Breaking Bad extremely playful on set, with Aaron Paul describing him as "a kid trapped in a man's body". Gilligan originally intended for Aaron Paul's character, Jesse Pinkman, to be killed at the end of "Breaking Bad"s first season in a botched drug deal as a plot device to plague Walter White with guilt. However, Gilligan said by the second episode of the season, he was so impressed with Paul's performance that "it became pretty clear early on that would be a huge, colossal mistake, to kill off Jesse". Donna Nelson, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, checked
Breaking Bad that there's an irrefutable difference between what's right and what's wrong, and it's the only one where the characters have real control over how they choose to live". Klosterman added that the central question of "Breaking Bad" is: "What makes a man 'bad' – his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person?" Klosterman concluded that, in the world of "Breaking Bad", "goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else". Ross Douthat of "The New York Times", in a response to Klosterman's piece, compared "Breaking Bad" and "The Sopranos", stating that both