Gould also manages to do very compelling things with Jesse in a very short amount of time, but I am slightly less positive on the Jesse material, on the whole, than I am on any part of Breaking Bad right now. Again, nothing in the specific execution of tonight’s Jesse scenes bother me – his escape attempts are gloriously staged, shot, paced, and even scored, and Andrea’s execution is exactly as shocking and gut-wrenching as it is intended to be – but I wonder if the show’s sadism against the character has, perhaps, gone a tad too far.
I have joked in previous reviews that Vince Gilligan possibly gets some sort of sick, twisted pleasure out of torturing Aaron Paul on a weekly basis – and as “Granite State” reinforces, Paul is always capable of finding new, distinctive, endlessly effective notes of anguish to play – but in turning Jesse into a literal slave, and then having another girlfriend murdered before his eyes, I simply wonder if the torment is stacked too high. It all depends on how Jesse’s story pays off in the finale, but I assume the purpose for pushing Jesse so low at this point is so he is forced to take drastic measures during the show’s climax (like killing Mr. White and then himself, which is still my current prediction for how the series ends).
But if that is the case, then the show is overcompensating. Jesse does not need extra torment at this point to hit rock bottom – he already descended past that a long time ago, and his entire arc on the series has been one of increasingly painful emotional abuse and devastation. Jesse has only ever been allowed to be happy, in fact, when the show needed to set him up for a proportionally precipitous fall. Walt telling Jesse point-blank about Jane last week seemed like the perfect final straw for the character, the absolute culmination of all the terrible things that have happened to him, and going any further than that – no matter how well-executed the material is – simply strikes me as overkill. At a certain point, torturing a character is just torturing a character, especially if that character has already seen his spirit killed many times over.
Nevertheless, Aaron Paul remains amazingly good here, and I am interested to see what the final inception of Jesse looks like. Again, if his material in the finale effectively pays off on all the torment he has endured, including what he sustained this week, then I will have no complaints. As with all the other characters, major and minor, this is hopefully the sort of dark, rich character development necessary to properly position Jesse for the endgame. Breaking Bad has earned my trust – I just don’t want all the jokes I have been making about the writers’ sadistic relationship with Jesse to become literal.
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