Breaking bad alternate endings movie#
Breaking bad alternate endings series#

You can see Jesse’s growth in his choices throughout “El Camino,” most clearly when he confronts the non-cops for the last $1,800 he needs to buy a new identity and a trip out of town. Even though Paul doesn’t quite look like his scrawny, edgy past self, he doesn’t have to you can better recognize it’s the older Jesse remembering these moments rather than the younger Jesse reliving them. That’s why the flashbacks with Mike and Walter work beyond framing Jesse’s thoughts. Some ghosts are helpful, like the weirdly angelic Badger (Matthew Lee Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), but they’re all ghosts - more representative of internal struggles Jesse’s processing than real, flesh-and-blood people. You can tell he doesn’t quite fit, and the people he encounters are remnants of his past or obstacles to his future. Jesse, embodied by an aptly aged Aaron Paul, doesn’t belong in this world anymore. Like Mike (Jonathan Banks) says in the opening flashback: You can build another life, sure, but you can’t make up for your past. Along the way, through self-reflection and telling flashbacks (that just so happen to feature everyone’s favorite former “Breaking Bad” stars), he comes to terms with who he is now.

He has to avoid the cops, who want him for questioning he has to find money, to fund his life on the lamb and he’s got to get out of New Mexico, leaving behind his old life in order to embrace a new one. “El Camino” gives definition to those assumptions, as Jesse is forced to fight his way out of Albuquerque.

But you could also assume from Gilligan’s goodbye that Jesse being alive also meant Jesse would be OK - not OK in the sense that everything would be easy, or that he’d fully recovered from his traumatic ordeal, but that he’d survive, find a different life somewhere along that desert road, and wouldn’t befall the same fate as his one-time mentor. When viewers first saw that exultation in 2013, they were just happy he was alive. Jesse (now an older, bulkier Aaron Paul) screams into the steering wheel as he speeds away from the Nazis who kidnapped him, held him hostage in an underground prison cell, and forced him to cook meth for their own profit.

Breaking bad alternate endings series#

Nothing really changes between the ending of “Breaking Bad” and the ending of “El Camino” - nothing that couldn’t have been assumed from the final shot of the series and the first (present-day) shot of the movie, anyway. The 155 Greatest Horror Movies of All Timeįrom 'Barbie' to 'Babylon,' Here's Everything Margot Robbie Has in the Works Netflix Film 'Darlings' Threads A Difficult Needle: A Black Comedy About.Domestic Violence Neil Gaiman on Why 'The Sandman' Isn't in the DC Universe Anymore: 'It Wandered Off Into Its Own Place' It makes “El Camino” a minor miracle in itself - a worthy epilogue to “Breaking Bad.”

Breaking bad alternate endings movie#

Like much of the series before it, the movie deals with consequences: What ending does Jesse deserve? By exploring that question, Gilligan expands on the surviving character’s self-identity without betraying the implications of his original conclusion. Yes, in his sequel film “El Camino,” the writer-director chooses to share more of what happens after those iconic final shots of “Breaking Bad,” but it’s purely Jesse’s journey and that journey is largely internal. Both factors make the prospect of adding to it daunting, to say the least. Rare is it to find such a fitting yet fulfilling ending to a long-running, highly respected drama series, and rarer still for just about everyone to agree that the show nailed its series finale. Even those who wanted to see more stories with Walter White and Jesse Pinkman had to respect how their stories wrapped up in the award-winning crime saga. Vince Gilligan didn’t want to change the ending of “Breaking Bad.” No one did.