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clearly linked to Walt’s rise in the drug underworld, is strongly implied
in a couple of unforgettable scenes. In the first episode of season three,
penitents crawl along a dirt road leading to a shrine built to Santa
Muerte, a Mexican deity representing death, leaving little doubt that the
two cousins sent by the cartel to kill Walter have pledged their lives to
the deity that rules their world (“No Mas” 3.10); that a drawing of Walt
White has been placed next to the altar suggests not only that Walt has
temporarily become the focus of assassins but that Walt will rise to a
point equivalent to that of deity worshiped by the villagers and the
cousins. In another episode of season three, after dropping Walter off at
his house, Mike drives away and his tires roll over a chalk drawing of a
scythe, a clear symbol of the presence of Santa Muerte (“Green Light”
3.04). Again, a couple episodes later, one of the Los Polios employees
responds to the presence of the Cousins in the restaurant by telling Gus,
the manager and meth dealer, “They’re back” (“Sunset” 3.06), the very
words an allusion to a scene from the 1982 movie Poltergeist. In a later
episode of the same season, demonic undertones again emerge as we see
the two sociopathic cousins using an Ouija Board with the former drug
lord Tio to learn the identity of the man responsible for the death of Tio’s
son, Tuco (3).
However, the p’^esence of the demonic in the world of Breaking
Bad becomes the most obvious in the linking of Walt to Satan. And,
here, Frederic Nietzsche again has some bearing, particularly if we
consider that, according to Nietzsche, in the absence of God, Man in the
future will become his own god (Friedman 157-158). And so it is: Walt
briefly becomes a kind of evil deity in Breaking Bad as he spins a web of
devilish deceit that leaves most everyone else behind — or dead. In his
metamorphosis, he becomes the counterpart of the devil — or, in the
absence of this figure, the devil himself, the Father of Lies. In the last
two seasons, some of the characters even recognize Walt as such. During
a family get-together to celebrate Walt’s fifty-first birthday, Marie
humorously remarks to Walt, “You’re the devil” (“51” 5.04). Hank’s
expression, once he realizes who and what Walt actually is, conveys a
disgust, a loathing, a hatred that signals his recognition of the evil
standing before him. At one point, Jesse labels Walt as the devil (“Rabid
Dog” 5.12). And Walt’s willingness to accept his own damnation as the
price for his rise in the drug underworld suggests a man who, somewhere
along the way, has sold his soul to the devil.
The identification of Walt White with Satan is important not
simply because it emphasizes a demonic dimension that the scriptwriters
may not have originally intended as a factor in the protagonist’s radical