In Romeo and Juliet, Verona is not a place in which you would want to raise your family. The Capulets and Montagues have left the city in total dysfunction. Indeed, the tragic hero in the play is the city. Consider that the final curtain doesn't fall with the death of Juliet, which would seem like the obvious stopping point. Instead, the focus of the play then shifts to Verona itself. Through the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, the city is healed. The title characters were simply instruments of some higher purpose.

Romeo and Juliet is especially comparable to Breaking Bad in that both works could have ended at almost any time and still have had reasonably happy endings. How many times could Walt have retired from the meth business? The day his daughter was born would have been the most obvious start for a new, clean, well-funded life. But his pride forced him back into the lab. Later, he could have let Gus Fring's death set him free. Obviously, he didn't.

Shakespeare wrote, "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow," and if that is the case, what does it say about human beings, the paragon of animals? In Shakespeare's works, each of us has a certain destiny. We can try to thwart it or challenge it, but ultimately we must align ourselves with it. The consequences of doing otherwise depend on the world in question. If the world is benign, you get slapped around a bit and fall in line. If the world has a malignity or malice toward you, you're going to get slapped around and die. What can you do about it? Nothing. In either case, once Shakespeare's characters discover who they really are, the world harmonizes; it falls into place.

All of this is part of the "great chain of being," an idea from the Middle Ages that found new life during the Renaissance and remained resonant through Shakespere's time. According to the concept, everything has a place in the universe. From the top down, you move from God to angels to cherubs and to human world. In the corporeal realm, kings are anointed as the highest creature, followed by aristocrats, the clergy, landed gentry, and the peasant cast. Women rank lower than men; rocks are lower than plants. And so on. Regardless of whether you are a peasant or an aristocrat or a king, where you are born is where you stay. Problems occur when someone tries to step outside of, or reject, the order in the universe. The great chain of being will demand a correction.

Walt threw the universe out of joint the moment he stripped to his underwear and cooked a batch of meth with Jesse. When he rejected his place in society (that of a humble schoolteacher) he destabilized the world around him. He became the dark star around which those who orbited were depleted of innocence. Skyler grew to accept Walt's business and embrace his money. Later, she encouraged him to kill Jesse, who Walt considers to be "family." Hank, who was an early and unexpected moral compass, gladly put Jesse out as bait, knowing that Walt might murder him (i.e. Jesse). Gomez stood by Hank's side during that plan. For his part, Jesse, while angst-ridden and drug addled, still shot an unarmed (and harmless) man in the head, on top of a list of crimes to make Macbeth wince. (Just because you feel guilty while bearing witness to the chemical disintegration of a child doesn't absolve you of guilt.) Alas, Albuquerque.