"Breaking Bad" - Creating Magnetic Attraction - NYTimes.com As the creator and show runner of "Breaking Bad," Vince Gilligan is charged with thinking up the most elaborate criminal capers he can imagine. It's the responsibility of everyone else on the show actually to pull them off. Take, for example, this scenario from Sunday's fifth-season premiere of that darkly comic AMC series: the increasingly nefarious Albuquerque drug lord Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) and his accomplices Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) realize that a laptop computer containing incriminating video footage has ended up in police custody. To extract the computer from an impregnable evidence room, the three wrongdoers obtain a powerful but huge electromagnet from a junkyard, put it in a truck and drive it near the police station, where they turn it on and erase the laptop's hard drive from a distance, trashing the evidence room in the process. As Mr. Gilligan acknowledged in a telephone interview, it would probably have been more sensible for his characters to pilfer the computer before the police obtained it. But you say to yourself: Where's the fun in that? Mr. Gilligan said. Let's make life harder for these guys. The idea for this hands-free heist, Mr. Gilligan said, came not from any real-life incident but from the collective deliberations of the "Breaking Bad" writing staff. It was also helped along by Mr. Gilligan's memories of his film studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he used a tabletop magnetic device called a degausser to erase audio tracks. "I remember being intrigued by this magnet and wondering if it was going to destroy my watch or sterilize me so that I could never have kids," he said. The fictional crime it inspired presented more immediate and practical problems for his "Breaking Bad" colleagues. Michael Slovis, who directed the episode, said that even before he received the script a producer told him, "There's a sequence in there, and we don't know how to do it." For starters the production designer, Mark Freeborn, had to find a working electromagnet, which he located in a junkyard in Albuquerque, where "Breaking Bad" is filmed. Then, with help from a technician at the nearby Sandia National Laboratories, he and his crew created a foam copy of this hefty device. "The quickest way for us to move this three-and-a-half-ton piece of iron around," Mr. Freeborn said, "was to make it weigh 50 pounds." The real one was still needed to lift cars in a junkyard scene. Mr. Freeborn said this was followed by about three days of debate among "Breaking Bad" staff members and consultants about how many car batteries would have to be rigged together to provide a portable power source for the electromagnet. "It's easy to think you know what it is, but when you put it on paper, it ain't necessarily right," he explained. The answer they arrived at was 21 batteries connected in series and 21 more connected in parallel. Meanwhile Mr. Slovis was contemplating the scene in which the electromagnet is turned on, sending anything metal in the evidence room whizzing at the wall. To create this illusion, he said, the various items were fastened to cables tied to pulleys that crew members had to turn in a quick and specific sequence. This scene had to be shot a second time when the objects did not appear to fly fast enough in the first go-round. Then special-effects artists digitally erased the cables from the footage. The Albuquerque Police Department allowed "Breaking Bad" to film some parts of the evidence-room sequence outside a substation. Still, there remained the question of how to shoot a scene in which the electromagnet causes Walter and Jesse's truck to tip over and come to rest against a wall of the police station. As Mr. Slovis said, "You can't really go tipping a truck into a municipal property." The solution: build a false wall outside the station and tilt the truck against that instead. Law enforcement officials in Albuquerque said they were glad to help the production, even if the show depicts outrageously illegal behavior. "Criminality is not endemic to Albuquerque, it's throughout the country, and it's a reality," said Steve Warfield, a deputy police chief for the city. Besides, he added, "we don't handle our evidence in that manner, so there's no basis in truth for it." Others were skeptical that the data-deletion scheme would really work. Lucas Mearian, an editor at Computerworld magazine, wrote in a e-mail that while a strong magnetic force could erase a hard drive at a distance, "it's not something that would occur in a matter of seconds" and not "just from passing by a magnetic field." Jason McMillen, a product manager at Garner Products, which specializes in data-elimination equipment, said that providing power to such a device for a sustained period would pose a significant problem. "You would have to brown out a good half a neighborhood," Mr. McMillen said. The "Breaking Bad" team did not necessarily expect that this plot would withstand close scientific scrutiny, though Mr. Gilligan suggested that he would enjoy seeing it tested on a future episode of "MythBusters." He added, "I would love to have "MythBusters" prove or disprove that on their wonderful TV show." But he was not concerned that actual criminals might try to emulate the plan and thus obliterate records of their misdeeds. "It seems easier just to leave town, change your name and shave off your goatee," Mr. Gilligan said. There are easier ways to stay out of prison. Correction: July 16, 2012 An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the number of batteries that would have to be rigged together to provide a portable power source for an electromagnet. The correct number was 21 corrected in series and 21 more connected in parallel, not 24 of each.