With a pregnant wife, a high school chemistry teacher’s salary, a sinkhole of debt, and a teenage son suffering from cerebral palsy, Walter White is pushed to the limits of composure. The focus of AMC’s original series Breaking Bad, Walt (Bryan Cranston) must also abide insolent students and obnoxious in-laws.

It’s enough to make anyone break.

Then, like a fly to a wanton boy, he’s plagued with lung cancer; stage 3a. He’s given about two years to live.

In some of the finest writing anywhere (AMC is remarkable; Mad Men is another masterwork of complexity), the series dramatizes the moral dimensions of a life in extremis. For Walt cannot bear the thought of leaving his family destitute. When he discovers the money involved in the Crystal Meth market, and that one of his former students, Jesse (Aaron Paul), is a key player in the underworld, he and the boy become partners. Walt will “cook”; Jesse will sell.

And so begins the teacher’s double life, hidden from his family and friends, though horribly ever-present to himself. As the series progresses, the man’s schizophrenic soul is tormented—half in, half out of the bed of evil where he lies. Walt marvels at what he does as though at a chemical reaction in his lab, astounded at his capabilities. Is he doing what he is because of what he faces? Or does this power come from something that’s always been there?

The usual casuistries are committed by a man emotionally overwhelmed: “What’s ‘legal’ mean, anyway?”—“Whisky was outlawed once”—“Lines are arbitrary.”

But Walt is too honest to believe such cheap logic. In a powerful scene of dialectics, he asks to be convinced why a savage drug titan who wants to kill him should be set free. Walt and Jesse have trapped the man in a basement, bolted him to a pole by a bicycle lock around his neck. Over a ham sandwich and a beer, the two discuss the eternal complications.

The brilliance of writer/producer Vince Gilligan’s ethical dilemma is in giving Walt a terminal disease. For the possible motives here are reduced. Wealth, fame, love—these cannot motivate Walt. The path he’s chosen cannot even save his life. It all boils down to what is the greater evil: doing this wretched thing, or leaving his loved ones wretched? Or finer yet: which is he too cowardly to face—the destitution of his family, or the desecration of strangers?

Most clever of all, Walt is given one motive outside these two: pride. He wants to provide for his own family, to throw off the condescension he has always been forced to bear. For once, he is praised as an “artist”; no one produces a finer quality grade of the drug than he.

Walt tries to mitigate the gravity of his choices, to limit the collateral damage of his deeds. But we see how porous such efforts are. You can’t stanch a tide with a sponge, or contain a bomb’s blast by shutting your eyes. And even as his own body is desecrated by disease, he beholds what he’s doing to the bodies of men.

Whether it’s the sins of others against us, our sins against ourselves, or only the havoc of a nature gone wrong, it is onto our skin, into our blood and bones that pain and anguish are chiseled. It is the body that must wear the hair shirt of our fallenness—“bearing our griefs, carrying our sorrows, stricken and afflicted.”

As Walt destroys the corpse of a would-be killer, he flashes back to his grad school days. There he stands before a blackboard, sketching out the chemical proportions of the human body. He steps away at the sum, mystified. “There’s got to be more to a human being than that,” he says. A girl across the way, his only audience, suggests that perhaps the number looks wrong because the soul is missing. He walks over, leans in, kisses her, and says to the one we later learn is the love of his life: “There’s nothing here but chemistry.”

The irony is perfect, as the scene swells with everything but science.

It is said that what we are is not what we do at first, but at second; not out of emotion, but upon reflection. Still, it’s often hard to unmeld the two; the soul is tied in knots, and the wiser man is cautious about claiming the purity of his motives. I admit to few virtues because I don’t trust what looks like one: Is this humility or only intellectual honesty? Am I being temperate, or do I only lack opportunity? Would I really turn the cheek, or rather give in to my native lust for revenge?

Most sobering of all is when I know the answer; when there are no attempts to excuse or to ignore or to justify; when I see full well, make my choice, and to the brooding God above I say, as though to a young child—“you might not want to look at this; you might want to turn the other way.”