Baby Blue: Breaking Bad's Walter White as Melancholic Solipsist

Indianapolis, IN

Vince Gilligan's decision to end his acclaimed television series Breaking Bad with the Badfinger song Baby Blue  was met with confusion by his music team. Eventually, the music supervisor, Thomas Golubić, defended Gilligan's decision with: this is a love-affair story of Walt and his love of science.  Walter White's love  is demonstrated by his expertise in crystallography which is used to manufacture the most flawless crystal meth New Mexico has ever seen, the street name of which is blue sky . Throughout the Pilot , the color blue is indicative of Walter's woes in life and while blue may indicate a love of science on the one hand; it also alludes to his downfall - his obsession (love?) with science drives him to an increasingly morose and melancholic state. The cinematography of the Pilot  foreshadows not only the profession Walt adopts as blue sky  manufacturer, but it reveals that his melancholic drive is inevitable. I see this inevitability as Gilligan's allusion to Heidegger's philosophical theories on the time continuum and humankind's limitation through ineluctable death. The color scheme also intimates that what the viewer experiences in this place blanketed in blue is perhaps the world through Walt's eyes. I'll demonstrate how the strategic and mathematical placement of the color blue throughout the Pilot  is an intimation of the melancholy and subtle solipsism to which Walter will eventually succumb.