Breaking Bad’s Suburban Shock Doctrine

In season four of AMC's Breaking Bad, fast food store manager-drug kingpin Gus Fring smoothly offers a first and only piece of personal history in response to DEA agent Hank’s probing questions: there is no record of him in his home country of Chile because he escaped during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose regime kept notoriously bad records. This detail and Gus’s (real or invented) history is never mentioned again, and by the season finale, Gus is dead anyway. But this quick and easily dismissed reference to Pinochet’s Chile may just have everything to do with the entire plot and trajectory of the series—not so much in Gus’s story, however, as in Walt’s.