Warning: Spoilers For El Camino.
As Jesse was sent barrelling into the dead of night at the end of Breaking Bad, his future was uncertain. With El Camino, we finally know where he went.
Picking up after violent chaos of ‘Felina’, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is on the run after escaping from Uncle Jack’s neo-Nazi compound.
Coming from Vince Gilligan, the creator of the Emmy-winning show, El Camino actually ends rather quaintly – but that wasn’t always the case.
Check out the trailer for El Camino below:
This is your last spoiler warning – if you haven’t watched El Camino, pop over to Netflix now and then come back.
After battling nasty goons associated with Jack’s gang, Jesse goes the Walter White (Bryan Cranston) route – paying Ed the Disappearer (Robert Forster, who passed away last week) for a fresh start in Alaska.
Unlike Walt’s death in the hail of his remote-controlled bullets, this is it for Jesse – he’s finally free, at peace with himself after years of crime and nightmares.
This matches up with Gilligan’s sentiments six years ago, saying he hoped Jesse made it the long road to recovery.
Check out the teaser trailer for El Camino below:
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Gilligan said:
Some people might think, ‘Well, he probably got two miles down the road before the cops nailed him.’ But I prefer to believe that he got away, and he’s got a long road to recovery ahead.
All these terrible things he’s witnessed are going to scar him as well, but the romantic in me wants to believe that he gets away with it and moves to Alaska and has a peaceful life communing with nature.
However, Jesse’s merciful sanctuary wasn’t always guaranteed. As Gilligan threw around ideas about the character’s fate, one idea emerged that would surely cause a divide among fans.
As per Entertainment Weekly, Gilligan said:
I thought it was up to the audience to figure out how Jesse got away, but that it was enough to see him driving off into the night victorious.
But then as the years started to pass, I found myself wondering at idle moments: ‘How exactly did he get away? Because that’s no easy feat! And what if he didn’t get away? What if he got busted right around the next corner?’
In the film, Jesse is no longer suffering the torture of the compound – but he’s still tormented by PTSD, with small things igniting terrified tremors.
In Gilligan’s alternate version, his emotional fate is similar, but where he ends up is much more bittersweet.
Gilligan explained:
I didn’t get super far down the road, but it was probably going to be a young woman who needed some help. He was hiding out by the Canadian border, and this woman was working at a motel as a housekeeper or something.
He goes into the process of saving her, knowing full well that he’s going to suffer for it, he’s going to get caught for it, but he does it anyway. And the last scene would be maybe him in a jail cell but at peace for the first time since the movie began.
I think there was going to be this component where he couldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t get a single night sleep for a week or so upon escaping. The police are looking for him and he’s too haunted and he’s too adrenaline-charged. And at the end of the thing, he’s in a jail cell, and ironically he can fall asleep like a baby. And I thought: ‘Ah, that’d be kind of cool.’
After discussing the idea with his girlfriend Holly Rice, and pitching it to Breaking Bad executive producer and Better Call Saul co-creator Peter Gould, Gilligan quickly realised it wasn’t the right ending for Jesse.
Gilligan added:
The writers and everybody looked at me like I was absolutely insane: ‘You can’t have Jesse back in a cell at the end of the movie! People will tar and feather you!’ I’m glad I listened to them.
While the writer-director conceded El Camino was the best way to close Jesse’s story, he believes there’s ‘a version of that movie that if perfectly executed would work’, but wasn’t sure if he was the man to pull it off.
As for Paul, he told Entertainment Weekly the idea was ‘so interesting’, but added he’s happy Jesse got away.
Paul explained:
Wow…. He never said that to me. Wow. That’s so interesting. I mean, I’m happy that he’s not caught, you know? I’m happy that he got away. There’s some things like as a fan – the parents of the boy [Drew Sharp] who was shot on the bike, I wish they knew what happened to their kid.
There’s little things like that that I would love their family to find out. But also, it’s so perfect and that’s what really tore at Jesse. He’s an emotional creature. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and he cares about people and cares about kids and their well-being.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is on Netflix now – yeah, bitch.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.