Jesse, meanwhile, gets his best showcase episode since season four – last year’s episodes kept Aaron Paul on the sidelines, which was narratively understandable but nevertheless disappointing – in a subplot that tackles an issue I have long waited for the show to deal with. Jesse has tried many times in the past to get out of the drug trade, and every time he did I found myself wondering what kind of future this character could have. The meth business has been destroying him, both physically and mentally, since the very beginning, and yet he has often been at his sanest and happiest when having that business as a constant in his life. Jesse is an immensely sensitive person – a good man and endearing character, even considering his criminal activity – and while his involvement with Walter White has led him to terrible things he will always be scarred by, he tends to succumb most heavily to those wounds when he has nothing else to fill his life with. He cannot live with himself when he cooks meth, but he tends to have an even more difficult time when he finds himself with nothing else to do.
So what would Jesse Pinkman do with his life once he has definitively left Walter White behind? That is not the exact circumstance we explore here – Walt’s delivery of $5 million in last year’s finale is obviously the catalyst to Jesse’s latest moral crisis – but it is close enough to count, as Jesse’s arc here is all about how he lives with the guilt of everything he has done. And as we might expect, that guilt weighs so heavily on him that he cannot function, his only means of coping being to give away his eponymous ‘blood money’ to people he feels he has wronged.
Again, this is a Jesse story that we have, on at least some level, come to anticipate, and yet the actual presentation does not feel simple or inevitable. Every emotional beat of Jesse’s struggle rings absolutely true – I was most moved by his insistence on providing for Mike’s granddaughter, Kaylee, which was a very nice callback to Jesse’s friendship with the man – and builds off his long-developing character arc in ways that feel earned, but not overly predictable. Aaron Paul is absolutely dynamite throughout – playing emotional confliction, or outright devastation, is his specialty – and I love the balance between delirium and genuine catharsis he summons at the end, when Jesse deals with his guilt by driving around low-income areas and throwing stacks of cash out the window. I doubt this release will be anywhere near enough to heal him, but I do think it is a legitimate step forward for the character. Paying $2.5 million each to Kaylee and the Smith family is merely attacking his guilt with money, but giving financial aid to the impoverished – however unorthodox the method – is actually altruistic (if not entirely selfless). If he can find more ways to convert the awful things he has done into truly good deeds, perhaps Jesse can discover a real path towards healing – though not, I suspect, if Walter White is still in the picture.
After all, as moments of long-awaited pay-off go, Jesse finally realizing that Walt is indeed a pathological liar is pretty spectacular. There will certainly be lots more to come from this point – I predict this is the first step towards Jesse uncovering all the other lies Walt has told him, including killing Jane and poisoning Brock – but even as I have spent several seasons now waiting for Jesse to finally call Walt on his bullshit, I absolutely did not expect Jesse to deduce the truth about Mike’s fate this quickly. But given how much of Walt’s dark side Jesse saw near the end of last season, this feels like the right time for this to happen. Walt gives as good a performance as ever in trying to convince Jesse of his innocence – and Jesse lets Walt think he believes him, because like Hank, Jesse senses it is better to wait and form a plan of attack than confront Heisenberg outright – but Jesse knows Walt far too well at this point (and cared too much for Mike to just let this one pass), and I think he, like Hank, is no longer fooled by the mask. And now that Jesse knows what a lying Walt looks like, I don’t think it will be long before he starts remembering all the other times Walt has used that performance tactic to convince Jesse of a platitude.
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