Vince Gilligan Had a Different Ending in Mind for El Camino

We’ve finally got to witness the end to the Breaking Bad saga and Jesse PInkman’s journey in El Camino, and while it’s a satisfying conclusion to the intense and emotional story to what came before, it turns out writer/director Vince Gilligan initially had another ending in mind for the tortured soul. *SPOILERS BEWARE*

In an interview with Vulture, Gilligan revealed that due to his love of irony in storytelling, he originally envisioned a plot in which Jesse would have to put his life behind someone else’s in order to achieve ultimate peace.

“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,” Gilligan said. “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.“

Though Gilligan was fond of the concept, it turns out everyone he pitched it to was not a fan of it and that both his girlfriend and the writers of Better Call Saul convinced him that Jesse had to get away in the end or else “people will riot.”

“As the saying goes, if enough people tell you you’re drunk, you need to sit down. So I dispensed with that idea,” Gilligan said.

Written and directed by series creator Vince Gilligan El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is described as follows: “In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future.”

The Emmy Award-winning series aired on AMC before seasons were later made available on Netflix. Vince Gilligan credited the streamer for its contribution to the show’s success in his 2013 Emmy acceptance speech, saying that he thinks Netflix helped keep the show on the air.

AMC’s Breaking Bad ended its critically acclaimed five-season run with a finale that brought in a series record 10.3 million viewers. It was followed by the prequel series Better Call Saul, focused on Bob Odenkirk’s small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill, which just got renewed for a fifth season.

The film is available for streaming on Netflix as well as showing in select theaters.