A Satisfying Goodbye
Why go back to the well? Breaking Bad is still widely regarded as one of the best television shows of all time, and its finale is still heralded as a perfect end. Sure, revisiting Vince Gilligan’s criminal world in Albuquerque has worked out with Better Call Saul, but that excellent series is focused on a different time in a supporting character’s life. Why pick up where a perfect finale left off?
Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad, and he returns to that world with El Camino, a sequel film that chronicles the immediate aftermath of Walter White’s death and Jesse Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul) flight from the neo-Nazi meth-cooking captivity he was subject to in Breaking Bad’s final episodes. But El Camino is about more than Jesse’s escape, it’s about him finding a path to a new life after so many false starts over the course of the series.
Gilligan, who writes and directs here, sprinkles familiar faces throughout his film, but he doesn’t let the story become a trip down memory lane. Jesse’s fight to survive and flee is about him looking back at the good and bad of the life he lived in Breaking Bad and finally learning some lessons about where he’s going. Contrasting Aaron Paul’s quiet, desperate performance here with the brash young man he played in the early seasons—Jesse’s days of exclaiming, “yeah, bitch!“ are long gone—makes clear his range and ability to give Jesse a thoroughly lived-in quality. His days in the drug business are officially over, but getting to a place where he can actually choose a future he wants is a new struggle. There’s no Heisenberg or cartels getting in his way.
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are beautifully crafted shows in every sense, and that extends to El Camino. Gilligan continues to make interesting choices in framing his shots, and his use of the familiar is wonderfully restrained, only revealing a returning character or location when the story demands it. Breaking Bad was always more Walt’s show than Jesse’s, and its finale ended with Walt at peace with his actions. Jesse now gets the chance to reach for that, and I don’t think anyone who loves the series finale will be disappointed by how this one wraps up. El Camino is more an epilogue than a series-capper, but it’s a satisfying one through and through.