Breaking Bad continues to be the type of show that just keeps on giving. Years after the show went off the air, finally answering who would live and who would die thanks to Walter White’s criminal escapades, fans still debate several key aspects of the program. There have been attempts to try and expand on the legacy of Breaking Bad, from the Netflix original movie El Camino to the award-winning Better Call Saul. (Just don’t ask us which show is better, because that’s too hard.) But there remain so many questions about Breaking Bad that we still have to this day, including this significant one about Walter, Hank, and the book left on the toilet tank.
Needless to say, there are massive spoilers for Breaking Bad in the remainder of this article, so stop reading now if you haven’t yet watched the show.
If you never started Better Call Saul, now if the time to stream it on Netflix.
There’s a pivotal moment in the final season of Breaking Bad when Walter’s brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), stumbles on a book of poetry that has been inscribed to “W.W.” And in the moment, Hank calculates all of the clues to realize that Walter is the Heisenberg he has been chasing all these years. It’s not one of the best Breaking Bad episodes, but it’s an unforgettable moment.
But given how calculating Walter (Bryan Cranston) has been at every step of his criminal career, is it fair to believe that he would leave such an incriminating piece of evidence lying around… on the toilet? This certainly felt, to me, like something Walter would have destroyed as quickly as possible. And it felt that way to an attendee at a 2014 panel held on behalf of the show, where Cranston and show creator Vince Gilligan took questions from the audience, and one man asked why Walter let that book be found. Gilligan admits that this plot point is one that the show’s writers continue to argue about to this day. But his reasoning for Walter’s crucial mistake goes something like this:
My personal take, and one to be taken with a grain of salt, is that he neither wanted to be caught, nor was he particularly arrogant in that moment. He had been out of the business a month when Hank goes into his bathroom. And he just was not as cautious as he should have been. I think it was a mistake, pure and simple. It's possible, too, that the book was given to him by Gail Boetticher back in Season 2. And it's possible that when he got the book, he, although you could argue this is a long shot, he might not even have realized it was inscribed. I've gotten books before that, uh, people have nicely given me and only realized years later… that they had inscribed the book to me. But if you said to me, ‘I don't agree, I think it was arrogance.’ Or ‘I think he wanted to get caught,’ I wouldn't argue with it.
So Vince Gilligan chalks it up as a mistake made by a brilliant drug-running chemist who’d let his attention slip because he was out of the game. Very possible. If you watch all of Breaking Bad in order, you will find plenty of examples of Walter making a huge mistake, or being lucky (and getting out of jams because of that luck). But how does Bryan Cranston feel about Walter’s slip up? The show’s lead told the panel:
Along the same lines as what I was planning on, with that in mind, it was that he used to be a very methodical man. He was a man of science. And along with the metamorphosis came this infusion of ego and impulsivity. Look what happened to Mike. Impulse. He got under his skin. So he's not as thorough as he used to be, and it was just… he's put that in the past, and he's doing things more on emotion than we've seen him before. I chalked it up to that – that he was a little more careless than he was before.
Can you imagine anyone else needing to weigh in? Both Cranston and Gilligan believe that Walter White dropped his guard, leading to one of the best scenes in the entire series:
For now, it seems like the Breaking Bad story is over (unless you count that embarrassing Super Bowl commercial that Cranston and Aaron Paul did). What burning questions do you still have about Breaking Bad, all these many years later?
