Breaking Bad: 1.1 ‘Pilot’ Recap
Original Air Date: January 20, 2008
NOTE: This series and recap contain very mature themes and language.
The Present
As a pair of plants fly through the air amid a desert landscape, an RV comes hurtling down the road, driven by a man wearing nothing but his underwear and a gas mask. The vehicle comes to a stop after veering off the road as the sound of sirens grows closer. The driver exits the vehicle, after taking a gun from an unconscious man on the floor in the back and his wallet and a handheld video camera out of the glove compartment, where another man is unconscious in the passenger seat.
The driver puts on a green shirt to go with his undies after he exits the vehicle, and he then begins talking into the video camera. His name is WALTER HARTWELL WHITE, and he’s from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The tape he’s making is not an admission of guilt for law enforcement personnel, but rather an explanation for his wife SKYLER and son WALTER JR., whom he loves very much. He wants to warn them that although they’ll learn some disturbing things about him soon, he only did what he did for them.
With the approaching sirens growing increasingly louder, Walter puts the camera on the ground, with his wallet beside it, and then stands at the side of the road, his gun aimed and ready to shoot whoever’s on the way.
Three Weeks Earlier
The story moves to Walter’s normal-looking house in a normal-looking suburban neighborhood, where he wakes up one morning when it’s still dark and begins to exercise. He has trouble breathing as he stares at a framed certificate on the wall that indicates he was a contributor to research awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985.
At breakfast, Walter’s wife Skyler wishes him a happy birthday while serving up veggie bacon — it has zero cholesterol! — that their smart-alecky son Walter Jr. later claims smells like Band-Aids. The two Walters then drive to high school, where Walter Senior is a chemistry teacher to dozens of bored and insolent teenagers and Walter Junior, who walks with the aid of crutches, is a student. “Chemistry,” Walter informs his pupils, “is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change…. It is growth, then decay, then transformation.”
It turns out that teaching is only one of Walter’s jobs. He also works at an area car wash after school. There, his boss BOGDAN is shorthanded and orders Walter to help out cleaning cars. Walter reluctantly obliges then suffers the humiliation of tending to the tires on a car that belongs to one of his troublesome students named Chad, who stands nearby with his girlfriend ogling and laughing in disbelief.
Walter, who has been coughing steadily throughout the day, returns home to find his wife has planned a surprise party for his 50th birthday. Her sister MARIE and their brother-in-law, DEA Agent HANK, are there, and during the festivities, everyone tunes into a news report filmed after Hank and his team made a big methamphetamine bust. As the footage shows boxes of money, a mesmerized Walt asks Hank how much they recovered all together. Hank replies $700,000, adding that the amount isn’t the most they’ve ever recovered and that it’s easy money … until the DEA catches you.
The next day, Walter passes out while working at the car wash, and he’s rushed to the hospital by ambulance. He finds it odd when the EMT asks if he’s a smoker, but later learns what caused the concern when a doctor breaks the news that he has inoperable lung cancer and an estimated two more years to live with chemotherapy treatments. Oddly enough, during the medical visit, the only thing Walter can truly focus on is the mustard on the doctor’s white lab coat.
When he returns home, Walter doesn’t reveal his condition to his pregnant wife, but he does take the opportunity to tell his boss at the car wash “Fuck you and your eyebrows” when Bogdan once again orders him to go outside and help wiping down cars. He leaves the job in a huff after knocking items off of a wall display and then calls his brother-in-law Hank to take him up on his birthday offer of a ride-along to a drug bust.
The suburban drug operation targets a meth dealer who goes by the name of Cap’n Cook and makes a signature meth mix laced with chili powder. As DEA agents and police offers surround the house where a suspected meth lab is located, Hank and his partner discuss why they’re all wearing gas masks — if you mix the chemicals incorrectly just a little while cooking up meth, inhaling the fumes can kill you in no time flat.
The officers enter the house and apprehend one suspect, EMILIO KOYAMA, and Walter asks if he can go inside to take a look at the actual lab. While Hank and his partner GOMEZ check first to make sure it’s okay, Walter notices the real Cap’n Cook climbing out the second-floor bedroom window of a nearby house in his underwear. To the teacher’s amazement, the dealer is a former student who failed his chemistry class, JESSE PINKMAN.
That night, Walter tracks Jesse down at his aunt’s house, where he lived when he was in school. Jesse thinks Walter is there to turn him in or give him a get-right speech, but Walter has something a little different in mind — teaming up, with Walter handling the chemistry side of things and Jesse handling the business side. After a brief bout of laughing, Jesse agrees to prevent his former teacher from turning him in. Walter insists, however, that the meth they cook be pure and work as advertised, meaning no more chili powder additives.
The next issue is where to cook the dope. They can’t do it at their homes because of the danger from the smoke, fumes, and being discovered by the law. Walter suggests a storage locker, but the cops are on to that and have dogs sniffing around. Jesse mentions that buying an RV from a friend of his would allow them to have a mobile meth lab they can drive into the boonies for cooking. So, Walter withdraws his entire life savings to purchase the vehicle. When Jesse asks why Walter is doing this and refuses to accept money as the only reason, Walter smiles and replies that he’s awake.
And awake Walter is, for the first time in ages. He and his wife take their son shopping for new jeans, and some high school idiots also in the store make fun of the fact that Walter Jr.’s parents are with him. Walter puts a stop to the teasing when he knocks the biggest jerk to the ground and dares him to throw a punch.
Walter and Jesse drive out to the desert later, and after removing all of his clothes save his underwear so he won’t go home smelling like a meth lab, the teacher cooks up a panful of glass-grade meth crystals. Jesse is duly impressed by Walter’s so-called art, and he takes a sample to arrange a sale to KRAZY 8, the cousin of his former partner Emilio. Krazy 8 drops some bad news, however. Not only does Emilio think Jesse ratted him out to the DEA, but Emilio is out on bail and in the house at that very moment. The cousins now order Jesse to take them to his source for the pure meth.
When the three arrive at the RV parked in the desert, Emilio recognizes Walter from the drug bust and becomes certain that Jesse ratted him out. Hell breaks loose, guns are drawn, and Walter and Jesse start running for their lives. Jesse goes down quickly, and the cousins want to kill them both. But, Walter manages to steal some time by promising to teach Krazy 8 his recipe.
Yet, when they’re inside the RV, Walter manages to escape from the cousins when he traps them in the vehicle after mixing the wrong chemicals together to create deadly phosphine gas fumes. A lit cigarette Emilio threw out the window then starts a fire, and Walter — still wearing nothing but his underwear — puts gas masks on himself and Jesse before driving away in the RV, with the cousins in the back.
The next few incidents are those that opened the episode. As the sirens approach, Walter stands on the side of the road in his undies and shirt, with the gun aimed and ready to shoot. He suddenly aims at his own head and pulls the trigger, but the gun doesn’t fire. It works just fine seconds later, though, when he aims at the ground and shoots by mistake. Good thing, too, because the sirens only come from three fire trucks, not the cops.
Jesse walks over and asks what happened in the RV, and Walter explains about phosphine gas before vomiting. Cut to a happy Walter scooping handfuls of bills out of the dryer.
RESOURCES
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1 opinion for Breaking Bad: 1.1 ‘Pilot’ Recap
Breaking Bad: Watch 1.1 ‘Pilot’
Feb 15, 2008 at 3:54 am
[…] you were so unfortunate as to have missed the pilot episode of the dark dramedy, just follow the jump to check it out in all of its magnificent glory. […]
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