Pursuing Success in Season Two

Abstract

Nearing the end of its first season, Breaking Bad promises a future expansion of its depiction of Albuquerque’s meth trade. In the penultimate episode, ‘Crazy Handful of Nothin” (1.6), Walt, undergoing what we see to be the degrading effects of chemotherapy — his nausea keeps him from work, his hair falls out in clumps — seeks to accelerate the earnings of Jesse’s piecemeal, hand-to-hand meth deals. Walt decides they should get a contract with a mid-level distributor who is new on the local scene, the fearsomely psychotic Tuco (Raymond Cruz), a Mexican whose pent-up supply of manic violence is nicely captured by the sharp fit of energy with which he snorts crushed meth off the blade of his Bowie knife. After Tuco bashes and hospitalises Jesse, Walt seizes back a sense of personal control from the ravages of chemotherapy by shaving his head bald, and — now having hardened his weak and pliant appearance — confronting Tuco. When Tuco asks for a name, Walt baptises himself ‘Heisenberg’. This not only evokes the difficulties of perception and knowledge posed by the uncertainty principle, but also implies that Walt is living-out a perhaps long-imagined fantasy of scientific recognition and fame, one tinged by the infamy of Heisenberg’s wartime nuclear research for Nazi Germany, an association heightened by Walt’s former work at Los Alamos.¹ After threatening Tuco with explosives ingeniously disguised as meth, Walt extracts a favourable business contract, and the fragile promise of a new, ongoing partnership is made.