1.6 "Crazy Handful of Nothin’" - Heisenberg Emerges

Why was it important for the story line to let Walter learn the truth about Krazy8's identity?

       I personally think this episode is the one where we as viewers are supposed to start to root for the character of Walter White. He gives you all you need for that: shaved head, alter ego, motivational speech about thinking outside the box, and an exclamation point in the form of a nifty explosion.

So here are three of the most prominent Facebook fan groups:

• Heisenberg, 6.500 likes. Heisenberg as a public figure.
• Heisenberg From Breaking Bad, 1350 likes. "Public Figure" Hesenberg's main competitor, but just a Teacher by identity.
• Walter "Heisenberg" White, 422 likes. "About: Walter White (Breaking Bad) is a proud and stupid Egomaniac who has just gotten Hank back unto his tail."

  
  

  All three remind me of Henry Jenkins's article "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture":

  • Media producers are consciously building into their texts opportunities for fan elaboration and collaboration...
    [...] and they leak information to the media which sparks controversy and speculation. Media producers also actively monitor and, in some cases, directly participate in the fan discussions on the Web as a way of measuring grassroots response to their productions. The products which are emerging within this new media culture, then, are more complex in their reliance on back story and foreshadowing, more dependent on audience member's familiarity with character history, more open to serialization, genre-mixing, cross-overs between different fictional universes, and more playful in their reliance on in-joke references or spoofing of other media content. As such, these media producers rely on audience access to an archive of episodes on videotape and the informational infrastructure provided by various fan-generated Web sites and databases. The most adept producers in this new media environment are, in fact, using the Web to reinforce or expand on the information contained in the commercial material.