Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer 2014 | Page 61

57 may still seem familiar to us: nothing more than an extension of the quasi-existential, often violent wasteland of American cinema and TV. But this is the world in which Walt White decides to recreate himself, and one can hardly blame him. For one thing, he knows that his brilliance is wasted on a career as a high school chemistry teacher. For another, he has allowed himself to be somewhat emasculated by his wife and by his bullying brother in law (“Pilot” 1.10). In fact, he really has nothing to lose in a world in which God, be He Judeo-Christian or Manichaean, has apparently either disappeared or never existed in the first place. One episode that powerfully reinforces the impression that God may have simply disappeared comes in season three, as students and teachers gather in an assembly to share feelings concerning the mid-air crash and one of the students asks, “Where is God in all this?” (“No Mas” 3.01). The question concerning the seeming absence of God in Breaking Bad is of enormous significance, for it immediately pushes our discussion into the metaphysical. From beginning to end, God does seem to be absent from Breaking Bad — a phenomenon that may have contributed to the series’ popularity. Indeed, the question of the absence of God, an ongoing crisis in Western Civilization, is one that Richard Friedman, professor of comparative literature at UC-San Diego, addresses in his book The Hidden Face o f God. Friedman makes the point that, for the past two thousand years, the God of the Bible has slowly withdrawn Himself so that He is never p