El Camino (Vince Gilligan, 2019)

Well, I was supposed to watch The Wild Goose Lake, as per your instructions, and I will either today or tomorrow. But sometimes you need to watch something your wife will watch with you, and this was it. And I'm certainly not sorry. El Camino was diverting enough, and given its relatively strong reviews, I would have felt a need to catch up with it eventually.

But it also reminded me why I was always rather agnostic when it came to Breaking Bad. Among the TV shows of the now-kaput Golden Age of Television, it was always the showiest and most self-satisfied. There was nothing particularly subtle about Vince Gilligan's touch, and El Camino is sort of a concentrated dose of that check-me-out approach. The first third or so uses a flashback structure as a kind of poor man's Resnais, to ostensibly explore the trauma Jesse (Aaron Paul) experienced being held captive by Todd (Jesse Plemons) and the white supremacists. But this soon gives way to an apartment disassembly that clearly tips its hat to Coppola's The Conversation, which in turn sets up a thread that leads, no joke, to an Old West showdown.

In addition to helping reorient us to old plot points, flashbacks allow for fan-service cameos by Jonathan Banks, Krysten Ritter, and or course Bryan Cranston. And it was of course lovely to see Robert Forster in one of his last substantial roles. But I guess the problem with a two-hour Very Special Episode of Breaking Bad, ultimately, is that Jesse is such an unambiguous good guy that whatever frisson the series created through Walter White's malevolent streak is completely wiped away. Early on, we see Jesse's pals Badger (Matt Jones) and Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) playing an evade-the-cops videogame ("Don't apex too early!") and Gilligan is essentially admitting that El Camino is little more than that.