It's an odd little trend once you notice it. It's far from obvious, but it's repeated just enough to clearly establish a pattern of behavior. Is this mimicry some interesting psychotic quirk of a man capable of doing almost anything to survive? It might be. But there are odd echoes through the Breaking Bad storyline that suggests it might be more than clever character window dressing.
Take Walt's wife Skyler as an example. Later in the story, she becomes aware of the threat posed by Walt's right-hand-man, Jesse. She urges that Walt kill him in cold blood. It's a stunning and terrifying transformation — almost as though her prolonged exposure to Walt permanently skewed her moral compass. Considering Vince Gilligan's universe as a whole, in Better Call Saul, our eponymous anti-hero decides to seek revenge on his brother's law-partner Howard Hamlin through what can best be described as weaponized mimicry. He copies Howard's mannerisms, style of dress, and eventually steals his company's logo and name, plastering his co-opted identity on a billboard for the world to see.
What's going on, then? Maybe it gets back to chemistry:
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." – Carl Jung
In addition to being an amazing story about a meth dealer in bad underpants, perhaps Breaking Bad is a Jungian exploration of one flawed chemist's experiment with the infinitely strange chemistry of human transformation.
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