10 Breaking Bad Moments That Almost Jumped The Shark

Despite its signature realism, Breaking Bad challenged the audience's suspension of disbelief multiple times throughout its five seasons.

Breaking Bad is a very realistic series, but it toys with certain ludicrous moments that could have made Vince Gilligan's magnum opus lose all credibility if approached from the wrong angle. Despite his increasingly villainous actions, Walter White's bittersweet journey resonates with audiences of all backgrounds, and Breaking Bad has aged incredibly well more than a decade after its final episode. So far, both the plot and the characters have proven themselves to be timeless, though certain episodes test the viewer's expectations.

The very premise of a show like Breaking Bad requires some suspension of disbelief. For instance, all the interest on the purer blue meth and Walter White's prodigious intellect wouldn't matter so much in real-life drug trafficking, where chemical perfection and prestige take a back seat to ruthless efficiency and business know-how. But realism was never Breaking Bad's top priority, as Walter White's downfall and its dramatic aftermath are what drives the story, whether that entails contrived coincidences or outlandish twists, which abound throughout Breaking Bad's five seasons.

The first major Breaking Bad moment that tests the audience's suspension of disbelief comes in the season 5 episode "Crazy Handful of Nothin'", where Walt first embraces his new life as Heisenberg, shaves his head, and rebels against his first meth distributor, Tuco Salamanca, by blowing up his headquarters with mercury fulminate. Not only is real mercury fulminate unlikely to detonate with such force, but Walt should have been the most injured person in the room. And even if he succeeded, Walt shouldn't have been able to continue his drug operations so easily, as it's just logical for other criminals to mark him as Albuquerque's top target either out of revenge or jealousy.

In Breaking Bad's second season episode "Negro y Azul", the decapitated head of Danny Trejo's Cartel member Tortuga is mounted on a tortoise, which is detonated remotely in order to kill and wound Hank Schrader's DEA colleagues. Considering the brutal practices of the real-life drug cartels, a "head bomb" is quite a realistic contraption. However, Breaking Bad was only in its second season at this point, and viewers hadn't been introduced to the more bizarre corners of the drug trafficking scene yet. Although feasible, Tortuga's exploding head could have provided the wrong idea of what the rest of Breaking Bad was going to look like.

Perhaps the most ambitious plot point in all of Breaking Bad is the catastrophic mid-air plane collision above Albuquerque, both witnessed firsthand and inadvertently caused by Walter White. The 167 victims of two colliding planes lose their lives as a result of an error by air controller Donald Margolis, who's still too distraught over the death of his daughter Jane after Walter White refuses to help her while she overdoses. This slightly far-fetched butterfly effect serves to illustrate the vast extent of Walter White's actions, but it challenges the viewer's willingness to believe it.

Fortunately, the slow-burn buildup to the tragedy in previous Breaking Bad episode and Donald Margolis' early introduction allows the plane collision to seem like an organic sequence of events rather than a fantastical prophecy. Breaking Bad also gives the tragedy enough importance to maintain its impact on Walter White, but not enough to draw too much attention to its real-life probability. If probability is still in question, however, plane crashes similar to Breaking Bad's have actually happened in real life.

Cousins Marco and Leonel Salamanca are two especially ruthless twins who worked as hitmen for Hector Salamanca and Don Eladio. Breaking Bad depicts them as remorseless killing machines who will stop at nothing to eliminate their targets, and Better Call Saul reveals more of their previous deadly missions. Marco and Leonel's detached personality then makes it all the more confusing to see how Breaking Bad's ever silent Salamanca Twins fail to kill Hank Schrader in the season 3 episode "One Minute".

Although Hank's skills make him an especially difficult target, there's no logical reason for Marco to retrieve his ax and make a show out of killing Hank, thus giving the DEA agent time to load Leonel's gun and shoot him. It had been established that the Salamanca twins aren't fond of theatricality, much less after one of them has been wounded. What's worse, Leonel could have broken his vow of silence to expose Walter White in front of Hank and the DEA at the hospital, but he also misses his last chance to avenge his brother and unleash chaos on Walt and his family.

"Fly" is one of Breaking Bad's most controversial episodes, as it focuses solely on Walter White's desperate efforts to get rid of a single fly that has entered Gustavo Fring's lab. While much more realistic than most other Breaking Bad episodes, the third season's self-contained "Fly" episode may come across as a slapstick comedy break in between actual parts of the main story. "Fly" puts Walt's perfectionism on full display, and the titular fly retroactively symbolizes Walt's tragic refusal to let go. Still, Walt's overblown and inconsequential war on a fly may border on self-parody.

There are many times when Walter White is almost caught throughout Breaking Bad. However, "Crawl Space" features what may be the least realistic one. Cornered by Hank's attempts to investigate Los Pollos Hermanos, Walter White crashes his car to stop Hank from meeting with Gustavo Fring and discovering his lab. Although it is Walt's only option at the moment, the fact that Hank never finds the obviously deliberate crash suspicious until he finds Gale Boetticher's diary is rather unrealistic, especially coming from an experienced DEA agent with a particular interest on Heisenberg.

Breaking Bad's fourth season finale brings Gustavo Fring's journey to an end with his highly anticipated death. But while Walter White's plan to turn Hector Salamanca into a living bomb after various sabotaged assassination attempts is a stroke of genius, Gus Fring's brutal death challenges Breaking Bad's sense of realism for a few seconds, as Gus exits the aftermath of the explosion with half of his face burned off, adjusts his tie, and falls death on the ground. This stylized death scene pays homage to Gustavo Fring's tenacity and provides a satisfying conclusion to his storyline, but almost takes Breaking Bad into fantastical territory.

Walter White's creativity is finally surpassed by Jesse Pinkman's in Breaking Bad's fifth season premiere "Live Free or Die", where Jesse proposes the idea of using a giant magnet to destroy evidence of their crimes. With the help of Old Joe, Walt and Jesse use an industrial-level electromagnet to damage a laptop inside a police building's evidence room, and they manage to escape unseen. While achievable, Breaking Bad's magnet heist seems too simple to be true, and the fact that the crime is barely addressed afterward makes it seem like the police quickly forgot about it.

Related: 30 Crimes Walter White Commits In Breaking Bad

The collective genius of Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Mike Ehrmantraut, Todd Alquist, and Kuby helps the train heist shown in Breaking Bad's "Dead Freight" episode easier to digest. Nevertheless, the train heist still requires plenty of suspension of disbelief, as even with the team's knowledge and a lot of luck, there are too many variables that can easily go wrong that their victory seems more like a miracle than an actual achievement. Just the task of filling up the train's tank with water after draining out its methylamine load without the train driver knowing is a stretch, even by Breaking Bad season five standards.

Walter White executes one final plan while facing Jack Welker and his group. Resigned to die, Walt literally takes out the big guns and creates a robotic machine gun, which he mounts on a car trunk and activates after entering Welker's headquarters. Although in line with his eccentric genius, Walter White's remote machine gun is still an extravagant weapon to use as the object that brings down Heisenberg and Breaking Bad's final villain. Fortunately, Walter White's poetic death at Welker's meth lab while the police finally catches up with him in his final moments is enough to compensate for his rather outlandish death method.