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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slowly withdrawn Himself so that He is never p