Prologue: March 19

Tom came home with five identical square boxes.

‘Now then you three, line up!’

He called out, ‘Nell, come in here a minute, we ’re going to try our gasmasks on!’ Out of the boxes came the most horrible, grotesque apparitions, straight out of Jeanne’s worst nightmares. She was stiff with terror. Tom, Nell and her sisters tried theirs on. Tom, wearing the fearsome mask, brought his face right down to Jeanne’s level.

‘Now, come on Jeannot, be reasonable. Don’t be a silly girl!’ His voice came out of the mask, thin and muffled, and making the most awful sound when he took his breath in, just like Sandy next door when his asthma was playing him up.

Jeanne sobbed, frightened. ‘No, no . . . I can’t. I’m scared . . . I won’t be able to breathe.’

Tom was angry now. ‘Come on, don’t be stupid! You can see we ’re all wearing them and we can all breathe.’ Panic set in. Jeanne gave full vent to her hysteria. She opened her mouth wide. ‘Wa-a-a-gh!’

Tom lunged towards her, her way of escape into the hall cut off by hands trying to grab hold of her. There was only one thing for it – quick! – behind the piano. As luck would have it, the piano had been placed at an angle across the corner of the room. She squeezed in and curled herself up into a very tight ball. Tom could not get hold of her, either from the side or from the top. Her sisters, Marie and Irene, giggled eerily somewhere deep inside their gasmasks.

Tom took off his mask and threw it to the ground. ‘Oh, I give up. That child’s becoming impossible, Nell.’ As though it was Nell’s fault.

Jeanne stayed curled up in her haven behind the piano, quietly sobbing to herself until it was safe to come out.

1890 – 1940

 Tom

William ‘Bill’ Simpson Sarginson and his friend Willie Peacock left Penrith, Cumberland, in the early 1890s to seek their fortunes. They were both tailors at a time when British materials and tailoring were much sought after.

Bill was soon employed as First Cutter by the prestigious House of Worth in Paris. He married Jeanne Marie- Francoise Tirefort, a giletiere (waistcoat maker) and they had two children, Marguerite ‘Maggie ’, born in 1894, and Tom, born in 1896.

When Tom was baptised, the Catholic priest refused to name him Tom as it was not a saint’s name but said that Thomas would do. Bill insisted that he wanted the child named Tom after his uncle back in Penrith. The priest agreed, but only if the boy also had another name, that of a saint. Bill and Jeanne thought quickly, and so the boy was named Tom Paul, after the acceptable name of a saint. Bill had Tom registered as a British citizen at the British Consulate in Paris.

The family lived in a flat in central Paris: 22, rue Cler in the shadow of Les Invalides. Bill had a workshop where he had a full-scale model of a horse, as he specialised in ladies’ riding habits en amazone – meaning side-saddle, to ride in the Bois de Boulogne. The model enabled him to drape the habit to his satisfaction and the children were allowed to ride on the horse when they visited occasionally. On one of their visits they met one of Bill’s clients, a Belgian princess who entertained the children by letting her jewel-encrusted pet scarab beetle run up and down the mantelpiece much to their delight.

While in Paris, young Tom was taken to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. What a treat that was for a boy, he was most struck by the Whirling Dervishes, one on each corner of the showground, who, he said, never stopped spinning for the whole four hours. He also saw La Goulue, the dancer depicted dancing on Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous posters of the Moulin Rouge. She had become known as the ‘Queen of Paris’ but, by the time Tom saw her exhibited in a lion’s cage in a circus show, she was old and well past her glory days.

When the children were in their early teens, Bill was promoted to manager of Old England, an establishment promoting British tailoring in Brussels, and the whole family moved there. They lived in rue de l’Arbre Beni, Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels.

Maggie was apprenticed to a leading Belgian milliner and was to make the rosettes for the wedding bonnet of the Belgian Princess Marie-Jose who married the Italian Crown Prince.

Bill had advised Tom to go into Electricity. ‘That’s where the future is, my boy.’ And so, in 1912, Tom was apprenticed to a Swiss firm in Brussels, Appareillage Gardy, learning about high and low tension switchgear.

When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, Tom and Bill were arrested and taken to the Ecole Militaire together with other British subjects at the end of August 1914. Bill, observing the comings and goings of crowds of people, all seeking help or information of some sort or other, said to Tom, ‘Look, I think we can escape. Just follow me, don’t look right nor left.’ And that’s exactly what they did. They threaded their way through the crowd looking neither right nor left, and found themselves back in the street and free.

They couldn’t go home and so stayed with kind friends: Bill at one house and Tom at another. They met Jeanne and Maggie, who were still free, at church on Sundays or in the park to exchange news and washing. Jeanne and Maggie were repatriated to England soon after by the Americans who were not yet in the war.

© Jeanne Gask

Bill Etheridge

Dennis Skinner

“I prefer to see [chemistry] as the study of change . . . that’s all

of life, right? It’s the constant, it’s the cycle. It’s solution — dissolution,

just over and over and over. It is growth, then decay,

then — transformation! It is fascinating, really.” — Walter White

We meet Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Walt’s family. Walt is poleaxed by some tragic news. With nothing to lose, Walt decides to try to make one big score, and damn the consequences. For that, however, he needs the help of Jesse Pinkman, a former student turned loser meth cook and drug dealer.

From the moment you see those khakis float down out of a perfectly blue desert sky, you know that you’re watching a show like nothing else on television. The hard beauty and stillness of the American Southwest is shattered by a wildly careening RV driven by a pasty white guy with a developing paunch wearing only a gas mask and tighty-whities.

What the hell?

Like all pilots, this one is primarily exposition, but unlike most, the exposition is beautifully handled as the simple background of Walter’s life. The use of a long flashback as the body of the episode works well, in no small part due to Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance in the opening, which gives us a Walter White so obviously, desperately out of his element that we immediately wonder how this guy wound up pantsless in the desert and apparently determined to commit suicide-by-cop. After the opening credits, the audience is taken on an intimate tour of Walt’s life. Again, Cranston sells it perfectly. The viewer is presented with a middle-aged man facing the back half of his life from the perspective of an early brilliance and promise that has somehow imploded into a barely-making-ends-meet existence as a high school chemistry teacher. He has to work a lousy second job to support his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son and still can’t afford to buy a water heater.

Executive producer and series creator Vince Gilligan, along with the cast and crew (Gilligan & Co.), take the audience through this day in the life of Walt, and it’s just one little humiliation after another. The only time Walt’s eyes sparkle in the first half of the episode is when he is giving his introductory lecture to his chemistry class. Here Walt transcends his lowermiddle-class life in an almost poetic outpouring of passion for this incredible science. Of course, even that brief joy is crushed by the arrogant insolence of the archetypal high school jackass who stays just far enough inside the line that Walt can’t do a damn thing about him. So this is Walt and his life, as sad sack as you can get, with no real prospects of improvement, a brother-in-law who thinks he’s a wuss, and a wife who doesn’t even pay attention during birthday sex.

Until everything changes.

The sociologist and criminologist Lonnie Athens would likely classify Walt’s cancer diagnosis as the beginning of a “dramatic self change,” brought on by something so traumatic that a person’s self — the very thoughts, ideas, and ways of understanding and interacting with the world — is shattered, or “fragmented,” and in order to survive, the person must begin to replace that old self, those old ideas, with an entirely new worldview. (Athens and his theories are discussed much more fully in the previous What’s Cooking essay, but since we warned you not to read that if you don’t want to risk spoilage, the basic — and spoiler-free — parts are mentioned here.) Breaking Bad gives us this fragmentation beautifully. Note how from the viewer’s perspective Walt is upside down as he is moved into the MRI machine, a motif smoothly repeated in the next scene with Walt’s reflection in the top of the doctor’s desk. Most discombobulating of all, however, is the consultation with the doctor. At first totally voiceless behind the tinnitus-like ambient soundtrack and faceless except for his chin and lips, the doctor and the news he is imparting are made unreal, out of place, and alien. As for Walt, in an exquisite touch of emotional realism, all he can focus on is the mustard stain on the doctor’s lab coat. How many of us, confronted with such tragic news, have likewise found our attention focused, randomly, illogically, on some similar mundanity of life?

It is from this shattered self that Walt begins to operate and things that would have been completely out of the question for pre-cancer Walt are now actual possibilities — things like finding a big score before he dies by making and selling pure crystal meth. Remember that Walt is a truly brilliant chemist, and knows full well what crystal meth is and what it does to people who use it. He may not know exactly what he’s getting into, but he knows what he is doing.

Enter Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, best known previously for his role on Big Love), a skinny white-boy gangster wannabe who, under the name “Cap’n Cook,” makes a living cooking and selling meth. He’s also an ex-student of Walt’s, and after being recognized by his former teacher during a drug bust, Walt has all the leverage he needs to coerce Jesse into helping him. Why does he need him? Because, as Walt says, “you know the business, and I know the chemistry.” Symbolizing just how far beyond his old life Walt is moving, he and Jesse park their battered RV/meth lab in the desert outside of Albuquerque, far from the city and any signs of human life. All that is there is a rough dirt road and a “cow house” in the distance. The desert is a place without memory, a place outside of things, where secrets can be kept, and meth can be cooked. This is where Walt lives now.

It is in this desert space that Walt becomes a killer, albeit in self-defense. Ironically, the one thing that Walt views as holding the keys to the secret of life — chemistry — becomes the means to end lives. Walt, a father, teacher, and an integral part of an extended family — in other words, an agent of life and growth — has now become a meth cook, using chemical weapons to kill his enemies. Walter White has become an agent of death.

The transformation is just beginning, but already Skyler (Anna Gunn, previously known for her roles on The Practice and Deadwood) is having some trouble recognizing her husband: “Walt? Is that you?”

© Ensley F. Guffey and K. Dale Koontz

Prologue

Long ago, the great god Popacapinyo made the world. First, he made the wolf and the hawk, and he made them swift and deadly. Then, he formed the bear and the badger, who are strong but slow. And then he made the cunning snake and the ape, who lie in wait for the foolish and the weak.

Then Lord Popacapinyo turned his hand to the world, filled as it was with tricks and traps, and he made other animals, the ones that eat grass instead of meat. To all these creatures he gave a gift, so that they would evade capture and live to breed again. Some were quick, some strong, some crafty, but he saved the greatest gift of all for last: the Spirit of Sacrifice.

That gift he gave to the lemming.

And he took the lemmings in his hand and spoke:

‘You, and only you, will never know fear or cowardice. You will never stand alone, because you will all run together. You will have what all other races lack, and that will make you greatest of all. You have Lemming Spirit.

‘All the world will be your foe, Rodents of a Thousand Enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. So you must catch them first. Attack all the world, lemmings, and show them terror, for they are weak and afraid. Show them your lemming spirit, and then kill them all! 

‘Dar huphep, huphep Yullai! 

‘For glory, the glory of the Yull!’

* * *

At 08.30, Greenwich Galactic Mean Time, a staff car and troop lorry rumbled into the remains of the British Quarter. The lorry rolled between the shells of buildings, past the broken sheds and abandoned allotments, the Yullian flag fluttering from its radio antenna. Foliage covered the cab roof. Half a dozen severed heads hung on a chain across the front grille like beads on a necklace.

It stopped in Coronation Square. A huddle of beetle people waited; as the lorry drew to a halt they pushed their young to the rear of the crowd, out of sight.

Lemming men jumped down from the back of the lorry, their new rifles gleaming, and fanned out in a glittering circle of bayonets as Colonel Fremcar Nonc stepped out of the staff car. He looked from side to side, taking in the dilapidated buildings and the empty pole from which the Union Jack had once flown, and smiled.

Nonc was new to this region but rumours of his prowess had already spread. He was, by all accounts, paranoid, self-important, unbearably pompous and sadistic to the point of lunacy, which made him fairly typical for a soldier of the Divine Amiable Army of the lemming men of Yull.

A semicircle of cringing natives awaited their new master. One of the beetle people scurried forward to welcome Nonc.

‘All hail, noble Yullian warlord,’ it chirped. ‘We thank you for liberating us, and welcome –’

‘Silence, slave,’ said Colonel Nonc, casually bashing him over the carapace with his walking stick. ‘I do not bandy words with savages. Where is the human?’

‘The woman waits in the potting shed, honoured master. She is bound, as you requested –’

‘Enough! Conversing with you besmirches me. Lead the way to the prisoner.’

‘Please, gracious master, follow me.’

Nonc followed, scowling. Four of his toughest warriors accompanied him. The beetle led them around the side of the governor’s house, through the crater-ridden vegetable garden. The offworlders had left in a hurry, Nonc reflected: they had not even bothered to pick their sprouts. One good charge from the Yull and the cowardly humans had fled. Somewhere to the north they were still trying to fight, it seemed: the last death throes of their weakling empire. They had forgotten how to be rulers, how to act with wisdom and justice.

He belted the beetle with his stick. ‘Piss off now, barbarian!’

The five lemming men stomped into the governor’s potting shed. It was large and clean, lit with electric lights. In the middle of the room were two chairs, and on one of them sat a woman in British army uniform, her hands behind her back and a rope around her waist.

Nonc sat down opposite and pulled a table over. He reached into his sash and took out a pack of cigarettes.

‘Hello,’ the woman said.

Nonc frowned, wondering how to break the ice.

‘Shup!’ he screamed, and he slapped her across the face. ‘Ugly weakling flat-snout pig-monkey coward, your war of aggression is over and your verminous slave race must all die slow! Cigarette?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ Nonc had been looking forward to telling her that she couldn’t have one. ‘Now then,’ he began, cracking his knuckles, ‘you have nothing to fear from me, offworlder scum. So let us have a little chat, eh?’

One of his men pulled down the blinds.

‘I understand you were captured by the beetle-things yesterday, on the outskirts of the town. I also understand you are of the Deepspace Operations Group, fools who presume to fight our glorious, entirely lovable empire.

For you are she who wields the knife, consort of the ghost-warrior Wainscott – may a thousand demons chew out his wretched heart. You are his witch-woman, the banshee-warrior, she who is called… Susan.’

The woman said nothing. Nonc took a deep drag on his cigarette. Thoughtfully, he tapped the ash away and touched the glowing end to the tabletop. He turned it slowly, a smile creeping across his face as the formica began to scorch.

‘Offworlder, you will tell me where I can find this so-called Wainscott. The Greater Galactic Happiness and Friendship Collective is most troubled by his continuing resistance to our grand plan for the betterment of the galaxy and wishes only to benevolently torture him to death.’

‘I can do better than that,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll show you where he is.’

© Toby Frost 2014