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meek high school chemistry teacher and part-time car-wash assistant —
to become a cold, ruthless individual. It is this transformation — the
result of his purposed descent into the drug underworld — that holds
Breaking Bad together, giving it an almost perfect unity and revealing a
shaping vision (quite accidentally, it seems) that borders on the
Manichean.
Manicheanism, a second century movement out of ancient
Persia, was deemed heretical and demonic by the early Christian church.
According to the Manichaean world view, the ongoing cosmic stmggle
between good and evil, or light and darkness, has resulted in the
universal triumph of evil. Theopedia provides an explanation:
[The movement’s founder] Mani postulated
two natures that existed from the beginning:
light and darkness. The realm of light lived in
peace, while the realm of darkness was in
constant conflict with itself The universe is the
temporary result of an attack of the realm of
darkness on the realm of light, and was created
by the Living Spirit, an emanation of the light
realm, out of the mixture of light and darkness .
. . A key belief in Manicheanism is that there is
no omnipotent good power. This claim
addresses a theoretical part of the problem of
evil by denying the infinite perfection of God
and postulating the two equal and opposite
powers mentioned previously. The human
person is seen as a battleground for these
powers: the good part is the soul (which is
composed of light) and the bad part is the body
(composed of dark earth). The soul defines the
person and is incormptible, but it is under the
domination of a foreign [and demonic] power.
According to The Encyclopedia o f Classical Philosophy, the Manichaean
war between “darkness and light and the battles of various heavenly and
demonic beings” have caused “the seeds of light, which [Mani] called the
‘suffering Jesus’ . . . to be entrapped in living entities, men, animals, and
plants.” Darkness, the victor, slowly but surely extinguishes the light —
it’s a phenomenon that is fully realized with the concluding episode of
the series.
Certainly, season one contains a few events that foreshadow
darkness’ eventual victory, but the world of the first season is one that