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So what future do you see fit for Jesse Pinkman? Does he get caught? Does he make it to Alaska? Does he live a tortured life? Or is he content?
I personally like Jesse’s character a lot. Aaron Paul did an amazing job, and made me feel sympathetic for the person he portrayed. But there’s the ending you think a person deserves, and the ending that’s most realistic for that person.
Other’s might disagree with me that Pinkman deserves a “happy” ending, or perhaps think that Pinkman would turn himself in, and feel most content with his life behind bars.
Where would you go if you were in charge of Jesse’s future?
I see him first making sure Brock is OK and maybe with his late mother’s parents, then never seeing the kid again. I think he still thinks of himself as a “bad guy”, or at least bad luck, and would want to spare the kid any more pain.
After that, if I were writing a show with him as the main character, I would have him get stuck on the way to Alaska, like maybe in Montana, and be forced to make some “crystal blue persuasion” to get the cash to continue to Alaska. Of course then he would get entangled in more crazy stuff, and there’s your show.
Jessie’s biggest problem is that he has no impulse control. Whatever feels right emotionally to him at the time is what he does. Hence the reason he’s into drugs, the reason he wanted to kill the drug dealers, and every other thing that Jessie does throughout the series. Jessie is capable of being very creative and intelligent but he doesn’t put as much effort into that as he does to chasing his emotions.
At the end of the series he has nothing. No house, no money. The only real thing he can do is find Badger and Skinny Pete and hide out with them a while which would quickly lead to more drug use to drown out the demons of his time with Uncle Jack and Todd. Realistically Jessie has experienced so much heart break, and he has so little emotional strength, that I think he’d find some heroin and overdose on it just like Jane did.
Jesse is a bad guy. He shot Gale in the face. He helped Gus murder a dozen cartel members. He helped cover up Todd’s murder of the railroad kid. He was a willing accomplice to all of Walt’s shenanigans. Just because he has a tortured conscience and is a loveable screwup doesn’t mean he’s not bad. He is bad.
Saul is gone, which means Jesse has no hope of repairing his vacuum cleaner, either. He will be tracked down and put away for a long time.
Jesse nabs Brock and heads to Alaska. But Brock’s grandparents have alerted the authorities by the time they can get there, and Jesse is apprehended in Oregon. In prison back in New Mexico for kidnapping and maybe car theft – whose car did he drive off with? – he ends up starting a secret meth empire from his cell block with help from a few zany inmates.
In my happy-ending he had a stash of money hidden somewhere. He gets it, leaves a large chunk of it at Brock’s Grandma’s house with a note that it’s for Brock, makes it to Alaska and lives happily ever after as a lumberjack.
Jesse still owns his house. I need to go over the sequence of events in my head, but from what I recall there’s no reason for the authorities to go after him.
The authorities have the late Walter White, and as far as the DEA is concerned Walt was the kingpin. Hank and Gomez knew of Jesse’s connection to Walt, but Hank made sure to keep everything he knew secret from his bosses.
Marie knows about Jessie, but she also knows that he was working with Hank to bust Walt. So far as she knows, he was killed with Hank and Gomez. The only other thing that connects Jessie to the case is the recorded confession, but I think it’s likely that Uncle Jack destroyed that as it implicated Todd in dirt bike kid’s murder.
I’d bet that no one is actively looking for Jessie, that he’s off all radar (he was held as a meth-slave for 6 months or so) and he’s not wanted for anything. I imagine that, if he needed the money and if he kept a low profile, he could sneak into town and sell his house. If he just decided to get the hell out of ABQ, he could pretty much go where he wanted and start whatever life he wanted.
He’s not going anywhere near Brock. He has no legal connection to the kid, who is probably living with his grandmother. He cares about the kid but he knows that Andrea was killed because of him, and I don’t think Jessie could face him.
So maybe he ends up a bush pilot in Alaska, maybe he’s an oil-field worker in North Dakota or Montana, maybe he ends up a junkie in Salt Lake City and turns his life around when he publishes a novel about a loser kid who has his life destroyed by the worst mentor-student relationship in human history.
Jessie is an emotional and physical wreck. He’s been kept as a meth lab slave for months, living in an underground cement cage. Emotionally he’s toast: Combo, Jane, Tomas, Gale, Drew, Andrea…A lot of people Jessie cared about are dead, directly or indirectly due to his actions, and he shot Gale in the face.
That maniacal laugh at the end as he drives off was the sound of someone emotionally unhinged. He’ll be back on drugs within days and will O/D within a year. Sad, because he was probably my favorite character on the show. But no way he goes on to have anything resembling a normal life. The scars run too deep.
There is no future for Jesse Pinkman. I don’t mean to be obtuse, but that’s just not how it works. When the series over so is Jesse’s story.
But if we’re to pretend that these characters exist, let’s take into account the writers’ creativity in previous seasons. There’s no reason not to believe that Jesse is an ice road trucker or a bush pilot if that’s what he wants. It doesn’t makes sense to suddenly start treating the characters as if the most likely thing is to be expected, because the most likely thing rarely happened in a series marked by coincidence.
Really JLR? Jesse is just a fictional character? Who knew? The rest of us all thought this was a documentary. :rolleyes:
Two ways to answer the question … there would a certain balance to the show if Jesse came into his own intellectually and broke good so to speak. Eventually making a life for himself as a chemistry teacher who actually enjoys the job, or even getting a PhD and doing real science, somehow giving back to the world, ending up making some product that makes Grey Matter obsolete and broke, donating most of the profits trying, without success, to assauge his guilt. Some twist has him in some partnership or conflict with Walt Jr.
But the writers made it clear that Jesse was someone who things happened* to* much more than someone who made things happen. He’d make some feeble attempt to live a normal life, maybe try to follow the travel dream he and Jane had come up with, but fall back into his drug using ways and die some ignoble death. Or kill himself. If he didn’t crash the car within a minute.
