dealer who is just trying to make some extra cash, but over the course of the show we see Jesse experiencing extremely traumatic things: watching people get killed, waking up to his girlfriend’s overdose, having to kill people to keep himself alive, getting kidnapped, watching children die, etc.
These traumatic experiences shape Jesse’s character; he goes from comedic relief to one of the show’s most devastating characters. He gets admitted to rehab for drug addiction in season 2 after the death of his girlfriend Jane by overdose, and that seems to help him a bit, but he relapses again in the next season. In season 4, he goes to NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meetings to try to sell them meth, where he eventually meets Andrea, a recovering addict with a 6-year-old son. He refuses to let her buy any drugs since she has a kid, and they eventually get together.
Jesse, as flawed as he might be, has a soft spot for children. He always tries to protect kids in dangerous situations, and he is extremely distraught whenever any children are hurt or killed in the meth business. He almost gets himself killed on multiple occasions trying to either protect children or punish people who have hurt them.
At the end of this television series, almost every person involved in the drug trafficking ring has died, except for Skyler, Jesse and Saul. Skyler is let off the hook, with Walter blaming himself for manipulating her to do his bidding; Saul’s ending was shown in his spin-off series, “Better Call Saul”; and Jesse escaped to Alaska with an alias at the end of his own movie, “El Camino.”
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