David Pierson - Breaking Bad

In “Seven Thirty-Seven,” however, the series ignores any temporary indicator. It is true that watching previous episodes has taught viewers to expect temporary games but with a succession of close-up shots on decontextualized objects, the disorientation becomes absolute. The presence of a black and white image, a common resource in film and television history for flashback sequences, [8] Examples in this area are multiple. The use of black and white images or other post-production effects is common in contemporary television to distinguish flashback scenes and make them explicit to the audience. For example, that is the case of Babylon 5 (PTEN/TNT, 1994-1998) or the series Veronica Mars (UPN/The CW, 2004-2007) that used sepia-toned images for its flashback sequences. makes even more puzzling a teaser that actually happens in the future. At that time, due to past experience, the viewer expects the main story to connect with teaser images at the end of the episode as has happened in previous examples. In this example, the prolepsis has a larger extent in Genette’s terminology and will not connect to the main story until the last episode of the season, “ABQ.” The audience’s feeling of disorientation increases. The viewers expected that at the end of the episode the gaps would be filled, but the series postponed this information increasing their curiosity. Breaking Bad begins its second season with what Sternberg (1978) refers to as a “retardatory structure," which deliberately reserves expository information till the end and thereby follows a narrative strategy of sustaining "curosity and suspense" (182).

The series also has the ability to distribute the cold opens that refer to that outcome offering new information for speculation every time, so that the viewer will be more intrigued as the season advance toward its end. From that moment on, each season beginning establishes a dialogue with the past season playing with the expectations of the audience. When the third season begins with the ambiguous image of people crawling on a dirt road the viewer wonders if he is watching a flash-forward, as in the previous season starts. Over the episode and the season, we will finally understand that this sequence takes place in the present and has to do with the Mexican ritual of Santa Muerte. In the same way the series Lost did during its six seasons, Breaking Bad plays in a self-conscious way with the audience’s knowledge so as to offer variations or repetitions regarding previous structures. Using images of spatial and temporal ambiguity, the series delays the introduction of key information as much as possible. The show does that at the micro, within the teasers, and at the macro-levels over the course of a season. Thus, the viewer tries to fill in the gaps and so he uses past episodes looking for a pattern. Conscious of this process, the series plays with the audience by offering similarities and variations creating the idea of a pattern that, in the end, is not there. After that, the only certainty the viewer can hold is unpredictability. The audience knows that facing a new episode of Breaking Bad means facing uncertainty.

At the start of the fourth season this self-conscious dialogue between the series and the viewer becomes even more evident. “Box Cutter” (7/17/11) begins, as the title makes explicit, with a close-up of a hand wielding a box cutter to reveal, then, Gale Boetticher. The third season had ended with Jesse Pinkman shooting Gale at his apartment door, thereby the audience experience a feeling of evident bewilderment looking back at a character they believed dead. As the teaser goes on, we discover that, in fact, it is a flash-forward. The narration plays with confusion during the initial instants, given that the series so far has not offered us any image to confirm that Gale died in the shooting.

At the start of the fifth season, the episode “Live Free or Die” (7/15/12) refers back to the teaser’s pilot episode of the series but in this case the flash-forward takes place a year in the future from the present time of the narrative. In this start, we see Walter White using a false identity and having breakfast. The fact that the character draws, using bacon, the number 52 on the plate, an image that takes us back to the pilot episode, announces to the viewer that the sequence is set in a very distant future. As in previous cases, this teaser is presented sufficiently vaguely and ambivalently to suggest without offering specific information. After the first eight episodes of the season, the series does not make any other reference to that start. At this point, however, the audience accepts the game of confusion because their past experience has taught them that in the end they will be rewarded.

Apart from the beginnings of the season and the examples cited above, Breaking Bad uses the strategy of temporary disorientation in several teaser sequences throughout all seasons. The episodes “Grilled,” “Breakage” (4/5/2009), “Bug,” and “Dead Freight” (08/12/12) begin in medias res with a flash-forward. In “Breakage,” we see two unknown men crossing a river. Upon reaching the shore, one of them finds a dental grill encased in an acrylic cube that turns out to be Hank’s souvenir from his encounter with Tuco. When, after the opening credits, the series shows the cube on Hank’s desk, the audience wonders how the cube will end up in the river, A question that will be answered at the end of the episode. The start of “Bug,” by contrast, is more ambiguous. The episode opens with an extreme close-up of a pair of glasses, which apparently seem to be Walter’s, lying on the ground. The image of a few drops of blood on the floor and on a shoe follows these initial shots. At the end of the episode, all these images are revealed as a flash-forward but until this moment they remain ambiguous and open to speculation. The same thing happens in the case of “Grilled” and “Dead Freight.” Both the image of a bouncing car in the desert and the image of a kid riding a bike in the desert form quite an indeterminate cold open, so that the viewer cannot fill the gaps until the episode advances. In the end, the viewers will understand that they were flash-forward sequences.

In addition, the series also uses often, as in the episode “Box Cutter,” teasers set in the past with the intention of restoring some events previously elided by the story. This is the case of “I. F. T.” (4/4/10), which shows the death of Tortuga, “Mas” (04/18/10), which tells the story of how Jesse got the RV to cook meth, “Cat’s in the Bag…” which shows what happened in the desert before Walter came home at the end of the pilot and “Abiquiu” (05/30/10) which shows a scene of Jesse and Jane visiting a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. In this sense, the teasers have the function of filling some gaps in the story that will provide useful information for the present of the narrative.

Finally, there is also another type of recurring flashback in the teasers of the series. In this case, those flashbacks delve into the past of the characters, just as was the case with Walter in the episode ”…And the Bag’s in the River.” In this second type are the beginnings of the episodes “One Minute” (05/02/10), “Full Measure” (06/13/10) and “Hermanos” (09/04/11). The first case delves into the past of The Cousins, while “Full Measure” is situated more than fifteen years ago to show Walter and Skyler just before buying their house. In the case of “Brothers,” the episode starts with a flashback that takes us back to last season, just after Hank’s shooting. At the end of the teaser, still in flashback, we see Gus Fring talking to Don Hector Salamanca and just before the opening credits, after Gus utters the words “blood for blood,” the disorienting image of a bloodstain on water appears. At the end of the episode, in another flashback sequence, the viewer will discover the bloodstain was caused by the former partner of Gus, Max Arciniega, killed by Salamanca years ago. This time the teaser anticipates the revelation promoting an image of curiosity.