First, a clarification: I love Jesse. Ever since he took the rap for his little brother’s joint in Season 1, I’ve wanted him to win (insofar as winning is possible, in the terminally unkind universe of Breaking Bad). Though he’s far from blameless in everything that happens to him, he retains something that’s close enough to innocence that makes me want the best for him despite his awful, stupid mistakes. That’s exactly why I think last Sunday, he should’ve died. It would’ve been the best thing for him.

Of course I understand that this was an impossible thing for Vince Gilligan to’ve done; he and Jesse and the show had claimed some kind of weird, sacred space in our culture that would’ve been terrible to transgress. They’ve been putting him in front of the camera more and more as the series has drawn to a close, and I can only imagine the pressures: from AMC, to keep their flagship show running smoothly, and from viewers who expect their emotional investments in it to pay off. He must be aware of The Audience, the huge, bodiless force of it, and he must know how it feels about Jesse – how angry it would be if he stole Jesse from it. It’s not Vince Gilligan the writer who couldn’t pull the trigger; he’s shown his willingness to murder our darlings, to do things that fill us with dread, moral outrage, and visceral disgust. But Vince Gilligan the creator, who appears on Conan O’Brian and half-hour post-mortem specials with cast members and other famous faces of television – he wouldn’t dare.

But speaking with the freedom of total obscurity, I can say anything, and I say Jesse should’ve died. Here’s why.

1: He’s busted.

As soon as they find him – and they will – Jesse is going to be thoroughly violated by the DEA. He’s the last person alive who saw Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez die; arguably, he’s the one who led them to their deaths. Whether or not it’s fair to lay that at his feet, a building full of angry federal lawmen with a pile of corpses where their perps should be aren’t likely to split hairs when they have a live suspect on whom to avenge themselves.

When this thought first occurred to me, I figured, “No, no way could they find him now – he’s been locked in a cage for months, he’s off the cops’ radar.” But he has been gone for months, and for a guy who disappeared from federal custody under suspicious circumstances, that’s an itch the DEA can’t afford to not scratch. It looks way too bad on them.

There are just too many reasons for the authorities to be looking for him to assume that ‘Jesse drives away in a stolen Nazi car’ = ‘Jesse is free now’. There’s Andrea’s murder; his name has to’ve come up in that investigation, and even if that wouldn’t make him a suspect, he’d qualify as a person of interest. Add to that the fact that it was ABQ cops who handed him off to Hank before he and Hank both vanished, so they’ve got to be interested in his whereabouts, too. Furthermore, the whole Heisenberg case has been cracked wide open; if they know about Walt, they know about Jesse. So much as I’d like to see him tear ass into the sunset screaming, “Vengeance, bitch!” I just can’t see it happening.

2: He’s broke.

We can safely assume he doesn’t have any money left, and it’s even possible that in his absence, his (parents’) house has been seized. His current assets consist of a car stolen from a murder scene and the clothes on his back. And even if we’re generous enough to allow him a future somewhere, his only profitable skill is cooking meth (remember back in Season 2, when he tried to get a job?). From an economic perspective, Jesse is permanently screwed. What’s he gonna do for a living – weep?

Speaking of which:

3: His nerves are shot.

Part of what’s so beautiful about Jesse, of what we love him for, is the eloquence of his suffering. Aaron Paul has done a fantastic job emoting the terror, self-loathing, anguish, and helpless rage that have been Jesse’s lot since he made the crucial bad decision of partnering up with Walt, and we, the hungry thing behind the fourth wall, we’ve loved every second of it. His guilt and self-hatred – mostly, but not entirely, over Jane’s death – allow us to experience our own mistakes safely, ’cause whatever we’ve done to hurt the people we love, it’s not as bad as what Jesse’s done. His fear, first of Gustavo and then of Walter, echoes our fears of drug cartels, terrorists, and serial killers, fed to us regularly by politicians and newscasters on TV. Jesse is the object of our catharsis, our vicarious tragedy, and if Vince Gilligan had killed him off, he would’ve been telling us bluntly that nothing is ever going to be okay.

But try to imagine, for a moment, going through what Jesse has gone through, and if you can’t see where a guy like that might deserve the peace and quiet of not being alive anymore, I don’t think you’re really using your imagination. Some people are born stern, and given enough time can recover from almost anything – but we all know Jesse isn’t one of them. The trauma of killing Gayle alone nearly destroyed him, to say nothing of the fallout from Brock being poisoned or the sheer brutality of Walt’s betrayal. The emotional extremes that he’s been through have probably wrecked his brain on a chemical level, as the stresses of thinking he’s going to die, being forced to kill an innocent, and getting chained up by Nazis, form permanent connections inside his head.

The toxic stew of grief, anger, and guilt boiling away in there would make his life hell… and we all know how he’d try to escape. With his brain already in pieces, he’d go back to junk and waste away to nothing, ugly and unmourned. Jesse deserves better: something quick and painless, just like what Walt ordered up for him. At least that way, he wouldn’t have time to spread the pain around to anyone else…

4: Everyone who loves him gets ruined.

… which seems to be a pattern with him. In fact it does him, as a character written by a talented and merciless storyteller, a disservice to call it merely a “pattern.” The ancients would call it his fate, the awful destiny that he not merely will not, but cannot escape. We see hints of this very early in the show, when his seemingly perfect younger brother turns out to be clumsily stashing weed in house (well, nobody’s good at everything), and again more clearly when he has his parents kicked out of their own house. You could even argue that being too close to Jesse is what got Combo killed. Everyone he reaches out to, everyone he cares for, comes to a bad end. If you think I’m exaggerating, let me list some names for you:

Tomas, Andrea’s little brother, who died because Jesse tried to protect him.

Mike, his substitute uncle, who wouldn’t let Jesse risk getting caught to bring him his getaway money.

Andrea, his second attempt at love, executed to break his will.

Brock, Andrea’s son, poisoned to trick him into going along with Gus’ murder, alive but orphaned.

Only Badger and Skinny Pete escape the curse of Jesse, and that could be either because they’re not really friends or because their status as the show’s only comic relief grants them immunity.

But the most fundamental reason why Jesse Pinkman should be dead, the deepest and most subtle, doesn’t have to do with other people.

5: He’s a fuckup.

This is the elephant in the room, trampling the keg at the Jesse pity-party: Jesse always screws up. Oh, sure, he cranks out some clever ideas when his back is against the wall, and he makes an honest effort to get revenge after one of his failures gets somebody killed. He tries. But ultimately, Jesse does not, cannot succeed. Unlike Walter, he’s all too human; he never makes the final transformation into a monster, no matter how bad it gets. Where Walt stares too long into the abyss, Jesse looks away, and while that makes him more like us, makes us love him, it also makes him weak.

The last episode reminded us that Jesse is weak in its intro: a flashback to the box. Jesse talks about the wooden box that he made in high school during an NA meeting – last season, if memory serves – and his point in bringing it up was not that there was hope for him, that he could create something beautiful if he could clear his mind and just focus on something pure. The point was that after he did that, he sold the beautiful thing for a bag of weed. It’s the ultimate expression of the fact that no matter how much we empathize with him, on a certain basic level, Jesse Pinkman sucks.

Without Jesse’s weakness, the show couldn’t exist. If he’d ever had the spine to defy Walter, to really tell him no, the story would’ve ended prematurely and we would’ve all been left wondering what the hell Vince Gilligan was thinking. A character less easily swayed by Walter’s rhetoric, or at least more committed to his own principles, could’ve wrecked the plot at a number of points along the way. He could’ve stayed out of the game after Jane died, or refused to kill Gayle, or simply not been around to come up with the wacky magnet scheme that kept them all out of prison.

More to the point, and most damning of all, he didn’t have the guts to do the one thing that would’ve been best for everybody: he didn’t kill Walt when he had the chance. If Jesse had put a bullet in Walt’s head, Gustavo and all his men, Mike, Hank, and all the other casualties in between would’ve been spared. If he’d just stopped listening and pulled the trigger, he could’ve had revenge.

But this wasn’t that kind of story. By the cruel internal logic of the world of Breaking Bad, Jesse got neither justice nor mercy. His revenge upon Todd was too little too late (although the symbolism of his weapon of choice was pretty satisfying), and the fact of Walter’s death did nothing to repair the trauma of his betrayal. All he got was a kind of awful freedom – the kind a bottle gets when it slips from your hand, a bullet when it leaves the gun – and a chance to finally say no. After what he went through, I don’t think that’s enough to keep on living for.

Fortunately, it wasn’t up to me.