And show creator and writer Vince Gilligan might have tipped his hand by showing us Walter's purchase of an automatic weapon (four minutes into season five) before allowing us to see Walter kiss his baby (eight minutes in). It's never a good sign when your semi-estranged wife tells you she's scared of you, as Anna Gunn's perpetually frazzled Skyler tells Walter when they finally meet, following the miraculously successful hit on Gus at the very incorrectly named Casa Tranquila nursing home. It's not for the uplifting display of family values, to be sure.
Thus the question we're left with at the cusp of Breaking Bad's final season - after issues like cancer, multiple homicides, addiction, savage beatings, family breakup, and what seems to be a pervasive meth-industry problem with business ethics - is this: Are Walter and Jesse capable of redemption? I think that's why we're watching. Especially when it comes to what we might call the realm of damnation. There's something about the human television-viewing mind, though, that doesn't crave premature certainty in its narrative arcs. One would expect Walter and Jesse by now to be thoroughly poisoned by their trade.
These are not demographics traditionally prepared for the special life skills required by drug lords. And high school chemistry teachers, let alone their students, are rarely trained in the Castaneda-esque techniques of the Psychic Warrior.
Indeed, the DEA investigators on the scene of murdered rival Gus's meth lab during Sunday night's season-five premiere looked somewhat insectoid in their baggy white hazmat suits. If we didn't grok what both Bryan Cranston's Walter White and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman are capable of by, say, the middle of Breaking Bad's pilot four years ago, well, it was somewhat incontrovertibly hammered home amid the carnage that ended season four (even James Bond never tried exploding wheelchairs): These guys are on a life journey that is no less bizarre than that of a surprised Kafka insect.