Breaking BAD: Why the White Family Never Once Used Their Own Swimming Pool

[00:00:11]There is a shot in Breaking Bad that lasts less than 4 seconds. A family's backyard swimming pool. Blue water still catching the afternoon light the way a pool does when it's been maintained carefully and nobody has been in it.

[00:00:22]Then debris begins to fall. A shoe, a piece of luggage, fragments of a commercial aircraft. 167 people have just died in the sky above Albuquerque, and the wreckage is coming down into a middle-class family's backyard. The family isn't home. Nobody is ever home at that pool. Walter White had owned that pool for years before a single piece [music] of Wayfairer 515 hit the water. He skimmed it. He checked the filter. He paid for the chemicals to keep the water clear and blue and ready for a family that never once used it.

[00:00:50]Across five seasons of Breaking Bad, through drug deals and executions and the systematic destruction of everyone who ever trusted him, the White family pool sat behind their house on Negra Aoyo Lane in exactly the condition a family pool should be in. Maintained, ready, empty. That is not a background detail Vince Gilligan left in by accident. The pool appears in more episodes than almost any other single location in the show. It is one of the most documented deliberate visual choices in the entire series. And in five seasons of television, across every summer those cameras filmed that backyard, nobody swims in it. Not [music] Walt, not Skyler, not Walt Jr., not Holly. The question is not why a plane fell into their pool. [music] The question is why nobody was ever in it before that plane came down. The answer is not about the water at all.

[00:01:36]>> Hey, Mr. White, make those tires shine, huh?

[00:01:41]>> Oh my god.

[00:01:43]You would not believe this cleaning.

[00:01:45]>> Walter White's house should not have a swimming pool. That is the first thing to understand. In season 1, Walt works two jobs. He teaches chemistry at JP Win High School.

[00:01:54]>> Chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change, not just >> and pulls shifts at the car wash to cover a mortgage on a house with a water heater he cannot afford to replace. How >> about buy a new hot water heater? How's that idea?

[00:02:13]>> He has a pregnant wife, a son with cerebral palsy, and a cancer diagnosis he hasn't told his family about yet. He is running at his absolute financial limit. He has a pool. That pool did not come with success. It came before the failure became visible. It is the last physical evidence of what the White family expected their life to become.

[00:02:31]Installed at the point when a chemist with Walter White's credentials might have reasonably expected the career that his talent deserved. The pool was aspirational. It was the shape of a future that was going to arrive. It stayed long after it became clear that future wasn't coming, and Walt maintains it. This detail runs quietly through the entire series, and it is the most precise thing the show does with that object. He skims, leaves, he checks the pH, he keeps the water ready. It is one of the most controlled visual ironies in the show. A man spending his evenings maintaining the symbol of a family life that he is with equal precision dismantling from the inside. The pool doesn't know what Walt is doing in the super lab. It just needs its filter cleaned. Walt obliges. The plane crash changes what the pool means. It doesn't change what the pool does. In the season 2 finale, a mid-air collision above Albuquerque kills 167 people aboard Wayfairer 515. The cause is Donald Margolus, Jane's father, an air traffic controller who returned to work too soon after his daughter's death and lost concentration at the moment that mattered. Jane died because Walt stood in her room and watched her choke and decided not to intervene. 167 people died because Jane's father couldn't see straight through his grief. The wreckage falls across the city. Some of it falls into the White family's backyard into the pool.

[00:03:52]>> This equipment is useless without us.

[00:03:54]Without Without Jesse and myself, you have no new product. You you you have no income. Without us, you have nothing.

[00:04:05]You kill me, you have nothing.

[00:04:10]>> You do this, all you'll have left is an $8 million hole in the ground.

[00:04:17]>> By season 4, everything Walt built has reached its terminal logic. Gus Fring has decided Walt is more dangerous than he is valuable. Walt knows this. He sits beside the pool alone, in a plastic chair, in the dark, and drinks. It is the single closest Walter White comes to using that pool in five seasons of television. He does not put his feet in the water. He does not move the chair closer to the edge. He sits beside the thing he has spent years maintaining and contemplates whether he is going to be alive by the weekend. Skyler is in a hotel with the children. The pool is immaculate. Walt sits in the dark and stares at it. The pool is still there when everything else is gone. The car wash is sold. The house gets condemned, stripped, vandalized. It outlasted the marriage. It outlasted the business. It outlasted the man himself. [music] The pool would wait as long as it had to.

[00:05:05]The White family kept making it wait.

[00:05:07]And the reason was never the cancer, never the meth, never Gus or Hank or the cartel.

[00:05:15]>> Hey, pool party.

[00:05:16]>> Where? What is she doing? Walt. [music] >> Hey. Uh, hey Sky. Maybe it's time to get out now. What do you think, >> Skyler? Hank asked you a question. You need to ask him.

[00:05:28]>> [music] >> The pool was empty before any of that.

[00:05:38]It was empty on the day Walt first filled it with chemicals instead of [music] his family. He just finally admitted what kind of man he was the night he sat down in the dark beside water nobody had ever used [music] and waited to find out if he was going to live until morning. The plane didn't fall into that pool because of bad luck.

[00:05:53]It fell there because Walt let Jane die and Jane's father lost his concentration [music] and 67 people came down out of the sky above a house where the backyard pool had been ready and waiting. Since before the [music] cancer, since before the lies, since before Walter White decided that what he deserved and what he had were two different things. There's a difference between owning something and living in it.

[00:06:15]>> The cancer and surgery and Hank being shot. It's just so many dark days.

[00:06:25]I think I was too scared or too angry or I don't know. I just wanted to quit. But you guys, you got me through it somehow.

[00:06:38]kept me going.