Bryan Cranston wears a TAG Heuer Monaco

Partway through the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad, Walter White turns fifty-one, and his former partner Jesse Pinkman gives him a watch for his birthday. White, the high-school chemistry teacher who has spent the series becoming the methamphetamine manufacturer Heisenberg, opens the box and puts it on. Bryan Cranston plays White, and the gift arrives in the season's fourth episode, "Fifty-One," first aired on August 5, 2012.

The watch is a TAG Heuer Monaco, reference CAW2111.FC6183. It is a square automatic chronograph, 39mm of brushed steel, with a royal blue dial, two square subdials, and a red central seconds hand. The Monaco has kept that square shape since 1969, and it has been a driver's watch ever since Steve McQueen wore one in the 1971 racing picture Le Mans. Inside is TAG Heuer's Calibre 12, and a current Monaco sells for around 6,000 dollars.

Breaking Bad treats it as a clock more than an ornament. The night of the birthday, White shows the watch to Skyler and makes a case with it: the man who gave it to him had not long before wanted him dead, so she too would come around. The episode then ends on a tight shot of the Monaco ticking on the nightstand. It keeps ticking through the back half of the series, until the finale, "Felina," where White sets the watch on a gas station payphone and drives off to die. By Vince Gilligan's account that started as housekeeping, since White wears no watch in a flash-forward the show had aired a year earlier, so the watch had to come off his wrist somewhere, and the payphone is where the series finally takes it.