The Watch - Does ‘El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie’ Live Up to Its Predecessors and Marketing? | The Watch

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

‘El Camino’ is the heavily marketed movie follow-up to ‘Breaking Bad’—can that proposition ever live up creatively to the titanic achievements of the original AMC series? We share our reactions to the film, Aaron Paul’s continuation of the iconic Jesse Pinkman character, and the balance of fan service and creative ambition in the era of the commercialized Thursday-night Netflix release. Host: Chris Ryan Guest: Sean Fennessey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I ain't sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Ringer.com. And joining me in the studio, he just tossed me the keys to his Fierro. It's Sean Fennacy.

I am the one who knocks. Oh, Sean, this is a all-s-spiler, all El Camino episode of The Watch. And when the big picture meets the small picture, right where the Twain meet, that's where you and I are. That's right. That's the center of our friendship.

Yeah. So Sean and I obviously are going to be talking entirely about El Camino, a Breaking Bad movie. It is going to be a spoiler discussion. So please, if you haven't watched Breaking Bad, the Breaking Bad movie, do not listen to this podcast. And if you haven't watched Breaking Bad, do not watch this movie. Huh. Yeah. I guess that's true.

Fair? Although Netflix does have a three-minute recap of the series. If you want to watch that before El Camino starts. That would strike me as a very strange choice. This will be a spoiler discussion. So yeah, and entirely about El Camino. Obviously, El Camino is the story of what happens to Jesse Pinkman in the moments, hours and days that follow the conclusion of Breaking Bad,

the beloved prestige TV show from AMC, from the mind of Vince Gilligan, that concluded in 2013. Chris, I need to know what you thought of this movie. Yeah. Like, I wanted to be on this podcast because I wanted to hear in person what you thought about El Camino. I've been waiting for El Camino with great anticipation, but waiting for your take on this, given how you covered Breaking Bad through the years.

I was shocked by how Safe had played it. And I was shocked by how much more it felt like a reunion movie than it did like an urgently, like a piece of storytelling that had to be told, which is the impression that I was under from Gilligan, that this is something like a lightning strike. And he's like, I have to tell this story. I need to know what happened to Jesse.

I need to show the world what happened to Jesse. and I think that what you get is a very sweet, very well-made, very unnecessary addition to this story. And we could talk about all the different ways and why I feel that way, but I ultimately felt like at the end of the day, this movie should have begun where it ended. That I was very interested in what do you do if you get away with it?

And you are out there in the last frontier, as Ed describes Alaska. or yeah, as I think Mike describes Alaska that way. And Jesse's out there and he's got his new identity and his new Toyota. And he's driving into the wilderness. I want to know what happens next then. I didn't ever really wonder how does he get out of Albuquerque. We never see the movie about what happens after the getaway.

Yeah. We always see the getaway. But if there was going to be one extended getaway. Group of people who could tell that story, it would be the breaking bad guys. I had a very similar reaction. The worst thing that ever happened in this movie is Better Call Saul, because it's literally just a longer and deeper and better version of this kind of a thing, which is an ancillary product around a masterpiece work that has to justify its own existence in its telling.

And far be it for me to tell Vince Gilligan how to make or create anything, but this did just feel not necessary. And we're in an age where we're devoting tons of time to a myriad of things. and there was an expectation that this was really going to matter. And I walked away from the movie admiring it, but feeling like it just didn't matter. And that's so disappointing. Yeah, I think that there's a lot. The Better Call Saw thing is crucial.

I do think that that is the worst thing that happened to Breaking Bad, or at least to this movie in that way. Because not only did they show that there's all this stuff on the margins of the Breaking Bad, like, mothership story that you can explore. And there are these characters that have these really, interesting, morally complicated, both pasts and futures, which I think is a huge part about El Camino is the way it's essentially backwards looking. Yes. Even though it is a sequel or even though it is about what happens next, it is obsessed with the, it almost feels like he's like, I really wanted to do this.

And there's a lot of Todd. Yeah. And it's like, it's almost like he wanted, hey, I had this whole idea for like what Todd does when he goes home to his apartment. I had this whole idea of what like Badger and Peter doing. I had this whole idea and he wanted to go through that stuff and that was more interesting to him than here's how Jesse gets out of Albuquerque and here's what happens next.

Because how Jesse gets out of Albuquerque is essentially Granite State and Felina again. Yes, they're just repeating the structure that we understand with the Ed character played by Robert Forster. Great to see Ed again. Yeah. I love Robert Forster. I've always loved Robert Forster. I always thought that that was such a genius updating of the Max Cherry character

from Jackie Brown. and he's so similar in his affect. But you're right, plot-wise, and I should say, I don't think Breaking Bad was one of the great plotted series of all time. In fact, I'm one of those people who, and I think there were a lot of people like this, who watched the first season and just thought, this is too slow and not for me.

And it took the third or fourth season for people to be like, Gustavo Fring, it's all happening, dude. You gotta be watching this show. Either at Jane or as Jane was kind of fading away from the story. Yes, and I was one of those people in part because I couldn't quite get on its frequency. And this movie is sort of on a breaking bad frequency. It's very interested in its flashbacks.

But aside from that, it's a fairly quiet, methodical character study about a person at the edge of his own existence. And it's kind of a fascinating document, I think, of filmmaking. It's very much like Sergio Leone movie, very much like a Michael Mann movie, very meditative, pretty raw and violent at times, a little bit about the sort of mechanics of how to do things. but as a functional sequel to a celebrated prestige TV show, do you think that we've been talking about this a lot lately about the way that TV shows are trying to follow up their own stories? Yeah. You know, where do you think that this fits in in the hierarchy?

I think it's a lot more like the Deadwood movie, which I think was compromised by obviously not being able to get off the ground for most of a decade. And then Milch's illness at the end, you know, at the end of the day. And then I think it reminds me a lot of the first Veronica Mars movie, which is essentially like a love letter to the fans. And that is one thing that I think Breaking Bad is pretty perfect. But I've never understood being like a Breaking Bad super fan.

Now, that's not like a criticism of people who are because I think it's really like having that kind of engagement with a piece of art is totally fine and totally cool. But the idea that you would need to go back and just give fans that one last ride through a cast of characters who had the perfect last ride. Can you imagine a better send-off for Jonathan Banks' character for Mike then the one he got on Breaking Bad or the one he is currently getting on Better Call Saul? Why would you go back and add another one in there? And the same thing goes for Walter, which is I think something that people are going to be talking about is whether or not they needed that last Cranston moment. I personally loved the last Cranston Paul moment in Breaking Bad. That was very dark, and a lot of it was left unsaid. And that kind of brings me to the case I would make for this movie,

which is essentially that Cranston was the brain or the head of Breaking Bad, but Jesse was always the heart. And Jesse's arc was kind of tortured, quite literally, in the last season of the show. And that they had put this character through so much, both physically and emotionally, that they almost felt like they needed closure for him, that they needed closure for the character.

On the one hand, I agree with that. On the other hand, that image of him sort of maniacally driving away from the scene was such a gripping capstone to the show. And, you know, sometimes it's better to not know. You know, I think a lot of movies, I saw a horror movie last night, I love horror movies,

horror movies almost always lose me at the end. They always lose me in the last 10 minutes because they feel the need to clear things up, explain them, conclude them. And most of my favorite horror movies leave me with this sense of a lack of clarity. And we know that Jesse gets away, but we don't know if he gets away. And El Camino shows us that it looks like he gets away.

Yeah, right. And I didn't want that confirmed for me. Well, I actually, it was sort of weird because a couple weeks ago, I can't remember if I was talking to Grotto or Andy about it, but I kind of guessed that this was going to be what the movie was going to be about. Or I at least said that one of my favorite moments that kind of is overlooked in the end,

towards the end of Great Bitring Bad, is Granite State and is the Robert Forster Ed character and taking Walt out of New Mexico and taking him to New Hampshire and that like outside, taking that character who we associate so closely with Albuquerque in that setting and putting him somewhere completely,

completely different and making him the fish out of water. And I thought that that was really breathtaking when it happened the first time. And I was like, well, I wonder if they'll do something like that with Jesse. Maybe not necessarily with Ed, but that they would put Jesse as a Everglades, you know, boat captain, tour guide or something. And that's just what Jesse is doing. And then he gets involved in one thing or maybe somebody tries to come get him. I don't know.

So I was kind of surprised to find out that that is what they did. Because I would imagine that they would have like a much better idea than me. because that's why they make Breaking Bad. Do you think that it's impossible to officially confirm or deny this, but do you think you would have enjoyed Jesse in Alaska a lot more than just Jesse exiting Albuquerque? This is the thing. It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback

and be like you guys didn't go all in on this. You decided to stay in Albuquerque to keep all the old characters around, regardless of how they looked now, which we can get into. And just kind of tell a Breaking Bad puzzle episode two or three times. Like how is Jesse going to get the money out of the refrigerator? How is Jesse going to get through the welder's office? How is Jesse going to get out of Aberkirky?

And it's easy to say like that if they had done a meditative character study about Jesse Pinkman living in rural Alaska and thinking about what happened to him, I don't know if fans, I don't know what people would have said. I don't know what I would have said. But it was interesting that like you're saying, that end shot of Jesse driving away leaves everything to the imagination and to watch El Camino and be done and be kind of like, I kind of prefer my imagination

to this. Yeah, that was the feeling it left me with, which is not to say we're being a little bit down on it. And I think we're being a little bit down on it because Breaking Bad set such an extraordinarily high bar, such a special show. And one of the things that is very special about it, and Adam Neiman actually wrote about this on the site and also made a video for The Ringer, is it was kind of a feat of filmmaking inside of a TV series and the filmmaking in this movie is really good

but that isn't one we're watching it on Netflix we're not watching it in a movie theater so you're not getting quite the same kind of I don't know seismic impact that you would have as a movie movie. It is in some select theaters but yeah right but I mean I would say the vast majority

of people will see it on the service and even though Breaking Bad is brilliantly made it's not considered necessarily as rewatchable as some of the other signature prestige TV series, I think because it's not as laden with like fun dialogue slash humor. Right. It has some of those aspects.

Right. But for the most part, if you rewatch like the Fly episode that Ryan Johnson directed, you're watching it with like cinephile brain. Sure. You know, you're looking at the shots, you're looking at the composition,

you're thinking about the tension that's created, the anxiety. But like, what actually happens in the episode is not a fun romp. And I think because of that, The movie is kind of faithful to that in some ways. It's very meticulous. Yeah, well, that's the thing that Saul figured out,

is that you can know what's going to happen to a character, although they've done this brilliant thing with the flash forwards in black and white of this guy working in a Cinnabon. And now we're both watching how Jimmy becomes Saul and then why Saul becomes this guy in Nebraska. And we have like these three different timelines, basically. With this, it's just much more,

well, I kind of know that they probably wouldn't have gotten everybody back together to kill Jesse Pinkman before he gets out of Albuquer. Right. So I know the end, which was always sort of a lot of the tension around Breaking Bad as you're watching box cutter and you're like, holy shit, I did not see that happening. I did not see the think that this was going to happen. I had no idea how they were going to get out of this situation, but I didn't think he was going to kill Gail and I didn't think that they were going to kill Victor or whatever. Well, if you know it's going to happen, broadly speaking, and there's not even really anything to overcome. I mean, essentially, this is a movie about a guy who has to get $1,800 more dollars and probably goes about it in the hardest way possible. Mm-hmm.

They probably could have just, like, stolen his parents' Prius and sold it. Yeah, the showdown with the welders is, is elaborate. Yeah. It's really just about being back there and putting on the leather jacket and watching guys call each other bitch and just kind of living through that again. So I want to ask you this. We've done a lot of stuff on the site about it. I think that there was just this even more than usual, incredible veil of secrecy around this movie.

Do you think that the way that the film was marketed, the way that the film was sort of presented to us, changed the way you viewed it? Well, they successfully eventized the movie. They got me really, really excited for it. And I watched it at midnight the night it was released. and stayed up to watch it because I love Breaking Bad and I was eagerly anticipating this,

not just because of what we do at the site, but because I was fired up. I love a new movie. I love when a new movie arrives. And I didn't even see the film early, like I have a chance to see the film early. I was just like, I'm going to watch it the way a lot of other people are watching it right now,

and I was happy about that. And then that ultimately leads to what I assume you'll agree with me about, which is just an inevitable disappointment and frustration because it's not, the results of the film are not worthy of the secrecy. And it feels a little bit like the way that J.J. Abrams would talk about movies in the past sometimes. Yeah. You know, where he'd be like, there's a big mystery right in the center of this thing.

But if I tell you that it's a mystery, then I have to kill you. And if I don't kill you, then I got to kill myself. And it's like, why are we going down this insane rabbit hole to protect something that isn't actually there? Yeah. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to appreciate, admire, and even love El Camino. I think a lot of people will. but in the hype cycle that we live in, it's fine. It's like, it's a movie?

Yeah, I think if you are somebody who, if Breaking Bad feels incredibly recent to you, if you've rewatched it going into El Camino, or if you were a little bit late coming to it, or if it's just something that's stuck with you over the last six years since it went off the air, and it's just like, there are people who feel this way about Friday Night Lights.

There are people who feel this way about The Wire. There are people who feel this way about Mad Men or the Sopranos where they're just like, it's just the main thing in my brain when I think about television, then this probably, like, just hits a lot of pleasure centers. For sure. And... Do you feel taken advantage of in that respect?

No, not at all. I will say I did not think that the movie was manipulative at all, almost to its own detriment. Even the Jane scene? I think that each of the flashback, the major flashbacks with the exception of Todd, although I think Todd probably figures into this somehow. I just haven't quite cracked it.

I liked being back with my favorite sociopath. Dude, make Breaking Todd. Yeah. It's fine. me, Plymins is amazing. He's so good. Yeah, I mean, and that was, I always thought that they had a bad guy problem after Gus. And Todd was so much more enigmatic than Jack or the other guys, but you had to have something

even more menacing in the background. I was so happy to, like, that, those interactions about pepperoni pizza and soup and cleaning ladies and all that stuff was just incredible. but I think that the flashbacks largely are philosophical in nature. So I never felt like, you know, it's not like when you get Walt. It's like, I just wanted to tell you that I always loved you, Jesse. You know, it's like, there's no heartstring pulling going on in that scene. Do you feel manipulated?

I didn't feel manipulated at all in a scene-to-scene moment. But when I looked back at the movie and I saw that we did get basically a moment with every significant person in Jesse's life. Now, not in the show's life. Right. There's no Huel in this movie. No Schuyler. No, Walt Jr. Yeah. Tons of characters are not there. And we even get a call back to the little boy. You know, we get a call back to that letter that he's sending him at the end of the film. And it just felt a little bit like paint by numbers.

Or it was like, we know we have to hit this person and we know we have to hit this person and we know we have to hit his parents. We know we have to hit this person. You know, we get Skinny and Badger and everybody kind of kind of comes back in some former fashion, and that just felt... It's a series of goodbye letters. It's like, you know, Skinny gets to say, you're my hero. Jesse gets to say to his parents, you did your best. It's not your fault. You know, like, I...

Maybe that's nice. Maybe I need to chill out. Yeah, well, but that doesn't change the fact of whether or not you enjoyed the movie. You know, I don't think we have to apologize. I'm not trying to piss on people's parade and say, like, oh, you guys are corny for like this movie. I think I'm very, very interested in if you do this and you already have, and Killigan has been explicit about like, I don't want people to think like, why did George Foreman get back in the ring with me? You know, I'm very nervous about this and, you know, I missed my writer's room. He said all these things in the Hollywood Reporter. It's not like that. It's just that if you have something like Saul that's pushing this story in so many different directions, I've been on this podcast for like two years, three years with Saul talking.

about how that's one of the most brilliant explorations of intellectual property that we have in that idea that you can play around with these tertiary characters and introduce more characters and connect time in different ways and show how people are corruptible. And then to do another, to do something else that doesn't have that same creative vision is kind of disappointing, I think. Yeah, I mean, you know how much I love Better Call Saul. In fact, Better Call Saul is kind of an interesting object to study in the aftermath of something like Joker. Like it's such a significantly better origin story than a lot of the origin stories that we get. This is obviously the opposite.

It's a postscript. It's an epilogue. It doesn't necessarily explain why things are the way they are, but it lets us reflect on a character that we came to care for over a long period of time. And that's powerful. I guess I just can't get past the fact that if you look at the moves that are being made in the film, it just feels like it would have been time better spent, though. maybe not as lucratively, but creatively or intellectually better spent for somebody like Vince Gillian who is so, so creative and so precise, to just make a movie like Thief, to just make his own

original story that uses the same ethic. Because he does have this incredibly dynamic sense of framing where to put characters in peril. He creates tension, even where there shouldn't be tension. Even the first encounter between Ed and Jesse when he's trying to return to him and he's sort of looking around the vacuum shop, and then he drops the money on the table, and then he called, the Ed calls 911. And that scene, the movie kind of comes alive for five minutes. I can tell you why that is.

Why is that? Because that is the Jesse Pinkbin we remember. Right. Because Jesse Pinkbin throughout the rest of El Camino, and I actually really, like, have nothing but admiration for Paul's performance over the last couple years. It's pretty rare that you see someone,

especially in television, willing to kind of sacrifice everything that made them famous. His charm. To just go through hell. while everybody else around him gets to have cool hats and spin-off shows and, you know, catchphrases. I mean, he, like, literally got tortured for a season and a half, had to watch his girlfriend, two of his girlfriends die, you know, gets thrown in a cage and tortured by Nazis for a while, and then gets to just drive off into the dark. We have no idea what happens to. Meanwhile, Walt gets all this pomp circumstance around his, like, the character's end. but when you see El Camino, he's like five different people.

Now, maybe he would be. You know, maybe he would be, he's obviously going to be traumatized after this. And he goes through the whole, like, you know, kind of like, shaves off his head and he tries to get back to normal. But the Jesse who walks into the vacuum supply shop is the Jesse that we remember. It's the guy who's like, I can kind of put this together in my head, but I'm two cents short. And I'm going to try and just willpower my way. It's the same thing was when he was cooking. He was always a couple of percentage points short behind wall in his purity.

And this is a story of a guy trying to get that extra 2%. And he literally says to Ed, I'm 96% sure you're the guy. Yes. I mean, that was obviously a nod to it. And I think that was where I wanted, I guess if you're going to go back, give me that. You know what I mean? I know, but there was something else in that, you're 100% right. And I think that's a brilliant reading of that character and the performance that Aaron Paul has given over

the years. But there was just an energy in the scene. There was just a kind of a liveliness. There was a tension. And it wasn't the kind of tension born of a Western-style shootout, like the one that Jesse has later in the movie. It was born of an interaction. You know, and there were a lot of great interactions on this show, most of them between Jesse and Walt or Gus and Walt or even Skyler and Walt. And losing Walt from the Jesse equation, it's obvious, but it's felt. And the the way that they try to solve against it, as you mentioned earlier, doesn't quite satisfy the feeling. And sometimes you need the head.

You know, you called Walt the brain of the show. Like, you really do need the head sometimes to tell the story. Better call Saul works, I think, because Jimmy is a, he's a head and a heart at the same time. And we're slowly seeing his heart die. And that's part of why that character is so interesting. And he has a foil. He has Kim.

Exactly. You know? And El Camino, the foil, is just desperation. It's the clock. Yeah, exactly. It's getting out. And we don't even, I mean, you know, we didn't even have, we had, in the Breaking Bad, you have these, like, representatives of law enforcement.

You have representatives of cartels. Like, you have all the different factions and all the different narrative forces in the show are represented by character. And in this, it's just sort of a vague feeling of dread and that a thousand cop cars are coming for me at any given point. And then by the time we finally settle on what he has to do to get out. you get a very good performance from Scott MacArthur, who's also really great in Righteous Gemstones,

as the welder, Casey, I think. Yet, it's very strange to sort of introduce a heavy this late in the game as, like, he has to cross an evil welder who built a torture device for him. Struck me as the exact kind of character who across an entire season of Breaking Bad would have been brilliant.

Awesome. Because that first encounter that they have when we realize that he is not a police officer, and then the tension in that scene with the refrigerator, and then getting to the sense that we're going to get payoff on this feud, on this showdown. You know, that moment when he looks at him across the street and says, I was waiting to see how long it was going to take for you to recognize me. And that shot when they're pulling away and he's standing in the middle of the street,

there's a bunch of shots of like really fixed on top of car hoods that is really cool. That's all the Sergio Leone shit. That's good, the bad, and the ugly. That's Vince Gilligan scratching that itch, which is really cool. Yeah. But it kind of just resolves itself too quickly. Across nine or ten episodes, you might have felt like with Casey, you know, we got major payoff. Yeah.

And in this, it just kind of moves too quickly, which is sort of the opposite of some of the other problems that we're identifying here. It's really interesting. You've posed a fascinating question here that I want to hear you answer, which is, is it better that this was on Netflix rather than AMC? I would have make a humble suggestion to Netflix about these things, which is I know that they're very dedicated and the numbers probably prove them out to a certain model of release, which is not unlike the music industry at midnight, these things are live on streaming services and diehards can stay up and casual fans can catch it on Saturday or next Wednesday or whenever they want. They just have to pretty much avoid the internet until then. I would submit that something like this, something maybe even like Roma, would just be better

if you guys just put it out at 9 p.m. or Sunday at 8. Or, or Tuesday night at 11. And it can be available forever in perpetuity and whenever people want to watch it after that. But there's something strange about all this buildup for a midnight release on a Thursday night. That just seems almost self-defeating. And I think we've repeated this theme over and over again,

which is that I'm starting to lose touch with how a normal person would watch something like this. It might be really easy for a normal guy who is at an office and is just like, oh yeah, I'll watch El Camino. I'm gonna probably watch that Saturday night. That'd be awesome. And it's not like he's gonna be bombarded

by Vulture and the Ringer and, you know, Vanny Faire about like everything you need to know about that crazy ending in El Camino. But. And yet here we are on a Friday morning recording this podcast. Because I want this podcast to be there for that guy when he finally gets around to watching El Camino. What are you doing, bro?

It's a really interesting thing. There's a really average breaking bad movie waiting for you, homie? Fuck baseball. It is, but it's a through the looking glass proposition because I think Netflix is in the same boat. Netflix is like, what we want to do is own the weekend. So how do we own the weekend by releasing on a Thursday at midnight in every territory in the world? Yes.

And it's interesting because it creates a higher level of tension to watch it at the right time, but also not everyone is going to be able to watch it at the right time. If they did what you're suggesting Sunday at 9 p.m. Right after Successions finale, El Camino will go live. We'd all watch together. What if it went live after the Super Bowl? Like, why not do stuff like that? Well, I think there's a reason for that.

You can't put a high, high value property in that space. What you need to put is something that is modest, mediocre, not bad, but just okay in that space because you can't eventize that thing. Okay, so then... Christmas Eve. Yeah, I mean, sure. Thanksgiving Eve. You know, it's something where you're like,

everybody in America is going to want to watch something tonight. They've done that before. They've been smart about, like, releasing stuff in that spot. They've got a lot of stuff in the pipeline, man. Have you not seen the trailer for Earthquake Bird? You knew a leash of a candor film, which is attempting, I think, to replicate the success of Bird Box. I mean, if she wants her, she could go for it, man.

I mean, like... I think for Netflix, it's different because they have so much content. They're still counting on the Irishman and marriage story and all manner of series that are coming later this year. A Breaking Bad movie is special, even if the results of the movie don't feel as special as necessarily we want them to. And, you know, we should probably ask ourselves if anything was ever going to make us feel like, yes, you did it. You know, like it's an unfair bar. Yeah, I think, I mean, that kind of goes back to what we were saying about the ending of the film, which I think is awesome. You know, because you have both the, the no way.

nature of the storytelling with just like everything in the back of that truck that Ed's driving and you're like, this is so well thought out. You know, this is so cool. Jesse and a cable knit sweater with a space heater and, you know, he's got, he's all set up back there. Like this works.

And that moment where he's kind of gotten out of the truck and you're like, what's next for this guy? It ends in the same place Breaking Bad does though. It's like, oh, what's next for this guy? He's driving out and instead of crying, he's smiling. So I guess that's nice for the character. Well, there are some thematic elements that are cool, you know, moving from the desert to the cold and the snowy terrains of Alaska

and the sort of hot and cold nature of that show, the hot and cold nature of Walton and Jesse, the sort of the fear at the end of the series, the joy at the end of the film. Like, I like where they landed. It's just that there's an unknown quality that is way less enticing than the unknown quality we had at the end of the series, as we said. Yeah. So it's tricky. again, like there are a lot of accomplishments intellectually inside the movie?

Yeah, they do several, and I wanted to ask you about this, about how you felt it worked as a movie, because it does feel, it feels like maybe three episodes compressed into one story. They do several of those kind of classic Breaking Bad, I think I mentioned this before, but Breaking Bad puzzle solving, problem solving moments where Jesse is presented with a seemingly insurmountable task,

not necessarily physically, but like with a clock on him, he intellectually needs to figure out how do I get out of this room or how do I hide this car or how do I get out of this city? And usually breaking bad, one of the hallmarks of the show was how well thought out that was. Now, I did think they cut a little bit of corners. You know, it's not like a huge critique, but there were cops outside of his parents' house.

He sneaks in the back door. He goes in there, he gets two guns. And then the next thing you know he's at the welder's office, but they never really show, like, how he eluded the cops on the way out. And, you know, like, all the things that you would have to do. Why weren't his parents' phone tapped, you know? Yeah, I mean, it was because those two cop cars drove off with the parents. So obviously, they knew Jesse had called from a burner and figured,

okay, we're going to follow the parents to Jesse. But one set of cops stayed and watched the house. I think a breaking bad episode from season four would then be like, and now Jesse has to get out of the house. And instead, it's just cut to Jesse's outside of candy welders with two guns ready to get rock and roll. Right. And that episode would have been called like Home Sweet Home. Yeah, right.

And you would have heard Home on the range on the soundtrack. Daddy's Lugar. Yeah. Yeah. But what did you think of it in terms of its pacing and structure as a film? It's okay. Yeah. It's still TV.

There's still a lot of scenes where someone is watching a news report and that's how we're getting information delivered to us. Yeah. Jesse Bruce Pinkman. Yeah. I just, you know, those are hacks. Those are storytelling hacks that. films that are trying to accomplish what this film is trying to accomplish don't usually have to do

which is like situate the audience, calm people. TV has a different mode. It has a different desire. It's meant to be more comforting. And even Breaking Bad, which is probably the most discomforting hit TV show in history,

still had to guide you through the process of storytelling. And this movie has to do that sometimes. And so it makes it feel less like a movie. A lot of movies are, and not all movies, should say, but kind of masterpiece movies, works from great artists, are less worried about holding your hand, and they just kind of thrust you into a world, and they're not dependent on

exposition, they're not dependent on reminding you of the past, things like that. Breaking Bad definitely had lots of, like, episodes that opened after the cold open with the white family at the breakfast table being like, here's what this episode's going to be about. Exactly. I have to go to the carwash. Yeah, and I think because of that, and because of the literally episodic nature of the encounter, that Jesse is having where he goes to this place and then he has this memory. And then he goes to this place and he has this memory. It just, it feels like TV. I love TV.

I love Breaking Bad. But it doesn't, it's not that Michael Mann thing that I'm describing. It has kind of reflections of it. But it can never totally get there. And that's, that's okay. That's nothing wrong with that. I'm obviously a bit specific about movies. I would prefer a movie.

But it is, I think you're right. There's just a compressed episode. element to it, which it makes me wonder, do you think that there should be more of, not the Breaking Bad story per se, though maybe we can talk about that if you want to, but should there be more of the Jesse story? I don't think they'll ever go back to it.

I think this was very much a sign-off, and I think it would be kind of an admission of defeat to say, like, we have to pick this up again in Alaska. Now, this could have an incredibly warm reception. I've seen the reviews kind of coming in, and for the most part, they're like, Even if it doesn't change the game, it's still a great game to play, kind of, you know, like, it's a lot of like three out of four reviews. Yep.

Do you think that people are afraid to say I wasn't that wild about this because of how important Breaking Bad is in the consciousness? Well, I think that there's like a total, there's like a whole thing where you're like, why do you guys watch this if you don't like it? You can't fucking say that to us, right? Oh, yeah. We love Breaking Bad and I wanted nothing more than for the show to be like, I don't know. an absolutely gripping chase movie or an incredible meditation on how you put your life back together

after like the most traumatic series of adolescent years that Jesse had. Yeah, well, it's, and it's something that you and Andy have talked about for years, but it's being judged literally against probably seven or nine of the best episodes of television ever. And we're talking about fly and Granite State

and Ozzy Mandias. And when we did the 100 episodes, we were literally fighting about how many Breaking Bad episodes. It's so hard to pick. And so many of them come in those later stages. That's sort of three, four, five, six season time period. Those are fresher in our memory, and they hold up that the series still works really well.

And so we can't get out of the way of that. And so it's interesting. I've seen something similar. There's a lot of like, um, it's great to have a game. You know, like this is, there's something strong about this, which is not the way that we talk about things usually in our culture. Like usually it's very like, this is the worst or this is the best. Yeah.

It's kind of nice to have something that is like, it's good. It's solid. It's not bad at all. Can we talk a little bit? about the fact that the people in this movie are six years older than the last time they played these characters. And that by starting the movie seconds after the end of Breaking Bad, it really does call attention to that. I think it really works for Aaron Paul because we know he's gone through hell. Yeah. So I thought it actually was effective to make him feel, you know,

he's just a little bit thicker around the edges. He's obviously a little bit more worn in his face. People often gain weight when trapped in neo-Nazi concrete cages and cooking meth. guys. It's a fair point. He probably should be very skinny. Todd was giving him ice cream. At various pizza and ice cream was like usually the one or two treats. Did he get that pie?

That pepperoni pie? I assume so. Okay. Yeah. Maybe he had some soup in the residence. He's got the bacon and bean soup. I wasn't bothered by with Aaron Paul. Almost every other character.

I was like, this person is literally a little bit more rich than they were six years ago and so they're a little bit fatter. Which is unkind, but it's like Mike is older. Walter is older. Kristen Ritter is older. All of these characters are older. Skinny is skinnier. Plemons is not...

No, but he's a fucking lord, though. He is fucking awesome in this movie. He is so good. Breaking Todd is a good idea. You're right. Why not? I know. Why not?

Well, I mean, we can't... Young Todd. Like young Sheldon, but about Todd. But Plemons? Yeah. Okay. Plemons plays baby Todd. I don't see, why not?

It's Plemons for 30 consecutive years. like looking at spiders. Why not? Who says no? Probably Jesse Plonitz. I'm not so sure. He's adventurous. I thought he was great and I loved the the whole sequence of the cleaning lady,

the apartment, getting out to the desert, the burial, and that moment where you can kind of, where Todd like fully breaks Jesse by basically talking him into not killing him. And it gives you actually, that was the one part that I thought, gave the last season five of Breaking Bad a little bit more resonance. Because if you understand that that happened,

you kind of understand a little bit more about how cowed Jesse is by Todd in those moments. Right. Did you struggle with that in the last season, kind of trying to figure out why Jesse... No, I was never like, why doesn't Jesse go full Stephen Seagall here? Or I kind of was, you know, and he goes through so much doubt and depression in that cage. It's not like I was like, Jesse needs to man up and kill all these guys. but you can see the progress of Todd kind of being more of like a psychological torture,

you know, towards Jesse of like dangling, you know, little treats and even just a human interaction, which you can tell Jesse starts to like slowly warm up to, but basically treating him like a pet, like a dog. Yeah, it always, I think when I watched the show, it struck me more like, this might be a reach, but like a reflection on Abu Ghraib and kind of like Guantanamo and things that were being done. to people, like a little bit of a faint at that. Yeah. And in this, it's much more like silence of the lambs in a way.

You know, the way that he's kind of teasing him and drawing him down the line and getting him to do horrible things, but also making it seem like he's his friend. And the whole contraption that the welder builds is all about, like, turning, like, breaking his, like, human spirit. Yeah. Yeah, that stuff was very interesting. You know, as we talk about it, and this is true of a lot of things in culture, and it was true of breaking bed after I skipped it after the first season,

you get more fired up. Maybe returning to it would be more rewarding. I don't know. What did you think of the Walt scene? I just didn't, it didn't click for me. That was, that was 1,000% just fan service. Yeah, it just didn't tell us anything more about Walt. Didn't tell us anything more about Jesse.

I think it would have been bizarre to not see Walt in a Breaking Bad movie. I think people actually would have been literally angry about that. Yes. But they also did not, I mean, of all the things that they were like, about the fact that these two started a tequila line and were taking lots of Instagrams together suggested that he was going to be in this. I think it was worthy though for what you described as sort of a philosophical reflection. Yes, you didn't have to wait your whole life for something, you know, amazing to happen. Yeah, that was a fittingly angered and

yet insightful Walter White observation. Walt throughout the series was capable of communicating his frustration with the way that things played out and seeing a kind of alternate reality through this like dumb shit genius that he was working with the whole time. So it's fitting that they got to have a moment together. But like it just didn't. It was, it's fine. Do you think this changes your feeling about the idea of like doing more breaking bad stuff outside of Saul? I don't know.

I think that we should probably wait until Saul is done. And I hope that Saul will be done soon, not because I don't like it, but because I do like it. And because I think containing it to a certain number of seasons is wise. And they've done such a nice job so far of keeping the momentum on that series. And then once that's done, and we have no breaking bad content, and five years go by, maybe it's time to figure something else out. But it's all IP now. Yeah.

You know? I mean, how do you feel about it? I hope it, I think that the Albuquerque underworlds and these characters are two different things. I think that Saul showed that there is all this interesting, all these interesting people and all these interesting stories on the margins and around the idea of crime and punishment and cops and robbers, or however you want to put it,

but just this idea of these guys haunting public courthouses and these people doing doc review and these people who are like, you know, moving into burner cell phones and how do you essentially start this slippery slope if in fact you're already prone to slipping in Jimmy's case? It's like Dostoevsky, Fincher,

and Law & Order SVU all wrapped up in one. And it has that same penchant for puzzle solving, but instead of meth and percentages of purity, it's highlighting and tape recordings and mail fraud. And I think it's, and similar to the way you were talking about Breaking Bad, I think I really perked up on Saul after a certain character left the show. But it took me a while to get used to Doc Review being like the, the engine of the show, you know?

So I still have a ton of confidence in these guys to do work in this space if they want to. And if they wanted to do a Kim show out of Saul, I think that would be really interesting. If they wanted to do, I don't, I'm trying to think of any other characters who would warrant this. Huel? Well, I mean, honestly, the one that's sort of sitting out there, the person who doesn't get any closure and doesn't get any check. in is Skyler. And that has always been sort of, that was like the one

criticism sounded towards the end of of Breaking Bad was not necessarily the treatment of Skyler, but the way that the fans treated Skyler is sort of getting in Walt's way too often. But they've, that would be something I would be, I don't know if you would ever make it. Those people were weird. Yeah, they were fucked up.

But I don't know what, like, I don't know whether or not Anna would want to do it again and I don't know where they would go with that. I've gotten the impression that while she is immensely proud of the show that it has toxified her relationship to the show because of the way that some people reacted to her character. I also just think because of the kind of like negative attention around her character would be really hard to just sell something like that.

I think fans would be like, why can't I get the Walt prequel? Why can't I get the Gus prequel, I think? It's probably like that's the other show, like how Gus built Poyos Armanos. Yeah, and I don't necessarily want like a series of like Carlito's Way, The Rise, you know, shows.

But I really love the fact that these guys over the course of, gosh, it's 10 years now, right? Or more than 10 years that they've been making, breaking bad products have discovered and mined and created an entire world for themselves that had never been on television before. What about like a once upon a time in America, Salamanca's story? Fuck yeah. You know, turn of the century, turn of the 20th century. Yeah. Mexico. That would be amazing.

Socario 3 That's a good idea That's a really good idea Okay What other breaking bad ideas can we do? Young Hewell Yeah young Hewle Young Hewle getting recruited by TCU

Blows out his knee What is he? Is he a defensive tackle? Goes into private security Yeah Three Technique guy Yeah Yeah

Goes into private security Kind of like a Chandler Jones You know Okay Or Fletcher Cox Got it Sean Thank you so much

For joining me today I hope that people understand that we are not like, this sucked. No, it was good. Yeah. It's good. It's just not. It's just, you're up against the best. Yeah.

And they knew that going into this. And I'll be really curious to see what other folks think about the movie, whether or not they feel like it was just kind of like a sweet ending to a character that they always loved, or whether or not they felt like it somewhat betrayed the creative legacy of the show, which was not about sweet endings for characters that we loved. It's all content, Chris. It's on a wheel. I'll talk to you later, Sean.

Thanks so much for joining me. You got it.