"Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan predicts Jesse's fate
At the end of the "Breaking Bad" series finale (obviously, stop reading if you haven't watched it), Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) escapes death and drives off into the night, and that’s the last we see of him.
But what happens after that? The acclaimed drama's creator, Vince Gilligan, has some ideas.
"My personal feeling is that he got away," Gilligan said in an interview with GQ.
But, he warns, Jesse's past actions could still catch up with him.
"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," Gilligan added. "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."
As for Walter White (Bryan Cranston), Gilligan admits he was in the cancer-stricken drug kingpin's corner by the show's end.
"I've kind of bemusedly scratched my head a bit, over the seasons, at the idea of people still rooting for Walt. But I don't think they're wrong. I just think it's sociologically interesting," he said. "Oddly enough, I think I started to root for Walt a little more in the final couple of episodes. I would argue he did the most nasty, sadistic thing he had ever done in our third-from-final episode, where he says to Jesse, 'I watched Jane die.' But in that same episode, he also did a couple of the kindest and most selfless things he had ever done. That episode really encompassed the duality of this character. He could be good, and he could be bad."
As for why the show became such a hit, Gilligan doesn't know the answer.
"We worked our butts off, but everybody works their butts off in TV. We tried to make the best show it was humanly possible to make," he told the magazine. "As to why this thing hit...I could make up some stream of nonsense, but honestly…I wish I could explain it, because then I might have a fighting chance on TV in the future. The truth is, I just have to be satisfied that it happened at all."
Gilligan's interview appears in the December issue of GQ.
Tell us: What do you think happened to Jesse after the "Breaking Bad" finale?