Meth cook spirals with midseason ending of ‘Breaking Bad’

In a Season 5 episode of “Breaking Bad,” Walter White sits in his living room watching TV…

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In a Season 5 episode of “Breaking Bad,” Walter White sits in his living room watching TV with his his son and baby cradled in his arms. Al Pacino shouts on the screen, “Say hello to my little friend!” before opening fire. “Everyone dies in this movie, don’t they?” Walter says. His wife walks in horrified, because she has watched her husband take on the same persona as Pacino’s character.

The fifth season opened with a flash-forward — a technique the show has implemented multiple times — of Walter spending a lonely 52nd birthday at a Denny’s before he illegally purchases a gun.

When the series first started in 2008, Walter was a sympathetic character. He was an incredibly intelligent man teaching high school chemistry in Albuquerque, N.M. Then he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. His character has rapidly declined over the past five seasons from being a caring family man audiences rooted for. Now he’s a monster, referring to himself as Heisenberg, set on accumulating mass amounts of money at whatever the human cost.

While sitting in a car at the beginning of the series, Walter notices a former student of his, Jesse, escaping a meth operation bust. Walter’s brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader, describes the loads of money that meth cooks and dealers make, and so Walter, desperate to leave his family — a wife, a disabled son and a baby on the way — financially stable if cancer claims his life, enters the meth business.

Two hours into the show’s first season, he’s already choked a drug dealer to death with a bike lock.

The former high school teacher goes from cooking in an RV to working for Gus Fring, a high-level drug distributor. When working for a drug kingpin who has a bad history with a Mexican cartel, which is also infuriated with the way Walter’s 99.1-percent-pure meth is infringing on its own operations, troubles are bound to ensue.

Gus also employs Gale, another person with chemistry experience, and Walter soon discovers that Gus plans to murder him and replace him with Gale. Walter tasks Jesse with murdering Gale after convincing him that Gus tried to murder a little boy he cared about. Walter’s murder plots don’t stop there. He convinces a former cartel enforcer to detonate a suicide bomb, then proudly declares, “I won.”

Walt could have left the meth business at that moment. Instead, he blows up the super lab he was working in and forges a new partnership with Mike, who protected Gus and helped with distribution, and Jesse, who appears to be at his breaking point after witnessing so much death.

Walter has gone beyond just wanting to make money, and that’s where the sympathy for his character dissolves — just like the many bodies that he’s had to get rid of. The money means something to him. He delivers a disturbing speech to Jesse in the fifth season about his decision to sell his stake in Gray Matter Technologies, a science firm that he helped found, for $5,000. Walter knows that the company is now worth $2.16 billion. He lost millions of dollars when he sold his shares in the company too early, and now he’s using the meth business to make those millions back.

When Jesse tells Walter that he’s “out” of the operation forged between himself, Walter and Mike, Walter is shocked that Jesse is walking away from $5 million, which he says is “pennies on the dollar” compared to the millions more he could make by continuing to cook meth.

“Are we in the meth business or the money business?” Jesse asks Walter.

Walter finds a new partner in Todd, a reckless character who is willing to help him cook. After months of cooking, Walter’s wife Skylar leads Walter to a storage unit where she’s piling stacks of cash because she can’t even possibly launder that much money in her lifetime even if she had 10 car washes.

“How much is enough? How big does this pile have to be?” she asks in desperation. Skylar, who sent her children to live with her sister and Hank Schrader, just wants her life back.

Considering his feelings prior to the cancer, Walter “broke bad” a long time ago. The cancer just propelled him to finally take action. All of the ingredients necessary for evilness were already there.

“Breaking Bad” often pairs the bloody with the mundane. In Season 1, Walter intimidates a Mexican drug kingpin by exploding a sample of a mercury fulminate bomb. As he walks out of the smoking building, Walter sits in his car counting a stack of cash as happy music kicks in.

In the midseason finale, Walter has 10 men, who Mike was paying off to keep quiet about Gus’ operations, murdered in prison in a span of two minutes. This scene, involving the shanking of men juxtaposed with Hank getting his photo taken with some young cheerleaders, is set to muzak.

These were men that Hank was looking into for questioning as he continued his search for the mysterious Heisenberg. And while it seemed like a dead end for Hank, a trip to the bathroom with some reading material would be the biggest lead he ever found. Gale inscribed a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to Walt signed G.B., which cues Hank to flashback to Gale’s files, which also mentioned a W.W. Hank is befuddled. In the final seconds of the show, he discovers that Heisenberg has been his brother-in-law the entire time.

“Breaking Bad” is a highly addictive show with one of the most meticulous plots in television, and that’s to be expected when it’s about the calculations involved in chemistry, the division of labor and payments and hiding huge drug operations right under the nose of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Key plot points are always answered, if not directly, then through subtle hints. Viewers know how much money is made, how much goes to paying individuals off, how much meth is cooked and how much of the ingredients are stored away.

“Breaking Bad” just aired its midseason finale, and while Walter says that he’s “out” of the game, it’s obvious by now that it’s not always that simple.

“Breaking Bad” is slated to air eight more episodes, but they won’t premiere until next summer. Audiences keep tuning in each week, dreading how they love a monster but tweak over wanting to know what he’ll do next.