Nearly two decades after its debut, Breaking Bad still gets a lot of praise, frequently topping lists of the greatest TV shows of all time. The series is often touted as a slow burn, with Walter White (Brian Cranston) steadily descending into crime and ruthlessness as the story goes on. The most difficult trick of that transition was foreshadowing it early on without giving it away altogether, and showrunner Vince Gilligan rose to that challenge. Gilligan wrote the first four episodes of the series himself, telling us everything we need to know about Walter from the very start. The most disturbing thing he ever did was right in the second episode.
Episode 2, “Cat’s in the Bag” finds Walter and Jesse (Aaron Paul) dealing with a corpse, having killed a drug dealer in a panic the episode before. They need to dispose of the body without leaving evidence that could be traced back to them, and Walt’s chemistry background leads him straight to the solution: dissolving the body in hydrofluoric acid. It goes wrong in this particular episode, but this remains Walter’s preferred means of hiding bodies as the show goes on, and it’s a sign that he was already a monster deep down.
Walter White Had Thought About Crime Before ‘Breaking Bad’ Began
A new viewer coming to Breaking Bad now might expect it to start with a relatively normal, well-put-together high school teacher. That was certainly the premise of the show, and it’s the simplified description most people would give their friends. However, a re-watch re-contextualizes this story quite a bit — particularly the beginning. In the end, Walt admits to Skyler (Anna Gunn) that he pursued the meth trade because he was good at it, and he enjoyed how powerful it made him feel.
With this in mind, the first few episodes feel completely different on a rewatch. Walt is not desperately using his chemistry skills in the most profitable way he knows how; he is selecting the outcome he wants and working backwards to achieve it. He is driven by the urge to outsmart everyone and get away with something, and it doesn’t take long for that urge to extend from drug trafficking to murder. In both cases, it’s clear he’s thought about this before — he doesn’t need to pause and think about how to cook meth or how to dissolve a body, or Google the specific ingredients.
The other piece of the puzzle foreshadowed here is Walt’s cruelty, which he unleashes on Jesse in Episode 2. He shows none of the patience and compassion that is essential to teaching, leaving Jesse with the grizzly job of melting this corpse without thorough instructions. When Jesse seeks a shortcut by using bathtub, Walt becomes irate, leaving Jesse to clean up the resulting mess.
Everything about this scene is chilling, and the show is smart to let it all speak for itself. Looking back, it’s shocking enough that Walter had already thought out how to manufacture meth, but it’s downright horrifying that he had thought out how to dissolve a body — right down to the type of plastic container he would use. Walter didn’t just have a capacity for violence lying dormant within him, he had a plan, and he was just waiting for a reason to execute it.
The Acid Scheme Carries Walter Through ‘Breaking Bad’
If there’s one clear sign that Walter’s hydrofluoric acid scheme is among his most devious crimes, it’s the fact that he kept using it throughout the series. His methods for manufacturing meth scaled up over the years, and his ability to negotiate with other criminals did as well. Many of his skills and practices evolved as he grew from Walter into Heisenberg, but as late as Season 5, he is still using this same old method to dispose of corpses.
The acid is used at significant moments in the story as well. In Season 5, Episode 7, Walter helps use the acid to dissolve the body of a young boy who merely witnessed the train heist he and his team had pulled off. Jesse looks on in horror, as if feeling that things have just escalated to a new level of evil. However, the acid is not really an escalation, it’s something that we’ve seen since the second episode of the series. It’s a visual reminder to the audience that things have always been this bad, depending on your perspective.
The last time the acid is used is in Season 5, Episode 8, to dispose of the body of Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks). This is another significant milestone in Walter’s moral decline, as Mike was an important ally — not to mention a friend and mentor to Jesse. It’s a bleak moment that makes you question if anyone is immune to Walter’s violence. His legacy is little more than a trail of bodies, including those that have been liquefied.
There’s a reason Breaking Bad is regarded by so many as an all-time great TV show, and the narrative symmetry in plot devices like hydrofluoric acid proves that. The show was a masterclass in storytelling, while its gruesome, dark elements helped it catch our attention and stick in our memories.
The series is streaming now on Netflix in the U.S.
- Release Date
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2008 – 2013-00-00
- Network
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AMC
- Showrunner
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Vince Gilligan
- Directors
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Vince Gilligan, Michelle Maclaren
- Writers
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Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, Vince Gilligan, George Mastras, Moira Walley-Beckett, Sam Catlin, Thomas Schnauz