Depicting Disaster: Uses of Catastrophe in "24" and "Breaking Bad"

When discussing series finales, it is hard not to bring up the early 90’s program Dinosaurs. The series, a sitcom featuring anthropomorphic dinosaurs, has become infamous for its shockingly bad ending, wherein patriarch Earl realizes that his actions in the episode are directly responsible for a worldwide environmental catastrophe, triggering the Ice Age that, as the viewers are aware, contributed to the mass-extinction of dinosaurs. Though the show often addressed controversial topical issues, the decision to end a sitcom on such a bleak and uncharacteristic note was poorly received by viewers and critics alike.

As we approach the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, I wanted to take a moment to consider an important episode in the series’ run, the second season finale, “ABQ,” and address the unique way in which it presents catastrophe. We will consider what the episode says about the intentions of the series as a whole as well as what it may say about the trajectory of the final few episodes. To provide contrast, we will consider alongside it another program that featured large-scale disaster, the suitcase nuke episode of 24.  

24 never shied away from big scenes. The notion of building an entire series around a perpetual ticking-clock scenario is nothing if not ambitious, and as the program continued, it repeatedly tested how much the audience would allow it to get away with. Though it devolved seamlessly from an innovative and challenging espionage thriller into a confused jumble of rehashed plotlines, it was in season six, episode four, that the show jumped the shark, when, after several seasons of teases and threats, the writers set off a small nuclear bomb in a Los Angeles suburb. Nuclear devices had been a fixture of the show since season two (there are only so many weapons a terrorist could utilize, right?), and while they had often come close to detonation, to actually use one on American soil during primetime to kill 12,000 people feels as egregious as having the protagonist of a Jurassic-based sitcom trigger the extinction of his entire phylum.

Yet I recall watching the episode with a sigh of relief. It wasn’t off-putting in the way the Dinosaurs finale seems to have been, but rather the only logical next-step for the show; after all, Chekov’s gun must eventually be fired. Showing more undetonated nukes would make the audience see them as an empty threat, a death warrant for a show structured around unrelenting suspense. Once the idea had been planted in the audience’s minds, the writers’ hands were forced; in the words of Nelson Muntz, “Gotta nuke something.”

I’m focusing on the writers of the show not because I have any idea about their creative process, but because their fingerprints are so present on the detonation scene. What should have been a moment of unspeakable evil and terror became little more than, “Did you see what they pulled off on 24 last night?” Which is not to say the writers should be vilified for this: it was an incredible episode. But because it was so incredible – in the sense of unbelievable – it felt hollow, like a Pyrrhic victory. They had won the title of ballsiest episode of television, but at what cost?

In contrast to the brashness of 24, Breaking Bad in its early days did not aspire to grand scenes of action. It has always been a slow burn, one that occasionally built to big payoffs, but just as often to quiet victories and heartbreaking loss. Before diving into an analysis of “ABQ,” let's get the spoilers out of the way and review for those who need a refresher. Walt is on the precipice of becoming a big-time drug manufacturer. He meets with Gus Fring, who tells him to ditch Jesse as a partner because he is not the businessman that the two of them are. Indeed, Jesse is laying in his apartment, strung out on heroin with his relapsed-drug-addict girlfriend, Jane. When Walt goes to Jesse's to get their money as a capital investment, Jesse is passed out and Jane, asleep, begins to choke on her own vomit. Walt goes to help her, but, seeing her as an obstacle to his partnership with Jesse, chooses to let her die. The next morning, her father comes to check on her and finds her dead. Devastated, he makes her funeral arrangements and then, not wishing to sit at home and stew, returns prematurely to his job as an air traffic controller. There, his grief gets the best of him, and he allows two planes to crash. As debris from the crash falls to the ground, the oracles that had haunted the season -- the pink teddybear, the bodybags, the men in hazmat suits -- materialize in a way no one expected.

I’ve read much and talked to many people about this ending, and I’ve heard many differing reactions. On the one hand, it’s seen as creator Vince Gilligan widening the scope of his story of a school teacher-cum-drug manufacturer; the plane crash is a Cambrian explosion, prefiguring the discovery of the complex and multilayered world of the drug trade. On the other hand, it is identified as a twist: we have been led to believe that the flash-forwards were indicative of a major catastrophe specific to the White family, whereas in reality they were portents of something wildly unexpected. Others see it as a physical manifestation of the world into which Walt has descended (or ascended) and the suffering he has caused and will cause. Still others choose to see it as the judgment of God quite literally raining down upon Walt. These explanations all have glints of insight, but fall short of grasping why it is such a shocking end. I think its true power in something more subtle and unique to the program. Let us first consider each of these explanations and see how closely they approximate the truth. 

“ABQ” is more than another instance of what has been called a “morality play,” a moniker given to another fantastic show, The Sopranos. Within this framework, Walt and his brother-in-arms, Tony Soprano, are experiencing the consequences of their immoral behavior, one painful lesson at a time. This is, to me, a simplistic explanation. To say Breaking Bad is a show about consequence is absolutely true, but to say it is show where consequence is the primary focus is misguided. Walt's is not a world in which the Hand of an Angry God is constantly pointing an accusing finger at him, doling out punishments only for him to quickly and reliably go astray. Walt is driven by a determination to succeed where in the past he has failed, and therefore, consequences are not as important to him as solutions, and Walt has proven himself resourceful in the most terrifying ways. (The one who struggles with consequence is Jesse. He cannot extricate himself from the suffering his actions cause, and so turns to Walt, his father figure, who constantly points him in the wrong direction.)

Nor does the plane crash function to signal Walt’s descent into the world of drugs; this already happened when he shaved his head. Consider the function of hair: major characters – Gus, Mike, Hank, Hank’s boss, Tuco, Hector, Victor – are all bald or nearly so from the moment we meet them, but Walt and Jesse go through stages of hair loss and growth. I believe that those involved in the drug trade on either side of the law are bald, and those without have hair. Walt shaves his head, ostensibly because he will lose his hair to chemotherapy, but also to appear as less of an outside before facing Tuco. Jesse's hair constantly grows back, symbolizing his wish to escape from the world of drugs.

The ending does seem rather like a twist insofar as we are led to believe one thing while another is delivered. Consider, however, successful twists in other works of fiction: The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club. In all of these, [spoiler alert] the twist relied on imperfect knowledge: we depend on someone else fumbling through a story and thereby hiding the truth from us. Verbal hid the fact that he was Keyser Soze; Bruce Willis could not have known that he was dead; the narrator was delirious and unaware that Tyler Durden was a part of his own personality. But the truth in “ABQ” isn’t hidden; it is a surprise to everyone: Walt, Jesse, and even Jane’s father, whose occupation is also not hidden by design, but rather by consequence: there was no point in revealing it until the last minute. Moreover, twists are more for the audience than for the story. We walk away from a twist lauding the creative minds for pulling the wool over our eyes so effectively. We see the author's hand at work in a twist, and they are more artificial for it.

But let us press this idea of a twist. We said that twists bear the imprint of the creator: they are exciting because they demonstrate how creative the writer was and how well we were duped, much like in a magic trick. But fiction is great when it feels inevitable. In "ABQ," we see the catastrophe unfold even before the characters do, and this sets Breaking Bad apart from 24. Walt and Jesse don't even find out that Jane's father was behind the crash until season three: if anything, the causes of the crash are more of a surprise for them than they are for us. Moreover, the crash should be relatively benign to us, the viewer, since we were not invested in the characters that died; even in the case of 24’s suitcase nukes, we had met a couple of the characters. Donna Bowman, in her review of the episode over at the AV Club, hopes aloud, "Oh Lord, I hope it's not anyone we know" in the crash. In the cold open of “ABQ,” when the camera draws back from the Walt household to the city at large, with two pillars of smoke rising from the earth, we learn that we are no longer comfortably situated within the White family. Walt’s actions are no longer part of a vacuum, a microcosm that only involves those we know, but rather within the real world, one inhabited by more people than we could imagine or hope to know. (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”) Unlike 24, where Jack Bauer is accused of bringing suffering and misfortune to everyone he comes into contact with, Walt does not even need to meet the people he makes suffer.

Which brings us to the explanation of widening scope. Whereas 24 had been threatening game-changing disaster for years, Breaking Bad in season two only intimated disaster for the White family. Shifting our concern from the White family to dozens of anonymous victims is an interesting idea. We can think of this in terms of the famous quote misattributed to Josef Stalin: The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic. We as humans do not possess an infinite capacity for sympathy. When one person dies, we can concentrate all our feeling on that one person; but when many die, we must divide our sympathy among all of them or else allow it to overwhelm us. Breaking Bad threatened the former, preparing us to feel something for whomever is about to die in the White family: first, the pink teddybear makes us think it could be Holly. Then, the broken windshield and multiple bodybags hint that it could be several people. And just when we can handle no greater tragedy, the camera reveals that it is more than just the White family in peril. In an instant, our sympathies are diverted to a national tragedy, a singular event that forces us to sympathize not with Walt, not with Jesse, but with an event that we may see on the news and say without much personal investment or true feeling, “How terrible that this happened.” The pity and fear that we had reserved, that we had set aside for one or all of the White family, we are now being told to direct toward the faceless victims of this tragedy.

That is the power of "ABQ." After we have processed how unique this ending is, let us consider how great the difficulties are that it creates. Not only does it refuse to give Walt an easy way out, not only does it deny him an easy way out, it refuses to let him – or us – suffer simply. We arrived at the tragedy by having our sympathy diverted from family members we knew to hundreds we did not; we were commanded to feel for them by consequence of how the show was presented. On the other hand, Walt watched it unfold linearly. He never suspected that his family was in danger; he never got the hints that we had received from the beginning; he never had his sympathy spread so thin.

And so he feels nothing. His family's death would probably have been enough to get him out of the business. Though we want to ascribe to Walt a cold heart, recall that, at least at the beginning, he did everything for his family. In the opening of season two, he calculates the $737 thousand (737, like the plane, get it?) that he needs for his family. So his family’s deaths would have taken away his reason for cooking meth. He would have taken revenge, perhaps died in the process, and that would be the end of his story. But Breaking Bad doesn't go easy on Walt or its viewers. In the first episode of season three, Walt is comparing the ABQ crash to that of greater air tragedies like Tenerife. He certainly feels remorse since he is not (yet) a monster, but he is rationalizing. He, in his brilliance, can get his conscience out of anything.

For this reason, I don't think we'll see the deaths of any of the main characters this season, or at least no one in Walt's immediate family. One can argue that he cared so much for his family that a death in the family would be the only thing to bring a close to the story (as I argued above). This is not a viable explanation for two reasons. The first is that it would be too simple. Blogs and message boards abound with theories, several remarkably plausible, about the deaths of Holly or Skyler by Walt’s hand. But killing off important characters has never been the modus operandi of this show. Whereas programs like Game of Thrones kill off characters to great effect, Breaking Bad accomplishes as much with life as those programs do with death. Consider Walt's cancer: because he thought he was going to die, he started cooking meth; to provide for his family, he saved up a mountain of money. Though we know that his intentions changed when his cancer went into remission, that doesn't change the fact that the original purpose of the money is no longer present. This is never dealt with explicitly, but I believe it should be kept in mind whenever we think about Walt's success. No matter what his intentions are now, he will be for as long as he lives the man who prepared himself to die and lived.  

Moreover, getting Walt out of the drug world through the death of a family member might have applied to season-two Walt, maybe even season-three Walt. Season-five Walt is a whole new animal. Just as season four necessitated his killing Gus to solidify himself as a ruthless druglord, season five finds Walt having left the drug world, and thus does not necessitate a violent end: consider the quiet way “Gliding Over All” ended: Skyler talks Walt into leaving the drug world, and the entire family sits down by the pool. Even Hank’s discovery of Gale’s book of Whitman is quiet. No, season five needs something else, something that neither you nor I can yet imagine. I think of it in this way: Bryan Cranston’s former show, Malcolm in the Middle, featured an episode where his character was forced to decide whether or not to pull the plug on a man he barely knew. After many sleepless nights and pro-and-con lists coming out even, he sees a third option, one that is never revealed to the audience but for which his wife Lois praises him as he lies in bed, smiling for the first time all episode. Speculation about Breaking Bad is fun (hell, I just wrote 3000 words about it), but ultimately unproductive, especially if we stick with the false dichotomy of kill or be killed. There will be a third option, one that we will not see and will end the show properly.

Which is to say, Walt will blow up Valencia with a suitcase nuke.