One of the most exciting aspects of the upcoming season of Better Call Saul is the hints it will drop about the post-Breaking Bad world. Throughout the series, black and white footage of Saul Goodman’s (Bob Odenkirk) exploits after being placed in the witness program at the end of Breaking Bad’s final season have been teased. It’s a rare glimpse into the future, which so far has thankfully not ruined the seemingly perfect Breaking Bad finale “Felina.”
One of the best aspects of “Felina” was the ambiguity. Whether Walter White (Bryan Cranston) got the justice he deserved is a question that fans were left to debate, but his fate was sealed. However, characters like Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) still had an open-ended future. Although fans were naturally curious about what Jesse’s life would look like after all the trauma that he had endured throughout the series, many felt that a follow-up would only shed away from the beauty of “Felina.”
However, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan surprisingly revealed that he had put together a sequel storyline that would supposedly “wrap up” Jesse’s character arc. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was dropped on Netflix in November 2019. The announcement was immediately met with skepticism, but Gilligan didn’t try to wrap everything up with a nice bow. El Camino actually sheds more insight on Jesse’s experience throughout the final season, and showed the beginning of his healing process. It serves as a fitting epilogue rather than a new beginning.
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In Breaking Bad Season 5, Jesse is captured by the criminal organization known as The Brotherhood. The utterly unlikeable Todd Alquist (Jesse Plemons) had betrayed Jesse and Walt, selling them out to his relatives in The Brotherhood. Walt selfishly chooses to bide his time, leaving Jesse to wait in captivity. Although the series depicted Walt’s eventual reunion with Jesse, it was never clear what Jesse’s final days with Walt looked like. El Camino shows an extended flashback in which Todd takes Jesse to his apartment to cover up a murder. It’s an intense sequence that gives insight into how much Jesse has changed throughout the series; he’s far from the goofy stoner that we met back in Season 1. Jesse is simply defeated, and can’t even manage to elude Todd after taking his gun. It demonstrated how empathetic Jesse had become, and how he truly wanted to make amends.
The theme of Jesse trying to redeem himself is present throughout. In the film’s opening sequence, Jesse shares a brief conversation with Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) before he is also betrayed by Walt. Jesse asks Mike where he would go to start over, and the older man tells him about his dream to move to Alaska. This isn’t just a touching moment; it gives Jesse a new goal. When we see him at his most defeated when he deals with Todd, it’s clear what Jesse has left to fight for. Jesse’s redemption continues in the present day, and he starts with visiting all the people he was closest to. The characters Skinny Pete (Charles Barker) and Badger (Matt Jones) had added occasional levitating on Breaking Bad, but their reunion with Jesse is played completely straight. They give him a brief resting place, allowing Jesse to adjust to his new reality without being completely alone. Breaking Bad has rarely been sentimental, but Skinny Pete’s line of “dude, you’re my hero” in El Camino is genuinely heartwarming. It’s also heartbreaking; Jesse would be an idol in his friends’ eyes regardless of whether he’d been traumatized, or had ever met Walt in the first place.
Jesse’s reunion with his parents isn’t as smooth. He’s placed in a challenging situation; he knows that as soon as he reaches out to his family, they will call the police and their house will be placed under surveillance. When he finally works up the courage to pick up the phone, Jesse’s apology is a deceit. He has to wait until both his parents and the police have left before he can sneak into the house and break into his father’s safe. It showed that some things about Jesse’s future would have to be ambiguous and that some of his scars would never truly heal. However, Paul really shows the dual meaning in Jesse’s words during the conversation. It’s something that he does a great job with throughout the film, in what is perhaps his best depiction of Jesse ever. We see that Jesse has a more honorable goal, but has to focus on his survival first. He’s still the same clever guy from Breaking Bad. Jesse eludes his potential captors when he returns to Todd’s apartment to steal the cash. In a film that is so emotionally grueling, it’s nice to see a brief reminder of that creative problem-solving that Breaking Bad had been so good at.
What’s even more powerful is seeing Jesse restored with a new sense of confidence that he had never shown before. There’d always been hints of the Western genre within Breaking Bad, but Jesse’s gun duel with Neil Kandy (Scott MacArthur) feels like a shootout taken straight out of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Jesse’s victory in the quick draw is the type of crowd-pleasing moment that we needed after seeing him at his lowest. There’s a symmetry to Jesse’s journey, and while El Camino doesn’t give all the answers, it leaves him in the right place. Vince Gilligan wasn’t trying to answer an overarching question and instead chose to show Jesse's new resolve in the wake of his mentor’s death. Jesse was in the same place that the audience was; he had been given time to process Breaking Bad just like we had. Breaking Bad had ended with Jesse screaming in agony as he drove away. It’s only fitting that El Camino ends with him on the road to Alaska, with a silently content look on his face.
