Vince Gilligan has kept El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie so deep under wraps that we didn’t even know the thing was officially in production until after it was fully shot. We’re currently only a few weeks away from the release, but we still barely know anything about the film’s actual plot. What little we do know is this: The movie follows Jesse on his fugitive run after the bloodbath of the season finale, and it will reportedly bring back “more than 10” castmembers from the show, including Skinny Pete and Badger, the methed-out Marx Brothers of New Mexico. And this week, another beloved Breaking Bad actor confirmed that he’ll be popping up again in El Camino, too: Jonathan Banks will be reprising his role as lightbulb-headed fixer Mike Ehrmentraut in the sequel movie. There’s just one problem, though. Ehrmentraut is dead.
But if El Camino is willing to bring back one glowering, bald character we all watched die in the series, then Gilligan better do it again—by resurrecting Walter White himself.
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Yes, sure, Walt is not, uh, alive, per se. The guy took a fatal bullet from his own robot machine gun during that bloody, neo-Nazi massacre in the series finale, and whatever is left of him presumably ended up on a cold table in an Albuquerque crime lab somewhere. But come on! These are minor problems, tiny details, small creative constraints to work around! Breaking Bad has always been a show that thrived when the writers backed themselves into a corner. And what better corner could there be than killing off their lead? Give us a Walter White cameo at least, you cowards!
The most obvious way to do it, of course, is through flashback, which is likely how El Camino will work Ehrmentraut back into the picture. But we can get fancier than that with Walt, right? This is Heisenberg we’re talking about. Maybe Jesse’s long-running guilt coupled with the new trauma of being trapped in that cage will manifest in some kind of Walter White hallucination—an invisible friend who follows him around, Harvey-style, like a pork pie hat-wearing Jiminy Cricket. That could work, right?
In fact, wait, who are those two people standing forlornly in the bosque of the Rio Grande in the trailer?
Is that Jesse on the left? And then who’s that one the right? He looks bald. Could it be Walt? Some kind of spectral Heisenberg haunting Jesse’s quest? Maybe a… wait. No. There are two cars, off to the side there, right? Ghosts of your dead teacher-turned-drug czar don’t drive station wagons. Sorry. But still! According to the Hollywood Reporter, Gilligan had a private jet on set to “shuttle a key castmember in and out of Albuquerque without notice,” but who, pray tell, could that key castmember be? If it isn’t Bryan Cranston bringing Walt back, it has to be Bob Odenkirk, but Saul Goodman should be well on his way to his new gig at an Omaha Cinnabon by the time El Camino picks up the plot. It has to be Walt, right? Please, let it be Walt.
Luckily, we won’t have to wait long to know for sure. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Story is set to premiere on Netflix October 11. Until then, give the trailer a watch above and think of all the convoluted meth zombie plotlines Gilligan could come up with to bring Walt and Jesse back together again. At this point, we’ll take what we can get.
