How Walter White Found His Inner Sociopath Ursula Coyote/AMC Bryan Cranston as Walter White in this season's "Breaking Bad." In an episode midway through the second season of "Breaking Bad," Walter White was honored with his very own narco-corrido, a song (performed in a precredit sequence by the group Los Cuates de Sinaloa) that spread the legend of "Heisenberg" across the border from New to Old Mexico and foreshadowed his clashes with the cartel competition. "This homie is already dead; he just doesn't know it yet," the lyrics warned, and of course the joke was that, at the time, Walter's unlikely career as a drug kingpin was made possible by exactly such knowledge. As far as he or anyone else could tell - apart, perhaps, from Vince Gilligan, the creator of the series and the ultimate master of Walter's fate - cancer would finish Heisenberg long before any cartel hit man got to him. Now, five years in, the cable-watching public is awaiting the final stanzas next month in the Ballad of Walter White, who has evolved into a complicated and very contemporary folk hero. His Heisenberg pseudonym was borrowed from the physicist whose uncertainty principle is popularly understood to express the idea that the presence of an observer changes the nature of what is observed. And Walter, a sad-sack high school chemistry teacher who found a vocation cooking the finest methamphetamine money could buy, was always adept at shifting his appearance depending on who was watching. In truth, though, his development over five seasons has been less a shocking transformation than a series of confirmations. Mr. Gilligan's busy and inventive narrative machinery has provided plenty of cleverly executed surprises, but these have all served to reveal the Walter White who was there all along. The sides of his personality - sociopath and family man, scientist and killer, rational being and creature of impulse, entrepreneur and loser - are not necessarily as contradictory as we might have supposed. Or rather, if we insist on supposing that they are, it may be for our own sentimental reasons. We love our television antiheroes, sometimes blindly. When James Gandolfini's death last month revived our affection for Tony Soprano, New York magazine reposted "The Long Con," Emily Nussbaum's insightful 2007 post-mortem on "The Sopranos." In it, Ms. Nussbaum argued that at a certain point, Mr. Gandolfini and the show's creator, David Chase, fully acknowledged Tony's monstrosity, and that viewers" decision to empathize or identify with him was their own guilty choice. The key message to the audience - one many of us elected to ignore - was a line delivered by a psychologist to Tony's denial-prone wife, Carmela: "One thing you can never say, that you haven't been told." We have been told about Don Draper, too, though in the most recent season of "Mad Men," his charm has begun to seem shopworn and sad, and his misbehavior more pitiful than demonic. And the truth about Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston in a career-defining, Emmy-dominating performance, has been there virtually from the beginning. Very early on, after he withdrew his savings so that he and his partner, Jesse, could buy the R.V. that served, for a time, as their mobile meth lab, Walter marveled that he felt "awake." Everything he did thereafter, from the first self-defensive killing to the coldblooded murders that followed, he did with his eyes open. Walter may have wanted us to believe - and may, at moments, have convinced himself - that he was a decent man driven by desperate circumstances to do terrible things, but that notion was either wishful thinking or tactical deceit. Viewed as a whole, in optimal binge conditions, with the blinds pulled down and the pizza boxes and chicken wrappers piling up around the couch, "Breaking Bad" reveals itself as the story of a man mastering his vocation and fighting to claim his rightful place in the world. Its dark, morally scandalous vision has been imposed on the kind of tale that is, more conventionally, an inspiring parable of entrepreneurial gumption. This formula turns out to be well suited to the times. The three principal antiheroes of 21st-century cable television inhabit different regions in the kingdom of modern capitalism. Tony Soprano is the inheritor of a family business, his managerial challenges complicated by kinship ties and tribal customs. Don Draper occupies a high-rise corporate zone of corner offices, mergers and expense accounts. As original as "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" undoubtedly are, they also knowingly draw on a rich reservoir of popular-cultural meanings attached to their chosen worlds. They look at familiar material from a fresh perspective, without quite letting go of the inherited romance of the Mafia and the advertising industry.