Things could have gone so much worse for Jesse Pinkman had Vince Gilligan been able to go with his original plan. The ending would have been darker, the course that Jesse’s life would have taken could have been a lot worse, and it’s very likely that fans would have been expressing their distaste and/or shock for it in a big way. After all Jesse had gone through already throughout the long history of Breaking Bad it was hard to think that he might have to endure even more struggle, but given that an ending spent with him in prison would have been well beyond the realm of poetic justice it seems that Gilligan made the right move in allowing him to escape. Every now and then there has to be a happy ending to round things out since honestly it kind of takes the joy out of a series if by the end nothing’s been accomplished and the last character standing by the end is given a less than proper sendoff. By the end of his run Jesse had more than earned a reprieve, though of course he had to do a little more dirt to finally get it. Jeremy Dick of MovieWeb has chimed in to make it known that the alternate scenes that Vince Gilligan initially wanted to put in will be available on Blu-ray so that people can see just what might have happened had he not gone with plan B.
Gilligan likely had a plan in place that made sense when he was first drawing this whole thing up, but putting Jesse in another cage by the end seems like a very poor way to go about it unless we could see what was going on in his mind and why he would do this. A couple of people that were very close to him stated that he couldn’t do this, that he shouldn’t go through with it, that Jesse deserved a lot better. He went ahead and shot the scenes he wanted anyway, but then went back and did things in a different manner so that fans wouldn’t be too bummed that things didn’t go the way they were hoping. In a way it’s almost hard to root for Jesse since yes he got a raw deal by the end of the series and was due a little payback, but at the same time this is a guy that made a lot of the wrong choices throughout the series and by the end somehow gets to be the last man standing by dint of surviving and because people actually felt sorry for him. It might sound a bit cruel and even cynical to say that he might not have deserved everything he had coming, but the guy didn’t start out as a genius or as a decent person and yet somehow throughout the history of the show he became the guy that everyone wanted to root for. Someone going from the sleaze, the underdog, and the least likely character to be enjoyed isn’t a new theme in any story, but it’s something that helped to drive the whole idea of Breaking Bad after a while. Gilligan actually admitted that he was ready to let go of Jesse’s story at one point, but brought him back on eventually.
How much would have changed things up? Think about Breaking Bad if Jesse had been allowed to leave earlier, and think of the impact that this would have had on the entire series. People would have been coming up with theories all year long on where Jesse had gone, what he was doing, and if he would ever come back. As of now however he’s the whole story as he’s the only one that’s left, and whether or not there will be a spin-off of El Camino or another show like Breaking Bad is hard to say, though Gilligan doesn’t seem to think there will be. Better Call Saul is about as good as it’s getting right now and even that show is rumored to be ending after season 5. The whole buzz that Breaking Bad created feels as though it’s slowly slipping away finally, riding off into the sunset as it were, enjoying the fan base that made it so great and thanking them profusely with a movie and a great deal of fond memories that people will hold dear for years to come. One thing is obvious, if there is another spin-off it’s going to have to be nothing less than the best since the original series was one of those that fans will always use as a comparison and won’t ever allow people to forget.
As Q.V. Hough of ScreenRant might agree it’s nice to see that Jesse got a proper sendoff for the time being, but if there’s anything next coming down the pipeline it hasn’t been announced yet.
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