7 Amazing Breaking Bad Easter Eggs You Probably Missed
Well, it’s over. By now you’ve likely smoked your last hit of blue and discussed at length with friends or internet trolls the end of the legend of Walter White. And I’m sure some of you, in reminiscing, have even considered rewatching the whole thing from the beginning, and to those people I say keep a sharp eye out because Breaking Bad has so many Easter Eggs I wouldn’t be surprised if Vince Gilligan had a secret bunny costume fetish. But all these added tidbits succeed in making the show even better, because even though you’ve seen it all before I’m sure there are things you missed the first time.
With that in mind I’ve collected my personal favorite (and very spoiler heavy!) Easter eggs that probably slipped right by. For example, did you spot …
1. Walt’s Pants
This one is sweet and simple and brings us all the way back to the very first episode of the series when we see Walt lose his pants off the side of the RV as he desperately races through the desert. Well, if he was really feeling nostalgic he could have picked them right back up as he rolled his barrel of money past them during Ozymandias. This Easter Egg even gets its own special behind the scenes look as the episode director, Rian Johnson, tweeted the below photo of the laying of the khakis.
2. Dead DEA
This tidbit proved to be a sign of things to come for do-gooder badasses Hank and Gomez. Right before Jesse tapes his testimony for Hank, Marie hands him a coffee cup that says DEA, but if you consider that the handle forms a perfect ‘D’ then the cup actually reads “DEAD” foreboding things to come for our agents. You were a beautiful man Hank, perhaps too beautiful for this world.
3. Gus and Walt Have the Same Crisis Moment
Back in the season 4 episode Hermanos we saw a flashback of Gus being forced to watch his ‘brother’ be killed by the Mexican drug cartel, of which he eventually got his oh so sweet revenge. This season when Walt watches his brother-in-law get murdered it’s hard not to notice the intentional parallels in the way the two scenes were filmed.
This seems fitting as we know that neither man is really the kind of guy to let those things slide.
4. Holly’s “Mommy” Wasn’t Scripted
All right, not so much an Easter Egg as an amazing behind the scenes tidbit that proves Breaking Bad has the best actors in television, even the ones that can’t really talk yet. According to episode writer Moira Walley-Beckett, the scene from Ozymandias with Walt and Holly after he kidnaps her originally included no dialogue for the baby and showed only a contemplative Walt eventually realizing he can’t do this to his daughter. But when they started filming the baby could see her real mom off camera and started to adlib the shit out of the scene and call for her “Mama”. The director then likely thanked the gods of meth for this amazing unscripted moment and called it a day.
5. Walt Takes on the Personalities of People He’s Killed
Probably the longest running Easter egg on the show, it’s a well documented fact that Walt takes on personality traits of almost everybody he kills. Going all the way back to season 1, you can see that after he kills Krazy 8 (yeah, it’s spelt with a “K” apparently), the guy who took his sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Walt quickly becomes a fan of crustless himself.
He later murders Mike, a badass enforcer who took his whiskey on the rocks. When Mike is alive Walt drinks his own whiskey without ice, but a season after Mike’s death Walt suddenly takes ice in his drinks.
And then there’s Gus. Oh Gus! Along with both watching brothers die in a similar manner as discussed, Walt picks up Gus’s taste in cars oddly enough. Gus drove a Volvo when he was alive, the same kind of car Walt is seen driving in season 5. If Volvo’s a sponsor this is probably less of an Easter Egg and more of an endorsement.
A more subtle and personal habit Walt adopted from Gus is how they both choose to spew their guts up. When Gus prepares to upchuck the poison he took in Mexico he calmly rolls up a towel to kneel on first, the only example I’ve ever seen of puking with class. Walt can be seen doing the same thing in season 5 when he gets sick from his cancer medication.
6. Walt Only Leaves Behind Jesse’s Watch for Continuity
If you’re like me and are always dissecting characters and looking for symbolism in Breaking Bad, you may have wondered why Walt chose that moment at the gas station in the finale to finally take off and leave behind the watch Jesse gave him for his birthday. It was a bothersome question, after all Walt decided to kill Jesse months before this and certainly would have recalled at some point during his long cabin stay that Jesse had been the one to give him the thing. Well, if you’re looking for symbolism you’re wasting your time, as Vince Gilligan explained in the episode of Talking Bad following the finale that it was pretty much only done for continuity purposes as Walt hadn’t been wearing it when they shot the flash forward scene in the Denny’s for episode 501 so they had to show him leaving it somewhere along the way.
7. The Episode Titles Are Clues
Breaking Bad has a lot of fun with episode titles, with a general rule being that if the title doesn’t seem relevant to the episode it’s likely a hint about something else happening that season. For example, Season 2 ends with a fiery airplane explosion over Albuquerque. Well, if you chronologically combine the titles of certain episodes in that season it spells out: “Seven Thirty-Seven” “Down” “Over” “ABQ” with “ABQ” being the airport code for Albuquerque.
And then there’s the title of the series finale, Felina, a clever chemistry pun and fitting for the end.
Oh, and if you’re expecting me to mention all the color symbolism peppered throughout the show, I don’t have time for that. But if you’re interested you can read the entire god damn wiki on it.
