On last night’s ‘Breaking Bad’ season five premier, viewers were treated to a lengthy, drug-assisted diatribe by the character Badger (Matt Jones), who regales Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) with his idea for a script for the original ‘Star Trek’ series (never mind that it’s been out of production for over 40 years). Well, it didn’t take long for an animated version to spring up, created by Matt Czap for Vulture!
The tale of a pie-eating contest gone horribly wrong can be viewed below. Don’t worry, if you haven’t watched the episode yet. This tale has nothing to do with the show’s main plot.
Pretty clever, huh? This story has a funny origin, in that ‘Breaking Bad’ creator Vince Gilligan came up with the idea during the show’s first season and has been repeating it ever since. The writer of last night’s episode, “Blood Money,” Peter Gould decided when he needed Badger to go off on a long tangent, to borrow Gilligan’s pie-eating contest story. He explained, “It would be the ultimate diet, really. Eat anything you want, and then Scotty beams it out of your stomach. But like with great technology, there are terrible things that can go wrong.”
But does the story fit within the strict rules of Trek? Vulture spoke to John Van Citters, the Star Trek brand’s resident fact-checker, and CBS Consumer Products VP. “Theoretically, Scotty could compare the pre-contest Chekov pattern with the ‘new’ Chekov and remove any foreign contaminants from the transporter stream, much the way it would filter out any dangerous new micro-organisms or parasites,” Van Citters says. “However, that depends on him continuously scrambling and dematerializing all of Chekov and not just beaming the pie from his gullet into space… Seems like a lot of work to cheat at a pie eating contest.”
Charles Baker sums things up by saying “I think Peter loves writing those scenes because it doesn’t take much work for him. It’s interesting. It’s such a great scene, but you watch it and you realize, ‘Wow, that scene wasn’t anything about us. It was all about Jesse. It was just to show Aaron Paul’s greatness at work without saying a word. We’re Muzak.’”
What do you think? Could the teleporter really be used to help Chekov cheat at pie-eating? Leave a comment below!
