A long shot captures a retro RV barreling down a desert road. It swerves in a cloud of dust across the great red open landscape. The screen flashes to medium close up shots inside the RV. As the camera thrashes with the chaotic movements of the vehicle the audience is shown, through a haze of smoke, two men in gas masks in the front and a disheveled trailer with two bodies sliding in the background. The RV swerves off the road and crashes into a boulder; out stumbles Walter White (played by Malcom in the Middle's Brian Cranston) in white briefs and a button up shirt. He retrieves a gun from one of the men laying on the floor and begins speaking into a hand-held video camera. The screen flashes to a medium close up shot from the hand-held camera's point of view and Walter White expresses his love to his wife and son, and claims that there will be some things they will learn about him in the next few days. Sirens are swelling; approaching closer up the road. A long shot shows Walter standing on the road preparing to meet them. The cinematography changes as Walter takes out his gun. A medium shot zooms to a medium close up shot and the audience is shown the raw intensity of Walter (facing the camera) as he steadies his gun at the horizon of the road. We have just been thrust into the exhilirating drama of Breaking Bad.
Breaking Bad is aired on the AMC calbe network and has completed its first, seven episode, season and returns for its second on March 8th. Its narrative is comprised of an overqualified high-school chemistry teacher (Walter White) who has a pregnant wife, and a teenage son with cerebral palsy. Walter has always taken the safe route in life and has been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. He is bearing twenty-five years of regret on his shoulders and has been woken up by the news of his grim condition. As Walter is pressed by time and a baby on the way, he decides that he wants to make a large sum of money to leave his family. With a PhD in chemistry, Walter uses his myriad of knowledge to produce the purest methamphetamine crystals anyone has ever seen --a sure way to get quick cash in the rampant meth scene of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He seeks out an old student of his who has the street smarts and experience to set up his sales, and rapidly finds himself immersed in another life.
The first episode of Breaking Bad begins at the near end of the story and takes us back through the events leading up to the thrilling scene described above. The narrative of the show is cognitively disseminated: the viewer is propelled to guess what Walter will do next because much of his scenes contain his pensive gazes.
Walter does not tell his family that he has terminal cancer, nor does he disclose his alterior identity. But the family, just like the viewer, is on to something and are attempting to find out as much as they can about their mysterious calculating husband/father. Thus there are other suspensful elements at work unknown to Walter and the viewer.
Breaking Bad encourages its audience to journey with its character by dropping them close to the arc in the episode's plot. And as all interested audience members do, we eaglerly participate in off-screen schemes, trying to piece Walter White's story together, discovering his character along his side and begging the show to give us more.
