Chicago Area Man Watches Breaking Bad Finale To See What All The Fuss Is About

by Lane Severson

Last Sunday night, a Chicago area man chose to watch the series finale of the critically acclaimed AMC show Breaking Bad. He claims the decision was made on a whim, having never once felt the need to watch anything more than the show’s pilot.

"Yeah, I watched the pilot when it came out, but it didn't really grab me," said Lane Severson with a vapid grin. Obviously pleased with himself for ignoring one of the best pieces of dramatic television in the last five years, he continued, "But people seemed to be really into the show, and I didn't have any fantasy players in the Sunday Night Football game, so I thought, ‘What the heck, let's see how this wraps up.’"

Breaking Bad has been nominated for forty-two Emmy Awards in its original run, but not once did Severson ever consider that he was missing out on a unique cultural phenomenon. "Have you ever seen that show Kenny VS Spenny?" Severson asked, referring to a reality-style television show featuring two Canadian friends who dare one another into asinine situations. "The one where they see who can stay tied to a goat the longest? That’s a classic!"

Severson, a graduate student in theology, attempted to position his cultural naiveté as social commentary, calling it an act of prophetic symbolism. "Pop culture is basically the modern church. We don't actually say this, but it is true. And watching shows in order, that’s like liturgy.  By taking the ‘eucharist’ of the finale, without attending the rest of the show’s ‘symbolic journey,’ I spit in the face of this false god."

Before viewing the episode Sunday, Severson crafted both a tweet and a Facebook post to announce his plan. "That'll get people wound up," he told his wife smugly. At the time of printing, not one of Severson's nearly two thousand connections had so much as ‘liked’ these self-obsessed pleas for attention.

Friends and family say that this barely scratches the surface of Lane Severon's neurosis. "He'll probably have the balls to write a long diatribe about how Walt never actually says he's sorry, or what Breaking Bad teaches us about the human condition," said long-time friend, Al Cedeno. "Lane loves to talk about stuff he doesn't know anything about,” added Severson’s wife, Laura, “which is basically everything."

Despite skipping sixty episodes of intense interpersonal drama, manipulation, murder, the rise and fall of a drug empire, and a lot of other stuff Severson doesn't know anything about, he said he didn't feel like he missed too much. "You know, the only flashback in the finale was back to the pilot," Severson said, puckering his lips for some reason, "and I saw the pilot."

Is Severson on Team Walt? He doesn't know what that is… but sure.

How does Severson feel about the conclusion to Jesse's story? "It was pretty good," Severson said. "He was in the first episode, so I was kind of wondering whether he would show up in this one or not."

"Mainly, I'm glad Walter White got out of that car wash," said Severson, referring to Walt's second job in the opening episode. "His boss there seemed like a real jerk."

At the time of writing this article, Severson was strongly considering catching up with the rest of the episodes on Netflix, something he could have done easily at any time over the past year, but just never got around to.

Lane Severson is a former child prodigy, current father of five, and Anglican. He blogs regularly at The Guilty Conscience. You can follow him on Twitter @_LxNx.

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Why I'm Not Watching Breaking Bad

by Charity Erickson

Sunday night was explosive. It was just nuts! Walter White, can you believe it, amiright?

Okaaay, no, I did not actually watch the latest episode of Breaking Bad. The Twitters tell me a line of some sort has been crossed…again. This is the draw of the show—the shocking and strange twists that are the mark of good storytelling—this is also why I stopped watching when I was only a few episodes into the first season. When a main character dissolved a human body in a bathtub, turning both the body and the bathtub into a sloshy, sinewy red soup, a line was crossed. I couldn’t watch any more. I mean, my god—that scene was supposed to be comic relief.

The vast majority of people I have talked to about my Breaking Bad aversion have said I should give it another chance, that if I stick with it I will discover its addictive qualities to be irresistible. And maybe someday I will find myself in a state of mind where I feel I can handle taking the plunge into Walter White’s dark world. But right now, the prospect of getting lost in one more piece of dark media sounds exhausting, overwhelming, and horrifying—and not the fun kind of horror. The panicky, get-me-out-of-here kind, and I really don’t need any more of that.

News and social media spit stories at us all day, speaking the evil of human existence into our coffee breaks and lunch hours in spurts of bloody electronic scrawl. “We shouldn’t look away,” we reason to ourselves; this evil is reality. To shut our eyes to it would be to refuse to see humanity as it is; it would be dishonest, it would be denial, it would be unethical. For, if we refuse to look upon the gross reality of life in this world, how could we effectively address ourselves to its improvement?

So it is a matter of ethics to refuse to look away from that which holds the clearest mirror up to nature; but as we can see in the growing trend of “dark” media production and consumption, it is also a matter of taste. If this year’s Emmy nominations are any indication (with nods to such unsettling series as Netflix’s House of Cards, FX’s American Horror Story: Asylum, and HBO’s Game of Thrones), a sophisticated consumer is one willing to look upon the angst of a complicated hero, or a villain with justifiable motivations, the mess of poverty, the sting of public humiliation, or nauseating episodes of uncanny violence and injury. This is the stuff that makes for “good TV.”

So, on the one hand, I’m embarrassed by my need to look away from “gritty” media like Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, and Orange is the New Black. Not only does looking away imply a refusal to acknowledge social, ethical, and existential questions and realities, but it also means I don’t have access to certain cultural conversations. Being conversant in this kind of media is a status marker—not watching hurts my popular culture street cred.

On the other hand, I don’t want to force myself to consume media that makes me crazy—it triggers my anxiety, so I mean that in a literal sense—just so that I might achieve a level of social enlightenment. Watching these kinds of programs can be an exercise in self-flagellation, the “don’t look away” principle feeding into a brooding preoccupation with the evils of this world and the burden of existing within it, only serving to reinforce our view of society as inherently sick and unsafe. Yet this isn’t exactly a “kingdom” mindset, which sees in humanity the potential for renewal and expects to see the love of Christ bring healing and redemption to all situations.

This is not to say that this media trend isn’t valuable; I do believe that in many ways, shows like Breaking Bad and Orange is the New Black are bringing darkness into light, exposing the myths our society believes about upward mobility and “the American Dream,” and revealing the dehumanizing effect of violence on the ones who perpetrate it. Most days (except for the days I need to dose up on happy with single-camera friendcore sitcoms) I would still rather spend time with these programs—even if they are almost unwatchably gruesome—than ones that celebrate an unthoughtful or too-easy optimism, and especially more than programs that try to develop moral complexity into an entertainment commodity, producing lame social commentary as in the film Elysium or the droopy existential metaphors of The Walking Dead (which, like many new programs, uses characters’ capacity for violence to create a token element of depth and complexity, but doesn’t have anything actually interesting to say about anything. At all.)

But for now, as much as I love good entertainment, I have to take a step back. It’s for the sake of my soul; not out of some legalistic focus on “edification,” “setting my mind on things above,” or “garbage in, garbage out,” but because self-care is a spiritual discipline, too. For now, I’m going to be patient. For now, I’m going to say, “Maybe someday, Walter White.”

That, and, “NO SPOILERS.” 

Charity Erickson and her husband live and work together in the north woods of Minnesota. Check out her blog for more of her writing and follow her on Twitter @CharityJill.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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The Meaning of the End

That's all folks.

by Ben Howard

Yesterday I was reading through a blog post where the author had collected a bunch of articles about Game of Thrones and theology. A few dealt with the issue of morality in the universe created by George R.R. Martin. They made arguments about what the story meant. 

The author of the post responded to one of these articles by saying that, "We can't yet say what the story means because we do not yet know how the story ends."

This phrase struck me in the moment and has stayed with me since. It fascinates me because while it's true, I'm not convinced that it should be.

At their very root, stories are constructs. They are snippets lifted from an ever-evolving, ever-unwinding narrative. We give them a beginning to provide context and an end to provide meaning, but the reality is that the meaning we impose is defined by where we begin and end the story.

Take for example the story of Johnny Cash told in Walk the Line. The story told in the movie ends with Johnny marrying June as the climactic moment in a story of love and redemption. The end of the story re-defines the meaning of Johnny's experiences as an unloved child, his rise to fame, his drug problem, and his unsuccessful first marriage. The story is cast in the light of its conclusion.

Happily ever after?

But in reality that's not where the story ends. It continues through the next 35 years of their marriage. What does that story mean? In fact, the real narrative arc continues on in their children and grandchildren, in their musical legacy, and in the iconography that survives death and continually ripples throughout history. The real story can be found in every aspiring country singer who idolizes Johnny Cash.

So what does a story mean if a story never ends?

To judge something by its end means that you have to choose. Either you can cut off the story and choose to say, "This is what this story means now, in this particular moment," or you can let it play out delaying ultimate judgment eternally because even in death, the ripples never cease. The consequences and effects of a life lived and a story told intermingle with the ripples of other stories and other lives and continue forward, gently fading into one.

The question of whether meaning is tied to an ending is an interesting one to consider now when the world of pop culture, especially TV, stands on the brink of so many of these "important" endings.  Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy ended last year. Mad Men is in it's next to last season. Breaking Bad is approaching it's final year. Even the prolonged (and occasionally frustrating) narrative of How I Met Your Mother is beginning it's final season in the fall.

Is the entire meaning and essence of these stories tied into their end? If Don dies, or Walter goes to prison, or if Ted meets "the mother" and she's terrible, does it ruin what came before it? What about the story that comes after it, the fictional narrative that we'll never see play out?

Worst movie, or worstest movie?

These may seem like insignificant questions once you step back and remind yourself that I'm merely talking about vehicles for entertainment, but the underlying conversation is far larger than that.

Most Christian theology defines itself in terms of its end. That's not just true for people who believe in the rapture, or an eternity spent in a heaven/hell removed from this world, but for those of us who believe in the second coming and the restoration of creation. So many of us define ourselves by the hoped for outcome at the end of the story, but what if this myopic focus blinds us to the beauty of everything else?

What if the end, and the beginning too for that matter, aren't actually real? What if they're constructs we use to delineate and divide life into consumable chunks? And if that's true, what does it mean when we use them to explain the parts in between?

What if stories don't end? What if life keeps going on? What does it mean then?

Peace,
Ben 

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

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On Breaking Bad and the Powers

by Adam Metz

I think if Dutch theologian Hendrik Berkhof were still alive, he might say that AMC’s big hit, Breaking Bad, just may be the perfect parable on the powers. His little book, ,Christ and the Powers, was translated into English by John Howard Yoder and serves as a foundational work for Yoder’s theology as well as the unique work of Walter Wink. I think it would be fascinating to reflect on this drama with the three of these great thinkers – now all dead (which, considering the tone of the show – seems kind of fitting).

Berkhof was one of the first (maybe the first?) to take a critical look at just what the Apostle Paul was talking about in the New Testament when he referred to “powers, principalities, and authorities.” Essentially, he goes on to suggest, they are the unseen forces that are at work in our world. This particular realm of discussion always makes me think of this scene from School of Rock – you may not understand the language of Powers – but everyone knows who “The Man” is:

I’ve never seen a more vivid commentary on the Powers than in the storyline of Breaking Bad. Hollywood has long wrestled with the dark realities and crises of sin through the genre of horror (a personal favorite!). Coming to terms with the reality of sin through the over-the-top nature of the the likes of Freddy Kreuger and Michael Myers is less threatening to our personal faith than what we encounter through Breaking Bad. It just doesn’t seem that threatening to talk about what we would do if a mass murderer ever broke into our homes or dreams.

Maybe it began with the Saw movies – or maybe it was Se7en - but somewhere along the line the audience wasn’t allowed to simply watch idly by as a terrible tale unfolds and project ourselves into impossible scenarios. Instead, these new movies invite us into more realistic moral quandaries – what do we do when our only choices are between two evils? To what extent are we willing to participate in the fallen state in order to maintain our self-preservation? Just how entangled are we in the sinful work of the Powers?

In the beginning, of Breaking Bad we meet Walter White – an under-achieving chemistry genius who teaches high school science. Providing the plot lines to the program, Walter faces the Powers up close and personal through disease (cancer) which plunges him to face other realities that we all face: economic Powers, the Power of health care, the illegal drug world, and on and on the story goes delving more and more deeply into the interconnected world of the Powers.  

What begins as a somewhat light-hearted traipse to the dark side of the law, continues to grow darker with each episode. It’s as if we the viewer are invited to witness the degree to which Walter becomes entrapped by the Powers in order to reflect upon our own life and the degree that the Powers have entangled us. As the story develops, the audience is forced to wrestle with the reality that the chief “hero” of the story, is slowly becoming baptized by the Powers and turning into the nemesis. This couldn’t resonate more directly with Berkhof’s teaching on the Powers: created as good, but fallen with all of creation and now ruling instead of serving.

Adam is a pastor at Alum Creek Church in Ohio. He is currently working on his Doctorate in Missional Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. You can find more of his writings at his blog Theological Vacillation and follow him on Twitter @CrasslyYours.

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