13 Breaking Bad characters who returned in El Camino

It’s been a while since you’ve seen Jesse and Walt — six years, to be more precise. And that was the last that you were ever supposed to see of them, as Breaking Bad definitively wrapped up its Emmy-winning five-season run with 2013’s “Felina,” which ended with meth lord Walt (Bryan Cranston) fatally keeling over and former partner Jesse (Aaron Paul) escaping from the Nazis’ compound. But creator Vince Gilligan has another chapter to tell in this crafty neo-Western. The two-hour Netflix film El Camino chronicles Jesse’s run from the law and escape to Alaska, but it also revisits the past, allowing for the return of Breaking Bad characters, both major and minor. Click through this gallery to see who wound up in a Bad place again. (Spoilers abound, obviously.)

Say hello again to America’s most wanted man, Jesse Pinkman, who is suffering from PTSD after his time in captivity. Now he’s on the run from the law, which includes all the police cars in Albuquerque.

Bad’s stoic, laconic fixer — who died in season 5 but lives on in the prequel Better Call Saul — appears in the opening scene of El Camino, a flashback down by the river. In this brief scene, which takes place circa season 5, Mike advises Jesse to take the money and run to Alaska (planting the seeds for the end of the film), where he could reinvent himself and start fresh, but not “put things right.”

Jesse’s dumbed-out drug buds factor into the early part of El Camino, providing shelter for Jesse when he shows up at their house. They give him money and a different car so he can continue his escape.

SAC Ramey, who worked with Hank (Dean Norris), is seen on TV answering questions at the press conference about meth-maker-now-fugitive Jesse.

Jesse’s perennially worried and always disappointed parents appear on the news to appeal to their son to turn himself in. He calls them and lures them to a duck-filled pond they used to frequent so he can sneak into the house while they’re gone and raid the safe.

The unkempt but solid junkyard owner helped Walt and Jesse get rid of the RV in season 3 and took part in the great magnet experiment in season 5. He returns in El Camino when Jesse, Badger, and Skinny Pete request his services to get rid of the El Camino that Jesse rode out of the compound. Alas, he gets spooked when he discovers that it has LoJack and flees the scene.

One of Jesse’s captors and part of the neo-Nazi gang, the pleasant-seeming psychopathic Todd plays a key role in the movie, taking Jesse to his apartment to dispose of the cleaning woman he killed because she’s discovered his stash of cash.

Not a person, sure, but a living creature nonethelss. This furry yet off-putting arachnid made its debut in season 5, when a little boy named Drew Sharp (Samuel Webb) riding his dirt bike through the desert captured it with a jar. Unfortunately, Drew kinda-sorta-but-not-really witnessed the train heist, and Todd shot him dead. And then kept the spider. In El Camino, when Jesse is taken to Todd’s apartment, we see the tarantula in a terrarium, an eight-legged prisoner of this psychopath.

A wicked lieutenant in the white supremacist gang, Kenny emerges in a flashback scene when Jesse is in captivity. He oversees the depraved pulley-and-shackles system that will keep Jesse on the meth assembly line, and he makes a losing bet with Kandy (Scott MacArthur) that Jesse can break free from the chains.

The grizzled owner of the vacuum cleaner store who also ran an illegal witness protection program resurfaces when Jesse shows up with a desperate request for his services. Ed initially declines to help Jesse, holding firm on past monies due for the last time that Jesse bailed, but ultimately Ed takes him to Alaska and transforms him into Mr. Driscoll.

Come on, did you really think he wouldn’t be in this movie? The most important and destructive person in Jesse’s life, Walt, who died in the series finale, pops up in a flashback from more innocent times (relatively speaking). In a scene that took place circa-season 2’s “Four Days Out,” the two eat breakfast after an almost doomed but ultimately triumphant cook that netted more than $1 million in meth, and he tells his young apprentice, “You’re really lucky, you know that? That you didn’t have to wait your whole life to do something special.”

Jesse’s girlfriend, who died in season 2 from an overdose (and who could have been rescued by Walt), is seen in a flashback that ends the movie as Jesse drives off into the Alaskan day. In happier times, Jane and Jesse are cruising an open road and she encourages him not to just to go where the universe takes him, but to take control of his own life.