Jeremy Urquhart is a writer at Collider who focuses on the Godzilla series, the films of Martin Scorsese, and anything in the action genre.
There’s no reason to put it mildly: Breaking Bad is a contender when it comes to discussing the greatest television dramas of the 21st century so far. Across five seasons, it depicted one of the most compelling character arcs in the medium of television, seeing a rather pitiful high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, transform himself into a drug kingpin after he figured he had nothing to lose following a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer.
Season 2 sees Walt fluctuating between his seemingly mild-mannered earlier life and the ruthless criminal he’d further become later in the show, and some of that’s found in the ominous things he tells Hank in trying to motivate him. Walt is kind of flexing and bragging, as well as possibly getting something off his chest, without actually admitting to what it is that’s changed his worldview so rapidly.
Context matters, as does the way Bryan Cranston delivers the dialogue here, turning what might sound like ordinary dialogue – “Skyler? Where is the money?!” – into something much more impactful. More than any words, it’s probably Walt’s screams and subsequent laughing fit, having perhaps lost his mind temporarily, that prove most haunting, too.
Anyone watching Breaking Bad back in the early 2010s would’ve remembered the wait feeling like a particularly long one, but Season 5B kicks off in style with “Blood Money,” inevitably having a confrontation between Walt and Hank, now that certain secrets are no longer secret. Sometimes, Walt’s attempts to sound intimidating sound a little corny or ring hollow, but retorting to Hank’s “I don’t know who you are” with a threat that ends with “Tread lightly” is effectively chilling.
He shows up unannounced at the family house, with Skyler turning him away, even though Walt thinks his offering of pizza – and dipping sticks; can’t forget about those – will help redeem him. This is, of course, followed up with Walt memorably hurling the pizza up on the roof. It’s an episode of Walt at his lowest, but he deserves it and the ridicule that comes his way, given his lying and the chaos he played a part in causing at the end of Season 2.
Making ends meet in his pre-drug-making days, Walt works at a car wash during the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, but snaps due to the pressure of his cancer diagnosis and unleashes on his boss, a man named Bogdan. Tired of wiping down and cleaning cars, in no uncertain terms, Walt curses Bogdan and his prominent eyebrows, haphazardly tries to trash the room he’s in, and then grabs his crotch while proclaiming “Wipe down this.” It’s one way to quit one’s job, that’s for sure.
Before he quite literally becomes a slave to a group of Neo-Nazis, Walt taunts Jesse and reveals a piece of information that he knows will hurt him more than anything else: the admittance that he “watched Jane die,” which occurred all the way back near the end of Season 2.
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