The life of Walter White (Bryan Cranston - Malcolm in the Middle), age 50, is a constant battle against endless obstacles. Having once been a successful research chemist at the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory, Walter is now teaching apathetic high school students in New Mexico while also holding down a part-time job at a car wash to make ends meet. Plus, he and his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn - Deadwood), a woman who has carved a modest career out of buying and selling items on eBay, are raising Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), a strong-willed 17-year-old whose cerebral palsy presents a continuous challenge for the family.

But all of these difficulties pale in comparison to Walter’s most recent discovery. The day after a 50th birthday party where his brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Weld (Dean Norris - Little Miss Sunshine), steals the show with anecdotes about life on the front lines of the drug war, Walter collapses at the car wash. And after landing in the emergency room where he is diagnosed with cancer and given two years to live, he chooses to keep the bad news to himself.

Providing for his family’s future is now his top priority, and Walter is presented the perfect opening in Hank’s offer to ride along with his DEA crew. During a raid on a meth lab, he watches his former student, Jesse Lee Pinkman (Aaron Paul - Mission: Impossible III), luckily avoid arrest. Seeing the ramshackle lab that Jesse uses to cook up the drugs and recalling Hank’s tales of the large amounts of cash confiscated during the raids gives Walter an idea. He knows he is a much better chemist than the dealers will ever be, so he raids his high school stockroom for some first-rate equipment after approaching the skeptical Jesse with an offer to become business partners. Armed with all the gear they need, Walter takes his reluctant new partner’s advice and, cashing in his retirement fund to buy a used RV, creates a mobile lab that will allow them to operate out of view of nosy neighbours, their competition and the police.

With Walter’s expertise, it isn’t long before they are ready to hit the streets with the highest-grade crystal meth Jesse has ever seen. But things for the new partners quickly begin to sour when Jesse turns to a local dealer known as Krazy-8. While Krazy-8 is eager to make a deal, his cousin Emilio, who took the fall when the old lab was busted, wants revenge. And things only get worse when, after taking Jesse hostage and returning to the RV, Emilio recalls seeing Walter with the DEA on the night he was arrested.

Facing the possible end to his audacious plan before it can even get off the ground forces Walter to think fast. With a fearlessness borne from the knowledge of his cancer death sentence, Walter calls on his chemist’s experience and engineers a daring escape – one that leaves Krazy-8 and Emilio dead and he and Jesse alive to repair their damaged lab before resuming their quest to become drug kingpins.

Confronting a bleak future that has freed him from society’s constraints and left him with nothing to lose, Walter White is about to undergo a profound transformation – one that will change him from a husband and father struggling through the game of life into a fearless and ruthless competitor in the dangerous world of drugs and crime in Breaking Bad.