Brian Cranston as Walter White in his underpants in Breaking Bad
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Guy Howie
Published 29 minutes ago
After joining ScreenRant in January 2025, Guy became a Senior Features Writer in March of the same year, and now specializes in features about classic TV shows. With several years' experience writing for and editing TV, film and music publications, his areas of expertise include a wide range of genres, from comedies, animated series, and crime dramas, to Westerns and political thrillers.
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Breaking Bad’s pilot episode is now the stuff of TV legend. It opens with the iconic image of Walter White in his underpants wearing a gas mask, crashing an RV carrying two dead drug dealers into a dead-end of New Mexico desert wilderness. The next 45 minutes explain how he got there with dizzying intensity.
Before the moment that he decides to break bad by cooking meth, however, Walter White utters arguably his best quote in any episode of the series. Around eight minutes into the episode, Walt speaks to his high-school class about the nature of chemistry:
"Well, technically chemistry is the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change. Now, just think about this. Electrons, they change their energy levels. Molecules change their bonds. Elements, they combine and change into compounds."
"Well, that's...that's all of life. Right? I mean, it's just, it's the constant. It's the cycle. It's solution, dissolution, just over and over and over. It is growth, and decay, then transformation. It is fascinating, really."
There’s plenty in this short yet remarkably profound monologue that we can apply to the nature of the entire universe. But, more pertinently, it has an enormous bearing on the trajectory of Breaking Bad itself. In fact, the essence of Walter White as a TV character is explained by this quote.
It serves as a prologue to his transformation into his alias Heisenberg during the course of Breaking Bad’s five seasons. You could even say that it gives away the ending of the series. Walt himself might not be aware of the things his words foreshadow, but Vince Gilligan is quite clearly using it to signpost where his show is going.
Walter White’s Quote About Chemistry Sums Up The Whole Breaking Bad Franchise
Bryan Cranston as Walter White during a class in Breaking Bad
Among all the extraordinary moments in Breaking Bad’s perfect pilot episode, Walt’s introduction to the nature of chemistry is perhaps the most important. It gets to the heart of what the show is really about, beneath the compelling interpersonal drama of its protagonist’s life struggles, and the thrilling depiction of the moving pieces within a criminal underworld.
Beneath the specifics of Walter White’s existence, we find a man whose restless resentment and hubristic ego drive him to take an unimaginably dark turn on life’s journey. This is the fundamental process that Breaking Bad renders as a gripping crime drama.
More than the core of Breaking Bad as a series, Walt’s speech to his class actually sums up the entire Breaking Bad franchise. The underlying theme it introduces also gets to the heart of Better Call Saul, and reflects the process of change presented to us in a different form in the TV movie El Camino.
No one has yet been able to describe Vince Gilligan’s seminal franchise in clearer terms than this short monologue. It remains the best summary of what happens to Walter White, Saul Goodman, and Jesse Pinkman out there today, and explains why the franchise is lauded as one of the most sophisticated stories ever told on the small screen.
Breaking Bad’s Pilot Foreshadows Walt’s Transformation Into Heisenberg With This Quote
Long before the moment that Walt apparently turns into Heisenberg in Breaking Bad, the show’s pilot reveals what’s going to happen in the mundane setting of a high-school chemistry lab. When Walt compares the change of chemical substances at a molecular level to life, his words serve as the perfect description of his own character development later in the series.
The words “solution” and “dissolution” could very easily be applied to different stages of Walt’s journey, as could “growth, and decay, then transformation”. The solution of his life appears to be a stable job and family, until he gets the news that he has terminal cancer. Then all normality dissolves into the chaos of an unlikely criminal enterprise.
In a sense, though, breaking bad becomes the solution to the lack of fulfillment Walt felt in his old life. That is, until it dissolves into a destructive fallacy which ends up taking his life.
On the one hand, his cancer could represent the “decay” of his physical being, preceding his “transformation” into a meth kingpin. On the other, Heisenberg could signify his “growth” into a powerful person who’s finally harnessing his talent for his own benefit, prior to the “decay” of his empire and his death, the final “transformation”.
Walt’s Description Of Chemistry Also Applies To Jimmy’s Story In Better Call Saul
Gene checking out a colorful shirt in Better Call Saul
It isn’t just Walter White’s transformation that his quote about chemistry can be applied to, however. It’s also an exact description of what happens to Jimmy McGill across both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Indeed, the idea of “growth, and decay, then transformation” might even fit Saul Goodman’s character trajectory better than Walter White’s.
In Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy grow from relative obscurity to become his alter-ego, a powerful and corrupt lawyer who helps manage the business of drug cartels and criminals. At the same time, this growth leads to a moral decay, and essentially ruins the life of those around him, before it ruins his own life, too.
The show’s biggest “transformation” isn’t when Jimmy changes into Saul Goodman. It happens at the very end, when he finally takes responsibility for his actions, admits to everything, and becomes a reformed character. This change marks the “dissolution” of Saul, as Jimmy sheds the alias which had once been the “solution” to all his problems.
It Feels Like Vince Gilligan Had Breaking Bad's Ending Mapped Out From The Start
Bryan Cranston as Walter White in the finale of Breaking Bad
The clarity with which Walter White predicts his own character transformation in his comparison of chemical changes to the circle of life gives the impression that Vince Gilligan had the whole of Breaking Bad mapped out from the start. Almost everything that happens in the show after the pilot episode can be summed up in this monologue.
Yet, as much as it might feel as though Gilligan knew exactly where the series was going from the start, that wasn’t the case. Instead, Breaking Bad’s plot developed organically, like most other TV shows.
Of course, its creator had a rough idea of what he wanted to do with Walter White, but right up to the final season, his plan for the show’s ending was far from certain. Gilligan actually considered multiple alternate endings for Breaking Bad, before he plumped for the one we know today.
The reason the series feels so well mapped out is because it features some of the best television writing ever scripted. At the same time, Gilligan had complete creative control over its story arc from start to finish, meaning he could implement his overall vision for Breaking Bad throughout the course of its story’s natural development.
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Breaking Bad
10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like Follow Followed TV-MA Crime Drama Thriller Release Date 2008 - 2013-00-00 Network AMC Showrunner Vince Gilligan Directors Vince Gilligan, Michelle Maclaren Writers Peter Gould, Gennifer Hutchison, Vince Gilligan, George Mastras, Moira Walley-Beckett, Sam Catlin, Thomas SchnauzCast
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Bryan Cranston
Walter White
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Aaron Paul
Jesse Pinkman
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Breaking Bad
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