Serial ity and Sustainabil i ty in Breaking Bad

In the popular and critical commentary on the so-called “prestige” television series –

Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad and others – critics often draw upon a vocabulary

of sustainability to describe everything from a show’s narrative dynamics to its prospects of

remaining on the air. The critic Alan Sepinwall, for instance, comments that The X-Files “was

able to borrow the bizarre atmosphere of Twin Peaks and make it more sustainable”(15-6);

Robert Harvilla, writing in The Ringer, wonders whether the spate of plot twists in the

second season of Mr. Robot will prove to be “unsustainable” in the long run; Avi Santo writes

that HBO’s emphasis on creative freedom has “raised concern over the sustainability of its

most popular programs” (41). That last example brings to mind a different, but related term:

“Peak TV,” which has recently displaced the earlier designation “Golden Age” to define the

cultural moment of television programming we’re in. The meaning of “Peak TV” varies

somewhat, but in general it seems to suggest that this is a period of maximum output, where

it’s becoming almost impossible for most viewers to keep up with all of the worthwhile

things to watch, and, as a corollary, where financial pressures, increasingly fractured

audiences, over-production, proliferation of streaming services and platforms, or some

combination of all these, will soon bring about some kind of falling off of interest, or

attenuation in quality.1 Thus although “Golden Age” and “Peak TV” both define a

significant cultural phenomenon and anticipate its inevitable end, the latter emphasizes the

technological parameters and economic pressures of that moment, the market forces that

both build and destroy. The term “Peak TV” is derived, of course, from the discourse of

“Peak Oil,” the concern that we have reached, or are about to reach, the upper limit of

petroleum production, after which the world’s insatiable demand for oil will have to reckon

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with ever-diminishing reserves.2 Like Peak Oil, Peak TV is about supply and demand,

production and overproduction; in other words, about sustainability.

Now, I would hasten to add that, on some level, such language means very little, eco-

critically speaking. As Stacy Alaimo has argued, the discourse of “sustainability” may have

first arisen in direct opposition to mainstream, growth-oriented economic orthodoxy, but it

is now commonly applied to “economies, national debts, personal debts, the housing market,

food systems, the Euro and all manner of more trivial matters” in ways that “do not in any

way critique the capitalist ideals of unfettered expansion” (2012: 559). That is, to talk about a

television series being sustainable or unsustainable is to traffic in compromised terms that

have lost most of their bite. While that is no doubt true, I also want to argue here that there

nevertheless remains a residue or trace of critical power in this vocabulary, and, further, that

the serial narrative format contains unique expressive possibilities for dramatizing the logic

of environmental crisis. When The Wire creator David Simon argues that “TV is about

sustaining the franchise. Not all of it. There’s some very good stuff out there. But a lot of it

is about sustaining the franchise. You know, looking for the hit,” he is critiquing the

imperative for endless narrative reproducibility, which demands stability, continuity, stasis,

and thus necessarily limits the kinds of things about the world that can be represented

(Paskin, 2012). That is to say, such a narrative imperative presupposes and depends upon the

idea of the endless reproducibility of the social world itself. Anyone who has seen The Wire

knows that, in it, Simon takes direct aim at such assumptions, and at the various institutions

(criminal, educational, political) that strive to sustain themselves at the expense of other

things like community, family, “real police work,” and the actual physical condition of the

city of Baltimore. Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, draws a similar contrast to make a

similar point:

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I want the actions the characters take on Breaking Bad to always have

consequences. I guess that in itself was a reaction to years and years of

television, watching TV shows in which the characters would have some life-

changing event where they kill someone or they get wounded and the next

week they’re basically back on their feet and there’s no emotional

repercussions […] That’s because television has to maintain a sort of a stasis

and keep the characters more or less in one spot from week to week to allow

for continuity, so the viewer can tune in and tune out as they choose. That’s

just what television does, and it’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just a

structural conceit (2011: VanDerWerff)

For Gilligan, this sense of stasis, the demand for limitless episodic iterability, means that the

ramifications of serious events often go entirely ignored, or unexpressed. He is talking here

about ramifications of a personal or moral variety, but, as I hope to show in what follows,

his approach has implications for representing ramifications of a material or ecological

variety as well.

My contention is that Breaking Bad puts questions of what we might call narrative

sustainability – questions like: can this plot be kept up? is this premise one that will continue

to hold interest over many seasons? – to work in the service of a trenchant and

environmentally minded critique of consumer capitalism. Breaking Bad’s eco-politics, I argue,

emerges less through overt expressions of alarm or outrage about environmental ruin, and

more through an unsustainable narrative logic that grinds against the twinned motivating

fantasies of unlimited economic growth and techno-scientific mastery. This essay is roughly

divided into two parts: in the first, I argue that the series quietly but insistently raises

questions of waste, toxicity, contamination, and unsustainable economic growth, through

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both its dialogue and its visual rhetoric. In the second, I move on to discuss how these issues

find expression through serial structure itself, and specifically in the relationship between the

different narrative units: the episode, on the one hand, and the season or series on the other.

My aim is to show that this is a text that, while it may not wear its environmental politics on

its sleeve, or seem at first glance particularly “green,” nevertheless offers, through its very

form and narrative logic, one of the most incisive critiques of our own unsustainable cultural

and economic order.

Sustainability and Exponential Growth

Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, explicitly introduces the language of

sustainability early in the first season, when his partner Jesse Pinkman delivers the week’s

profits, and they fall short of expectations:

Walter: Help me understand the math, ok? I gave you one pound, correct? You and I split two thousand dollars per ounce. One thousand dollars each. One pound, that’s sixteen ounces. Sixteen ounces should net to me sixteen thousand dollars. Sixteen. Not fifteen. Jesse: Something came up. W: Something came up? J: One of my guys got held up by a couple of junkies, lost an ounce. But it’s cool, ok? Skinny Pete’s cool. W: Oho. So you’re saying that your guy got robbed, or rather you got robbed, but it doesn’t matter. J: Dude it’s called breakage, ok? Like K-Mart, shit breaks. W: And you’re thinking this is acceptable. J: It’s the cost of business, yo. You’re sweating me over a grand? W: Hey look I’m just the chemist; I’m not the street guy, yo. But it seems to me that what you call “breakage” is just you making a fool of yourself. I’ve

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got another technical term for you. Non-sustainable business model. (2009: “Breakage”)

Walter here is using the attenuated version of the language of sustainability Alaimo critiques,

but what’s interesting to me is the relationship between that term and the one Jesse

introduces, which also happens to be the title of the episode: “breakage.” One way to frame

that relationship is as a contrast between the business model and, for lack of a better term,

the “real” world; between, on the one hand, the abstract equations of Walter’s blackboard,

where sixteen is sixteen, and inputs always equal outputs, and, on the other, the material

world Jesse inhabits, where the actual transactions take place, and waste, disorder,

unpredictability, and risk are unavoidable products of any transaction. The term “breakage”

stands for what we might term the “entropy principle” at work in the series: the idea that

every act of exchange necessarily involves the production of some amount of disorder or

waste in the system that must be attended to later, usually at great expense. There is no plan,

no scheme, no clever device, no technological fix that can avoid this reality. Crucially,

though, Walter doesn’t simply ignore breakage, he seeks to control or instrumentalize it. He

tells Jesse: “What happens when word gets out and it’s open season on these clowns you’ve

hired? Once everyone knows that Jesse Pinkman, drug lord, can be robbed with impunity? You

think Tuco had breakage? I guess it’s true, he did. He broke bones. He broke the skulls of

anyone who tried to rip him off” (2009: “Breakage”). If Jesse thinks disorder is a fact of life

that must be patiently endured, Walter believes it should be offloaded, turned elsewhere and

upon others. In his hands, the noun “breakage” becomes the transitive verb “broke,” and is

refashioned as a kind of weapon. Walter’s approach here, and throughout, is defined by a

lethal dialectic between abstraction and violence: when he discovers the inevitable mismatch

between clean, abstract model and messy external circumstances, his solution is not to

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question his model (x=x), but to manipulate external circumstances, violently or otherwise,

until they correspond to it.

Thus when Walter invokes the language of sustainability his comment both conjures

environmental discourse, and reveals the way that discourse has been compromised by the

expropriation of its key terms. For him, a “sustainable” business is not one that attempts to

understand and work within the limiting conditions of a given environment, but one that

seeks to control that environment and alter those conditions in the name of endless

profitability. It should come as little surprise, then, that his lecture to Jesse about a

“sustainable business model” is followed two episodes later by the demand that their new

business achieve “exponential growth.” This demand is repeated several times over the

course of the series, and, since it’s a familiar term from conventional economic discourse,

may not seem all that unusual or striking. But it seems to me Breaking Bad aims its critique at

the rot lurking within the conventional and the taken-for-granted; its target is both the mild-

mannered suburban dad, and the economic orthodoxy he spouts.3 It is precisely Walter’s

complacent use of terms like “exponential growth” and his other appeals to economic

orthodoxy (which I’ll discuss in a moment) that we are meant to question.

As environmentally minded economists going back to John Ruskin and John Stuart

Mill have pointed out, there is a fundamental incompatibility between a growth-based

economic order, and a sustainable economic order.4 Put simply, we live in a world of limited

resources that has a finite capacity to absorb waste, where entropy or “breakage” is the rule

not the exception. Exponential growth is, by definition, unsustainable.5 As the economist

Herman Daly writes:

Entropy would not be so limiting if environmental sources and sinks were

infinite, but both are finite. […] The ordered structures of the economic

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subsystem are maintained at the expense of creating a more-than-offsetting

amount of disorder in the rest of the system. (1997: 33)

For Daly, the dominant economic paradigm sweeps such limits out of sight, reducing the

environment to an “externality,” and treating commodities as infinitely fungible abstractions

that move in a self-contained, cyclical system of exchange.6 This, he argues, is the destructive

blindness at the heart of conventional, growth-oriented economic orthodoxy, the monstrous

effects of which are becoming increasingly visible in the form of superstorms, coastal

erosion and flooding, and rising sea levels (among many other things). When Walter

instructs Jesse to, “corner the market, then raise the price. Simple economics” (2009: “Negro

Y Azul”) or when he jabs at a map of Albuquerque and says “Here, here, here, and here

what does that look like to you? Opportunities. Golden ones, that’s what that looks like. It’s

an entire city full of buyers. Now why aren’t we exploiting that?” (2009: “Negro Y Azul”) his

glibness suggests the kind of reductive bracketing of real-world pressures and limits that

ecologically minded economists have been describing since at least the nineteenth century.

But, crucially, “breakage” is not simply something Walter fails to manage; it is

something he produces through his very efforts to manage it. This is illustrated perhaps most

vividly in one of the series’ defining symbolic events: the midair collision of two passenger

jets over Albuquerque in the second season. The sequence that produces this disaster is

circuitous but clearly traceable to Walter’s attempts to eliminate disorder and risk from his

operation. Briefly: he allows Jesse’s girlfriend to die, which throws the woman’s father into a

state of grief, which affects his job as an air-traffic controller, which leads to the crash. Like

“spontaneous combustion” in Dickens’s Bleak House, this event is offered not so much as a

plausible consequence of certain behaviors, but a spectacular symbolic eruption of the text’s

central moral dynamics into the frame of the narrative. On one level, since the crash cannot

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be used as evidence against him, it represents the perverse success of Walter’s plan to

offload “breakage” onto others and into the environment at large. But, in an additional,

deliberately fanciful, turn of events, debris lands upon his own house, serving as a reminder

both that there are vast, unpredictable and unmanageable forces at work in this system, and

that he is subject to them too, because he remains a part of it.

Although, chronologically, the crash occurs at the very end of the second season, the

aftermath is shown to us through brief, mysterious flash-forwards all season long. On first

viewing, these scenes make little sense – it’s not clear until the finale what kind of event

produced the glimpses of damage we see. The mise en scène – the stark, overexposed, black-

and-white shots of the White house and yard; the images of a hot-pink teddy bear glowing

unnaturally, almost radioactively, like some parody of vitality; the fragmentary, view-from-

nowhere shots of men in hazmat suits picking through a debris field; the fishbowl sounds of

human breath through a respirator – all of this suggests not merely disaster, but a specifically

toxic event of unknown magnitude. Inexplicable upon first viewing, and uncontained by the

linear chronology of the main plot, these images are obviously related to Walter’s operation,

and yet remain disconnected from the events of any given episode until the end; instead,

they hang for the entire season like some extraneous matter beyond the bounds of the

comprehensible narrative world, imbued with an aura of grim inevitability, and approached

only by means of a protective yellow suit and artificial breathing apparatus. Because the

crash site is allowed to remain suggestive of environmental contamination of mysterious

origin and undefined dimensions, it functions for almost the entire season as a quasi-

expressionist commentary on the toxic nature of Walter’s business. This kind of unexplained

flashfoward is, I would add, a visual technique Breaking Bad frequently draws on over the

course of its six seasons. The images of swirling smoke and debris that serve as the cold-

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open to “Crazy Handful of Nothing” in the first season; the shots of the derelict, vandalized

White family home that kick off the premiere episode of the final season: when we first see

these bewildering, chaotic landscapes, we don’t yet know how exactly they came to be that

way, but nevertheless understand they represent the inevitable issue of Walter’s method,

means, and logic.

The visual interest in toxicity is later reinforced elsewhere as well. In the third-season

episode “Fly,” which also takes as its subject the repercussions of the decision that led to the

crash, Walter pursues a “contaminant” in his lab – a rogue housefly – to the point of

hopelessness and exhaustion. “It’s all contaminated,” he finally admits, referring not only to

the state of the laboratory itself, but his entire enterprise (2010: “Fly”). And near the end of

the final season, he attempts to save the enormous pile of money he has accumulated by

burying it in large plastic drums deep in the desert. Here we have a generic staple – buried

fortune, a remote locale, a modern-day treasure map in the form of GPS coordinates – given

a distinctly eco-conscious twist. For the iconography of sealed drums and desert

containment has a deep political and cultural history in this region, calling to mind the

methods of toxic waste storage often employed in New Mexico, Utah, and other Southwest

states burdened with “nuclear sacrifice zones.”7 As the episode’s title “To’hajiilee” makes

conspicuous, the burial site is located in a Native American reservation, a region that has

historically been a prime candidate for nuclear testing and waste disposal (such territory is

not subject to the same kinds of federal health and environmental regulations as the rest of

the country). I should add that Breaking Bad does not emphasize this environmental history,

but in the unmarked storage drums that do not stay safely buried, it offers a potent sign of

how profit and poison, money and waste, are the indissociable issue of the ideology of

exponential growth. It is notable here that, for six seasons, money has reliably worked as the

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means through which Walter managed the problems his operation has created. Here, for the

first time, it fails to work – he tries to bribe the men holding his brother-in-law captive, but

they execute him. As Walter discovers in these final episodes, money can no longer clean up

the damage it has caused because, on some level, it is itself the toxic material.

Breaking Bad also subtly and persistently builds a network of references to energy use,

waste, and resource consumption that, taken together, suggest the exhaustion and threat

lurking beneath apparent suburban plentitude. Some of references are verbal, like brief

discussions of “water-powered cars” (2010: “Sunset”), or hydrogen fuel on Mars (2009:

“Phoenix”), or “unlimited supplies” of hot water (2009: “Over”), or “toxic waste” leaking

from an old boiler (2009: “Over”), or the Exxon-Valdez oil spill (2009: “Better Call Saul”).

Other references are visual, made through the use of dialectical montage, with scenes

punctuated with arresting images of expended energy forms: lit matches extinguished in a

swimming pool (2008: “Pilot”); cigarettes crushed in ashtrays (2010: “Abiquiu”); shots of the

sun sinking (2009: “Over”) and atomic bomb blasts (2009: “Negro y Azul”). That last

example opens a scene in which Jesse, adopting Walter’s terms and pedantic manner, makes

a speech to his lieutenants about achieving “exponential growth,” and serves as an ironic

comment on their false sense of power and control. Jesse’s speech, it’s also worth noting, is

set in the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, a venue that

quietly reminds us of the region’s history in the development of atomic energy.

These visual and verbal references to energy consumption both echo and extend the

show’s more overt interest in the dynamics of the methamphetamine trade, because they

play upon the familiar analogy between fossil fuels and illegal drugs. The former, after all, is

popularly described an addictive substance from which our society must break its harmful

“dependency.”8 This nexus between drugs and energy is forged in subtle ways – through the

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use of the museum setting; through Jesse’s description of a meth high: “just a little gas in the

tank and suddenly everything is interesting” (2010: “Abiquiu”); and through the moment in

the third season when his car runs out of fuel and he actually exchanges meth for gasoline

(2010: “Green Light”). But this analogy is more elaborately imagined as well, perhaps

nowhere more clearly than in the second-season episode “4 Days Out” (2009) in which

Walter and Jesse drive the “gas guzzling” RV into the desert for an epic, weekend-long meth

cook. As they prepare to return home, they discover the battery has died, stranding them in a

remote part of the desert. This mishap suddenly turns all the commodities they ordinarily

take for granted – food, water, oil, and electricity – into dangerously scarce resources. As

they work through a number of contrivances to start the engine, the objective of the episode

itself undergoes a telling transformation: from manufacturing drugs to manufacturing energy.

Correspondingly, the desert itself changes from a conveniently deserted staging ground to a

decisive environment hostile to unaccommodated human existence.9 The heavy immobility

of the RV not only upends the pair’s plans, it provides a striking visual contrast to the many

shots of suburban freeways streaming endlessly with cars.10

“4 Days Out” thus makes pointed use of the show’s Albuquerque setting to

juxtapose a resource-intensive lifestyle with the environment of scarcity encircling it.

Although this part of the American southwest has for decades appeared to many as an “adult

playground to be enjoyed without consequences” (2011:19), as Andrew Ross argues, the

region simply cannot function as a habitat for such a large, high-consumption population

without a complex energy-intensive infrastructure and a continuous flow of resources from

elsewhere. The demographic boom “the Sunbelt” has experienced since World War II

powerfully expresses, again, in Ross’s words, “the national appetite for unrestrained growth”

(ibid.: 15) as well as the ways in which the fantasy of expansionary American capitalism

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eventually must confront the natural limits of an environment. As James Meek argues,

Breaking Bad draws a pointed visual contrast between the “man-made desert” (2013: 8) of

suburban Albuquerque and the vibrant, non-human sparseness of the actual desert. But this

contrast, I would argue, also lends the show something of a pre-apocalyptic quality, where

the thin bubble of comfort is shown to be leaning precariously on the serrated edge of a

wasteland. Interrupting their preparations to supply the addicts of Albuquerque with

methamphetamines, the unexpected energy crisis in “4 Days Out” reveals a state of

dependency that characterizes the region as a whole. In this way, the metaphorical nexus

between the structures of drug and energy addiction helps connect Walter’s seemingly sui

generis story of going rogue to the destructive “habits” of ordinary life, as the pursuit of a

never-ending flow of money, cars, energy, or drugs is undermined by the ever-present threat

of scarcity and collapse.

Unsustainable Narratives

As I mentioned above, Walter’s obsessive pursuit of a “contaminant” in his

laboratory in the celebrated third-season episode “Fly” functions as an allegory of sorts for

his operation as a whole, in which he continually strives, and fails, to clear a space that

contains no contaminants, no disorder, no unpredictability. When he admits near the end

that “it’s all contaminated,” it’s a rare moment of self-knowledge, where the character

articulates a reading of the symbols in his own story (2010: “Fly”). But the tension between

containment and contamination that the fly symbolizes and that “Fly” thematizes, is, I want

to argue, also worked out on the level of narrative organization. That is, over the course of

its run, the series tracks the different forms of disorder that spill over from episode to

season, and from season to series. Consider Walter’s elimination of the drug lord Tuco

Salamanca, an act that neutralizes a lethal threat and seemingly brings the first season’s plot

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to a close.11 But the third season opens with Tuco’s identical twin cousins arriving from

Mexico to avenge him, and follows them as they cut an even more destructive swath of

violence through the community, and pose an even more serious threat to Walter and his

operation. They are yet another unforeseen reaction he has produced through his efforts to

contain the damage his operation has caused, one that exceeds the bounds of the “closure”

seemingly arrived at the end of the previous season. They arrive without warning, and in that

sudden novelty and strangeness suggest the wider system of forces and geographic spaces

with which the operation is intimately connected, but which have, until now, remained

beyond the bounds of Walter’s imagination. Their twinship, moreover, suggests a

multiplicative process in which the “solution” to one problem only begets two more, just as

their mute, expressionless ferocity invites us to read them more as embodied principles of

disorder a la Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men than as “realistic”

characters. The system then widens further, and the violent agents multiply yet again, as

Walter’s efforts to eliminate these threats leads him to Gus Fring, his region-wide network of

thugs, pushers, and hit men, and the Mexican drug cartel that begins crossing into New

Mexico with greater firepower and in larger numbers. Embedded in this multiplicative

narrative economy is a nightmare version of the desire for “exponential growth” driving

Walter’s business plans.

The other nightmare version of exponential growth, of course, is cancer, which both

sets the plot in motion, and serves as a metaphor for the unsustainable logic of the narrative

itself. Like Walter’s business, cancer lays waste to the very environment upon which it

depends, creating the need for even more desperate and (and often destructive) remedies.

The abstract blueprints that would govern production and reproduction – whether business

model or DNA sequence – routinely suffer damage upon contact with the concrete

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conditions of a material world defined by contingency, randomness, and entropy. In this

way, the moral, the ecological and the medical are united in a dense, shifting, mutually

imbricated metaphorical system that expresses the complex interchange between psyche,

body, and environment. As Gilligan remarks:

Walter White is a guy who suffers from cancer but also in a very real yet

metaphorical sense, he is the cancer of the show. He is a cancer on his

family, and these decisions he makes as a person, these decisions to cook

meth and be a criminal and do the things he does, are having a very clearly,

very long-term adverse effect on everyone around him […] He’s the engine

who drives their lives. (2011: VanDerWerff)

The phrase “very real but metaphorical sense” nicely captures the zone of symbolic realism

in which the narrative dwells. The urge for growth inside Walter – both the cancer itself, and

the oft-repeated demand for “exponential growth” – produces a widening radius of chaos,

explosions, corpses, dead bystanders, poisoned children, and debris fields, as if the disorder

within the man spills beyond him to become disorder without. In this way, the logic of

metastasis connects Walter’s body and mind to the economic fantasies he entertains, and the

disordered, contaminated environment he produces.12 Most insidiously, the money in

Walter’s grasp continues to grow with each passing season – from a few thousand in the

early episodes, to eighty million by the last – as the potential payoff and the exorbitant costs

escalate in a mutually reinforcing spiral. Narratively and symbolically, the series tracks the

rapid proliferation of various forms of moral and physical disorder that emerge from the

operation – what we might call tropes of unsustainable growth.

Through a network of references to depletion and addiction, as well as through a

narrative logic through which a “fix” for the present moment always generates more long-

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lasting and dire complications, Breaking Bad presents a complex double vision of applied

scientific knowledge as it is put in the service of the profit motive. The short-term power his

scientific expertise produces prevents him from recognizing both the chaos it also produces,

and the self-undermining direction of the pattern as a whole. As Ulrich Beck argues, the

“expansion and heightening of the intention of control ultimately ends up producing the

opposite,” and thus further risks “arise precisely from the triumph of the instrumentally

rational order” (ibid.: 9). The paradoxical dynamic Beck delineates – where the local triumphs

of instrumental rationality always sow the seeds of an even larger defeat – is central to the

logic of Breaking Bad. “Now that we’re in control,” he tells Jesse, incredibly, in the fifth

season, “no one else gets hurt.” To which Jesse replies: “You keep saying that and it’s

bullshit every time.” (2012: “Say My Name”). The enmeshment of success and failure that

Beck identifies as fundamental to much Western scientific discourse becomes, in Breaking

Bad, a narrative principle: it is the dialectical interplay between complication and solution

that produces, over the course of the entire series, increasingly extreme versions of both. A

narrow scientism masquerading as “science” and motivated by the promise of unending

profit and total security, is fatally undermined by its own narrowness, by the persistent

inability to grasp the ecological dimensions of behavior, and the chaotic complexity of a

world that resists any attempts to achieve comprehensive control.13

Thus although Walter and other characters talk of exponential growth, the show

itself insists that no matter how profitable the plan, no matter how well executed, and no

matter how ingeniously it is underwritten by specialized scientific knowledge, costs will

always eventually outpace revenues. And “costs” in this case means not just the up-front

expenses of obtaining raw materials or equipment, but the measures that must be taken to

cover their tracks from police and family, dodge reprisals from rival drug dealers, and

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manage all the new risks and consequences produced by their actions. The process is cheap,

but the cleanup is expensive. At one point in the second season, after Jesse complains that,

“I’ve already lost more than I’ve made,” Walter replies:

You want to know how much I’ve got left? After completing my first round

of treatment and financing the world’s most expensive alibi? Huh? Zero –

zip – nothing. I’ve got nothing to show for all of this. Nothing for my family,

which, as you might remember, was the whole damned point. (2009:

“Breakage”)

Walter’s consistent failure to reckon with the chaotic totality of consequences undermines

whatever “gains” he has elsewhere made. At the beginning of the final season, he admits

that, after an entire year of scheming, concealing, fleeing, hiding, poisoning, bombing, and

killing, he is still, incredibly, “forty thousand dollars in the hole. Does that seem like an

acceptable stopping point to you?” (2012: “Live Free or Die”). This dynamic, in which all

the profits from the meth trade must be used to manage the fallout from the meth trade,

runs through the entire series, and creates a futile one-step-forward, two-steps-back narrative

logic.

That the various, unexpected expenditures come in such strange forms (faking a

mysterious illness; paying for someone to go to prison; footing another’s tax bill to keep the

IRS away) would seem only to emphasize the excessive unpredictability of the world and the

futility of trying to control it. But Walter mistakes the strangeness of these events for the

unlikelihood of their reoccurrence. Each catastrophe is treated a necessary part of what he

calls the “learning curve,” and thereby folded into a teleological narrative of increasing

mastery, rather than taken as a sign that his premises are flawed: “perhaps I was overly

ambitious,” he muses, “it’s not going to happen that way any more” (2009: “Breakage”). In

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the fifth season, he tells Jesse that since their main rival has been eliminated, their operation

is about to become “self-sufficient,” a rough synonym for “sustainable” with the added

suggestion of total autonomy (2012: “Buyout”). The latest obstacle always becomes the final

obstacle, and thus the idea that the plan will work on the next go round survives six seasons’

worth of disconfirming evidence.

Sustainability is thus not simply about the viability of Walter’s business plans, but

about the relationship between those plans and the stories in which he embeds them. Those

stories are psychologically “sustaining,” because to believe that the latest iteration of the plan

will finally fix everything is to imagine that the anxiety, labor, duplicity, expense, moral

compromise, and violence will all at last be made worth it: “I – we – have suffered and bled –

literally – for this business,” Walter exclaims when Jesse suggests they quit, “and I will not

throw it away for nothing” (2012: “Buyout”). But such stories are also sustaining insofar as

they are inter-articulated with a self-aggrandizing moral rhetoric that allows Walter to

continue arguing for his own decency despite the many heinous things he has done. “What

happened happened for the best, you hear me?” he tells Jesse, “I wouldn’t change a thing.

You and I working together, having each other’s back […] it’s what saved our lives. I want

you to think about that as we go forward” (2012: “Madrigal”). Their history of deceit and

violence, spun into a story of loyalty, offers lessons for the future: the expert teacher has his

pupil forever on the learning curve. At some point, tending to the narrative becomes more

important than tending to the reality that narrative claims to describes; or, as Walter puts it

in Season 6: “the story comes first.” (2013: “Blood Money”). And that’s the case even when

the divide between story and reality is unmistakably apparent, even when the person being

duped is the person doing the telling. As their lawyer Saul Goodman remarks: “If you’re

committed enough you can make any story work. I once convinced a woman I was Kevin

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Costner, and it worked because I believed it” (2010: “Abiuqui”). Or consider the drug

kingpin Gus Fring’s final moments in season four, in which we see him, in profile, calmly

exiting a room in which there has just been a massive explosion, adjusting his tie with

uncanny poise. It’s an extraordinarily shocking visual, since, for a moment, it seems as if the

aura of indestructibility and control Fring has cultivated has actually made him impervious to

violence. The camera then pivots to reveal that half of his head and face have been

destroyed in the blast, and once we see that, he immediately falls dead to the floor. The

sequence has a strange kind of hyper-realism to it – like Wile E. Coyote suddenly noticing

his feet are running on thin air. It suggests both the almost magical “sustaining” power of

fictions of control, as well as their inability, ultimately, to keep material reality at bay. (2011:

“Face Off”).

These self-concealing narratives of order swirl most potently – and therefore most

insidiously – around the mythos of the nuclear family. “Everything I have done,” Walter tells

Skyler late in season 5, “I have done for this family” (2012: “Fifty-One”). Self-cast as the

archetypal male provider, Walter can justify any behavior, any act of violence or spasm of

self-indulgence; indeed, his subscription to this narrative is so strong that it keeps him from

recognizing how the very family he would provide for is manifestly disintegrating as a direct

result of his efforts to provide for it. By the fourth season, his business has not only

estranged him from Skyler and broken up the household; it has put everyone under the

threat of death. Thus a conflict emerges between the ability to sustain a narrative – to

marshal the verbal and imaginative “resources” to justify, occlude, euphemize, rationalize,

and whitewash destructive behaviors – and the ability to sustain the world that narrative

purportedly describes, but that those behaviors actively undermine. What is especially

complex about this unsustainable narrative dynamic is that two different time scales are

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always at play at once. As we have seen, Walter’s resourcefulness works in the short-term,

insofar as it allows him to manipulate people and processes, to bluff his way out of danger,

and to justify extreme actions to meet the needs of the moment. But in the long term, the

temporary success of such actions only prevents him from recognizing certain obvious facts,

including the larger pattern of moral and material degradation he produces.

The interplay between these two time frames corresponds roughly to the relationship

between the operative narrative units in Breaking Bad: the episode and the season. The

former often hinges upon ingenious “devices” (both narrative and chemical) that can address

some immediately pressing problem, while the latter surveys the cascading damage brought

about by the constant recourse to such remedies. To resolve the complications in one kind

of storyline, even more intractable and dangerous complications must be offloaded into the

other. The series as a whole thus grows darker and more disturbing as patchwork remedies

are episodically applied and overall conditions steadily deteriorate. This dynamic is brilliantly

encapsulated in the fifth-season episode “Dead Freight” (2012), in which, over the course of

a single episode, Walter and company devise, prepare for, and successfully execute an

audacious plan to steal precursor chemicals from a train. The extreme implausibility of this

heist narrative, including the seemingly tidy resolution, is puzzling at first, but in the last few

frames of the episode, we see that such implausibility is precisely the point. For just as the

men are celebrating their success and the episode seems about to fade to black, a boy rides

up on a dirt bike and spots them (his presence in the desert, incidentally, was indicated in yet

another inexplicable flash-forward, in the opening sequence of the episode). His appearance

is a sudden rip in the fabric of a plan they had managed to hold together in so many other,

much more vulnerable, places; by having everything work out just the way they’d planned

for so long, it’s as if the team accrues a debt to probability that has to be discharged. A

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member of the crew reacts by impulsively shooting the boy, which initiates, in the following

episodes, another chain of actions, decisions, plans, unforeseen consequences, and acts of

violence. There is no clearer example of Gilligan and his writers playing with the

conventions of television, turning the thematic and material problem of containment and

spillage (a plot centered on siphoning 1000 gallons of methylamine out of a tanker) into

structuring narrative principles. Here the show-runners take the closing seconds of what

otherwise seemed like a perfectly designed and executed plot, and turn them into a catalyst

for all more storylines that will define what happens for the remainder of the series.

Despite the short-term function they serve, Walter’s own narratives are unsustainable

because they work to undermine the very conditions that allow them to continue being told.

The dynamic is a vivid example of what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” a condition

in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing […] the object that

draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011: 1).

Berlant uses the concept of cruel optimism to describe not extreme behaviors like Walter’s,

but the slow wearing-away of everyday existence. As she puts it:

Cruel optimism […] grows from a perception about the reason people are not

Bartleby, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose

to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to. (ibid.: 28)

This seems very different from Walter’s condition, since his radical swerve from the norms

of ordinary life, misguided as it may be, does at least seem an attempt to interfere with various

forms of immiseration he experiences. Indeed, his rebellion against the mindless

reproduction of a stultifying existence is clearly part of what makes the character so

compelling in the early episodes. And yet, as the series continues, it is just as clear that his

rebellion is fatally incomplete because, unusual as it seems, it remains trapped within entirely

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conventional patterns of thinking. Walter’s progressive scientism, his subscription to the

“simple economics” of exponential growth, his investment in the mythos of the nuclear

family and the patriarchal provider are all expressions of an unexamined, cruelly optimistic

telos. Because of this, his behavior represents not, as it first seems, a deviation from the moral

logic of everyday life, but a metastasizing version of it. The insidious dynamic at play in

Walter’s various narratives is that they are simultaneously self-defeating and self-reinforcing.

The worse things get – financially, morally, emotionally – the harder it becomes to ignore the

fact that his approach is fatally flawed; at the same time, the worse things get, the more acute

the need for a narrative that will endow his actions with meaning and allow him to believe it

has not all been for nothing.

The disjunction between Walter’s self-serving “I did it for the family” narrative and

the degraded reality that narrative both keeps at bay and helps bring into being, becomes

steadily more obvious and unbridgeable over the course of six seasons. One by one, his

associates and family members (Skyler, Jesse, Hank, Marie, Walter Jr.) notice, and respond to

his fiction-making with their own counter narratives. “You’re not hurting anyone but my

family…” Walter pleads with Jesse, who is about to set fire to his money, “[the money is]

not for me – it’s for my children.” “Oh you’re going to talk about kids?” Jesse replies,

“You’re seriously going to go there?” and reminds Walter of his history of violence against

children (2013: “Blood Money”). The first half of the final season centers on the

proliferation of these counter narratives among Walter’s friends and family, and his futile

attempts to shore up his own crumbling story. But after these attempts fail, the final few

episodes hinge on Walter’s own process of abandoning his cruelly optimistic, unsustainable

narrative, and coming to see his behavior for what it is. There have been glimpses of this

awareness before – in his aforementioned confession at the end of “Fly,” “it’s all

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contaminated” – but the denouement over the last three episodes leads us to the clearest

articulation of it, the powerful moment in the finale when he admits who he is to his wife.

He begins with a familiar refrain: “All the things that I did, you need to understand – ”

which Skyler, tired of this story, interrupts: “If I have to hear one more time, that you did

this for the family –” To which Walter replies: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.

And I was really – I was alive” (2013: “Felina”). The power of narrative to manage, conceal,

and obfuscate has, in the episodes leading up to this moment, repeatedly comes into direct

conflict with the brute, unavoidable reality of Walter’s degraded circumstances.

Breaking Bad is considerably less invested in realism than, say, The Wire is: it traffics in

symbols, expressionistic visuals, and almost fantastically implausible events: the fly in the lab,

the airline crash, the pink teddy bear, Gus Fring’s strange death scene, among many other

examples. And yet, ultimately, the show is fundamentally grounded in a kind of realism

insofar as it insists – and eventually forces its protagonist to understand – that reality can be

bent, manipulated, and fictionalized only so far. Just as the show’s jarring violations of linear

chronology all eventually find their place in a comprehensible cause-effect pattern, so too do

Walter’s various fantasies and flights from reality finally succumb to the forces of necessity

and entropy. In “To’hajiilee” when Walter’s brother-in-law Hank is executed in front of him,

the camera focuses not on the actual victim, but on Walter, who drops in slow motion – first

to his knees, then over onto his side – as if he is the one who has been shot. Here we have

something like a symbolic version of what has happened, internally, to the character; that is,

in some sense, the self that has persisted believing in his own ability to neutralize whatever

disorder threatens him or his family has at last suffered a fatal blow. But that symbolism is

itself only made possible by, only finds its significance in, the material and undeniable fact of

an actual death.

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Although Hank’s death is a narrative pivot point, the show prepares us for the

dissolution of Walter’s unsustainable narrative by way of the radically changing mise en scene –

specifically, through the changes visited upon the White family home itself. Over the course

of the season, the house is invaded by multiple hostile parties, doused with gasoline,

threatened with arson, vandalized, and abandoned. The destroyed house functions on two

levels here: in one sense, it is, like Hank’s body: incontrovertible evidence of the failure of

Walter’s family-first narrative. In the season-opening flash-forward we watch him wordlessly

tour the wreckage, grimly resigned (we later learn) to the coming end. But on another level, it

also is the breakdown of the set of the television show Breaking Bad, the sign of its demise as

a coherent fictional world. Through its six seasons, the series’ locations have continued to

expand and change in stride with the extreme metamorphosis of Walter and his business:

from middle-class suburbia to the hallways of the DEA, to the headquarters of drug dealers,

to a state-of- the-art meth-lab under an industrial laundry on the outskirts of town, to the

hacienda of a drug kingpin in Mexico, to the headquarters of a multinational in Germany.

Through it all, the White family home has remained the visual and thematic constant, the

pivot point around which all the rest revolves. The stable, secure home is not just central to

Walter’s own narrative, it is also the locus classicus of the television family drama, and the key

signifier of middle-class order and prosperity. Like the White family home, the series Breaking

Bad is itself destroyed by the very forces that made it possible in the first place. That is, as

Simon and Gilligan made clear in the passages I quoted in the opening, the imperative of a

conventional television is, in Simon’s words “to sustain the franchise” – that is, to sustain

itself. What makes Breaking Bad so interesting – and indeed so exhilarating – is the speed and

ruthlessness with which it undermines the very foundational premises that make it possible,

the disregard it seems to have for the need to sustain itself. As the writer Alec Nevala-Lee

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notes, Breaking Bad “is all but unique among important television shows in that its underlying

conception changed radically after its first season, as the writers began to honestly examine

the story’s implications.” The narrative proceeds by establishing some kind of tensely

equilibrated set of relationships, fatally disrupting that equilibrium, and then building

something even more insecure upon whatever remains. The problem of sustainability thus

appears not only as a central theme of Breaking Bad, it defines its narrative architectonics, and

its lifespan as a series. I would note here that the term “to break,” in television writer

parlance, means something like “to work out the plot” (Gilligan, for example, remarked that

season 3 “was the hardest season we’ve had yet to break. It was mind-numbingly hard to try

to play this game”). But we can see how Breaking Bad plays with the paradoxical doubleness

of that term, since “breaking” the show eventually and inevitably leads to a broken show.

Unlike, say, The Sopranos, Mad Men, or even The Wire, all of which could have continued for

an indefinite number of future seasons, Breaking Bad tethers itself to the self-undermining

logic of the profit motive and follows it to its own unavoidable terminus.

I would argue that this, ultimately, is Breaking Bad’s most innovative and powerful use

of serial structure: it plays the limited scope of the individual episode against the more

expansive horizon of the series, showing how the actions that successfully manage crises in

the former produce chaotic aftereffects that dramatically change the course, integrity, and

continued viability of the latter. This ingenious interplay of time scales formally dramatizes

one of the most insidious difficulties in addressing our current sustainability crisis: the urgent

demands of the moment must be addressed, and yet addressing them threatens to only

further destabilize the system, and create other, more unmanageable, long-term emergencies.

Science is, of course, at the heart of this lethal spiral, since (like Walter White) our own

established social and political order consistently refuses to even entertain questions about

25

our “growth-based” economic orthodoxy, and thus reaches reflexively for scientific fixes to

address problems that science has caused in the first place. In an interview, Gilligan refers to

Walter White as the “engine” of the series; like an engine, he both generates momentum and

consumes the fuel needed to continue. The brilliance of Breaking Bad lies, in part, in its

willingness to represent this “fuel cycle” as an irreversible one that brings the show itself to

its inevitable end.

1 Writing in Slate.com, Willa Paskin notes that the term was coined by John Landgraf, and

defines the problem in these terms: “Nearly 400 original series aired in 2015, and that

number will get higher in 2016. From Landgraf’s perspective, this volume is keeping

audiences from finding good series they would enjoy, and this is unsustainable on the

network end of things.”

2 For an informative, influential discussion of Peak Oil, see Kenneth Deffeyes’s Hubbert’s

Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.

3 Curtis Marez, writing in the Critical Inquiry blog argues, the series presents a “cognitive map

for popular thinking about political economy” (2013). Marez’s focus is on racial coding in

the representation of capitalist practices – how Breaking Bad tells the story of how Walter

gradually displaces and incorporates his Latino rivals. But I would argue the show also

presents a self-conscious critique of popular thinking about conventional economic wisdom,

terminology and tropes, and that is nowhere more evident than in the repeated demands to

achieve “exponential growth.”

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4 See Ruskin’s Unto this Last and Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI.

5 For more on exponential growth and natural limits, see Meadows 2014: 37-49 esp.

6 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen writes: “[T]here is the general practice of representing the

material side of the economic process by a closed system, that is, by a mathematical model in

which the continuous inflow of low entropy from the environment is completely ignored.

But even this symptom of modern econometrics was preceded by a more common one: the

notion that the economic process is wholly circular […] no other conception could be further

from a correct interpretation of the facts. Even if only the physical facet of the economic

process is taken into consideration, this process is not circular, but unidirectional. As far as

this facet alone is concerned, the economic process consists of a continuous transformation

of low entropy into high entropy, that is, into irrevocable waste, or, with a topical term, into

pollution” (1971: 281, emphasis his).

7 See, for example, Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War

New Mexico.” Cultural Anthropology 19.4 (2004): 517-550.

8 See, for example, Tamminem (2006) and Eberhart (2007).

9 Such a transformation of the “environment” - from a blank canvas upon which human

development occurs to a complex material system in which humans are inextricably

enmeshed - is brilliantly theorized by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures, (2012: 1-20).

10 For example, see the first-season episode “…And the Bag’s in the River” (2008).

11 Tuco is killed in the second season, but only because the first was interrupted by a writer’s

strike. The first two episodes of the second season complete the Tuco storyline even if the

repercussions of that storyline are felt for the rest of the series.

12 In this way, Breaking Bad belongs to what Heather Houser has brilliantly defined as “eco-

sickness fiction,” a mode that “do[es] not seek to narrate the etiologies of environmental

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illnesses such as cancer or infertility” but uses illness as a complex homology for the

imbrication of humans and their environments (2014: 381-2).

13 For a discussion of the science/scientism division, see Wood 2012: 12-3; Slovic 2012: 181-

3; Beck 1994: 30.

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