The tricky thing about this Breaking Bad movie — which is happening, everyone says so — is that Vince Gilligan and company appear to have boxed themselves in a bit, plotwise. That kind of thing will happen when you kill off just about all of your interesting characters in the last season and then make a prequel series that methodically lays out the origin stories of just about everyone but Walter White, who, again, at least where we left the Breaking Bad story, is very much dead.
And so, Pinkman! Reports — oh, there have been reports — indicate that the movie in question will follow “the escape of a kidnapped man and his quest for freedom.” That sure sounds like Jesse Pinkman, given that our last vision of him involved breaking free from his Nazi hellcage and screaming — literally and figuratively — off into the Albuquerque night. Some reports are even straight-up confirming that it’s a Pinkman special. That’s cool. I’ve given up second-guessing Vince Gilligan on these types of things after Better Call Saul went from “a questionable spin-off about a thin but fun character” to “maybe the best show on television and one that might end up giving the original a run for its money.”
But deferring to his judgment doesn’t mean I’m sacrificing my god-given right to toss out some very bad and very unsolicited ideas for this thing. No, it certainly does not. I am still super going to do that, right now, after this sentence and maybe two more. None of these will ever get made, nor should they. I regret absolutely none of it.
Jesse on the Lam
Okay, I lied. This one might get made. Kind of. Back in the wake of the Breaking Bad finale, when Gilligan was doing interviews galore with every outlet that could wrangle him, he said this about Jesse:
My personal feeling is that he got away. 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. 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.
I… I would watch that. I will watch that, if that’s what they end up making. I am very much here for Jesse Pinkman, like, chopping wood in Alaska under a fake name like Brett Saskatchewan or something. In fact, this brings me to another idea…
Meth Crisis
For reasons that are unclear and never adequately explained, the government needs high-quality meth, pronto. The crystal blue stuff that took over the southwest a few years ago, preferably. Maybe it’s a military thing, maybe it’s an undercover investigation, who cares. The point is, with Walter dead and Gus and his superlab gone, the options are running thin.
CUT TO
A helicopter swoops over an Alaskan forest and lands in a clearing. A man in a suit steps out. He carries himself like someone important, chest out but not swaggering, moving with purpose but totally calm. He approaches a bearded man who has paused his wood-chopping to address this stranger.
“Son,” the man says. “Your country needs you. Can you still cook up that fancy blue meth.”
The bearded man freezes, just for an instant. “Not sure I know what you’re talking about, friend. Name’s Brett Saskatchewan. I work over at the hardwa-“
“Drop the act, Pinkman. We know it’s you. We’ve had you on our radar for months.”
The bearded man freezes again, this time for a few instants. “But… why me? Don’t you have some government chemist who can cook this stuff up?”
“Why you?”
The bearded man gets frustrated. “Yeah, why me? I left that life behind.”
“Because you’re the best, dammit!”
And so on and so forth.
Huell’s Motel Adventure
Ahhh, but what if this isn’t about Jesse Pinkman? What if it’s about another Breaking Bad survivor? One who, say, was left waiting in a motel room and whose story was never given a proper ending? It’s Huell time, baby.
We open where we left off. Huell sitting on the couch, waiting, killing time. He puts on the television. Static. He calls the front desk. They send an alluring member of the staff to fix it. Dark hair, quiet, mysterious. Days pass, he stays in the motel, still, in part because he’s doing as he’s told, in part to come up with more excuses to bump into this employee.
One day, after he kicked the door off his mini-fridge and tried to claim that it fell off when he was “putting the milk back,” they finally have a real conversation. Turns out she’s been at the motel for six years and the manager is a real jerk. Nothing criminal, really, or at least nothing that the police would come in blaring the sirens over. Huell wouldn’t want that anyway. He’s just… he’s just a jerk. So they develop a plan.
What follows is about 75 minutes of goofy shenanigans. They put a potato in his tailpipe, they put laxatives into his soup, they put green dye in his dandruff shampoo. Kids movie pranks. Tons of them. Huell knows he’s playing with fire. One call from this manager could risk it all. But he’ll do anything for this woman. He’s smitten. He doesn’t even care that her nametag says “Debbie” but everyone outside of work calls her Nina. Everyone has secrets.
The Rise of Don Eladio
This one only works if we can figure out how to age Steven Bauer down about 30 years to his Scarface days. Maybe CGI? Or, um, lasers? I’m not exactly sure how the technology works. The point is that I want Stephen Bauer strolling around swimming pools with huge open robes draped over his shoulders and huge cigars hanging from his mouth. Kind of a prequel to the prequel, at the dawn of the Salamanca partnership. B-plot of the movie is Gus Fring in Chile and eventually coming to America. All of it.
I’m serious about the robes, though.
Jesse’s Waterpark
Listen. I can see the writing on the wall here. Jesse got the hell kicked out of him for many seasons. He lost two girlfriends and his family disowned him and he lived in a Nazi cage like a dog for entirely too long. Was he an angel? No, of course not. He killed people and sold drugs and was a piece of crap, in general. But he was sweet. Kind of. You get the feeling there was a much better life for him somewhere, if things had broken a little differently in one or two places. I don’t know. I remain very conflicted about this and probably will forever.
What I am not conflicted about is this: I really do not want to bring Jesse back just to watch life smack him with the sole of a giant shoe over and over again. I can’t take it. I’m just not built for that kind of misery. That’s why I’m pitching this idea, which is literally just Jesse Pinkman opening a water park and loving it. Smiling a lot, goofing with employees, making enough money to be successful but not rich, the whole thing.
Yes, there are problems here, starting with the fact that this absolves him of his past sins and continuing on to the fact that the movie would kind of suck. I honestly do not care. The man has been through enough. Just let him buy some damn water slides, Gilligan.
