While Breaking Bad hasn”t been on the air since 2013, fans of the show may want to revisit it based on a new morsel of information about Walter White and why he left Gray Matter Technologies.
As a refresher, Gray Matter is the firm White co-founded with his friend Elliot Schwartz. In what turns out to be a bad business move for White, he sells off his interest in the firm to Schwartz for just $5,000. The company becomes wildly successful, making Schwartz a billionaire while White scrapes a together a living as a high school chemistry teacher before earning millions as a drug king pin.
The series does touch on why White leaves the firm. It happens after White spends the weekend with his girlfriend/lab assistant/future wife of Elliot Schwartz, Gretchen and her uber-rich family. But Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan shed a lot more light the what really happened during that fateful weekend in an interview with the Huffington Post.
“I think it was kind of situation where he didn”t realize the girl he was about to marry was so very wealthy and came from such a prominent family, and it kind of blew his mind and made him feel inferior and he overreacted,” Gilligan said. “He just kind of checked out. I think there is that whole other side to the story, and it can be gleaned. This isn”t really the CliffsNotes version so much. These facts can be gleaned if you watch some of these scenes really closely enough, and you watch them without too much of an overriding bias toward Walt and against Gretchen and Elliott.”
Co-showrunner Peter Gould added, “I think the interesting thing is not exactly what happened but the fact that Walt hasn”t let it go over all these years. He has no perspective on himself. He gets to the point where all he can really do is try to justify everything that he”s done.”
And in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, “Now you know the rest of the story.”