As for Jesse, the future is far less clear – few people have endured the sheer number of horrors he has – but where I firmly believed, a week ago, that Jesse could never survive this finale, I am now amazed at the emotionally uplifting note Gilligan and company chose to end his story on.
Earlier today, in preparation for the finale, I was watching the show’s all-time best episode, “One Minute,” in which, among many other eventful happenings, Jesse is hospitalized after taking a beating from Hank, and finally, near the episode’s conclusion, confronts Walt on what a poison he has been from the beginning. It is a defining scene for Jesse, because for the first time, he is full cognizant of just how manipulative Mr. White has been, and just how much he has suffered as a result of their partnership. Jesse is truly strong in that scene, stronger than ever before, but ultimately, he is too weak to walk away, too weak to fully extricate himself from Walt’s toxic orbit.
And that, in a nutshell, is Jesse’s arc – I believe he is a good person deep down, but he is not completely a victim in everything that has happened. He knew, at least from that scene in Season 3, what a destructive force his partner was. And he could have walked away there, or any other number of times before and after. But Jesse was too weak to walk away, too weak to reject his surrogate father, and in the end, too weak to stop horrible things from happening to those he loved the most.
The brilliance of “Felina’s” climactic scene, then, is how it tests Jesse’s strength point blank. Walt drops his gun. Jesse picks it up. “Do it,” Walt urges. “You want this.” Like always, Walt is tempting the boy – giving Jesse the option to do further evil for his own selfish benefits. And after all he has been through, Jesse can finally understand this. “Say the words. Say you want this. Nothing happens until I hear you say it.” Jesse cries. He probably wants to kill Mr. White more than anything in the world, but he knows that if he does so on Walt’s terms, then he will forever be Heisenberg’s prisoner.
“I want this.” Walt admits. And that is all Jesse needs to hear. However hard it is to walk away, he knows he cannot give in to Walt anymore, not even to get revenge. So he drops the gun, and drives away, laughing and crying hysterically while he does so (a similar emotional ‘release’ to what I felt watching the subsequent final scene). Whatever happens next, Jesse is finally ‘free,’ in more ways than one, because he finally said ‘No,’ to Walt, finally refused to do Mr. White’s dirty work, and finally proved himself the bigger, better man by rejecting the opportunity for revenge. I think many will read Walt’s actions in that scene as guilty or apologetic, giving Jesse the chance to kill him as a way of setting things right, but I strongly feel that what Walt did was purely sadistic. Like telling Jesse point-blank about Jane’s death, it is a way of sticking the knife in further; Walt will get the death he wants, and Jesse will be destroyed even further in the process, caught indelibly in a circle of violence.
But Jesse rises above that violence, something he always had the potential to do, and while the chances of him having a normal, healthy life after this are extremely slim, Jesse does have a future. He is free, for the first time since the pilot. What happens next is a mystery, but that Jesse’s future is no longer set in stone is, in and of itself, a minor miracle. He does not have to be shackled by the horrors of his past. He can move on, if he is able and so chooses, and he can have a life outside of Walter White. It is not where I predicted we would leave this character, but I could not be more satisfied by the resolution he received.
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