"One Doesn’t Simply Break Bad in an Instant; It’s a Long Process of Moral Erosion"

I'm likely in the extreme minority of people in the western world who've yet to see a single episode of the acclaimed AMC television series Breaking Bad.  I've been asked to watch it time and again by a number of people, particularly my oldest son, yet I've simply never taken the steps to do so.  

I'm not much of a TV fan in general. I find myself losing interest rather quickly in most of what I see on the tube.  It's all too common for me to abandon my wife as she watches the end of some particular show we've been viewing together to go off to shower and otherwise ready myself for bed.

Yesterday, after reading something of interest about the show, something that peaked my curiousity and got my mental synapses to fire, I'm thinking that perhaps I've really missed in Breaking Bad something special, something educational, something deeply meaningful.

What follows is excerpted from a piece over at Catholic Virtue that speaks I believe to reasons for the show's popularity.  Be warned, there are spoilers:

In the beginning, Walter could hardly be a more sympathetic character. He is passionate about his subject (if not about his frequently inattentive students). But one day, he receives a diagnosis of advanced lung cancer that forces him to confront his mortality. With a disabled son and pregnant wife, Walter worries that his death will leave his family impoverished. As he runs the numbers, he realizes that to keep his family comfortable after his death, he would need to make more than a million dollars in just a few months. When he sees a drug bust on television, Walter realizes his best option to make fast cash is to put his chemical expertise to use manufacturing methamphetamine.

Over the course of five seasons, Walter descends deeper and deeper into evil, becoming the ultimate anti-hero. So how does one go from a common chemistry teacher to a murderous drug lord? Or as series creator Vince Gilligan puts it, “What if it was essentially me— in other words—a guy who has never broken a law, barely littered or jaywalked, who has never broken the law in any serious way suddenly finding himself being a meth cook, doing something reprehensible?” Gilligan’s answer takes three primary forms: Walter’s evil deeds are motivated by pride, rationalized with good intentions, and lead him slowly but surely into total depravity.

...

Four seasons ago, no one would have expected good old high school teacher Walter White to kill a man in cold blood or to poison a child—probably because the Walter White at the beginning of the story would have immediately refused and denounced such behavior. But his willingness at the beginning to engage in a passive sort of evil (feeding the destructive addiction of others) paves the way for killing in self-defense, committing pre-emptive strikes, and threatening the lives of children to accomplish his ends. The lesson here is that one doesn’t simply Break Bad in an instant; it’s a long process of moral erosion.

Read the whole thing.  It's enlightening.

It seems the show is a lesson in what might go wrong with good intentions, a lesson in how we endanger ourselves the moment a moral boundary is crossed, not in the moment of that first crossing per se but in the ease with which those boundaries can then be crossed again and again.

I read somewhere that the creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, was raised Catholic.  Catholicism arguably is about the identification, establishment and preservation of certain moral boundaries... and, most importantly, the mending of mind, body and soul of those who've decided for too long to succumb to the ease there is in crossing them.

I don't know what happened to Walter White in the season finale.  Don't want to know at this point in case I do in fact decide to get my hands on the series and watch it but this I know personally and all too well.  

I need help avoiding the long process of moral erosion.  I need help in recognizing, respecting and not crossing moral boundaries.  And I particularly need help in knowing that having failed to do so in the past, and likely failing to do so again in the future, there's still hope and redemptive forgiveness.

That help I have found to be most adequately and richly provided by the Catholic Church.