Turkey Bacon
S1 E1: Pilot
Breaking Bad, Sony Pictures Television, 2008.
Walter White turns 50 the way most of us hope not to: awake at 5:02 in the morning, exercising alone on a stair-stepper beneath evidence that he was once a promising scientist.
This is Walter White at 50: a man who eats the veggie bacon. He gets up before dawn to exercise alone on a stair-stepper. He teaches chemistry to teenagers who barely listen to him, then works a second job at a car wash where one of those same teenagers gets to watch him scrub the tires of his sports car. He is brilliant, overqualified, underpaid and so accustomed to swallowing his own disappointment that he barely seems to notice the taste anymore.
Then Walt learns he has inoperable lung cancer, and the strange thing is that the prospect of dying seems to wake him up.
The changes start small, relatively speaking. He quits the car wash by telling his boss exactly what he thinks of him and, more specifically, his eyebrows. When a group of teenagers mocks Walt Jr. in a clothing store, Walt doesn't quietly absorb the humiliation as he has his own. He attacks their ringleader. And when a DEA ride-along leads him to former student Jesse Pinkman, Walt sees something in the meth business that no one else would reasonably identify as an opportunity.
Jesse knows the business. Walt knows chemistry. Walt is dying. Apparently, this is enough of a business plan.
Soon, the mild-mannered chemistry teacher is standing in the New Mexico desert in his underwear, cooking extraordinarily pure meth inside a Winnebago and discovering that the expertise no one seems particularly interested in elsewhere commands considerably more attention here. Jesse calls him an artist. Walt corrects him: It's basic chemistry. But for the first time in the episode, we see what Walter White looks like when he knows he is the most capable person in the room.
By the end of the day, that capability has become something much more dangerous. Cornered by armed drug dealers, Walt doesn't simply survive. He thinks. He uses chemistry as a weapon, creating poisonous gas and trapping the men inside the RV. Soon he's standing in the middle of a desert road in his underwear, holding a gun and waiting for the police to arrive.
Except they don't. The sirens belong to fire engines, and they drive straight past him.
The world has not caught Walter White. It has barely noticed him. But the man who returns home is not quite the same one who sat down to his birthday breakfast that morning. That Walt quietly accepted the veggie bacon, the second job, the unpaid overtime, the humiliations and disappointments of a life that had become much smaller than he once imagined. This Walt has discovered what he can do when he stops accepting things.
When he climbs into bed beside Skyler that night, she can feel the difference even if she has no idea what caused it. "Walt, is that you?" she asks.
Not exactly. The Walter White who ate birthday veggie bacon that morning has had a very long day.
Make it! Turkey Bacon in the Oven