According to user ratings, Breaking Bad is the best series of all time. But MeinMMO editor Jasmin Beverungen never really warmed to the series. As a trained chemist, she had to find out through an experiment that not everything that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman fabricate is true.
Breaking Bad is not only one of the best, but probably the best series that has been released to date. In a ranking on Reddit, the largest rating platforms were compared and an average score was calculated. Breaking Bad emerged as the best series, even ahead of Game of Thrones and Chernobyl.
While I’ve already seen (or am still watching) numbers 2 and 3, I’ve already given up on Breaking Bad twice. I’ve never managed to get past the fourth episode.
This may be due to a combination of several factors:
Unfortunately, the hype didn’t reach me. The series had the best conditions to impress me. Before I became a journalist, I studied chemistry and almost got a doctorate.
That’s why other science series, like The Big Bang Theory, have captured my heart. There’s obviously a lot of nonsense in TBBT that isn’t true. I especially remember the laser safety goggles that would get you two boiled eyeballs.
But precisely because Breaking Bad has a much more serious tone than TBBT, I would have expected that everything would be right here, especially on the chemistry side. The comedy genre is probably the reason why I forgave TBBT’s mistakes more quickly. Unfortunately, in an experiment with a “corpse” I discovered that not everything is correct in Breaking Bad.
Salami experiment showed me that not everything is right with Breaking Bad
What kind of experiment was that? In the second episode of the first season, which I even saw, a body is dissolved in a bathtub. You can watch the scene in the following video from Rotten Tomatoes TV:
The two (hobby) chemists use hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the solution. This is an extremely dangerous acid that I avoided as often as possible during my studies:
Hydrofluoric acid is therefore particularly good at dissolving bones. But what about the meat leftovers? We asked ourselves this question in the trainee laboratory and therefore carried out an experiment to recreate the bathtub scene.
There is now even a spin-off that I will probably never see either:
Better Call Saul – Trailer for the spin-off of Breaking Bad
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We used a plastic container for the experiment because the hydrofluoric acid would have dissolved our glassware. Walter White was right about that. We didn’t want to use a human corpse for the experiment, so we used a salami as a substitute.
We discovered that the salami did not dissolve even after several weeks. Even the concentrated 40% hydrofluoric acid did not help to chop the salami. I still haven’t gotten over the disappointment to this day.
There are even more inconsistencies in the series to prevent copycats. For example, Walter White’s synthesis steps to produce blue crystal meth are made up.
If you were to try out his synthesis route in the lab, you wouldn’t get crystal meth that has such a hallucinogenic effect – and certainly not the blue color that is seen in the series.
At this point I can understand why the actual synthesis route is not shown in the series. But with the hydrofluoric acid I would have thought that a similar effect would be seen here as in the second episode.
In general, I feel much more comfortable in the world of anime. There are shorter episodes here and I know that most of them are nonsense. A few months ago, a green-haired pharmacist particularly captivated me: New anime convinces with a young pharmacist and I look forward to every new episode