Breaking Bad: 7 Flaws That Nobody Seems To Have Noticed

6. It Is Incredibly Self-Indulgent.

What's that? You want an excuse to have a man's head mounted on a turtle crawling across the Mexican desert? That is absolutely fine, it needs no story of any real substance surrounding it at all. Vignettes like the turtle and the incident with the drug addict crushing her husband's skull with an ATM are part of the raw style of Breaking Bad, but the represent the show at its most self-indulgent. More moments include the twin cousin hitmen; they get a huge build-up, a massive focus on their background and their stories, but in the grand scheme of things they actually turn out to be fairly irrelevant, save for hospitalising Hank. The show doesn't just indulge itself with over-dramatic cut-scenes and additions to the storyline which prove fairly pointless, they actually cheat just a little too. Think of the prologues in the second season. Their black and white with a splash of colour is reminiscent of Schindler's List, and hints at danger for the main characters which actually never materialises. None of the primary characters came to any harm as a result of the plane crash, after all. Vince Gilligan has referred to the plane crash as an attempt to visualise "all the terrible grief that Walt has wrought upon his loved ones" but has also admitted that he is "not sure I can tell you with 100% certainty of what the symbolism is" of the pink bear that falls from the wreckage. Self-indulgency at its finest; you want to create a symbol with this pink bear that ends up everywhere, yet you're not sure what that symbolism it? And you want to use an old man to commit suicide in order to kill his lifelong enemy? Well, alright, we'll give you that one...