#but he has his little moments on humanity in brba and i think that they couldve been great friends

[saulbaby]

The fact that Walt isn't falling deeply deeply terribly in love with Skylar in delight when she's making him practice the gambling story before seeing hank and Marie is proof that he is evil

[artemispanthar]

i want to know your animal headcanons 👀

Okay, you asked for it lol here’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and this is VERY rambly so I apologize in advance

So I’m big into Better Call Saul at the moment and even way back when I watched Breaking Bad the first time and they introduced Saul I was like “Oh, this guy would 100% be a weasel” ‘cause, like, he is, in the figurative sense.

People don’t really have a high opinion of weasels and if you call someone a weasel you’re saying they’re a liar and/or a thief but, like, an undignified one. Like, foxes are famously thieves too, right, but they command respect, they’re the dignified thieves, the Robin Hoods, the sneaks with class. A weasel is like “ugh, that guy?” and sometimes also a snitch. You weasel your way out of responsibility, you use weasel words to mislead people. Oily scumbag lawyer guy who has a million sneaky ways to solve a problem? 100% a weasel

(disclaimer: I frickin’ love weasels, they are my second favorite animal, so I say all that with love lol)

But BCS significantly expands BrBa’s colorful side character into a full-blown protagonist, caricature no more, so does that development change what animal he’d be? No!

See, on the one hand, the weasel’s reputation isn’t entirely unfounded. They are thieves, they break into chicken coops and slaughter the whole flock, abscond with eggs, and they’re super hard to keep out because they’re crafty (and have those funky noodle bodies). But, on the other, it’s also not entirely fair ‘cause, you know, they’re animals and they gotta eat. Lots of other animals can (or try to) break into farms, is it fair to paint the species as evil for that? And, I mean, a humanoid weasel would have a human-esque morality system and they’re not beholden to that reputation - but I think people would certainly hold it against them (like, metaphorically, I don’t imagine speciesism in this situation)

Fits Jimmy, I think. Dude coming off a big screw up and generally a bad reputation and who some people just kinda see as kinda off, “the kind of lawyer guilty people hire”, you know. A weasel trying to outrun that weasel rep and also sometimes it’s just so hard to resist breaking into that chicken coop when they make is soooo easy (and it’s just so much easier than having to run down prey, right? Work smarter, not harder!)

You know what a weasel also is? Tenacious, scrappy. These dudes are tiny but they will take on prey many many times their size (and win!). But at the same time, they can easily get into situations they should definitely not be in because of poor threat assessment, such as, oh, I don’t know, deciding picking up money from a notorious drug cartel in the middle of the desert is a good idea. They’re notoriously clever and can always figure out an ‘in’. They even mesmerize their prey with little dances (showmanship!). They have a very high metabolism so they’re always on the move, and what I gather with Jimmy from stuff like the phone place he is not someone who’s comfortable idling.

Now weasel is kind of an umbrella term, you say, so what kind of weasel would he be? Easy! Jimmy’s a stoat, Saul (circa Breaking Bad) is an ermine.

See, lots of animals turn white in the winter but stoats “become” ermines in their winter coat (for fur trading reasons). Ermines are glitzy stoats, stoats with pizazz! but at the end of the day all an ermine is is a stoat with a coat of paint (and, really, is all that fancy bombast really better than when it was just a boring old stoat?). Ermines are prized for their coats and so are more well-regarded than stoats (like having a very successful criminal lawyer practice) but it also draws a lot of attention and will get it killed (or, you know, have to flee to Nebraska under an assumed identity)

Here’s what I picture: season 1 Jimmy is full on stoat, brown with a white belly. As the seasons progress and he slides further into amorality, his fur would become mottled with patchy white more and more until we get to Breaking Bad era where he’s completely snowy white ermine. Visual morality metaphor! If this were an alternate universe where people were animals, the show would 1000% do that because they love their visual metaphors

Anyway, yeah, so that’s one animal headcanon I’ve been thinking a lot about

[falafel14]

El Camino Review: “Dude, you’re my hero and shit.”

 Where to start? (Bitch). 

Okay so I loved that Mike was the one who gave Jesse the idea to start over in Alaska. Jesse’s determination to follow a path that Mike recommended for him felt like he was desperate to honor one of his very last memories of Mike, which felt like a very Jesse thing to do. Then there was Mike’s line about how Jesse can never put things right. It’s the one thing he’ll never do. And when Mike said that I couldn’t decide whether he was establishing that Jesse’s redemption was impossible or just calling his redemption an impossibility so that Jesse could subvert expectations. In my heart, I wanted the latter. But I got the former. So was I disappointed? Actually...no. We’ve lived with the Choose-your-own-Jesse-Pinkman-ending thing for the last six years. I fan-ficced my own Jesse resolution and that gave me closure. Now I feel like I’m getting to see Vince Gilligan’s own personal Jesse resolution that he needed to give himself closure. And Vince’s choices are very different to mine, but understandably so. Vince is the one who personally made all those creative choices to put Jesse through the worst kinds of Hell (not me, I didn’t do that shit...). So after years of torturing this character so excessively I can understand why Vince needed to deliver his most abused creation to a place of peace and safety (Alaska apparently).     

And if I couldn’t get a redemption story for Jesse...well, at least I got one for Skinny Pete! Damn. Skinny has always been my favorite of Jesse’s friend circle and this film solidified why. Like Jesse, Skinny’s another smart compassionate guy who could have amounted to so much more if he hadn’t fallen into the drug world. The moment when he called Jesse his hero brought me to tears. I mean Skinny never saw the worst of Jesse’s crimes, but this line suggested to me that regardless of what Jesse had done, Skinny always saw Jesse as an impressive, admirable and decent person. And that was fucking lovely. It was heartwarming to see characters like Old Joe prepared to help Jesse out purely because they remembered him as being a good kid. But Skinny’s the one who risked his own freedom (”I’m on probation, yo!”) to give Jesse a chance to escape. So here’s hoping that your mad piano skills are discovered in prison, Skinny Pete! Oh and Badger’s lines about Skinny’s driving had me howling - “You couldn’t drive Miss Daisy!”, “You couldn’t drive Thelma and Louise off a that cliff!” Vince, if you want to write a straight up comedy next, then I’m here for it.      

Skinny Pete aside, I’d say my favorite parts of El Camino were the flashbacks. I mean...who knew we were going to get so much fucking Todd? And you know from my fanfic that I wanted the full horror of Jesse’s time as Todd’s prisoner/pet explored and...yes, it was every bit as horrific as I had expected. And yes, I feel terrible for laughing so often at Todd’s cheerful oblivious psychopathy. I wasn’t laughing all the time though. Who knew that the most heartbreaking line of all Breaking Bad canon was going to turn out to be... “Pepperoni”? Let’s just get it out of the way and say Aaron was devastating once again as Jesse Pinkman and is surely set to win a fourth Emmy for this role. And if Aaron’s going to be in the lead category this time, could we get a supporting actor nod for Plemons? Because DEAR GOD, he was blood-chillingly brilliant as Todd.

Then we have these two fuckers back together again. I knew they’d have to bring Bryan back in some way and Jesus, if you’d asked me to pick any missing Walt and Jesse moment from canon that I’d like to have seen...I swear my first choice would’ve been the journey home from 4 Days Out. This was the last time Walt still had his humanity, the last time we had juvenile “Yeah bitch!” Jesse and the last time before their relationship was so horribly poisoned by betrayal. Just before the mess of Combo’s murder, then Jesse’s heroin spiral, then Walt letting Jane die that they never came back from. It was just so wonderful to go back to a time when you could see these two genuinely cared for each other, even while being the most hilariously dysfunctional odd couple (”I totally graduated high school, dick!”) I never thought I’d get to see Bryan and Aaron acting together as Walt and Jesse again, especially this version of Walt and Jesse. It was a gift. This scene alone made the whole of El Camino worthwhile. 

Which is not to say the rest of the BrBa movie is anything shabby. While it is a getaway story rather than a redemption story, it still had me on the edge of my seat. Man, I love that Vince is such a merciless writer. Like, normally in a movie when your antihero character is in a room hiding from police, the writer will give you a moment of tension then allow the character to slip away. But Vince is all nope! The worst is going to happen. Jesse is going to get caught and worse still those guys aren’t even real cops but men who were complicit in his kidnapping ordeal. Man! And I love how Jesse gets a moment of being a badass when he judged that the Kandy Welding guy wasn’t going to shoot him, but then we get him being a dumb dipshit thinking he could call the bluff of the Disappearer guy. And yet it all felt consistent because Vince’s writing and Aaron’s performance have always balanced Jesse’s smart and stupid moments so well. And while I personally didn’t want Jesse to commit further crimes and get more blood on his hands in his bid for freedom, I can’t begrudge Vince going all the way in making Breaking Bad a contemporary Western complete with its own gunslinger quick draw scene. That was awesome (”Dude, you’re on fire...”)

Did I love everything about El Camino? No. Like Felina was for Walt, Jesse’s resolution did feel a little overly neat. I didn’t really want the Vacuum repair guy to be the solution since Saul had stressed that Jesse would only have one shot with him. The guy then giving him a second chance but being persnickety over the exact money felt like a contrivance. Also, I didn’t like Jesse screwing over his parents again. I know that Jesse’s folks could be dicks, but still. Lastly, the letter to Brock. It was pure fan service, I know. But if the moral of this story is - ‘Jesse doesn’t get to make things right’ - then he shouldn’t get to write a letter to Brock either. Because what could Jesse possibly say that would make things better for Brock now? I have to say, that beat didn’t feel earned for me. 

Finally though, I will say I liked the choice to end on the Jesse/Jane scene. As with the Walt flashback, this comes just before the end of S2 and the last hope Jesse had of a happy ending. Because I don’t really feel like Jesse’s new life in Alaska will be happy from now on. I feel like Jesse will always be lonely, scarred, self-loathing, guilt-ridden and haunted. He’ll never escape who he has been. But the message of Jane’s last line seemed to be simply telling Jesse to be his own master from now on, which I suppose is a good mindset for a guy whose biggest downfall was being too easily led. Did Jesse redeem himself for his crimes? No. Could he have ever redeemed himself for his crimes? Probably not. Do I think Jesse should go on suffering? Nah...leave him be.