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But the world created by the writers of Breaking Bad is not
really a place where anything goes, damn the consequences. In the world
of Walt White, bad choices do ultimately have bad consequences. In fact,
the notion that there is no absolute truth, that the universe is without
order and meaning, is called into question by at least two episodes from
the series.
The first is episode three of season one. Here, Walt and Jesse are
scrubbing the hallway floor of Jesse’s house, removing the blood stains
and whatever else is left of Cra y Eight’s brother Emilio. Jesse’s attempt
to dissolve Emilio’s corpse in a bathtub of muriatic acid has failed
miserably. It is then that Walt remembers standing at a blackboard years
ago in college and breaking the human being down into its chemical
components. His lab partner is behind him, watching him work. The
calculation does not add up, as it should, to 100%. In fact, Walt’s
calculations are .111958% short. Surprised by this oversight, Walt
comments, “There’s got to be more to a human being than that.” As the
lab partner later mentions, this missing element is the soul (“And the
Bag’s in the River” 1:03).
The question concerning the existence of the soul poses a
dilemma, the full significance of which is quickly fading in a culture
whose college educators, at least according to Richard Asma, professor
of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, hesitate to initiate
classroom discussions about something for which there seems to be
virtually no empirical evidence. If there is no soul (as Asma contends), if
there is nothing beyond death, if the human being is no more than a
mixture of chemicals in a random universe — as Count Leo Tolstoy
thought before his conversion — then surely the world we inhabit and
the lives that we live are without any order or meaning — or our lives
take on meaning only by virtue of our own choices. Moral systems
become no more than social