In an interview from 2009, Jessica Hecht, who plays Gretchen in Breaking Bad (above), fills us in on what happened when Walt left her and Gray Matter:

Vince Gilligan told us exactly what went down between the characters off screen: We were very much in love and we were to get married. And he came home and met my family, and I come from this really successful, wealthy family, and that knocks him on his side. He couldn’t deal with this inferiority he felt — this lack of connection to privilege. It made him terrified, and he literally just left me, and I was devastated. Walt is fighting his way out of going back to that emotional place, so he says, “Fuck you.”

In the show, Hecht’s character “Gretchen” doesn’t know that this is what motivated Walt’s desertion, nor do we the audience know this, even now, on the eve of the show’s finale.

Put this together with something else Gilligan has said in interviews.  According to him, Walt crossed the line into evil when he refused to let Gretchen and Elliott pay for his cancer treatments.  This, as Gilligan sees it, puts the lie to Walt’s assertion that all the bad things he did on the wrong side of the law were “for his family” — because Gretchen and Elliott offered him a way to take care of his family without participating in crimes, in drug dealing and murder, all of which put his family in greater danger than accepting the Schwartz’s charity would have.

The flashback scene that introduces Gretchen, back in season one, when she and Walt talk about the soul, ends with Walt leaning in to Gretchen, as though he’s about to kiss her — but we don’t see the kiss. However, according to Hecht’s 2009 interview, the kiss was filmed. I suspect we’ll see it in the finale.  It will remind us that Walt “broke bad” when he deserted the true love of his life, Gretchen, because his pride and insecurity wouldn’t allow him to face her wealth and privilege, any more than they would allow him to accept her charity later on when he and his family needed it.

Gilligan has said that, in the writers’ room, when he and his team got stuck, they would remind themselves of Walt’s “superpower”.  It wasn’t intelligence, or an expertise in chemistry, or courage, or cunning.  It was lying.  That’s the core of Walter White.

From the moment he deserted Gretchen and constructed a lie to explain it — that she and Elliott  squeezed him out of the company they founded — Walt’s whole life has been a lie.  The rationale for wanting to build an evil empire based on meth — that it was all for his family — was a lie.

He wants money and power to fill up a hole at the center of his psyche that nothing can fill, to set aright a life that broke bad long before his cancer diagnosis.

I have no idea how Gilligan and company are going to crystallize all this in the finale.  One way would be for Walt to go recover his fortune from the Nazi thugs, take it to Gretchen and throw it at her feet, in a now meaningless gesture of triumph, then wait for the forces on his trail to come and kill him, dying in Gretchen’s arms.

One little kiss then . . . Felina, goodbye . . .

Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse.

— Bob Dylan

There have certainly been a lot of extraordinary cable TV series in recent years — series with arresting concepts, high production values, good writing and good acting . . . like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Justified  Many of my friends are enthusiastic about these series and urge me to check them out.  Invariably I will rent a season or two of episodes, start watching them and lose interest.  The novelty of the concepts wears off, as does the surprise of how well the shows are made.  “This is really great for a TV series,” I’ll think, and then remember that I don’t need to watch TV series when there are so many movies I haven’t seen, or want to revisit, which are better.

Breaking Bad has been the one exception.  It’s not just really great for TV, it’s really great for any medium, a genuine work of art.

As usual, Breaking Bad has an arresting premise — a basically decent but existentially bewildered man is driven by an avalanche of bad breaks into a life of unspeakable jeopardy and horror.  In this respect it resembles a classic film noir.  The production values of the series are first-rate, as are the acting and writing.  But these are not the things you marvel at.

What you marvel at is the momentum of dread that builds and builds relentlessly — often in improbable or unlikely ways but with the inescapable logic of a bad dream.  It’s something different from the carefully doled-out surprises and frissons of an engaging soap opera or crime thriller.  It’s soul-wracking.

Cancer, a disabled child, insufficient health care coverage, a marriage straining at the seams, old age, a society infected with sickening violence, drug addiction, the onslaught of merciless judgement, the failure of love in every guise, disappointed dreams and ambitions, good intentions gone horribly awry, professional failures that lead to unspeakable tragedies for others, criminal bankers and lawyers and businessmen who walk the streets freely, hopeless Latino and black kids who spend their lives in jail or end up in a morgue.

This life of perpetual hell is not like the life most of us lead, but it’s the life we habitually fear, because we know that we could stumble into it by chance, by a succession of bad breaks, and that each of us will have passages through that kind of hell sooner or later, despite all our efforts and all our virtue and all our careful planning.

In the hell of Walter White, Breaking Bad‘s protagonist, everything that can go wrong does go wrong — every dreaded phone call comes at precisely the wrong moment, every lucky break turns out to have hellacious consequences, every innocuous misstep carries within it the seeds of colossal disaster .  The series of events is not, as I say, plausible, strictly speaking, anymore than being chased by lions in a dream is plausible, but it feels plausible the way being chased by lions in a dream feels plausible.  The events embody unconscious terrors, the ones we don’t want to think about in waking life.

Perhaps this is just a way of saying that Breaking Bad is about grace, though grace is almost totally absent from its world.  It appears in brief manifestations, unexpected acts of kindness, unexpected moments of reprieve from an overpowering and malevolent fate.  It appears, too, in the series writers’ love for their characters — in the fact that basically good people turn out to be twisted by dark secrets and toxic regrets . . . that basically bad people have their reasons, their heartbreaking, all too human reasons.

Grace can be known through this series precisely by its absence — like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing from the dead center of the puzzle, its shape clearly defined by a void.

I watched most of the series in a set of marathon viewings over the course of a week or so.  I was disturbed that I was starting to sympathize with its protagonist Walt — this made me feel a little loopy, a little paranoid.  But then I had an even more disturbing revelation — I am Walt, and so are all of us.  We are all capable of his mistakes, his sins, his moral bewilderment, his weakness, his humiliation, his rage.  We all need a pardon for unpardonable things, and it’s a pardon we’re not likely to find in this world.

You think you wouldn’t kill innocent kids to protect your home and family?  You already have, through Barack Obama, your elected representative, using weapons you paid for by the sweat of your brow.  And if you want to understand how a basically decent but weak man like Obama can turn into a moral monster, Breaking Bad has some profound insights into how that process works.

So then . . . back to grace.  Always back to grace.  Maybe the grace we need doesn’t exist — maybe that missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle was never included in the box, maybe it was never even manufactured.  Still, the empty outline of it is right there in front of us, haunting and maddening — the key to something.

Click on the images to enlarge.