Vince Gilligan Said The Original Ending Of El Camino Was SIGNIFICANTLY Different

***SPOILERS BELOW (OBVIOUSLY)***

It's almost been a week since El Camino came out and I think the feedback has been pretty consistent, or at least as consistent as it could be in the Internet Age where everyone not only has an opinion but the means to argue with every person who had a different opinion than them on some form of social media. Some people liked the movie, some people didn't, and while most people agree that it wasn't the most necessary movie in the world, it did give us some closure to Jesse's story, which was nice considering the only character who changed more than Jesse throughout Breaking Bad was the nice science teacher father of two that slowly morphed into a murderous drug kingpin. While I love Reddit theories, fan fiction, and all other types of conversations we can have for hours about what happened to fake people in a fake world, it's kinda nice that Jesse got to escape to Alaska while all his loose ends tied up as nicely as possible for someone that was shunned by his family, spent months as a prisoner to Nazis, and saw multiple women he loved die.

However, it appears Vince Gilligan had a little bit of George RR Martin in him when it came to taking away the happy ending of a beloved character while ripping out the audience's heart. Or at least that's what he told Vulture:

After Breaking Bad ended, you said that Jesse Pinkman was free, that he successfully got away. All these years, you maintained that. But I wondered if you had second thoughts as you started to write the movie. Were there other possibilities you considered?
Yes, I did. I like irony in storytelling. I love ironic twists. Once I had set about coming up with this movie, for the longest time I had it in my mind that the thing we wanted most to see was for Jesse to escape. And the thing he wanted most to do was escape. So I was trying to concoct a plot in which, hero that he is, he saves somebody else — somebody I would have introduced as a new character into the movie. Because he’s such an innately heroic character in my mind, he saves someone at the end of the movie and he willfully gets himself caught knowing that it’ll save this other person. At the end of the movie, he’d be locked in a jail cell somewhere in Montana or someplace. And he would be at peace with it. It was all this very interior, emo-type, very dramatic stuff.

I actually think Jesse's fatal flaw of being good-natured to a fault could have been a hell of a twist to drop on the audience's head and definitely would have elicited more of a reaction than what El Camino got. But holy fuck him rotting away in the clink would've been a bummer, no matter how "heroic" he would have been.

Luckily, Vince's girlfriend threw his idea into a bathtub and his Breaking Bad peers poured acid all over it until it became an unrecognizable puddle of goo.

I pitched it to my girlfriend, Holly, and she said, “Are you out of your mind? You can’t have him in a jail cell at the end. You got to let him get away. People will riot.” I said, “No, don’t you get it? It’s art. It’s artistic.” And then I said, “No offense, you’re not a writer. I respect you, of course, and I love you. But you’re not a writer.” And then I went the next day and pitched it to Peter [Gould] and the writers of Better Call Saul, and they all looked at me in silence. They said, “Are you crazy? He’s got to get away at the end.” [Laughs.] As the saying goes, if enough people tell you you’re drunk, you need to sit down. So I dispensed with that idea.

Again, I get that the reason we loved Breaking Bad is because of the twists nobody could see coming. And the more I think about the deaths as well as psychological damage the "good" characters were dealt, Vince Gilligan has more George RR Martin in him than I realized. But still, bringing back a character that crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side only to throw him into a slightly less smelly river of shit 6 years after he escaped the first river just seems fucked up. El Camino may not have been perfect. But I walked away happy that Jesse didn't fuck up his life any more than the events of Breaking Bad had already done, which needless to say is a LOT. So shout out to Vince's Jane and the other cooks in the Breaking Bad universe for sending Jesse to the Great White North instead of some nondescript jail in the Great Plains.

For more El Camino #takes, check out the BarstoolDVR reaction video me and a bunch of other knuckleheads here did the night (or in this case morning, fuck you Pacific Time Zone) the movie came out.