In the opening episodes of the first season, we’re cued to sympathise with Walter’s plight. Humiliated by attractive, spoiled young students who have inherited more money than he’ll ever have, forced to work part-time in a car-wash to meet his family’s bills, he learns, just as he turns fifty, that he has inoperable lung cancer. When he dies he will leave his family nothing but debts. At one point, asked by a hospital psychiatrist why he went missing for 24 hours, he explains:
My wife is seven months pregnant with a baby we didn’t intend. My 15-year-old son has cerebral palsy. I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable and within 18 months I will be dead. And you ask why I ran?His moving speech is true in its facts, and persuades the shrink, who promises to keep his story secret, to release him from hospital. But the speech is still a lie: the actual reason Walter went missing is that he was being held prisoner in a shack in the desert by the homicidal, snakeskin-shirt-wearing meth-snorting drug dealer who was distributing his product, while the dealer’s paralysed uncle, who can only communicate by using a bell to express ‘yes’ and ‘no’, signals frantically to the dealer that Walter tried to poison him.