Easter Eggs You Missed In El Camino

Breaking Bad was always a series designed to reward close viewings. By the time it wrapped up, it was agreed that one of the show's critical strengths was its clockwork-like attention to detail. Everything about the show seemed to be there with clear purpose, making it a rare series without much in the way of plot holes, dropped storylines, or extraneous scenes, and that's a trend that continues in the sequel story El Camino.

When the acclaimed final episode of Breaking Bad, "Felina," premiered in September 2013, it decisively concluded the saga of Walter White. It was something of a ghost story, following Walt in a new identity as he poked through the ashes of his old life, tying off some loose ends and leaving him with some semblance of victory. But the fate of Jesse Pinkman was left unknown, leaving viewers with a sliver of hope for his future but no details. 

Now, El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is here to fill in the blanks, serving as a final character study for the series' other leading man. Did Jesse get away with his freedom and his life? Did Mr. White, the devil himself, stay dead? And how many references are hidden throughout the film? Well, let's delve into the details and dig up some Easter eggs you may have missed in Breaking Bad's grand epilogue, El Camino.

Over the course of their time on Breaking Bad, Skinny Pete and Badger proved themselves to be surprisingly adorable. While it would be easy to write the two off as layabouts perpetually in the process of getting their lives together, the show imbued them with peculiar interests and surprising depths, from Skinny Pete's showstopping piano skills to the duo's abiding passion for sci-fi. 

In the season five Breaking Bad episode "Blood Money," Skinny Pete and Badger have an extended dialogue about Star Trek, with Pete spinning theories about how transporter tech works and Badger pitching his own episode of the show. 

In a later episode, "Rabid Dog," Walt meets with Saul Goodman and his associate Patrick Kuby in an effort to locate the fugitive Jesse. Kuby then explains that he posed as a meter reader to plant a bug in Badger's mom's house, hoping to overhear some intel on Pinkman's whereabouts. Unfortunately, he only managed to hear three hours' worth of Pete and Badger prattling on about Babylon 5. (We want to see that deleted scene.)

With that background in mind, it's a real pleasure to see Skinny Pete's house so decked out in Star Trek paraphernalia, from starships on the bookshelves to sci-fi inspired chairs in front of the TV. It's just another detail to further flesh out characters we thought we already knew, showing how their addictive personalities can be put toward interests way more wholesome than what you'd find at the end of a meth pipe.

Of all people, who would've thought the Breaking Bad movie would spend so much time on Todd? One of the most loathsome villains in a series that had plenty of those to go around, Todd returns in El Camino in extra large fashion, with an extended flashback of a dreadful weekend Jesse spent in his company. With the series already having firmly established Todd as a truly cold-hearted psychopath, El Camino delves into just how weird he is, in skin-crawling detail.

With his apartment full of serial killer-esque trophies, sparse decor, and an actual dead person, Todd in El Camino comes off like a combination between Jeffrey Dahmer and that kid from St. Elsewhere. The most perplexing objects in Todd's home can be found in his collection of strange, apparently hand-made snowglobes. While they'd be innocuous and kitschy as decor for your average kindergarten class, they come off as eerie, even sinister, in the context of Todd's apartment. 

The most insidious example of Todd's craftsmanship is the one held up by the faux police officer just before a cornered Jesse makes himself known. The snowglobe seems to show a representation of Todd locked in a winter wonderland with Lydia, the high-powered operative in the global meth scheme whom Todd developed an unsettling fascination with during the series. Keeping to what Todd knows about her, she's shown literally submerged in a giant teacup, frolicking while Todd watches. We don't mean to be controversial, but we're really glad that guy is dead.

Jesse's escape from Albuquerque in El Camino is a long and arduous process, more resource-gathering and table-setting than an all-out sprint out of town. When Jesse returns to his parents' home, sneaking in with a hidden key after luring them off of the premises, he makes a beeline to a locked safe, working to retrieve some old guns for a coming conflict. 

As he makes his way through the house, he briefly stops by the stairs to look up toward the second story, where the safe lies at the floor of a closet. When he pauses to look up, he's standing over an evident crawl space, outlined in the floorboards. 

Jesse would have no way of knowing this, but a crawl space just like this one played host to one of the most iconic shots in the entire series ... and one of the lowest points in Walt's criminal career. In the "Crawl Space" episode, Walt ended the hour literally sunken under ground, his face framed by the rectangular entrance until the floor of the house looked like a kind of open casket. The famous shot had intense implications for the story to come. Walt, it seemed, was a dead man.

Notice how Jesse doesn't have any business in the crawl space of his own family's home. When Walt was backed into a corner, he sank into the ground. Finding himself in a similar situation, Jesse keeps his eyes up and ascends the stairs, getting one step closer toward freedom.

When Breaking Bad first started, it was easy to see Walter White as a good man with his back against the wall and Jesse Pinkman as his amoral, necessary foil. Oh, how that perspective changed by the end. One of the ways in which the audience learned to view Jesse with compassion was in the way he himself was compassionate toward those around him, particularly children and animals. Even typically loathsome creatures like creepy-looking insects were treated kindly by Jesse, as was shown in the season two episode "Peekaboo." 

That episode involved Jesse going off on his most arduous solo mission to date, fending off violent, far-gone methheads as he attempted to also do right by their sorely neglected child. Before that episode took off, though, Jesse whiled away the time by letting a large black bug crawl onto the back of his tattooed hand, regarding it with a smile as it crawled around his fingers. (That Skinny Pete then immediately moved to crush the bug seems to have done little harm to their abiding friendship.)

El Camino makes a reference to this scene as Jesse waits for the strippers to leave before his final attack on the neo-Nazis' associates, letting a similar bug crawl onto his hand. He regards it closely this time, keeping his thoughts private. Whatever he's thinking, it's likely that bugs like these were among his only companions during his long months in captivity. At least they're not houseflies, though. On Breaking Bad, flies drive you crazy.

When it was first announced as the official title of the mysterious, shot-in-secret Breaking Bad movie, the name "El Camino" struck many as only deepening the mystery. It was unexpected. What could it mean? 

Obviously, "El Camino" is most known as a classic car from Chevrolet, with the hood stripes on some models forming the basis for a few of the Breaking Bad movie's promotional posters. It's specifically the model of car Jesse uses to flee from the Nazi camp, but he doesn't hold onto the car for that long. Instead, it remains stowed at Skinny Pete's place as part of an improvised plan to keep Jesse safe. After the first 15 minutes, it's barely in the movie anymore. So what gives?

Well, Breaking Bad was always a series that enjoyed playing around with titles. Like in season two, the titles of each of the ominous plane crash flashforward episodes ultimately spelled out "737 Down Over ABQ." And then there's the last episode of the show, "Felina," which is both an anagram of "finale" and a reference to the Marty Robbins song that scores a critical part of the episode. And translated into English, "el camino" means "the way," which is a turn of phrase as open to interpretation as Jesse's original fate. He spends the movie looking for a way out of his predicament, and a way forward in his life, perhaps ending up, as Aaron Paul told us so many years ago, as a carpenter living quietly in Alaska.

Gus Fring is long dead by the time El Camino rolls around, murdered by Walt at the end of the season four Breaking Bad episode "Face Off." After politely terrorizing Walt and Jesse for two seasons, all while keeping up appearances as the respectable proprietor of the fast food chain Los Pollos Hermanos, Gus met his grisly end when Walt teamed up with Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) to lure him into an explosive trap. 

While several other characters who perished over the course of Breaking Bad still managed to make an appearance in El Camino, Gus is not among them. However, there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it nod to Breaking Bad's greatest antagonist in the same early morning sequence when we glimpse Duke City Sports Bar. Right after the camera reveals the new business occupying Saul's former office space, it shows a fast food restaurant named "Twisters." 

Twisters is in fact a real-life restaurant in Albuquerque, which provided both the interior and exterior shots for Los Pollos Hermanos in Breaking Bad. In El Camino, it would seem that the fictional restaurant has since morphed into its real-life counterpart. 

Considering Breaking Bad's reputation for sprinkling clues and meta references throughout its episodes, most viewers likely went into El Camino expecting much of the same, prepared to watch closely so as to not miss anything. However, it still came as an amusing surprise when El Camino not only delivered on the Easter egg front, but explicitly called them out in the setting that proved to be the richest when it came to subtle self-referential nods and callbacks.

During a flashback to Jesse's time in captivity, Todd (Jesse Plemons) takes him to his apartment as he works through his to-do list of extremely disturbing errands. As Jesse stands uneasily in the doorway of Todd's abode, his host asks him what he thinks of his place. Jesse offers that it's "nice, kinda pastel," to which Todd responds, "I was thinking of Easter eggs." 

At first glance, the line seems pretty innocuous — as are the vast majority of the things Todd says — but it's hard to imagine Vince Gilligan wrote in a literal mention of Easter eggs without considering how the term has long been used in pop culture. Most likely, Todd's line is a wink to the audience, letting us know that Gilligan is aware that we're all watching closely, and that our efforts will be rewarded.

One of the pivotal moments in Breaking Bad occurred in the first half of season five, on the heels of Walt and Jesse's successful train heist, which they carried out with Todd's help. While they were still riding high from the robbery, things took a sharp turn when they crossed paths with a young boy named Drew Sharp (Samuel Webb), who'd been out riding his bike in the desert and just happened to come across the criminal trio. Although the child hadn't seen them commit a crime, Todd still shot and killed him over Jesse's frantic protests, later arguing that no one was supposed to know that they'd been in the desert at all. 

Before Drew was killed, the boy came across a tarantula, which he scooped up in a glass jar, presumably to keep as a pet. In El Camino, Jesse sees that Todd has a pet tarantula, which he keeps in a desert-like terrarium in his room. When he returns after Todd's death, a saddened Jesse feeds the tarantula, no doubt thinking of the child he was unable to save. Although we have no way of knowing for sure whether this is the same tarantula that Drew found, or if Todd simply decided a tarantula seemed like a good idea and went out and got his own, its presence in El Camino is undoubtedly a reference to that first deadly encounter between Todd and Jesse in "Dead Freight."

Before Todd was a drug dealer and casual murderer, he was an exterminator working for Vamonos Pest. While Vamonos Pest was a legitimate pest control company, its crew would often supplement their income by stealing from the houses they were fumigating, or granting access to other criminals for a price. Vamonos was eventually purchased by Walt, Jesse, and Mike (Jonathan Banks) as a front for their meth cooking operation, and as a result, Todd became increasingly entrenched in their business before turning antagonist.

El Camino includes a subtle nod to Todd's pre-Breaking Bad profession in the scene when the two Kandy Welding Company employees search his apartment for his money, pretending to be police officers. When Casey (Scott Sheperd) walks into Todd's bedroom, which Jesse had utterly destroyed in his frantic search for Todd's cash, Todd's Vamonos Pest uniform can be seen in the foreground of the shot, although the logo is only half visible. It's a stark reminder of how disastrous Heisenberg's partnership with Vamonos Pest ultimately proved to be, with Todd, Walt, and Mike all winding up dead, and Jesse fleeing to Alaska.