Before Walter White was a killer, he was just a desperate man with a plan

Arts admin July 5, 2026 0 Comments

Before Walter White was a killer, he was just a desperate man with a plan

This week in Autopilot, a Globe series on great first television episodes:

“Breaking Bad”

Episode: “Pilot”

Pilot air date: Jan. 20, 2008, AMC

Stream it on: Netflix; Prime Video

Once you’ve seen the end of a series, it’s impossible to look at the beginning as you once did. Take “Breaking Bad,” which brought Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, and us, to hell and back, continually reaching new levels of darkness that grew hard on my soul even as I kept watching to see what might happen next, and just how low Walter would descend. It can be hard to remember, until you circle back to the start, that he was once a dorky chemistry teacher with a terminal cancer diagnosis, trying to cook meth in his tighty whities.

This is the trick that “Breaking Bad” pulled, transforming Walter, as series creator Vince Gilligan put it, from Mr. Chips into Scarface, or from Walter White into Heisenberg. The thing is, you can already see hints of Dark Walter in the pilot episode. He’s there in a clothing store, when, as an enraged dad, Walter attacks the bully making fun of Walter Jr. (RJ Mitre). He’s definitely there in the RV, when the desperate meth chef uses a chemical reaction to kill the two dealers trying to move in on his turf (in the words of Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman, “Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!”). “Breaking Bad“ was so disturbing because it suggested that we all have a Heisenberg lurking within, just waiting for the right occasion to break out.

Of course, we could only see hints of that back in 2008. At first we just saw a frustrated middle-aged New Mexico man dealt some bad cards trying to leave a nest egg for his family. His brash brother-in-law, Hank (Dean Norris), happens to be a DEA agent. Walter sees a report of a raid on the news, goes for a ride-along, spots his former student, Pinkman, and makes him a business proposal: Show me the ropes of the drug trade and I won’t turn you in. Walter has a notion that he can use his chemistry knowledge to make a quality product. Boy, is he right.

The future still holds plenty, little of it pretty: the lies, the betrayals, the body count, the corpse disposal. Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) aren’t in the picture yet. “Breaking Bad” hasn’t yet broken all the way bad. But it will soon, with a vengeance.