Take a look at this scene from the Season 2
Breaking Bad episode Peek-a-boo.
What does it reveal about Jesse Pinkman?
Jesse notices a beetle on the ground.
He squats down and examines it,
fascinated.
He sees his friend approaching
and stands up hurriedly.
[Yo.]
Skinny Pete walks up and crushes the beetle.
Jesse looks down, a little sad,
but doesn’t say anything.
This scene, without dialogue
and in just a few seconds,
reveals the core of Jesse's character.
Jesse is someone who looks at the world
with childlike wonder.
He's full of sympathy for the weakest.
But he lives in the world that crushes the weak.
So Jesse’s story is about
a loss of innocence.
And like most things Breaking Bad,
his transformation works
both on a realistic level
and on a heightened symbolic one.
It can even be read as
a dark version of the story of Christ.
Jesse is an innocent in a world that punishes
his virtue at every turn,
and he suffers for the sins
of his spiritual father/God, Walt.
So let’s look at why Jesse Pinkman
lived for your sins.
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Jesse is nothing if not
an overgrown kid at heart.
With the cap’n’cook license plates
and ridiculous swagger,
[Cheddar, Mr. White.
Fat stacks.
Dead Presidents.
Cash money.]
he’s like a high-schooler pretending
to be a drug dealer.
The oversized clothes make him look
like a kid in hand-me-downs.
Yes, we meet Jesse jumping out of
a woman’s bedroom mid-tryst.
But he's got kid’s innate humor
and silliness.
[Since when did they change it to opossum?
What's up with that?
When I was comin’ up it was just possum.
Opossum makes it sound like he’s Irish or something.
Why do they gotta go changing everything?]
Because he’s a big kid himself,
Jesse has a special affinity with children
throughout the series.
In "Peek-a-boo," when he’s looking for
the meth heads that robbed Skinny Pete,
he finds their neglected child.
[Where’s your folks?
They here?]
Jesse plays with the kid
and tries to protect him.
[Just don’t go back inside, alright?
You stay right here, OK?]
He has a close bond with his little brother Jake,
and he doesn't resent his brother
for being the favorite son.
And it’s the murder of
the unsuspecting kid in "Heist"
that drives Jesse to try and break all ties
with Walt’s operation.
Jesse feels connected to kids,
because in the world of Breaking Bad
it seems like -- apart from Jesse --
children are the only ones who can be innocent.
Jesse’s relationship with Jane starts
like a sweet teen romance.
They show each other their sketches
and hold hands.
But pretty soon they are doing heroin
and blackmailing Walt.
So very quickly, the innocence of their relationship
has been lost.
This arc -- of Jesse finding something good,
and then losing it, and losing faith
in the world and himself,
is repeated over and over in the show.
[OK.]
Jesse may want to protect children from harm,
but he's the one who needs protection.
He’s essentially an abandoned kid.
[Hey dad.
Hey mom.]
His parents think he is a hopeless screw up
and want nothing to do with him.
Jesse needs someone to tell him what to do,
and so he finds a parental figure in Walter.
[Say it like you mean it.]
[I’m a blowfish!]
[Blowfish!]
[Yeah!]
Their dynamic immediately resembles
a father-son relationship.
[Three entire bags of funyuns?
What?]
[Funyuns are awesome.]
[God.
How about something with
some protein, maybe?
Something green, huh?]
Walt literally calls Jesse his son
on more than one occasion.
[You're good at a lot of things, son.]
[Look, I'm his father, all right?
I can check on my son's well-being.]
[Son, you need to stop focusing
on the darkness behind you.]
This is especially strange because Walt not only
has a very low opinion of Jesse
[Did your mother drop you on your head
when you were a baby?]
but also in fact has an actual son,
Walter Junior.
Yet somehow his relationship with Jesse
feels more real and profound.
Why is that?
The answer is that Jesse is the first
and really only person
who sees Walt’s talent and power close-up
and admires Walt for those things.
[This is pure glass!
This -- this is art!]
Skyler’s not hi-fiving anyone over
a good batch of meth,
and Mike and Gus aren’t fond of Walt, either.
Unfortunately, this father-son relationship
is a deeply dysfunctional one.
[You are a pathetic junkie
too stupid to understand and follow
simple rudimentary instructions!]
Jesse longs for appreciation,
but Walt never gives it to him.
[You said I was no good.]
I'm nothing!]
And when Walt does offer Jesse a positive affirmations
it’s usually to manipulate him.
[Your meth is good, Jesse.]
The father-son dynamic makes it
all the more tragic
when Walter betrays Jesse’s trust --
[Would you just for once stop working me?]
it’s like he’s hurting his own child.
For a while, Jesse finds a new surrogate family
in Gus and Mike.
They treat him like a child too --
Gus at one point has Mike essentially babysit Jesse.
[I can smoke, right?]
[Not a chance.]
Both Gus and Mike have a more genuine respect
for Jesse than Walter does.
[The kid's a hero.]
Possessive Walt can’t stand these rivals
showing interest in his Jesse.
Jesse starts out with a great deal
of loyalty and respect for Walt,
[Yeah, Mr. White!
Yeah, science!]
but he ends completely disillusioned
with his father figure.
[And all for that asshole Mr. White!
He poisoned Brock!]
In this sense Jesse’s arc mirrors
a teen coming of age story,
which is also often about
a loss of innocence --
becoming disillusioned with the parents
you thought were good and all-powerful,
or with the world in general.
Jesse even acts out the way a teen would --
by throwing massive parties
or angstily shutting everyone out.
Jesse has been around longer than Walt
on the drug scene,
but it’s clear that Walt is the natural here
while Jesse is out of place
in the world of crime.
He’s not cut out for the “survival of the fittest”
world of Breaking Bad.
And so this world finds endless ways
of punishing Jesse’s moral purity.
When Walt insists they connect
with a bigger drug dealer
and they meet with Tuco,
[Mr. White, it's too risky.]
Jesse ends up in the hospital.
When Walt tricks Hank into
thinking Marie is hurt,
it’s Jesse who again gets beaten to a pulp.
And when Jesse isn’t being beaten
he’s beating himself up,
often for things that aren’t even his fault.
[I almost shot you.
I’m so sorry.]
He's consumed with guilt over the deaths
of Combo, Jane and Tomas,
and over Brock ending up in the hospital.
[Go ahead, just take it.
Take it.]
Walt is a master at convincing himself
that his actions are morally necessary,
[No matter how it might look,
I only had you in my heart.]
but Jesse’s the opposite --
he refuses to let himself off the hook.
[I'm the bad guy.]
He just won't let himself stop suffering.
[So no matter what I do,
hooray for me because I’m a great guy?
It’s all good?
No matter how many dogs I kill,
I just do an inventory and accept?]
So Jesse is punished again and again,
by himself,
because of his desire for virtue.
He tries and fails, multiple times,
to get out of the business --
[I'm pretty much a self-starter, so.]
[I'm thinking there's a little misunderstanding.]
Jesse passionately wants to
do the right thing.
[This man needs help!]
[This man pays my salary.]
What's really sad is
that Jesse suffers for sins
that aren’t even his --
Slate’s Jessica Winter made the point
that Jesse suffers for Walter’s sins.
As she wrote, “You could judge the progress
of Walter’s moral corrosion at any given moment
by measuring how hollowed out Jesse was,
how pulped and zombiefied.”
Walt somehow has a hand in most of Jesse’s pain.
Both directly
[It's gonna have to be you.]
and through chain reactions
of destruction.
Look at the situation with Jane --
Walt pushes to expand their meth-selling business,
[It's not our territory!]
which results in Jesse’s friend Combo
getting killed over turf.
Jesse blames himself for Combo’s death
and turns to drugs,
causing Jane to start doing drugs again,
and introduce Jesse to heroin.
The innocent romance they had is gone.
Then Walt shakes Jesse,
causing Jane rolls over on her back
and starts choking,
and Walt chooses to stand by
while she dies.
Every time Jesse experiences tragedy,
does something terrible
or blames himself for something,
Walt is directly or indirectly behind it.
[Everything I’ve ever cared about is gone.
Ruined, turned to shit, dead.
Ever since I hooked up with the great Heisenberg.]
So after all these ways that
Walt punishes and abuses Jesse,
the question that many people asked
after the series finale is,
why does Walter save him in the end?
This is the mystery at the heart of the ending,
just as the strength of their connection
is a mystery throughout the show.
The dark interpretation of the end is
that by choosing to let Jesse live
at a point where Jesse has lost
everything he has to live for,
Walt once again asserts
his dominance over the boy.
But on the lighter side,
he may be driven to protect Jesse
because of a last faint parental instinct.
In the beginning, Walt needs Jesse
to boost Heisenberg’s ego.
But his reasons for needing Jesse evolve.
By the end of the show,
Heisenberg is a legend and he doesn’t need
ego boosting anymore.
But he seems to want Jesse around
for something else:
Jesse is Walt’s true son --
and it would be better to say
that he is Heisenberg’s son.
And as his life comes to an end
in the final episodes,
Heisenberg is concerned with his legacy.
And so he needs Jesse because Jesse is
the one who’s known Heisenberg the best,
from the beginning --
the one who truly carries on the memory
of who his spiritual father was.
Thus we can see a selfish aspect
to the final act of saving Jesse,
so that Heisenberg can still live on
in Jesse’s mind --
but we can also see that Heisenberg
has always somehow loved this kid,
for reasons that neither of them
ever truly understand.
So Jesse is taking upon himself
the sins of others,
bearing the marks on his body and soul --
and thanks to all this suffering,
Jesse can be seen as a Jesus figure.
Jesse isn’t quite the image of obvious virtue
you’d associate with Christ,
but that makes sense because of the world
we’re situated in.
If Jesse is Jesus, and Heisenberg is his father,
that makes Heisenberg God the Father --
but he’s a bad God of a very twisted,
corrupt world.
So what we’re seeing is Jesus
if he weren’t the son of God --
but of the devil instead.
[Mr. White -- he's the devil.
He is smarter than you, he is luckier than you.
Whatever you think is supposed to happen,
I'm telling you, the exact, reverse opposite
of that is going to happen, OK?]
And since Jesse is a devil’s Jesus,
that’s why he’s not really suffering
for the sins of all mankind,
but for the sins of his father in particular.
[I watched her overdose and choke to death.
I could have saved her.
But I didn't.]
We get a few hints at this Jesus connection
in the show.
Jesus was a carpenter and Jesse mentions
that he would like to be a woodworker,
because he enjoyed the craft in high school.
[I built it out of Peruvian Walnut
with inlaid Zebrawood.
It was fitted with pegs, no screws.
I sanded it for days
until it was smooth as glass.]
Later, when Jesse is locked
in the lab of Uncle Jack’s gang
he fantasizes about building another box.
The scene is shot luminously and feels
even more clearly like a Christian association.
The time Jesse spends in captivity
could be a parallel to the time
between Jesus’ death and resurrection --
after Jesse witnesses Todd killing Andrea,
he is locked in a pit,
which could be interpreted as corresponding to
the cave Jesus’ body was kept in
after the crucifixion.
Jesse’s hair and beard are longer
than they’ve ever been in the series,
also bringing to mind a biblical martyr.
And then the resurrection comes
when Walt sets Jesse free from captivity.
But Jesse’s final escape
is a dark resurrection --
he’s not returning to Heaven;
he’s returning to bad Earth,
from an even worse Hell --
and there’s no foreseeable end to his suffering.
What’s the deeper meaning of all this?
Why have this symbolic, dark Jesus story
woven in here at all?
Jesse as pure innocence, abused and beaten up
through the story,
illuminates the darkness at the core
of the Breaking Bad world.
Evil actions may be punished here,
but good intentions and the desire to be virtuous
are answered far more severely.
Jesse brings to mind the maxim,
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
He’s a reminder that trying to be good
doesn’t mean that good things
will happen to you in return --
in fact in Breaking Bad virtue
is a clear disadvantage.
So if we want to hold onto our moral goodness
we have to do so,
regardless of the outcome --
we have to be prepared to suffer for it
for it to go completely unacknowledged
and unappreciated.
In spite of everything he experiences,
Jesse never goes Walter’s utilitarian way
of weighing the value of not hurting other people
against the value of some “greater good”
or the power he desires.
In spite of everything,
Jesse keeps the faith in what he believes
to be good --
not hurting others, protecting children,
and treating people equally.
And he holds himself accountable.
So when in doubt, we can ask ourselves,
what would Jesse do?
[You have a good rest of your life, kid.]
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