Revisit Jesse Pinkman's Story Before You Watch El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

His was a long, messed-up journey — and for better or worse, it's continuing.

In advance of the release of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Netflix has released a short video chronicling the travails of the flick's main character, Jesse Pinkman, who perhaps suffered the most as the infamous Walter White completed his transformation from high school chemistry teacher to meth mastermind. The clip was posted to Netflix's YouTube channel.

While the video features no footage from the film, it serves as a potent reminder to fans of all the horrors Pinkman (Aaron Paul) had to endure before finally getting an improbable shot at freedom in Breaking Bad's series finale. It opens with Pinkman being interviewed in the home of White's brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader, at a time when the ace meth cook was preparing to flip on White (in the season 5 episode "Rabid Dog").

"Just tell us everything you remember," Schrader says. "Any business dealings, any personal dealings, any criminal activity you were a witness or a party to... anything and everything. Just tell us your story."

The clip then proceeds to tell us Pinkman's story, with a montage scored to the strains of "Enchanted," a cover of a Platters tune by R&B-crooning sisters Chloe x Halle. It starts at the beginning, with the birth of the "Baby Blue" methamphetamine formula which would become the signature of White, AKA Heisenberg, back in the relative good old days when the pair were cooking in a converted RV out in the New Mexico desert.

It then moves through a laundry list of lowlights of Pinkman's experience, and while fans of Breaking Bad know full well that the poor guy could never catch a break, having all of the worst of the horrifying events that befell him assembled into a supercut really helps to drive the point home. Here, we have Pinkman's severe beating at the hands of the psychotic Tuco Salamanca; his fateful meeting with girlfriend Jane (Krysten Ritter) and her subsequent death by overdose; another, even more brutal beating, this time courtesy of Schrader; his forced labor in the underground meth lab of chicken restaurant/illegal drug magnate Gus Fring; his extremely reluctant murder of fellow meth cook Gale Boetticher; the cold-blooded killing of new girlfriend Andrea by the dead-eyed Todd; his captivity by a Nazi gang after being betrayed by White; and his rescue from that gang by the very same man. It's a grim, and incomplete, list.

As the series ended, Jesse was screaming (literally) away from the scene of his rescue as White lay dying, and while we don't yet know what awaits him down the road, the video clip's soundtrack does give us a bit of a clue as to the tragedy that will loom largest over Pinkman as he attempts to elude the authorities and find some semblance of peace: the death of Jane.

As you may be aware, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has always been a fan of meaningful songs with multiple layers of context which he can deploy to enrich his story. For an example, look no further than the Breaking Bad series finale "Felina," which made prominent use of the Marty Robbins song "El Paso," one of those story songs in which someone dies at the end. In the song, the narrator's forbidden love for a girl causes him to bolt from town under threat of bodily harm, but his love's lure is too powerful, and he's drawn back — only to be promptly shot down, and expire in the girl's arms.

The song's narrative closely mirrors the events of the finale, in which Walter White returns from self-imposed exile to try to set things right and preserve his legacy as the most cunning, ruthless drug lord the world has ever known, and pays for it with his life. "Felina," by the way, isn't just an anagram of "finale" — it's the name of the girl in Robbins' song.

It appears that El Camino is already following this aesthetic, with the choice of "Enchanted" as the soundtrack for this new clip. Although the cover version by Chloe x Halle is certainly haunting, that simply can't be the only reason it was selected — unless it's just a funny coincidence that the original Platters version was playing on the stereo in the season 2 Breaking Bad episode "Mandala," during the scene in which Jesse and Jane use heroin together for the first time.

Jane's death could certainly be seen as the event that changed Pinkman forever, and not just because if she had lived, he may have found the courage to break his ties with White and quit the meth trade for good. It hardened him inside and dealt a severe blow to his already fragile sense of self-worth, and it's quite possible that if it hadn't happened, most — if not all — of the horrors that landed on top of the young man one after the other over Breaking Bad's next three seasons could have been avoided.

Pinkman will have to deal with the ramifications of that loss, and everything that came after, in El Camino — and to hear Paul himself tell it, the flick is the coda that Breaking Bad fans have pined for since the series' end in 2013. Speaking with the New York Times, the actor said, "[El Camino is] a chapter of Breaking Bad that I didn't realize that I wanted. And now that I have it, I'm so happy that it's there... [After reading the script], I couldn't speak for a good 30, 60 seconds. I was just lost in my thoughts. As the guy who played the guy, I was so happy that Vince wanted to take me on this journey."

Well, Mr. Paul, you may not have known you wanted more Breaking Bad, but all of the show's legions of fans aren't just happy — we're beyond thrilled, and we can hardly wait for one of the greatest stories in the history of television to finally get its conclusion. We just hope that, for once, Pinkman can finally achieve some sort of victory over life, his worst demons and impulses... and the late Heisenberg, whose shadow is sure to loom large over the proceedings.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will drop on Netflix on October 11.