Breaking Bad is rated the best series of all time according to user reviews. However, MeinMMO editor Jasmin Beverungen never really warmed up to the series. As a trained chemist, she had to find out for herself through an experiment that not everything Walter White and Jesse Pinkman create is true.
Breaking Bad is not only one of the best, but probably the best series ever released. In a ranking on Reddit, the biggest rating platforms were compared, and an average score was formed. Breaking Bad comes out as the best series, even ahead of Game of Thrones and Chernobyl.
While I have already seen places 2 and 3 (or am still working on them), I have stopped watching Breaking Bad twice. I never managed to get past the fourth episode.
This may be due to a combination of several factors:
- The individual episodes are very long at 45-50 minutes. With many series like Fallout, I didn’t mind if the episodes were close to an hour long. However, with Breaking Bad, it felt a bit stretched for me.
- I was told that the series only really picks up pace from the second season. Until then, one apparently has to “struggle through”.
- The characters were unsympathetic to me from the start. Of course, I would have had to watch more episodes to wait for the development of the protagonists. However, with many other series, I have at least found one character interesting after just a few episodes.
Unfortunately, the hype never reached me. The series had the best conditions to impress me. Before my time as a journalist, I studied chemistry and even almost earned a doctorate.
Other science series, such as The Big Bang Theory, have therefore stolen my heart by storm. There is obviously a lot of nonsense in TBBT that isn’t true either. I especially remember the laser safety glasses
that one would catch two cooked eyeballs with.
But precisely because Breaking Bad strikes a much more serious tone than TBBT, I would have expected that everything, especially on the chemical side, was accurate here. Presumably, the comedy genre is the reason why I forgave TBBT its mistakes more quickly. Unfortunately, I had to discover in an experiment with a “corpse” that not everything is correct in Breaking Bad.
Salami experiment showed me that not everything is true in Breaking Bad
What was that experiment? In the second episode of the first season, which I even saw, a corpse is dissolved in a bathtub. You can watch the scene in the following video from Rotten Tomatoes TV:
To dissolve, the two (hobby) chemists use hydrofluoric acid. This is an extremely dangerous acid that I avoided as much as possible during my studies:
- Hydrofluoric acid is a highly toxic substance that can be fatal upon skin contact. It is particularly quickly absorbed by the skin and can thus quickly reach deep skin layers and the bones.
- The acid can already dissolve the calcium from the bones and cause severe pain without anything being visible on the skin surface.
- In the event of poisoning, a syringe with calcium gluconate solution is therefore available in some laboratories that can be injected into the affected area. This way, the hydrofluoric acid can theoretically react with the calcium from the solution without attacking the bones.
Hydrofluoric acid can therefore dissolve bones particularly well. But what about the fleshy remains? We had posed this question in the trainee laboratory and therefore conducted an experiment that is supposed to recreate the bathtub scene.
In the meantime, there is even a spin-off that I will probably never watch either:
For the experiment, we used a plastic container, as the hydrofluoric acid would have dissolved our glass equipment. Walter White was right about that. For the experiment, we did not want to use a human corpse, so we used a salami as a substitute.
We found that the salami did not dissolve even after several weeks. Even the concentrated hydrofluoric acid of 40% was not able to break down the salami. I have not gotten over the disappointment to this day.
There are more inconsistencies in the series to prevent imitators. The synthesis steps of Walter White to produce blue crystal meth, for example, are made up.
If you were to try out his synthesis route in the lab, you would not obtain crystal meth that has such a hallucinogenic effect – and certainly not the blue color that is seen in the series.
In that respect, I can understand that the actual synthesis route should not be shown in the series. But with hydrofluoric acid, I would have thought that a similar effect to that in the second episode would be seen here.
In general, I feel much more comfortable in the world of animes. Here, there are shorter episodes and I know that most of it is nonsense. A few months ago, I was particularly captivated by a green-haired pharmacist: New anime impresses with a young pharmacist and I look forward to each new episode
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