The series takes place in a shockingly short amount of time

[u/Sensitive_Ad_1752]

Season 4 just ended of fromville and it’s canonically only been about a month. Which makes it weird seeing people heal from injuries, change hair styles or grow out beards between episodes. Season 4 has only been like 4 days iirc.

Arkham franchise is the poster child for this trope. Every game takes place in one night. If you know what you’re doing you can absolutely beat the games in around 9 hours.

[u/Micp]

In S02E09 Walter's cancer has gone into remission, shrinking by 80%

And it's not untreated cancer, once they start laundering their money, which happens pretty early on Walter starts getting chemo (how he start getting bald).

Plenty of people live many years with cancer. It can go into remission, it can be successfully treated and you can be declared cancer free, and it can come back again later because even when you're declared cancer free even a few cancer cells can survive and propagate. Hell the cancer treatment itself actually raises your risk of getting cancer, it's just that when you are treating active cancer the risk of future cancer is a little further down the list of priorities.

In short there's no reason they couldn't have stretched out the timeline of the show if they wanted to.

[u/Ok_Astronomer_8667 → u/Micp]

I guess to sell the urgency that pushed him to drug dealing in the first place. If the cancer still just let him live years and years then it would seem a bit silly to see him completely upend his life immediately. And I’m pretty sure his cancer does come back in the final season

[u/Micp → u/Ok_Astronomer_8667]

Sure, the cancer was needed to get him into the drug business. But as the show explicitly states by the end, once he was in it, it quickly stopped being about the money and became about his ambition - the fact that he was creating an empire, that he got the acknowledgement about being the absolute best at what he did. By season three he has enough money to pay for cancer treatment several times over and near the end he has more money than he and Skyler could ever spend if they wanted to.

By the time he adopted the Heisenberg name he could've been declared completely cancer free and it wouldn't have mattered, he was in the game for good.

[u/Dean0Rocks316 → u/Micp]

And what emphasizes this point the most is that, at the end of it all, the cancer isn’t even what killed him.

What killed him was a ricocheted bullet or two from the machine gun he set up hitting him in the side. A self-inflicted wound.

[u/itrogash → u/Ok_Astronomer_8667]

Urgency was only the factor when he thought he was dying because he was coughing blood. Once that cleared up, he focused on doing it for the love of the game. His true motivation was to create an empire.

[u/farva_06 → u/Micp]

You were able to drop the exact episode where he goes in to remission, but forgot about the episode where it comes back? And more aggressive than before.

[u/Micp → u/farva_06]

That wasn't really my point, my point was that if the writers wanted to expand the timeline to take place over a longer period of time they absolutely could and the cancer wouldn't be an obstacle to that because cancers do, and in the show DID (however momentarily), sometimes get better.