Here are couple of quotes that go with my previous post about Breaking Bad.
This first quote is from Maureen Ryan at the Huffington Post.
“But as someone who, like Gilligan, was raised Catholic, I’ve long believed that one of the show’s strengths is its intelligent and even compassionate exploration of sin, guilt, good, evil and the consequences of altruistic and selfish choices. Nothing about ‘Breaking Bad’ offers a moral prescription, yet, as I wrote earlier this year, it offers an exceptionally clear-eyed and honest appraisal of one man’s soul-destroying delusions and ultimate selfishness. ‘Sin’ is a concept that people of many faiths and belief systems have struggled to define for millennia, yet it’s a word you don’t often hear uttered in conversations about challenging art; however you feel about it as a concept, the word simply comes with a lot of baggage.
But sin lives at the center of this show, which, like many great works, has not supplied answers as much as it’s asked fascinating questions.”
Here is another quote by Vince Gilligan, the creator of the show.
“I have to speak for myself, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I like the idea that there’s a point to it all. I like the idea that if you’re really a rotten human being, you don’t prosper for it. Not in the end. Day by day, you might, but there’s some sort of comeuppance, some kind of karma, whatever you want to call it,” Gilligan said. “Conversely, if, as most of us hope to be, you’re a good person, it all kind of works out in the end. But I don’t know that the world is really like that.
“I think it’s a basic human need to want to believe that the world is fair,” he continued. “Of course we live in a world that seems grotesquely unfair… I like that feeling on this show… [that] every action has a consequence. I think I respond to that. I think that feels right to me — that every bad thing Walt does comes back on him, that it has a consequence. … Maybe on some level what I’m intending is to explore a world where actions do have consequences. They do in our real life, we know that. Is there some final tally in which the balance sheet evens out? If it doesn’t exist in this world — I can’t say whether it does or it doesn’t. But maybe it will in this made-up world of ‘Breaking Bad.’
Gilligan gets a lot wrong here from a Biblical perspective. But his evaluation that sins have consequences is Biblical even if his remedy (the tally sheet) is not. Breaking Bad is 62 episode exploration of the effects of sin upon a man and his family.<>
[…] lives at the center of this show.” Maureen Ryan on Breaking […]