Story Archive

The Heisenberg Principle

The popular Breaking Bad TV series, about Walter White, a fictional Albuquerque, N.M., high school chemistry teacher who learns in the first episode he has terminal lung cancer, recently ended. In the series, White turns to crime, manufacturing meth to make money to leave his family after he dies. After the finale, a group of fans, led by Albuquerque high school science teacher David Layman, purchased space for an obituary for White in the local newspaper. Layman said the tribute “was fitting, because the series was based in Albuquerque and it provides some of us some closure.” The obit went viral online, spread by BrBa fans. Newsstands ran out of copies, and the Albuquerque Journal got requests for copies to be mailed as far away as Manitoba, Canada. Online, the paper said a story about the obit had the most page views of any story since it started keeping track of its site statistics. The paper, however, says it got a complaint: a reader, editor Kent Walz says, “had avoided knowing what happened to Walter and was going to watch the episode later. He said we ruined it for him.” (RC/Albuquerque Journal) ...Is anyone else shocked that a TV series about a man with a terminal disease dies in the last episode, or was the last guy who reads newspapers the only one?