Breaking Bad ran for five seasons, and during this time became an American TV favorite. One of the reasons that the show was so beloved by the viewers was because of the show's ability to violate the viewers' expectations. Viewers became so entrenched into the "lives " of the characters whether it was: Walt, Jesse, Hank, or even Saul, and Vince Gilligan's willingness to throw audiences for a loop while keeping a sound narrative was the driving force behind the love for the show. .
The use of the expectancy violation theory (EVT) in Breaking Bad is masterful in the sense that when viewer expectations were thrown off course the dividends rewarded to the audience were beautiful, and also didn't hurt the shows ratings. There were times that I was left saying to myself "no way that just happened ", like when Walt allows Jesse's girlfriend to overdose. Other times as a viewer you get a grasp on what is about to happen moments before the expectancy "norm " is violated in which case you get excited to see the payoff. For example the episode where Walt kills Gus while setting up the cops, in one of the coolest season finales I've ever watched, gives you a split second to add up what is happening before it does, and then after it happens you sit there thinking "wow ".
For the group presentation the episode that was chosen by our group for analysis was the third episode of the first season; where Walt has to struggle with killing Krazy 8 and officially "breaks bad ". The chosen starting point in the episode for presentation is when Walt is deciding whether or not to kill or let Krazy 8 go. I chose to focus the EVT from the perspective of Walter White as appose to using the EVT from a viewing perspective outside of the show. Walt's expectancy at the beginning of the situation is not to kill Krazy 8, but to establish trust with him so that he (K8) won't end up killing Walt and his family if released.
Developing out of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime, abjection is central to Julia Kristeva's development of Lacanian psychoanalysis. ... War is abject because of its propensity to break down meaning; in one of Kristeva's more potent definitions, abjection is, "a weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes [one]," (2). ...
