Although the end of “Breaking Bad” tied things up definitively for Walter White, the final episode left some plates spinning, and none makes fans more curious than the undecided fate of Jesse Pinkman.
Spoilers Ahead
After living as a slave to Uncle Jack and his gang (forced to cook meth while chained to the ceiling), Jesse finally escapes the compound and drives off into the night, howling with his newfound freedom. That’s the last we see of him though. In the script, series creator Vince Gilligan left his destination ambiguous, writing, “I like to call it ‘something better’ and leave it at that.”
The conclusion of Jesse’s tragic arc was seemingly left optimistically vague, but in light of a new interview with GQ, it seems the ending that Gilligan intended for Jesse may not actually be “something better.”
Fielding a question about what Walter’s plan for himself might have been if the machine gun didn’t take him out, Gilligan said that while he and the writing staff may have had a specific answer, the show now belongs to the viewers. So nothing can be answered definitively, including what happens to Jesse after he escapes.
“My personal feeling is that he got away,” Gilligan told the magazine. “But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they’re going to find this kid’s fingerprints all over this lab and they’re going to find him within a day or a week or a month.
“And he’s still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents,” he continued. “But yeah, even though that’s the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it.”
So while it’s neither a definite answer nor an ending that Gilligan hopes for, Jesse’s arrest for the murder of Hank and Gomie is officially entered into the list of possibilities for what happened to Mr. Pinkman after the series ended.
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